I’m still wishing everyone I see “Happy New Year.” So, I send you that message of joy as well.
I truly hope that this year is a good one for all of us.
It has been about a week since I posted, and since I’m still ON BREAK (*hip-hip-horray!*), I feel like I can have a leisurely breakfast and write up some thoughts about the past week.
Last Friday, Texas Seestor was off of work and we got together with some friends and saw the Muppets! It was SUCH a fun and funny movie! It had a huge number of 80′s references and comments sort of making fun of itself; I love that they weren’t taking themselves too seriously.
New Year’s Eve was really fabulous. I had a migraine for most of the day, but it went away enough by the evening that we went to a dessert and drinks party that some friends were hosting. They have this party annually, but it is the first that we’ve gotten to go, because Mom and Dad stayed home with my nieces and babysat so that Texas Seestor, Trainwreck, and I could go to the party.
The desserts were SO YUMMY! And then we started playing Rock Band.
OMG was it ever fun!
I’ve never played it before, but they had a microphone, so we started with Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock And Roll” and I sang the lead. I wasn’t sure ahead of time if it would be in my range, but it was! I rocked it out! There was a bit of a weird time-delay/echo that I’ve noticed with gaming systems that do karaoke, but I pretty much just tried to ignore it and focus on hitting all of the pitches and slides correctly. It was SO COOL!
I did not try to play any instruments; I was having too much fun either singing the lead, or singing along with Texas Seestor whenever she or someone else was singing.
It makes me want to go out for karaoke sometime.
How often do I think that?
In other music news, the new band I’m in had our second practice on Monday after New Year’s Eve. I shake my head at how quickly songs are coming together; it is really remarkable. The lead vocalist’s voice has such texture and richness to it. And man does he shine on John Denver songs!
We are working on a song that has only been recorded once, and we are doing it more like it was originally written, so I ended up recording it with my iPhone in order to learn the new rhythms and phrasing. I’ve listened to it a lot this week in order to learn all of those things, but also to just have the sound wash over me. Listening to it again the next day really surprised me. At the time when we were singing it and I was recording it, I was working so hard to match his phrasing, that I couldn’t really appreciate it. But listening to it after the fact let me revel in the moments when our phrasing, slides, and sounds were matched (especially toward the end of the song).
It is a good one.
We’ve got 6 songs that are ready to go with just two practices. I’m working on learning an additional 10 songs this week to see if we can take some songs that do not typically have a lot of harmony parts in them and add harmonies to them.
The challenge is finding songs for acoustic guitars with 3 part harmonies.
I’ve realized that a lot of songs with harmony that I’ve always loved have keyboards, electric guitars, and drums (and are usually 2-part); sometimes they sound fine scaled back to 2 guitars, but other times, probably not. We’ve got some Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Eagles, John Denver (as mentioned), James Taylor, and the Beach Boys. I’ve got the other 2 guys ready to do an Indigo Girls song (Power of Two)! We’ll see how that one goes this coming week. I’m working on convincing them to consider Dixie Chicks, Rascal Flatts, and Lady Antebellum. I’d love to find a good Corrs song that would work for our voices!
Anyway, it has been a nice part of my break to be working on this. I need something to channel my energy into.
I’ve also cleaned up my apartment, and hung some artwork.
I teamed up with a friend at Trivia Night on Wednesday night and we won! It was mostly due to his knowledge, because he wins a lot, but I knew a few questions that he would’ve missed if I hadn’t been on his team. He let me have the bottle of wine that came with the winnings. It was the wine that I had been drinking that night, so I know it is a good one. He kept the little certificate thing to add to his montage of certificates.
If you are wondering: One of the questions I knew (that he didn’t know) was about the city that had the first subway.
Of course I knew that answer! Boston! You can’t exactly live there for 7 years and not hear about that at some point.
We got an extra point for guessing the year it started. 1897!
cool, huh!?
