There is just enough snow accumulation here in my part of Texas for the roads to become potentially treacherous (if they are not treacherous already) and for schools to shut down for a snow day! In parts of the country where salt/sand/cinder trucks are available, this amount of snow would be nothing, because the trucks would have laid down enough salt/sand/cinders ahead of time to make the roads negotiable. But since small amounts of snow can easily turn to ice without those preparations, I think that the administrators are doing the right thing today by keeping buses and cars off of the roads.

Happily, I don’t really care at this point if I lose a day of lecture. We are on a schedule, but there is only one other prof with whom I need to coordinate the timing of our lectures which is waaaaaaaaaaay easier than the situation I had in MN. Also, in MN we were on a super strict schedule to get through certain chapters. Here, it is much more relaxed.

Thus, I will spend the day prepping my lecture for Monday and writing up a lab that needs to be ready to hand out on Monday too.

Part of me wants to just curl up with a book and read all day; but that is a luxury that I can’t really afford right now if I want to still take tomorrow off. I have been trying to be better about having one whole day off each week. It is better for me, and better for my students. My lectures are more creative and energy-filled if I’m not burnt out. Did I mention that on my evaluations last semester, my highest marks from the students were in the enthusiasm category?

Some of that is because now that I’ve been teaching the material for the 3rd (or 2nd time, depending on the class) it is easier to spend the time finding the “interesting examples” that make the material interesting at this basic level. It is tricky, because in biology, a lot of the things that I find inherently interesting require an understanding of concepts which they simply have not learned yet. However, one of the things I REALLY like about the genetics textbook that I’m using is that each chapter starts with an interesting situation that IS understandable to students with their level of knowledge.

Anyway, back to the snow day. I’m excited to have this change in scenery. The first snow of the year, even in MN or IN or MA, was always something that I found some joy in – as long as it didn’t make my commute bad that day. However, when that first snow occurred, part of me knew it to be the indicator of a long, drawn out winter that was just around the corner.

In contrast, THIS snow is simply joyous, because there is nothing of that impending sense of disruption and doom. I also have no need to go out and drive in it. At the most, I will walk around my apartment complex and look for things to photograph before it all melts away.

JOY!

and beauty!

On Tuesday, Mom and Dad came over to my apartment, and we built the shelves for my garage. They also helped me figure out how to fit everything inside.

Once we got that finished, we headed to the historic/tourist town down the street from where I live. We had a fabulous lunch there and then played tourist for a while. THIS time (as opposed to a trip during the summer), I brought my camera!

Those were Christmas windows in an antique store.

I had to laugh that these are now considered antiques.

This building looks like a lovely place to sit on the front porch, and rock with a glass of iced tea in my hand.

I had to laugh at the barrels that were used to prop up the branches of this tree.

I’ve always loved how some places use these beautiful cabbages (?) (maybe lettuce?) as a way to have something pretty in the wintertime.

Look how little it is inside the packaging box!

Yes, I just had to get that turquoisey blue color.

And it is so slim!

I’m really quite fond of it.

Maybe in the future I’ll get a pic or two of it in my new armband. Yes, that is right, HB bought me a Nike armband to hold my nano. And by the way, doesn’t nano remind you of the old children’s teasing thing that you did with your tongue? neeener neeener neeener

Enjoy your weekend. I’m hoping for good weather to go on a biking trip with HB that got postponed due to inclement weather last weekend.

*UPDATED to add pics of the armband*

Note: This is the start of the playlist of the songs that I downloaded on Sunday. I’m using it for my walks.
Can you read the titles of the songs?

Hint: you need to look on Flickr at the larger sizes

I’ll post the list later if no one gets it.

I was reminded of this photo by Amber’s picture of the light shining through the blue plastic half of a piggy bank.

Part of what I liked about this image was that we’d only recently received our new furniture, and HB had cozied up on one of the chairs with a bottle of Tennents. When I turned to say something to him, I realized how the light was shining through the bottle and creating a really crisp shadow of a bottle on the arm of the chair, but that it was curved, and that part of the shadow was green. I guess it is still a shadow… although maybe the part where the light created horizontal cross beams of lighter green light would be considered a refraction of light or something scientific-sounding like that. Physics was never my strong suit, but that wikipedia description looks right for refraction.

