Texas Seestor spotted this on dooce’s blog and then found a news clip about it at Entertainment Weekly.
Here is the original youtube video. If you like dance movies or dance scenes in movies, you have to watch this one! Make sure you crank up your sound!
Note: on my computer the categories are overlapping the video. If you want to see it in all its glory, click on the words “original youtube video” above.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at Texas Seestor and Trainwreck’s home. Older niece (M) had just gotten a set of legos the night before. So, on Saturday night, we all trekked to the family room to hang out and play legos with M.
Of course this also meant that Scoochie (S) went with us, and Texas Seestor and I had to strategically stretch our legs out to prevent her from getting to the legos. I was mostly in charge of making the barrier and Texas Seestor was in charge of watching her like a hawk to make sure that S didn’t get into anything. S is VERY curious and loves to explore.
S decided that since she couldn’t get to the legos, the next best thing would be the wooden puzzle. It was perfect for lifting and chewing, evidently.
I think that is it for now. I’m still sort of half asleep. It was a challenging week. But good.
I need to pack up and head to school here shortly. So, this has to be a bit less edited and rough. I have an 8:00 on M, W, F so I try to be at work around 7:00 at this point. Mainly, because there always seems to be something that I need to print out or copy or whatever before I head off to class.
It is fun to be back in the classroom. But I’ve never found going over the syllabus to be a whole lot of fun. I try to emphasize the good parts with enthusiasm “Here are the study tips!” “e-mail me if you want to meet with me!” “Here is a cool video about Biology (that also demonstrates how to use the website for the texbook)!” But it is hard to put a smiley face on cheating and plagiarism. That brings to mind an interesting moment. My 10:30 M, W, F class are pretty much all first year students that were alert and stayed with me even through the details. But the room was really hot; something was going on with the air system, and although it had been reported already, it hadn’t gotten fixed. So, at about the 30 minute mark, students were fading.
And then I started explaining some of the common forms of cheating and the penalties for cheating. Boy did they wake up quickly at the mention of expulsion! ha! I had all eyes on me at that point.
Anyway, I did an in-class activity that was developed by some Profs. at the University of Minnesota Duluth yesterday to teach the scientific method. It was good in that students were participating by throwing out ideas when I asked questions; that can be a huuuuuuuuuuuuuge barrier in any classroom. They have to feel like it is safe or okay to “say something stupid” (their misconception, not mine). But it was bad in that I felt really disorganized with how it went. I was trying to use their powerpoint that I had modified, and there wasn’t enough room for me to write additional explanations.
So, it was sort of a hit-or-miss day.
It also took way longer than I’d planned, which was a bummer.
Oh well. You live, you learn. Part of teaching is trying new things out and sometimes watching them bomb. I’ll see how they do on the quiz. Maybe they still got some of the key concepts.
Well, I’m off to teach some more! See ya later, alligator.
Saturday, instead of my going up to my sister and brother-in-law’s home, they all drove down to see me for a few hours!
Take home message of this post: It was really, really great!
Some details:
The 50 min drive here apparently went well. My older niece (M) was apparently playing with my younger niece (S) by doing raspberries for about 20 minutes.
When they arrived, I heard something slam (must’ve been front doors of their vehicle), and I peeked out my window and saw that they had really arrived! I went outside, and when M saw me, she RAN at me with this HUGE smile on her face! I squatted down and she lunged into my arms; right before I lost my balance, I was able to put a hand on the ground behind me to keep from toppling over. It was really terrific. S also smiled at me with a big grin when she noticed me.
When we got to the pool at my apartment complex, we realized there was no one else there! Perfect!
A couple of sort of funny things about my pool are 1) I’d actually never been swimming in it and 2) once we were in it, it seemed a lot bigger than it did when I had just walked around it on an earlier visit.
We realized pretty quickly that M LOVES this pool. There is a ledge that goes all around one side of it that is a perfect height for her to bounce around on. S also LOVES the zero entry section. She crawled around with this huge smile on her face. She also had this huge grin when Texas Seestor carried her around in the water. The challenge with S is that she is so adventurous and curious that she leans forward suddenly and dumps her face into the water. Which is a bit of an eek moment! Oddly, she seems to know to hold her breath already.