My other friend is back in town after being gone to Colorado for the holidays. We went out to supper last night. She will get to join us for trivia next week too. She and I are going to attempt to be “good” and continue getting a lot of work done next week for school, so we are limiting our plans to mostly evening events.
Yes, I’m on break next week too. Meetings start on Thursday of next week (Jan 12th) and classes start on Wednesday of the following week (Jan 18th).
But this whole break is sort of a working break. I worked up until Christmas Eve and I worked some the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I’ve mostly ended up doing a “slow down” when I’m at my apartment and not visiting family. Although there was nothing slow about doing that curriculum proposal last week. Whew! That was a hard one. But I got it in, and I heard back from the chair of the committee this week that it looked really good! woooot-wooooot!!!
Okay. And with that reminder of work, and since it is now 9:30 am, I ought to write a recommendation letter for a student who wants to go on a Study Abroad trip or maybe work on my syllabus for Genetics.
I just finished watching X-Men First Class in Blu-Ray. What an amazing movie. I loved getting to hear the back story on Erik/Magneto, Raven/Mystique, and Charles. It was really cool and had some neat twists and turns. It is too bad that there wasn’t more of Hugh Jackman in it (Wolverine), BUT the fact that James McAvoy was in almost every scene made up for it.
I’m such a sucker for any James McAvoy movie. I fell for him when I saw him in Penelope and it blossomed into a huge crush when I saw Becoming Jane.
But I digress.
The X-Men movies are really great; I highly recommend them.
I had a lot of fun with my family for Christmas last weekend. And here we are, on Wednesday, headed into New Year’s weekend, which I’ll spend with them again! We are starting to make plans for more movies and meals together.
Yesterday and today, I’ve been trying to tie up various things on my work to-do list. The letter of recommendation I needed to do for a student was relatively easy. Of course, today I got another request from a different student. The curriculum proposal for a new Developmental Biology course has taken quite a bit more of my time and energy. But I got a pretty good draft completed tonight. I’ll talk to my department chair about it tomorrow and hopefully have it wrapped up and submitted tomorrow. It is officially due on Friday at 5 pm, so if I can finish it on Thursday, I can take Friday OFF and not think about work.
I DID go for an exercise walk yesterday in our gorgeous 60+ degree weather. It was really fabulous. I’d wanted to go again today, but I was focused and trying to get the proposal done by supper, so I skipped it.
I’ve also managed to run some errands, which included boring things like grocery shopping, and getting food for Max, but also included fun stuff like stopping in at Dress Barn to check out their sales. I did find one cute top and one sweater; both have some frills and ruffles and have purple in them!
I also found a new, fitted exercise (dry) t-shirt in purple too (at a sporting goods store). I’ve been wanting to buy some new clothes since the weather has turned cooler, and just haven’t managed to find the time. I’m hoping to get to some more stores in the upcoming weeks. Everything is pretty picked over, so it is a bit challenging, but this is when I finally have time, so this is when I’ll go!
I finally saw “The Blind Side” with Texas Seestor and Trainwreck last weekend. It was a really good movie. I can totally see why it won awards.
I also rented “Crazy, Stupid, Love” which I do NOT recommend unless you are a Ryan Gosling fan and just want some eye candy. I’d gone to redbox a bit spontaneously (and had not scouted the availability out ahead of time) and had wanted to rent X-Men. When it was empty, I just picked a “romantic comedy” instead that I’d thought had good reviews. Not the best choice, and it taught me to plan ahead, for sure! Oh well, two out of three movies is pretty good.
In other news, the new band that I’m in had our first practice last week. We are mainly working on songs that are designed for 2-3 part harmony and acoustic guitars (Crosby, Stills & Nash, Eagles, Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver), sort of a country/rock cross. We had some really gorgeous chords during some of our very first run-throughs on songs. I got goosebumps a couple of times! We have a lot of potential. We’ll see if anything more becomes of it than just playing for someone’s surprise birthday party in late January. I’d like it to become something more. But for now, it is just good that we have any kind of goal; it will keep us practicing regularly and getting a bit of a set list down. I’ve had fun learning harmonies on all kinds of new songs and resurrecting harmonies I’ve sort of learned but haven’t been able to sing with anyone (like the 80′s songs such as “More Than Words” or “Hole Hearted”). I’m also stretching into country a little bit more than I’ve ever done before with a Wynnona Judd song and Sons of the Pioneers. It has been really interesting to branch out a bit more.
