Kidneys etc

I'm pretty sure everyone here knows about this, but I wanted to note in the family timeline that I'm planning to donate a kidney. I've been planning to do this for a long time now, but I wrote about it here, in case you haven't seen that yet.

Perhaps Kels or even a guest blogger will be interested in sharing more about what that looks like to Team GW. Perhaps they will be interested in writing for my hypothetical book of short stories about kidney donation. If finding a job takes too long, that's going to be what I work on to keep myself busy. More on that later.

Things are good here- we are planning a camping trip to the Olympics for Thanksgiving, and STILL get to eat stuffing with the family this Sunday. Work is winding down, but I feel like this is a nice time of year for some free time.

Tyler Has No Room for Existential Crises

The weather perked up this weekend, and since Monday was a day that daycare closed, Jess wanted to take advantage of the nice timing to go camping. So we did! We went out to Garner State Park, a few hours west of us, brought food, a tent, and some sleeping bags, and just hung out for a while.

It was nice. I brought my hammock that I got for Christmas and spent several nice naptimes in it. We also did some hiking up the mountain (only sorta in quotes) in the park to see what it had to offer. We came upon a cave that went down about 30 feet or so, and Tyler was initially pretty nervous because he knows one thing and one thing only about caves: they have bears in them. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that this cave had 'Zero Bears', but only after Daddy went down first to make sure it was safe. I'm so brave.

S'mores were had, of course. Tyler mostly liked the chocolate, the marshmallows are very messy, and Tyler doesn't like to be a messy eater. I also did a mostly successful experiment where you fill an Ice cream cone with marshmallows and chocolate and strawberries and then heat it up in the fire. Worked pretty well, but not better than S'mores, which, as it turns out, you can also put strawberries into. Yum.

At one point we found a dead rabbit. Tyler wanted to see it, and I let him look at it for a while, though letting him know that dead things are not safe to be near. He wanted to know why the rabbit was laying there, and I did my best to explain death to an almost-three-year-old. I told him that a car probably hit the rabbit and that sometimes there are hurts that don't get better, and then the rabbit just goes away and doesn't come back. He kept asking questions for a while (mostly about cars and safety...and squashing) and then moved on. Later the rabbit was gone, probably cleaned up by park staff. Tyler decided, with full authority, that this meant the rabbit got better. There is no space in his brain that is shaped like death, it just doesn't fit in there yet. Though he keeps asking about the rabbit, so maybe it's getting formed.

Anyway, I got to cook breakfast sausage and eat s'mores and feel justified in my calorie intake because I then put Tyler in my backpack and hiked to the top of a nearby mountain (with nice views), so it all mostly evened out. Tyler even had a good day this morning, his first day back at school, which, when compared to other 'first days back' we've had to go through, is nearly miraculous. He doesn't wet himself as much either. He's getting so big!

-N

Winter Wonderland!

For the last couple of years, Matt and I have managed to get in one winter camping trip. We usually go with Matt's bestie, but this year his family is too busy, so we decided we should just go ourselves. We booked a cabin at Wallace Falls State Park, as scant hour from our house, and figured we could have an early Valentine's weekend escape.

Things being as they are, this was exactly the sort of week where if we had not already made a reservation, there was no way we'd be going camping, even for one night, even an hour from home. It was a busy week, Matt has been getting "additional opportunities" (a management joke) at work, and I hadn't been feeling that well. Neither of us had any time for planning, but come Friday night we went to REI to buy ourselves a campstove, and Matt ran to the store for groceries (bagels, goldfish, and frosted animal cookies). The forecast seemed like it might be too cold for sitting around a campfire, so we opted not to pick food that should get cooked over a fire, and went for stuff we could cook on the stove. We rationalised that we could hike the falls on Saturday, and either slow poke our way home on Sunday, or admit defeat and come back whenever we were ready to wimp out.

Our evening activities included cataloging the species in the animal cookies.
Is the lower right a pig?

The hike up Wallace Falls is not that arduous, but I was feeling ... very... slow. The 5 mile, low elevation gain hike took more than 3 hours. We got to stop and look at lots of things. The tiny ice towers that form when water freezers under mud. The "snow" that forms along the river canyon from the splash of the falls. The icecicles that crowned every rock in the river. It was a really beautiful hike.