I guess my point to this post is that I’ve always really loved stained glass and colored glass in general. There is this really amazing set of stained glass windows in a chapel in a city north of Chicago. I have film photos of some of the windows, but the next time I am in the area, I’m going to make a point of photographing those windows with Dee-Dee’s assistance.

HA! I just realized today is ground-hog’s day! How fitting that I have a post about a shadow.

Also, we usually do the traditional wrapping of the presents placed under the tree, that sort of thing.

But this year, HB went a different route and led me down to our living room with my eyes closed.

And look what he got me!

Isn’t it cooooooooooooooool?!

At first, I was surprised to see a Really Red teaset. But MAN, just look at that teapot!

It can blast out at you like a neon fire-engine.

Or look like Alladin’s lamp.

How could I resist something with such great curves?!

It really is striking. Get it, striking, HB strikes again?!

tee-hee! Don’t mind me, I’m just happy and tired, all at the same time.

I took all pictures with Dee-Dee, my Nikon D-70. For some I used the combination of a tripod and self-timer (for the first time) in order to avoid the whole blurry/shaking/too much caffeine issue.

Cool huh? With the nice rounded shape, and the twigs and the trees in the background.

It is still fascinating to me the way snow piles up on top of things in the oddest shapes.

It can look so graceful.

Or in this next case, symmetrical.

I just took these pics with Dee-Dee while it was still snowing.

Then when I turned to go back inside, I couldn’t resist another shot of the snow as it melted on the deck and the afternoon shadows that were cast by the railing.

I took this next one, because it reminded me of Squirl saying how much she likes the way the snow looks on the evergreens.

Those trees have been looking really nice the last few days as the sun shone on them. (no pictures of that yet, because I was thinking that to really get the right shot, I need to go outside…)

The table on the downstairs deck reminded me of a mushroom.

And again, as I turned, I liked the way the snow looked as it accumulated on the dark wood of the stairs connecting the two decks.

Anyone up for a snowball fight?

Snow and sunlight can be almost hypnotic, if you let your eyes follow a curve from left to right… right to left… left to right….

I call this one undulating.

I took all pictures with Dee-Dee the Saturday after Thanksgiving, in the afternoon, as the snow was melting on our deck.

I took these pics when I was at school on Saturday. I’ve always thought that when the water is boiling, the water columns for the distilled water system are really pretty.

In case you are puzzled by it, I turned the second pic 90 degrees counterclockwise and put the columns on their side. I like the image better that way.

Taken with my (our) Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P71.

I have the camera with me this week (yay!), so I brought it into work with me on Monday. As I was doing my experiment, I realized that I’m in a bit of a unique situation, in that there are tools and equipment that I use in my daily life that I pretty much take for granted. However, I’ve decided to take pics of them for two reasons.

1. Certain views of them can be pretty &/or semi-artistic.

2. With the way technology advances, these things may or may not be the tools that we use to do molecular biology in 5, 10, or 20 years.

Even within the 15 years that I’ve been doing research, I have seen techniques, that used to be considered standard, get phased out as the technique has become more automated. For example, I am one of the few people my age who have done DNA sequencing by hand (because I did it in my undergrad research project and for my work-study job). Right after that time period in 1996, a different kind of DNA sequencing became more affordable and individual labs quit spending time and energy doing it themselves. At this point, I don’t know of anyone who regularly does sequencing in their own lab anymore. Nowadays, you pretty much just send a sample of DNA to a sequencing facility (in house) and get the results back. tah-dah! No effort involved, except to trek the sample upstairs.

So, with this idea in mind that the kinds of techniques and tools I use today are likely to change in the future, I have decided to document some aspects of my experiments.

Here are some close-up views of my experiment on Monday.

First an overview shot of my protein gel. I don’t really want to get into a lot of detail about what each thing is or how it works… I just put this pic here so that the close-up shots can be put into a wee bit of context.

Next, a close-up of the swirling bubbles…

I also really like how a dye that intially appears purple in a tube, begins to separate into green and purple (and at one step pink).

If you look really, really closely, you might notice that there are two sets of 4, 5, 6, and 7, in the pic above.

I like this last image for the soft/fuzzy watery gel part of the image contrasted with the hard/solid very electronic part of the image.

AND you can see that the dye has now separated into a red/orange line and the blue lines.

AND, from a “good job on your experiment” standpoint, it ran really, really straight.

FINALLY, from This Gel, I got some of the BEST data that I’ve collected in a while (yesterday).