Okay. It is 11 pm, so it is definitely time for bed so that I can be bright and bushy-tailed for my work on my proposal tomorrow. Later!
I keep thinking that I’m going to have time to finish posting about the rest of my vacation in Massachusetts, but I really don’t see it happening. So, I’m going to attempt to summarize (with the help of some photos) of the various things that I did this summer.
When I got back from my vacation and scientific meeting in Boston, I started summer research with an undergraduate student. His project involved working with RNA which degrades really easily if it is exposed to the enzymes (RNases) in dust. So, I was able to convince him, by showing him some highlight and tip sheets about working with RNA, that it was worth it to spend the first few days cleaning the lab spaces.
We ordered chemicals and primers for doing PCR and the supplies just barely arrived before I headed off to Port Aransas (TX gulf coast) for a family vacation. When we were planning the vacation, I was thinking that I wasn’t going to be doing summer research this summer. This meant that I basically had to get him up to speed and able to do the experiments by himself (or with minimal emailing/phone calls) in a short period of time. The great thing was that we did a quick RNA extraction, RT, and PCR, gel, and photo. We got a PCR result! That meant that he had a stock of RT (cDNA) to go back to while I was away and keep trying new PCR conditions. It was good for him to have to learn to work more independently and do some trouble-shooting. AND that allowed me to go to Port Aransas and hang out in the pool with my nieces, Texas Seestor, Trainwreck (bro-in-law), Mom, and Dad.
We spent all day at the pool, because my nieces were a bit afraid of the ocean again. The pools are incredible! I had a ton of fun there.
A couple of times, after supper, we went out to the beach to play in the sand.
All of the photos from that trip are on Flickr in a set.
When I got back from vacation, I went back to working with my undergrad all week long on research. I also wrote a Letter of Intent for a grant proposal. It was basically a 1 page summary of all of the parts of the grant; I think I had 2 pages of references for that one page (single-spaced) of writing. It was rather intense. But I did get it accepted and am now trying to find/make the time to write the full grant! (due October 10th which is really soon! – I really need to turn it in about a week or so early)
As an aside, science writing is one of the things that I really dread. Once I start, I’m usually okay at it, but it takes me a long, long time. This is one small part of why I decided I didn’t want to be a full-time PI at a big research institution where all of the funding depends on grants and publications. It just isn’t my passion. However, mentoring students IS my passion. So, a small school setting makes so much more sense for me. But I am finding that the funding is really an issue when it comes to doing molecular biology research. We only had $1200 this summer for a 10 week RT-PCR project! We spent 1/3 of that on the enzymes to do the RT and 1/3 of that on the enzymes to do the PCR! That didn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room for chemicals for the RNA extraction, filter tips, RNase-free tubes, etc.
However, we did find out that we could cut all of our reactions in half to make them last longer. And we found other ways to stretch our small amount of money. But that isn’t going to be enough to do cell culture in future summers; which is why I’m writing a grant. We are also trying to get some local businesses to donate some money. I’ll be spending more time on that this year, I believe.
Anyway, around the time that the letter of intent was due, I went to the 4th of July parade in our town.
Towns from towns all around had floats to promote their local festivals and show off their festival queens and festival princesses.
There were a fair number of horses (drill teams) and cars (car clubs) too.
Other summer activities included going to the annual ice cream party hosted by some friends.
There were 17 flavors this year!
They have a really great pool, so I spent most of the party with my nieces in the pool. It was such fun! I was so glad to be invited. It is hard to fathom that they make 17 flavors of ice cream and host such a huge party each year.