So we all swam around, splashed, played with squirt toys, and dunked ourselves in the waterfall.
It was a whole lot of good, Texas, hot weather fun.
We went out to supper to a tex-mex restaurant that had yummy, homemade, puffy tortillas. During supper, M kept asking if we’d be going back to my apartment. We were wanting to make sure that they didn’t leave much later than 7:00ish so that they could get home in time for her bedtime, so we kept telling her “yes, for a little while.” She seemed okay with that. Once we realized there would be enough time, I told her that we could play playdough for a while too. I was feeling rather uncreative without the usual set of cookie cutters that we use at their house when playing playdough; I guess I’m going to have to get some cookie cutters! M didn’t care if I was creative or not creative, and we had a lot of fun.
I don’t have any pictures I can share with you for this visit, but I’ve got some others that I’ll post later from last weekend.
bye for now!
From the title of this post, you might think that I have another dreaded shopping experience to relate. For those of you who have been reading for some time, you will recall the various posts about this.
But I have happy news to relate this time! I went shopping after work yesterday from about 6:30-8:00 pm. Yes, it really did take me an hour and a half, but that is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar better than my usual 3-4 hour experience trying to find pants (and sometimes still coming up empty-handed).
I found a pair of pants – dressy & black – that are a) appropriate for professorial-atire and b) probably the best fitting of all time! woooot wooot!
Where did I find these magic pants? Once again, they are from Dress Barn.
Having pants to wear on days when I’m in the lab is a much, much better option than wearing a medium-length skirt and trying to find closed-toed shoes that don’t look completely dorky with a skirt. I will continue to plan a shopping trip to find decent clog-like or some other super comfy style of shoes for wearing with a skirt for when the lab isn’t using anything spillable. Honestly, I feel much safer wearing pants in the lab when working with solutions.
But get this, pretty soon I’ll have my very first lab coat that has my name and degree on it! I’ve never had this before, and it is very exciting!
I also get a) business cards – which is another first for me and b) a permanent (engraved) magnetic name tag to wear at school functions – another first. Well, that is if you don’t count the name tag that I wore as a teenager when I worked after school and during summers at Hardees. 
Anyway, I suppose to some, these are sort of frivolous things. But I really like these kinds of indicators of permanence.
I’ve had so much stuff going on this week that I don’t even where to begin. Suffice to say that it is exciting to have everyone reporting back to school, but the work load has also increased dramatically. I will have to fall back into my “old ways” by working on stuff for school for most of the weekend. That means that for the first time in about 3 months, I’m not going to spend the weekend with Texas Seestor, Trainwreck, Munchie, and Skoochie.
Munchie (M) has been asking all week about when I am coming back to their home. And for most of the week, I had planned to be there from Friday night (after M’s bedtime) to Sunday morning when I leave for church. So Texas Seestor and Trainwreck have been telling her Saturday. I guess each day, she also says something like, “Today is Saturday!” And then they have to tell her something like “noooooooooooo, today is Tuesday.”
But as of Thursday night, I realized that there is just no way I can swing a visit up there and still get all of my stuff done. Texas Seestor and Trainwreck had to break it to her yesterday (Friday) morning and I guess she was very, very upset and insistent that I was still coming to visit. Thus ensued Trainwreck and Texas Seestor to brainstorm a solution, and they have decided to drive the 50 minutes down to my apartment after naptime to go swimming at my complex, and then go out to supper. We are all hoping that this will help smooth over the change in plans. It just breaks my heart to hear how she has been asking all week about me and then to hear how upset she got.
I’m also looking forward to seeing them. To be quite honest, it is really hard for ME to not see them this weekend too. I had really wanted to get to see them most weekends. But this week has been rather unusual in that my entire day has been booked with meetings from start to finish. So, I’m hopeful that I can go back to seeing them for one day each weekend. Or at the very least, for part of the weekend.
And with that, I need to buckle down and fly through my prep for the coming week’s lectures! See you on the flip side!
Hello!