It was cold. He didn't want to pose for this picture.

Since I knew I was going to be moving slow, and that it was cold, I wore my heavy winter coat, and a layer of thermals under my clothes. I was quite toasty, and pulled off my hat and gloves when we were moving. Matt, however, always has a super high metabolism and forgot what cold is all about. He was wearing highly ventilated plastic pants, and a fleece he has had since high school that uses a technology he calls "wind accelerating." His hat and gloves were firmly in place the whole time, and only in the last mile did he concede to putting the raincoat he had (along with several other other layers) in his backpack.

The trail head to the falls is also where our cabin was. Our last winter camping was in a yurt, which is basically a big tent wearing a warm coat. It has a light bulb near the door, and an outclassed radiator chugging along all night. Last year's yurt slept 5, with a bunk bed and futon, but once we put a couple backpacks in there, the place was full. I had expected some variation of that, but this cabin was posh. It had TWO rooms. The thermostat was set when we arrived, so it was quite toasty. There were curtains on all the windows, and adorable log furniture, including the futon, bunk, end table, dining table and chairs. By this point, we were both happy to sit inside and read, slipping out as far at the porch (yeah, porch) to boil water for tea and warm up our soup. Well after dark, maybe 7?, Matt stepped out to rinse the stove of our soup, and mentioned that there was some "slow rain" falling outside. Sometime after that we realized that "slow rain" falling in the cold was snow!

Snow in Western Washington! Everyone Panic!

Actually, sitting in a toasty cabin with nothing to do but my knitting (and timing Matt to see how many pistachios he could eat in 60 seconds) was the perfect place to be on a snowy evening. The half inch or so that accumulated was still there in the morning. Matt has plenty of snow driving experience, even in his sporty little car, so our only concern was that outside of the state park, the weather may have prompted an Armageddon level of panic and mayhem. It actually seemed quite mellow. Wallace Falls is off highway 2, so most of the outbound traffic was heading up the mountains to ski, and the westboard traffic was light. There was a bakery in Sultan, WA keeping busy in spite of the weather. And we opted to stop at the Reptile Zoo in Monroe on the way home, too. (Did you know that not all lizards have limbs?? If your snake has eyelids, it might not be a snake...) It was a cool museum, that maybe Tyler would enjoy (unless one of his parents has a phobia about snakes, in which case, forget I mentioned it). It was kept nice and warm for the cold blooded critters there.

Two headed turtle at the Reptile Zoo, obviously.

There seemed to be even more snow- like a whole inch!- at our house. It's melting slowly, and I expect the pandemonium will have subsided in time to make it to work tomorrow.

Fall in Austin

For those of you returning after the last blog entry, yes, Jess did make it back just fine. Tyler seemed quite happy to see her, though he wasn't as deliriously beside himself as Jessie would have liked. Perhaps because it was the middle of the night for him. She picked him up to rock in the chair a little bit, then Tyler got out of the chair, walked over to his crib, and pointed at it. He's a really good sleeper.

Last weekend we went camping. It was a little bit spur-of-the-moment, we got invited out by Jessie's boss to spend a camping weekend out with a bunch of people from work and a whole lot of food. Don't get me wrong. We weren't rouging it by any stretch of the imagination. We drove right up to the campsite. There was no way I was carrying Tyler's travel-crib any appreciable distance, to say nothing of all the other stuff we needed to bring.

Early in the week was pretty cold, so we packed for cold nights. We even got a couple of hand warmers to put in the bed with Tyler in case it got really cold. Of course, this turned out not to be a problem, as it was very temperate most of the time, and occasionally even a little too warm. The main downside of the whole trip was that Tyler woke up on Friday night a little after midnight and didn't get back to sleep until about 3:00 AM. He wasn't fussy or anything, just chattery, and we didn't want to wake up nearby campers. After that frustrating spell, though, the rest of the weekend was great.

We were camping with about 8 or so other families, most of whom had kids in high school, though there was a second strata of a few kids still too young for school, so Tyler had some playmates, though he mostly stayed with us and explored. They had some hammocks set up that spent time between getting napped on by grown-ups and getting swung on by pre-teen boys. There were several different full-sized grills in attendance, including a smoker, and someone brought a flat-screen TV and a portable satellite dish to watch the important College Football games on Saturday. I'm just saying we weren't wanting for much. We joined in the food fest in our own small way. I brought hobo pouches for us to eat on Friday that were delish! Saturday we tossed in our hot dogs along with a lot of hamburgers, side dishes, and other random goodies provided by everyone else. It turned into a buffet.