We also saw Footloose at an outdoor park in Austin. Next year, they are doing the Sound of Music. Some of my friends (neighbors of Texas Seestor and Trainwreck) are organizers of the musicals and perform in the musicals (the very accomplished teen in the family), so it is always great fun to see the show. There is a wealth of talented performers in Austin, so the local productions are just amazing.
At the end of the summer, I went with them to see Hairspray – another summer Austin musical. And it was fabulous too! Seeing those shows were definitely some of the high points of my summer.
Near the end of the summer, and just before school was starting up, Mom and Dad baby-sat my nieces so that Texas Seestor, Trainwreck and I could see the last Harry Potter movie. We saw it in 3D IMAX, which was just incredible!
The 3-D part didn’t matter as much as the IMAX. I wish I could see ALLL my movies in IMAX. It was the first time I’d seen a traditional movie (and not just an hour-long IMAX movie) on an IMAX screen. WOW! The sound was just incredible!
Mom and Dad also baby-sat right at the very end of the summer so that Texas Seestor, Trainwreck, and I could go to the Schlitterbahn waterpark for the day and stay until it closed.
There were two watercoaster rides that we rode that were just incredible. The Wolf Pack was the raft ride that we rode when we first arrived. Dragon’s Revenge is their newest ride and had EIGHT uphill sections where blasts of water shot Texas Seestor and I uphill (on a two-person raft)! It was AMAZING! Both of them had pretty long waits (about an hour), but we knew before we went that all of the big rides would have long lines (even on a weekday). We rode the Black Knight at the end of the day when the line was shorter; it is a black, enclosed tube, which is rather unsettling, but definitely adds to the adrenaline rush.
Other things about Schlitterbahn that I hadn’t realized was just how many inner tube rides there are! I was envisioning the type of waterpark that I’d gone to as a teen where we went on a lot of body slides and rode mats on the slides. Schlitterbahn is almost entirely raft and tube rides; it makes for many fewer bruises!
And I also discovered that a “tube shoot” is basically like going over a (small) waterfall on a tube. They are crazy fun.
Going to Schlitterbahn was the last thing I did before I started work again at school. We literally went on a Tuesday and I had all-day faculty meetings the next day on Wednesday. Classes started the following Wednesday for me. It was a great way to end the summer.
Speaking of classes, I’m teaching 2 sections each for 2 courses that I taught last year. That is helping me a lot with my course prep, because a lot of what I prepared last year (powerpoints), I can use again this year. But I’m also tweaking and revising things that I want to improve. Also, I’ve designed their workload differently as far as the type of prep they do before they come to lecture each time. It makes it so that I have to get their Incomplete Notes posted online earlier than in past years. But thus far, the students seem to be responding well to the new structure. Their first exam is next Friday, so I’ll see how they do!
In other news, I am singing regularly with my church Praise Band, and I have been encouraged by the lead singer to find some songs where I can do solos. We did a song by Casting Crowns (Glorious Day) which was in a perfect spot in my range. I did a couple of solo verses on that song, and I sort of surprised myself at how well I could sing it when it was in such a good spot in my range! I surprised some people at church too! That experience has helped me get some additional confidence in singing solo or in a more exposed setting where the instrumentals have backed off in volume.
I continue to spend most weekends (at least Saturday) with family. We played a lot of slip-n’-slide, baby-pool, squirt bottles, this summer in attempts to stay cool amidst the 100+ degree weather.
Dad got their used golf cart up and running, so one of the fun activities when we are at Mom and Dad’s is to go on golf cart rides. We especially go in the evenings when the sun is setting and it is cooling off.
That is a view of one of the first-ever golf cart rides as you look out across the golf course from my parents’ back deck. There is another road on the other side of the course.
When we are at Mom and Dad’s we also enjoy watching out for deer.
You can see how dry it is in their yard. They had to stop watering their grass a while back this summer when water levels dropped to a certain amount.
Mom and Dad also had a couple of owls that were living in their trees out front.
Here is a photo of just one of them.
As the tree got more brown, the owl became easier to spot.