As the title indicates, I have officially reported back to school (Tuesday, Aug 17th). This means that I basically arrived at 8:30 just prior to the President’s welcome for new faculty and staff by more or less skipping the breakfast. And walked out to my car at something like 7:15.
Ah yes. It begins.
People who have been at this school for years kept trying to console any of us new folk with comments about how they know sitting in orientation meetings all day is really awful. But I guess I’m a total goof and/or alien, because I actually like this kind of stuff. After two years of teaching where I felt like I didn’t know as much as I would’ve liked about a) what had been going on and/or any new initiatives at school and b) where to go when certain problems arose, it was a relief to get to meet those people and ask my questions. I really hope that the other people in my orientation “class” don’t think of me as “that woman who always asked questions.” But honestly, I have found some of this info to be extremely helpful, and now was my chance to get it more easily than spending precious time cruising the website.
Other than that, my exciting news is that on Thursday of last week, I met with my department chair and the associate provost – who used to be the chem dept chair – to go over what I had prepared for talking to our Development office (i.e. fundraising) for my research needs. The grand total is just over $80,000, which was rather daunting until I heard that in chemistry, they need a certain piece of equipment that might cost them $200,000. With that in mind, my total didn’t seem quite so outrageous to either of them.
Anyway, the dept chair and the associate provost were very helpful and gave me places to tweak my cover letter/case statement. That also gave me places where I needed to change my powerpoint presentation before I met with Development on Monday of this week.
Monday, I met with the director of Development and she is SUPER excited about my research. She asked lots of questions and became really passionate about the topic. yay! She was also REALLY excited at all of the material I was providing to them.
I was under the impression that Development was mainly going to ask private donors for the funds for my project. So, I’d tailored a lot of the information that way. However, after hearing about my needs, she decided that they would just go ahead and contract out for a grant to be written. The school cannot afford a full-time grant writer, so this is the option that makes the most sense. During my job offer negotiations, the school had talked about contracting out with a grant writing agency to a) find sources of funding that would apply to my research and b) help write a grant. I hadn’t realized it was such a strong commitment, on their part, to do this, because it wasn’t really in my written offer. However, evidently our oral discussion was more solid than I’d realized; which is also really fantastic. There is pretty much no way that I could write a grant on my own during the school year for that kind of money; so this is key to getting my lab started.
Oh and as an aside, I am evidently “known” now as being a “tough negotiator.” Which is rather funny to me, since I never viewed myself that way. I guess all of those conversations with HB about his work projects and such, not to mention the support of some of you who talked to me outside of the blogosphere, had more of an influence than I’d realized!
She emailed the grant writing agency my documents (they are based in DC), and talked to them on the phone yesterday. Yesterday afternoon, I got an email that a particular grant-writer has been assigned to my work; this was very quick work on their part! I am supposed to hear about their ideas for funding agencies on Sept 3rd – which is really fast!
I know that this is going to add to my work load immensely this year. But when getting a lab up and running, it is sort of now or never.
I’m super psyched about this! And it totally makes up for the long hours. So, there you have it, the latest update on my work life.
Sunday was quite eventful in my music and praise life!
I mentioned in my last post that I was going to be joining the Praise Band at my church in a few weeks. Part of the reason this became a fact, instead of a hope, is a series of events that began 3.5 weeks ago.
On that Sunday, 3.5 weeks ago, the pastor gave a sermon about prayer. It was so well received that on Tuesday, he sent an email to everyone on the church email list that he was going to continue preaching about prayer for the next two Sundays.
Prior to this email, I had spoken to the music director, we’ll call him N, about singing with the Praise Band. One of the things N had said to me was that if I ever wanted to sing a solo in church to let him know about the song, and they would fit it in when the message of the song and the message of the sermon were similar. Well, my intention was never to be some big soloist in church; I just wanted to sing with the band. I haven’t really worked to find songs that I’d be good at as a soloist. There are songs that I know, where I’ve done solos on the verses, from my church back in MN. But they aren’t necessarily ones that I’ve connected with the strongest.
BUT since I KNEW the topic of the upcoming sermons, I was inspired to try to find a song in my repertoire that fit with a message of prayer. And voila! I found one of my favorites! The song is a prayer to offer one’s life up to God to do His will, and to be led by Him; it is called The Potter’s Hand.