Tyler liked exploring, as you could imagine. He was very interested in us setting up the tent, and then trilled by being allowed to run around inside it. He ran around with some of the younger kids, but his stubby legs couldn't quite keep up. There was a little playground nearby with a see-saw that we got to ride on with Tyler, he really liked that. And we even went on a short hike on Saturday morning, though we did mostly have to carry Tyler around with us. He still liked looking around, and it was great exercise for us. He also needed some alone time, because there's a lot to take in when you're that young, so we spent some time in the tent with him just reading old familiar books before bedtime.

We decided to head home Saturday night, reasoning that it would be better sleeping for both Tyler and us, and we were just going to pack up and head home in the morning anyway, so we wouldn't be missing a whole lot of campitude. So we put Tyler to bed in his little travel-crib like everything was perfectly normal, then picked his crib up, carried it out of the tent, and packed everything while he slept in his crib next to the car with a blanket tossed over the top. Then we said our goodbyes, woke Tyler up enough to get him in the car seat (and he was an absolute gentleman for the whole ride home) and made our escape back home. Only one night in a sleeping bag and already the bed felt more comfy than I remembered it being before.

I'm super-excited about Seattle. Jess and I have a few things we want to make sure we get to do, though we're keeping the schedule kind-of light so that we don't overwhelm the little one, though he's certain to spend at least a few days in the tender care of Nana and Great-Nana while Jess and I are off doing crazy things like...I dunno...probably learning about history or something.

Oh, and we voted. Got in on the Early voting which was great, because no lines. :) I got to hold Tyler while I made my selections and he watched. He was equally entranced by the touch screen I was using and by all the grandmothers staffing the polling place who kept giving him smiling faces. I think he liked the attention. When we were done, we gave him both of our 'I Voted' stickers and hung out for a while at the playground outside the voting area. He liked that. Yay for Democracy!

-N

A job that isn't a career

I started working this week.  Nice.  I'm a part time teller at Key Bank, which gives me a chance to practice dressing like an adult, re-infuses a little cash into the budget and reduces that stench of unemployed desperation.  Although, if we are going to be honest, I have like 3 jobs- 5 if you count those that doesn't pay me in non-negotiable currency (see, I am learning so much at the bank!).  My coworkers are a lot less buttoned up then I was afraid of, and I'm doing a decent job at learning.  There is something deeply intimidating about taking someone's cash off their hands for them, so I am just training for the next couple weeks.  I did let someone into their safe deposit box today, though.

But, let's be for reals, I took this job so I could find a better job.  While I'm there for 20 hours, I don't mind chatting with them about training for long term promotion, but when I am not there I am doing contract work and looking for a job that suits me better.  Because my new coworkers laughed when they heard I had a Ph.D.  I met with an engineer this evening to talk about transitioning into bioengineering.  I'm trying to work my schedule around my internship at the UW.  I've got another meeting tomorrow to talk about more volunteer opportunities.  I'm not giving up on this yet.  But I do need a couple more blouses and probably a grey blazer to make this work in the long term (I like blazers- they have pockets).

Matt and I are going camping this weekend not far from Mt Vernon.  We are going with his bestie who was born on the leap year, and just celebrated his eight birthday.  We had pizza AND pie on Wednesday- much like the Olympics, waiting 4 years makes you want to get it right.

Almost done

Tomorrow is my last day on the job. I thought I would feel very sad and overly nostalgic. I finished my last experiment today, gave away a few more freezer boxes of reagents, and convinced my coworkers to take a frozen yogurt break. I mean, I will miss THEM, and having an excuse to see them everyday. But really, it is time to move on. It's scary not to know where I am going next, but I'm actually feeling excited about it. I mean, I have lots to do.

If you are still following the "other blog" you may have seen that a recruiter called me today simply to walk me through how to make better connections on LinkedIn. It seems pretty obvious when he explained it, but I thought that looking for strangers to connect to might be a violation of.... something, I don't know. If I can find them, it's because they are willing to be connected with. So the next stage of the job hunt will be more targeted.