Of course, when it sat on the roof, it was really easy to see!
Well, I think that covers the majority of my news from the summer. I hope to not go quite so long between posts. But with school and then with getting sick (I have some sort of cough right now), I haven’t had a whole lot of time to write long posts. Now that I’m more “caught up,” I hope to post small things more frequently!
I am still not on facebook. One of these days, I’ll get to it. But for right now, I need to go water my plants, prep some Incomplete Notes for lectures, clean my apartment, and work on my grant!
On Wednesday after Memorial Day, SeaQueen and I went to her parents’ house on Cape Cod. I’ve been to their house in Woods Hole many times, but she and I had never really toured around the Cape much. This time, we had planned on going out to Martha’s Vineyard, but the weather was supposed to be stormy on the day when we had time to go (Wed afternoon and evening). So, we ended up visiting with her neighbor, going to a local gardens, going out to eat, baking cookies (the kind that come in a tube of dough), and we watched a Sandra Bullock movie that night.
This is the place that had the neat millstones in the landscaping.
It also had some anchors and an old bell.
Once again, the rhododendrons and azaleas were blooming.
It was really neat having the gardens be right next to the water.
All of the anchors were really interesting.
One of the paths started out simply enough.
And rapidly became a bit more interesting.
I definitely didn’t want to lose my footing and go tumbling down the hill!
It was really lovely.
As we were leaving, there was a wild rabbit in the grass eating his supper.
He was so teeny-tiny compared to Max!
Here is a photo of Max – I know there is nothing in the photo to give you a good reference for his size – but that willow-cube toy is about 3 inches in each direction.
The next day was the last day of our vacation together, and SeaQueen and I drove out to Provincetown. I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.
I’m continuing my story about my vacation out east to Rhode Island and New England to see SeaQueen and go to a scientific conference. There are additional posts about our trip on Memorial Day to the azalea garden and to the Gilbert Stuart birthplace.
Upon leaving the Gilbert Stuart birthplace, we headed back to SeaQueen’s place via a scenic route. We were just going to drive past Narragansett Pier and beach, but it looked so neat, that I convinced SeaQueen that we should park and walk around. We ended up checking out the surfing, paddleboarding, and the two towers.
It was really fun to be at the ocean and hear the waves crashing.
There was also a certain energy at the beach that I can’t quite put my finger on; it was an air of excitement, but also something else. Maybe exhilaration? It was that feeling of people desperate to squeeze every last drop of fun out of a weekend that was rapidly drawing to a close. There were definitely a lot of people who were checking out other people, so maybe it was sexual tension too. Whatever it was, it made for an interesting energy.
I don’t have any photos of our evening spent with SeaQueen’s friends and newborn baby girl. We had a fun time visiting with each other; we ate good food and played Apples to Apples, which was rather funny.
I don’t have any photos of our Tuesday trip to Six Flags New England. But it was AMAZING!
We were convinced that since school was still in session (recall that this was the Tuesday after Memorial Day), all of the kids would still be in school and the lines would be miniscule. Well, imagine our surprise/disappointment, when we got to our first ride of the day – a coaster, of course – Bizarro – and the line was over 30 minutes long! Bizarro is the ride that replaced Superman. It was our absolute favorite ride at the park. We ended up starting our day with Bizarro, and ending it with two back-to-back rides on Bizarro. By the end of the day, the lines WERE miniscule, because the kids had all boarded their buses and gone home.
What did I love about Bizarro, as opposed to Batman or others? Well, it was FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAST and it went HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGH!
I just looked up some stats and it goes up 20 stories and the first drop is 221 ft.
It goes up to 77 mph!
Boy did it get my adrenaline flowing! So much so that I felt a little ill when we road it back-to-back at the end of the day. But it is just an incredible, incredible coaster.
Also, the restraints on it are MUCH better than any other coaster I’ve ridden.
The restraint is this huge padded yellow thing that covers your midsection (you can see it on the screen capture above). I don’t like the ones that come down over my shoulders, like on Batman (see below), because I end up banging my head against them too much. The designers of Bizarro really solved that problem well.