I emailed N and the pastor to offer up my willingness to sing this song. I sent them the key phrases that were about prayer, and that spoke to me. I suggested that perhaps I could sing it for them so that they could “decide if they wanted to incorporate it” into the 3rd service on prayer; this is code for “you can judge my singing and see if I’m good enough to sing at church.”
Well, I stayed after church on that 2nd Sunday of the prayer series, which was 1.5 weeks ago, and I sang it for and with N. At the end of running through it a few times, he told me that he thought it was ready to go and he’d tell the pastor as much.
Now, it was just a matter of seeing if the pastor thought the message of the song fit with the message of his sermon, and I needed to wait to hear from them.
Well, last week, I never heard from either of them. So, I assumed that it didn’t fit with his sermon after all. I was okay with that. I was mainly excited that I’d be joining the band soon (Aug 22)! I got ready for church, like usual. I showed up about 5 minutes before the service would start, like usual. And when I was walking down the aisle to go to my see, N was at the front of the church and walking toward me waving at me to come talk to him.
Our conversation was something like this:
N says “Hi Danielle! I’m so glad to see you! I lost your phone number and wasn’t able to reach you. Would you be willing to sing with the band today?”
Mind you, they had just finished practice and the service was about to start.
My eyes widen and I pause and say “uhhhhhhh….. sure.”
“Because we are planning on doing the Potter’s Hand.”
“Oh!” pause “Did you want me to sing lead vocals?”
N says “Absolutely!”
I say “uhhhhh… sure!”
And then we had a hurried 3 minute conversation discussing the logistics. My biggest concern was that when we had practiced it the week prior, I discovered that they did a different order of chorus and verses once they got through all of it once and were doing the repeats. I had these visions of my being ready to sing another chorus when the band was going back to a verse! But he reassured me that the powerpoint was correct and that the person running it would switch the slides in time for me to be prepared for the next part of the song.
And then, we prayed. And the service started!
The opening songs were great. It felt wonderful to be back up front singing and helping to lead the worship music. I felt right at home. Albeit, I was still adjusting to the sound and microphone some.
The pastor gave the children’s message, and I knew The Potter’s Hand was up next, and my mouth was getting a little dry from nerves. I drank water, ate a mint. And then it was time for me to lead everyone in singing the Potter’s Hand!
Once I got up front, and the keyboardist started playing the song, my nerves went away with the familiarity of it. N started introducing me; I was listening to him until the vocalist next to me started humming the song. When I heard her, I realized the key was VERY different than what I’d practiced. I realized, or at least I thought I realized, that singing it at the high octave might make it too high when it got to a later part of the song. And singing it at the lower octave might be too low. But I didn’t have time to try it out, because by then, he was done introducing me and I needed to start singing!
oh dear!
I decided to sing it low. As I was going through the first line and approaching the second, in my head, I did one of these “oh crap! I’m not sure I can hit the next notes, because they are so low!”, but I kept singing. And I hit them!
To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, I recorded me singing it at the approximate key where we’d practiced it and then the key that I (think) I actually sang it during the service.
Note: In order to a) use the equipment that I have – which is only an HD video camera that has audio too and to b) continue to not show any pictures of me and protect my anonymity, of sorts, the recordings just show my computer screen of the words while I’m singing.
Oh and I’m, of course, singing it acapella, since I don’t own or know how to play keyboards. And I was behind the camera so that I could see the words on my computer screen and have the camera recording the computer screen. But it has decent sound, I think.
Here is the key that I did in practice:
And here is most of the song in the (approximate) key that I sang at the service. Note that I did it in one “take” and discovered after I’d uploaded it to Flickr that Flickr only accepts videos of 90 seconds maximum. My video was 1:48, so the last line is cut off. I didn’t want to re-record it, or edit it, since it had already taken me a while to get it all set up and then to upload it. But again, you can hear a decent chunk of it; I cut out the 2nd verse, as it stands.
I’m also a little nervous about putting this out there, because it isn’t perfect by any means. But well, perfection is overrated, right?
And there you have it!