I also spoke with a Career Coach today. I have mixed feelings about this service- I don't think it would be that helpful to solve my imminent problem, but I suspect it might be invaluable for helping me reach my long term goals. But what it comes down to is paying someone to provide mentoring and counseling for career problems. I mean, shouldn't I be able to find mentors in real life? Like, for free? Because this career coach is the opposite of free- like $200/hr (or packages for 10 sessions! Only $750!). Not like I've shopped around much, but my impression is that these services- esp for someone with any concept of the science universe, will not be cheap.

Oh- and we went camping over the weekend and it was awesome. Beautiful (non-hurricaned) weather all weekend, great food, nice long hike and TONS of butterflies. Nice to get away, I suspect it is doing a lot for my peace of mind this week.

Another amazing fire

The forecast for the weekend was cold, snow, possible rain, and more cold. This is why I was committed to doing my part to add to global warming- Matt and I spent the weekend at the Laurelville Mennonite Church Center, firing the wood kiln. But first off- let me show you how awesome all the stuff the THREE of us made for this class. Amazing volumes, right?


All that is hand packed into the kiln- it takes most of a day- more than a normal work day for sure, to carefully balance each piece on 'wadding'- clay mixed with sand and wood chips that becomes unstable after the firing, but keeps all the pieces from melting to the surface of the shelves.



We lit the fire at 7- this is the earliest we've lit it, EVER, and a couple hours really seemed to help. Once the kiln was going, we could focus on the business of making wood fired pizzas. Oh yeah.

We share the load in 8 hour shifts, mine were both midday- my coworker Sarah went from 8pm-4am (I did that before- it is tiring), and Swarna did from 4am-noon. I tried to be helpful and stack wood or gives breaks whenever I was awake, since I had the easiest time. During my shift on Saturday, I moved the temp from 800 F to 1700 F- so I was pretty much feeling awesome. My friend J even came out to see what all the fuss was about! But my camera started acting up- so I don't have any more pictures. Frown.


By 7am Sunday, the kiln was up to the temp (2100 F) it needed to be help at for a couple hours (Thank you, Weather!), so my shift was rather abbreviated. We did actually help seal up the kiln this time. This involves slowing the rate we feed the kiln, then choking out the air intakes and sealing the cracks with more wadding. The bravery and skill required to 'mortar' the kind of crack that has 2150 degree flames shooting out of it we left to our teacher. I just dropped the last piece of wood. We seal it up, and let it happily melt the remaining ash into glass while it cools. We'll unseal it on Thursday, and see what we get. There are other photos posted here, but these are quite similar to similar albums of the past.

Departmental Retreat

Every year my department has a retreat- this is a common thing in academia. We all hang out, listen to talks, and share some meals. I'll be presenting an old poster, and leading a Q&A for the first year grad students (on surviving your first year). It's a good opportunity to rub elbows with people we don't normally see, and a casual atmosphere to share science. This part of the retreat, I totally get. It's kinda an imposition on my weekend, but I understand why we do it.

The part of the retreat I don't get is that everyone thinks we are 'camping.' Yes, we are bringing sleeping bags to sleep in, but in this sense, it is much more like a slumber party. True, there will be a bonfire, and the forecast calls for rain, but let's be straight- this is where the ecologists in the department LIVE all summer. It's not plush, but we are going to the departments ecology station. It's more like "going to camp." There are big dorm rooms fills with bunk beds, lights, hot running water, a ping pong and a cafeteria. And, let's not forget this major point- we are going to be talking about science. Drinking beer from kegs, and talking about science. It's just not camping.

I don't want to come off as more-outdoorsier-than-thou, but this kinda brings up a key point of division between me and the locals. I'm bringing clothes I intend to get plenty muddy, and I haven't made up my mind on the shower issue, but if you can hear highway traffic, and there is an official lights out (cuz, y'know, there are lights), it's not exactly getting away from it all. And yet my classmates are baking camping food and preparing the traditional camping Jell-o shots. I should just accept that this is as rural as people from New Jersey have ever been, and accept that is makes them happy.