We rode coaster after coaster that day.
We also went on some water rides, because it did start getting pretty hot about halfway through the day. We really got soaked on the river rapids ride. We rode the swings, which was quite breezy and relaxing.
It was the first that I’d been to an amusement park and rode coaster after coaster in a really long time. It was a blast!
After leaving the azalea gardens (described previously), SeaQueen and I ventured to the birthplace of Gilbert Stuart – portrait artist (painter). This is a place that SeaQueen had not heard of, but when we were worried of being rained out at the beach (and I went searching online for tourism), I spotted the entry in the “museums” section. I had no idea who Gilbert Stuart was, but I saw that it had a gristmill and snuff mill with functional waterwheels, which was enough for me to want to go see it.
(snuff mill on left, gristmill on right)
I’ve always been fascinating by mills and the workings of mills.
The tour guide was fabulous! Here he is describing how millstones have grooves in them.
The bottom stone stays in one place, and the top one is the one that spins and grinds (powered by the flow of water across the wheel, of course). They are both grooved. Millstones can have different groove patterns, as was evidenced by the different millstones that SeaQueen and I saw in a different park/gardens in Massachusetts. At that park, the millstones were part of the landscaping which was really unique and creative (shown below).
The story of Gilbert Stuart is rather interesting. He is the artist who painted the (unfinished) image of George Washington that is used on the dollar bill.
This is a sheet of one dollar bills from the mint that have not been cut.
Gilbert Stuart also painted images of many of the early U.S. presidents. I like the one he did of Dolley Madison (below).
All of the paintings are reproductions, because his art is too valuable to be housed at the birthplace where there is poor temperature and humidity control and inadequate security. I guess someone on the trustees committee for the birthplace once had the bright idea of housing an original on the grounds; they advertised it, and it got stolen!
Anyway, the story of Gilbert Stuart is also linked to the snuff mill, which made it very interesting to me. Snuff is the powdered tobacco that men and women used to stuff up their noses to get a buzz (before smoking tobacco became more common). This will be no surprise to my fellow lovers of historical fiction who are familiar with characters who kept their snuffboxes handy and who always kept a handkerchief handy for their brown dribbling noses (rather disgusting sounding – but isn’t smoking just as disgusting? – I digress).
Anyway, prior to this time period (mid 1750s), there were zero snuff mills in the U.S. So, any tobacco that was grown here in the states had to be shipped to Europe to be ground into snuff and then shipped BACK to the states for sale. Well, a rich person in Rhode Island (RI) decided that he was going to make a bunch of money by bypassing the shipments to and from Scotland by building the first colonial snuff mill in the states that could mill the locally-grown tobacco. He needed someone experienced to run the mill. So he recruited Gilbert Stuart’s dad and family to move from Scotland to RI to run the mill!
Gilbert was born at the snuff mill in RI and grew up in this relatively wealthy family. He showed a tendency to draw and color. A visitor from Scotland who was an artist, recognized Gilbert’s talent and convinced Gilbert and his family to allow Gilbert to study with him in Europe when Gilbert was in his teens. On the voyage to Scotland, Gilbert was tutored and mentored by this artist. However, the person either died on the voyage or died shortly after their arrival in Scotland! I don’t recall when the tutor died. What I distinctly remember our tour guide telling us was that Gilbert was all alone in Scotland with no money, no credit, and he knew no one! Also that he “must have” been getting some training on the long voyage from the states to Scotland, because his painting improved in just that short period of time. Gilbert ended up getting various odd jobs and (literally) working his way back to the U.S. again; I think he may have worked on the ship in order to have passage. When Gilbert was 20, he moved to England to study with Benjamin West, a famous painter.
His early work was not very good, compared to what he would be capable of later in life.
And then with time he was capable of this kind of work:
That one is my favorite. It is called “The Skater” and won him acclaim in 1782; he was 27 years old! The original is actually really large; our tour guide showed us a photo of him (I think) standing next to it in the gallery where it hangs.