It was well received. People in the band were very complimentary and surprised (in a good way), judging from their comments. I felt good about it. N told me it was good.
And regardless of how it went, I sing in the band on Aug 22nd!
Hi there,
I still have every intention of posting my “Fun Outings with Mom and Dad – part 2″ to follow-up on the part 1. But currently I’m uploading HD video to Flickr which is sucking up all of my bandwidth and my patience for navigating around the internet. Thus, it will have to wait.
Now, WHY am I uploading video to Flickr, you may ask?
Well, as it turns out, today is my Dad’s 65th birthday! Yes, this is the milestone that is allowing him to retire in a couple of weeks! wooooooooooooo hooooooooooooo for Dad!
And it won’t be long until Mom and Dad live here and I see them quite regularly; or at least, I hope to see them regularly.
Happy 65th Birthday, Dad!!
======
In other news, the kinds of things that are going on with me:
1) I’m trying to compile all of my research needs (i.e. supplies and equipment). Right now, I have an excel file with at least 6 sheets, and the total is at $45,000 spread out over 3 years. To give you a point of reference, some schools will offer $25k to $75k as start-up money for a new faculty member’s research without even knowing what you want to buy. Instead, I’m not getting any start-up money, and I’m writing this up so that our development office can go out and ask private donors for money.
After talking to a mentor of mine at school who has been around the school for quite some time (and received the no-strings-attached start-up money) he suggested I go ahead and ask for new versions of some of the ancient stuff that we already have. This would be things like a new -80C freezer (around $12k) and a new microcentrifuge.
When I was looking for a refrigerated microcentrifuge for spinning down small tubes in the 1.5 ml range. I found this woooooooooooooooooooonderful new centrifuge by Eppendorf which can do small tubes, as expected, but can also, surprisingly do 6, 15 ml or 50 ml tubes. And with alternate rotors, can spin down microplates, PCR plates, PCR strips and just on and on! It is intended to be an economical alternative to buying two separate centrifuges; usually, a lab has to have one centrifuge for big tubes and one for small tubes/plates etc.
OMG. I really, really want that centrifuge.
How many bake sales would it take to buy this centrifuge, I wonder? hmmmm…. probably too many.
My mentor’s suggestion is that the worse they can do is say no and that I might as well ask.
2) Now I have to write a cover letter/case statement for why I need this stuff. It is nothing like writing a real grant, but it is still time consuming. Once I write it, my mentor suggests that I get input from everyone in the dept (all 5 people). Which, again, is easy, since it is only 5 people. But that will also require at least 5 meetings during a time when most people are on vacation.
3) In the meantime, I’m feeling the pressure that I ought to be working on my syllabi and first days of lecture. Classes don’t start until the 24th, so really, I have quite a bit of time. Last year, I went on vacation to Port Aransas just prior to the start of classes. Consequently, I wrote my syllabus 3 days before classes started; it turned out fine. So, I’m trying to console myself with that.
4) I have exciting news on the music front! In a few weeks, I am going to join a really awesome Praise Band at my newly-found church! Joining this band has been a bit tougher than what it would be if I’d gone to one of the other churches that I’ve found down here. Other churches have sort of been desperate for vocalists. The church that I’m going to be singing at has really high standards and more than just me who wants to join it. So, I had to prove to the director that my voice is good enough, my spirit is in the right place (so to speak), I’m better than the other people, and I’m responsible enough to be in the band. He has gotten burned in the past by someone who wouldn’t show up for church every now and then when she was scheduled; thus, my being dedicated is a significant part of his willingness to let me join. Well, that and my voice, of course.
I’ll sing solos every now and then, maybe duets, but I’ll mostly be doing back-up harmonies. Since I looooooooooooooove singing harmonies, I think that this will be a perfect fit.
And, better yet, the pastor is awesome, awesome, awesome. AND it is UCC (United Church of Christ).