This is part of the reason I haven't participated since my first year. First, I was totally jilted by the camp atmosphere, and that completely destroyed any possibility I would want to talk about science. I was just too shell shocked to imagine going back and enjoying it. Now I am trying to imagine this more like going on a grubby vacation, or an open air conference. I'm not really convinced that these two worlds can or should co-exist well, but I'm willing to give Sleep-away Camp with the Whole Department another shot.

Feeding the inferno, and other things I couldn't do without Matt

<-- Just a pizza, but more like how I imagined the firing might go. We survived the wood firing, which I hope by the end of the post you'll appreciate as a righteous achievement. I went to the laurel highlands to participate in firing this kiln as the culminating event in my Wood-Fired Ceramics class (a generous birthday gift from Mom and Dad!). My teacher Joe, had described the process as 'you know, the kiln has to be loaded, and there is a lot of smoke and ash that transforms into glaze and it takes a long time and then later we can unload it. Oh, we can camp and there is pizza oven.' This description somehow failed to convey the sheer amount of labor, heat and vertical shooting FLAMES that would be involved. Really, I should have put that together on my own- Normal glazes melt at just under 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and to deposit enough ash that could be transformed into a glass that would melt evenly on the surfaces, that has to get to 2,300 degrees. And sit there for hours.

The whole process is transformative. A dusty shed at the edge of retreat center is filled with shelves, pots and wood, sealed shut and becomes a kiln. The pots turns from earthware to ceramics, the logs turn to ash which becomes a colored glass. For myself, I rebuilt my definitions of 'uncomfortably hot,' 'dangerously hot,' and 'hot as summer in hell.' But with Matt there and my classmates/coworkers to cheer me on, I suited up and conquered the flames. We won't see the pay off for all this hard work until next weekend

I was nervous going in to my first shift- the kiln had been cooking for a full day, and I was handed the gloves at 8pm Saturday night with the temperature at ~1,600 degrees. Joe hoped it would get to 2,000 by lunch, and Matt and I had the reins until 4am. I'd been watching my coworkers, so I knew what to do and had safety gear to do it in, but pulling the lid off a blazing inferno brings out a really instinctual response (RUN AWAY) that seemed impossible to overcome. Within the first hour though, I was doing it all. Opening the door to reveal the blaze, counting the cones of glass that would melt as the temperature increased, piling in wood until flames poured out the chimney, the pressure holes in the ceiling and finally the door itself until I slammed the inadequate-seeming pillow of fiberglass back over the hole. In this blazing atmosphere, you can smell the oxygen burning out of the iron, a smell that accompanies thick black clouds of burnt metal. Matt and I took turns feeding the fire and passing the wood, and Matt killed time by splitting logs and raking coals. As scared as I was to be in charge of this monster until 4am, I was so much more brave to have Matt there with me, whose welding experience gave him an edge at things like battering a coal bed flat with an iron rod, and raking coals until the iron rod turned red hot (eta:30 sec). With his support in tending, we got the fire to 1900 degrees by 4am. We saluted the next shift by shooting flames out the chimney and slept a few hours.

We took over again with more help the next day at noon. The temp was up to 2050, and we wanted it to get just a bit hotter and stay there over the day. We worked the first until about 6, and then left the kiln in the careful hands of Joe to tend for another day or so. When it is done, he'll seal up all the intake, choking out the flame and giving the pots a chance to cool slowly. We'll be back next weekend to unseal the door (we closed gaps with raw clay, which was baked into submission over the weekend) and unload the kiln. I can't imagine what we'll see- pots fused together by overzealous ashing, pots shattered by inarticulate wood tossing? we nearly destroyed the door on several occasions by shifting bricks out of place so severely they had to be banged back with a mallet-, but I hope some things come out well. Just as Joe described though, we made a lot of pizza, the camping was quite glamorous and it was a lot of fun. Fabulous! More pictures, here!

Camping Near State College

Just got back from a nice weekend away from the city. A former lab mate's family owns a cabin in the middle of the state, and she was gracious enough to host us there for the weekend. It is a sleepy little property with great sun and stars, and a wide yard that turned out to be perfect for playing croquet. We played several rounds, with decreasing appearances to the rules. There was also time to squeeze in a little Scrabble, and quite a few s'mores. We at a lot of great food, drank some nice wines and relaxed with a post-doc from across the hall and her husband. I think this next week and coming month will be increasingly crazy, so I am really glad we had a chance to relax together.