The Wikipedia entry for Gilbert Stuart says that over the course of his life, Gilbert painted over 1,000 portraits. You should check out that entry if you want to see a list of the names of people whose portraits he painted and images of his paintings.
The other thing that was really neat about the birthplace was all of the aspects of colonial living that were on display. There are too many photos for me to post here but they are in a set here.
Herbs were dried behind the fireplace in the fancy, upstairs, rarely-used, living room.
A bench with a nanny board (like a short fence) allowed a woman to sit on the bench and have a small child next to her; the nanny board would keep the child from rolling off of the bench. The board could be removed so that a couple of adults/older children could sit on it.
This next photo is fuzzy, because I took it really fast. But the idea is that a well-made bed was so expensive, and fire was so common, that people kept the tools for dismantling the bed hanging on the bed post. If a fire would break out, they grabbed the tool and dismantled the bed quickly!
Can you imagine living in an age where fire is so common that you have to be able to quickly dismantle your bed for safe-keeping?
I liked the bedside table, because it had eyeglasses, old books, and a neat candle stand on it.
The spinning wheel was very large
as was the loom (sitting next to the grinding mechanism of the snuff mill).
My absolute favorite part of the whole tour was seeing the snuff mill actually be put into gear so that the pestle grinds the mortar (probably not the correct terminology). There is a video in the set on Flickr that shows it in action. Here is the video embedded in this post (hopefully one of those will work for you!):
Here is a photo too.
All in all, it was a really wonderful day! I learned many new things about colonial living and mills, I learned about a famous american artist, and SeaQueen and I had a lovely picnic on the grounds. It was quite a nice way to spend our Memorial Day in lieu of going to the beach!
I FINALLY posted all of my photos on Flickr of my trip out east to Rhode Island and Massachusetts to see SeaQueen and go to my science conference!
Jenski was in Rhode Island at the time too, so she met SeaQueen and I for supper at a great Indian restaurant. We had a lot of fun catching up in person and talking about all the stuff that we don’t talk about on our blogs. We had all worked together (in separate labs) in MA back when I was getting my Ph.D. They both went on to get their PhDs at different schools and are now post-docs. I’m glad we got together.
SeaQueen and I had all kinds of plans to meet up with her lab-mates and go to the beach on Memorial Day after breakfast. Well, on our drive home from breakfast, we saw a parade gathering. I got online to see where the parade was going to be (in case there was time to see a bit of it, OR if we needed to adjust our route accordingly), and the website said that the parade was canceled for severe weather!? severe weather? weren’t we going to go to the beach? Well, it turns out that everyone had assumed that someone else had looked at the weather to see if it was a good beach-going day. We started trying to come up with things to do that would be inside (like a museum) or located close by and cheap so that if we got rained out we could just bail on it really fast.
We ended up having more fun, we both think, than if we’d gone to the beach. We went to an azalea garden and spent a couple of hours taking photos!
It was one of the best times I’ve had going somewhere and taking photos. Usually, I’m with people who are NOT taking photos and thus don’t want to move at my snail’s pace. But SeaQueen had recently got a DSLR body from a friend who upgraded her camera; SeaQueen bought a lens and was ready to go super slow at the gardens too.
I have many, many photos of the gardens on Flickr. Here are a few of my favorites.
No, those are not azaleas. They are irises. But they were so gorgeous, they are my favorite photos of the day.
THOSE are azaleas.
And these next ones are rhododendrons (same family, different structure in how the blossoms cluster). They were in bloom too and were just gorgeous!
And then riiiiiiiiiight as we were taking these photos of the fencing made of vines, the rain started! We were at the end of the tour of the gardens, fortunately.