I grew up Disciples of Christ which merged with the UCC quite some time ago. Anytime I’ve moved, I’ve always hoped to find a UCC church that has good music and good sermons, but it has been a bit hit or miss. I’ve ended up at at a Methodist church and, most recently, a Lutheran church, instead.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the UCC, it is pretty much the most liberal Protestant denomination out there. They were the first to ordain female ministers, the first to allow openly homosexual ministers to be ordained, and they have always been at the forefront of ways to be accepting of all people (hence the “united” part of the name). This fits with how I view what Jesus was trying to accomplish in his own ministry when he was here on Earth; so it is a better fit for me than any other denomination.
Well, I think that is enough for now. I ought to get ready to go into school and work on this cover letter/case statement. And maybe I’ll work on my syllabus when I need a “break” from it.
Happy Birthday, Dad!!!!
I mentioned previously that I had some fun things going on last week that I would share with you, and here they are.
Last week, Mom and Dad were here in TX. They drove some things down (and across) from IN on Saturday that can’t be moved by the movers. They also wanted to use the week to make a decision about tile and carpet for a large percentage of their new house here in TX. And to top it off, there was the possibility that some of it could actually be installed that very same week!
On Monday, they chose tile and carpet, and I worked on a manuscript for some of my research. oodles of fun, that.
On Tuesday, they came down to my apartment so that Dad could see it for the first time in person and so that Mom could see the latest stage. I had hoped to get the last two boxes of decorative things unpacked before they arrived, because I had visions of them helping me hang framed art that day. However, it just took me too long to do the manuscript on Monday and other unpacking/cleaning on Tuesday morning.
Consequently, we used our Tuesday to go out to a fabulous, fabulous German lunch and go site-seeing. Lunch was just amazing. I had three kinds of sausages, sauerkraut, red cabbage, and what they called “German potatoes.” Turns out German potatoes are fried/sauteed potatoes cooked with baaaaaaaaaaaaaacon that have baaaaaaaaaaaaaaacon bits on them. OMG were they ever good. The sausages were fabulous.
Did I say the food was amazing?
Anyway, on the way to shopping in the historic part of town, I drove them past a couple of things that my town is known for. And we happened to go past the library.
Note that these were taken on one of my prior visits to the library; we did not go inside on this trip.
I love the high ceiling, natural light, and light fixtures inside.
And this library is the one that has the Starbucks machine inside; that is very funny to me, since I didn’t even know they existed.
Here is one of the landscaping features you see as you walk to the front door of the library.
And on my way to the parking lot, I spotted this sign.
That sign for the reading garden intrigued me, so I decided to venture to the back of the library
Turns out, it was just a very open space with benches and minimal landscaping. But I did see a lovely crepe myrtle that was in bloom.
And then we headed to the historic and tourist-y shopping district in town.
I hadn’t taken my camera with me, which was a shame, because there were some lovely places that were really photo-worthy, but that just means that I’ll have to go back!
We had a really fun time there. We were mostly just browsing, but we did keep an eye out for a breezy gardening hat for Mom. We saw a LOT of various decorative things for inside and outside. In fact, Mom found a great wrought iron, glass, bead and bell hanging piece; I guess it could be considered a windchime. She was hesitant to buy it, but the price was so low, that Dad and I went back to buy it for her.
I found this really interesting stone that is in the shape of a smooth egg that changes color inside (very subtly) depending on the angle from which you view it. And I scoped out clogs. I have been debating with myself about buying a pair of clogs for school. Not being able to wear open-toed shoes in labs means that I have to think a bit differently about what kinds of shoes are wearable for work.
And then, pretty soon it was time for us to end our day of site-seeing. But we made plans for another outing for Wednesday.
- to be continued in part 2 -
I was just on the MSNBC site and saw an article about a “plus-sized model” whose photos had gotten retouched to make her appear thinner and the outrage surrounding that.
Well, turns out that the fashion industry considers anyone who is a size 8 up to a size 20 a “plus-sized model.”
How bizarre is that?
They basically say that anyone who isn’t a size zero or size 2 is above the norm, and thus is considered plus-sized. Note for the men out there who are confused, stores that sell women’s fashions categorize size 18 and above “plus-sized.” Consequently, you might imagine how this is confusing terminology for those of us who shop in typical stores.
Anyway, I thought I would share that info about terminology today. I think it is interesting, and it says quite a lot about fashion.