I never know what to call my posts. There is so much that I haven’t blogged about that I barely know where to start, especially since I need to keep this short. I leave in about an hour to go give my second of three finals. Yes, we are in finals week here. Commencement is Saturday. I have seniors in my classes and senior grades are due on Thursday at 5 pm. This makes it so that I’m in a time crunch right now. I still need to finish writing my final that I’m giving tomorrow morning; I would be designing questions right now, but until I’ve had a bit more tea and am fully awake, it is really hard to come up with exam questions (it is 6:15 am as I write this).
I’m mulling some things around in my mind about faith, divorce, marriage, and relationships right now. It will take me a while to formulate my ideas, more time than I have right now. But I think that I’ll be writing something about it within a few weeks. Right now, what I can say is that I’ve been praying for something for almost 20 years, and it has finally happened. Hallelujah! However, it wasn’t at all in the way that I was expecting, and I am still processing it.
The good thing is that I’m taking next week off, OFF. I will have plenty of time to mull. I, of course, have a to-do list of things that I want to accomplish. But I also want to spend some time in reflection. I know that if I do anything related to work, it will be to clean up my office and figure out my schedule for the scientific conference that I’ll be attending in early June.
Once mid-June gets here, I’ll be back up and running doing summer research with an undergraduate student until the end of July. We’ll spend time getting the lab space cleaned, unpacked and assembled. I hope that we can get some decent experiments done this summer. I’m still trying to get the equipment I need for my experiments. But, I’ve made some progress. Then, I’ll have a week or two to prep for the start of classes in August.
In the middle of the summer, we are taking a family trip to the Texas coast again. I’m really looking forward to all of the vacations.
For now, even though my tea is still not finished, I think that I ought to finish getting ready for work and then write some exam questions.
Today is my birthday! AND it falls on a Saturday this year! AND, even better, it is the first weekend of Spring Break!!!!
You know what that means?
hmmm?
Well, I’m going to tell you, of course.
I am not going to work this entiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire weekend!
AND, throughout the week, I’m going to take time to do some fun activities.
You can’t tell that I’m excited, can you?
Right now, I’m at Texas Seestor and Trainwreck’s place. I arrived yesterday at 5 pm just when Trainwreck brought the girl’s home from daycare – or PRE-K as my oldest niece exuberantly tells us. We played/I lounged while she played until about 6 pm. It was a great way to start the weekend. About partway through, the youngest finished her supper and bath and came up to play too. She is such a funny thing. She is at that stage where she loves putting things together and taking them apart and making them fit. Over and over again. Who knew that putting a plunger into the barrel of a syringe (all child-toys and not a real one) would be so fascinating?
We watched a lot of the coverage last night on the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. How very awful and sad. My heart goes out to all of them.
I’ve been up for about an hour and I’ve eaten a small amount of cheerios or “pre-breakfast” to tide me over until we go out to breakfast. I think that we are going to go to one of my favorite places where I can get really good biscuits, sausage, and really good shredded, fried potatoes. I LOVE the shredded hash browns and biscuits at this particular place. Of course, if we don’t end up going there, the other 2 places we tend to go out for breakfast are also really awesome.
Other plans involve going out to supper tonight and having cake and ice cream at some point.
Then tomorrow, Texas Seestor got tickets for she, Trainwreck and I to go see a vocal performance (a Pops). I’ve been trying to find some sort of performance to go to in the upcoming months as a treat to myself, and voila! She surprised me with this! How perfect! Mom and Dad will watch the girls so that we can go out.
This week, Mom, Dad and I hope to go to the zoo. There is one in the area to which I’ve not yet been, and I’m really excited to go.
We are also talking about taking a trip out to another town that has artsy-craftsy type stores to spend part of a day.
I’ll have to be really efficient with getting my work done on all of the other days where we don’t have activities. But I should be able to do that. I’ve got incentive, because if I can get my stuff done, then I can take the entiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiire weekend off next weekend too!
Don’t get me wrong. I really do love my work. But I’ve been working really long hours, and I’ve sacrificed a lot of “relaxing time” by having this type of job (and by wanting to do it to the best of my ability). And I’m just a tad burnt out right now.
hmm….
I think my older niece is up. I’d better go. The fun begins!
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.
