INDECISION 2008

I was ready for Super Tuesday. I had my outfit planned and I was ready to get out and vote! Then Edwards dropped out. Now what!? I have no idea who to vote for tomorrow. None. Nada. No clue. Both are worthy and historic candidates. I will admit to feeling a little giddy at the prospect of having a woman president. And I do feel slightly obligated as a woman to vote for a woman (girls gotta stick together). But when it comes to making a decision, it shouldn’t be about race or gender. It should be about the issues and the policies.

And I still have no idea who I’m voting for tomorrow. I could still vote for Edwards, but I feel like that’s throwing my vote away. Chris said that I could vote for whomever he wasn’t vote for and that way our votes would cancel each other out. That’s not only throwing away my vote, but his vote too. I’m thinking of playing the eenie-meanie-minie-moe game or flipping a coin.

NOSTALGIC FRIDAY SCIENCE

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the US entry into the space race. Explorer 1, the first satellite, was successfully launched into orbit on January 31 1958. The Explorer satellite was launched atop a Juniper C rocket and carried a cosmic ray detector to measure radiation levels in orbit. The cosmic ray detector, provided by Dr. James Van Allen, showed much lower radiation levels then expected. Dr. Van Allen theorized that the detector was saturated by very strong radiation from a belt of charged particles. A second satellite launch two months later revealed this to be true. This charged belt of particles trapped in space by the Earth’s magnetic field became known as the Van Allen Belts.

Explorer 1 only transmitted for a few months. Its last transmission was May 23 1958. It finally burned up in the Earths atmosphere in March 1970. It’s hard to believe that 50 years ago people were gathered around their TV sets to anxiously watch the launch of Explorer 1, a lowly satellite. Explorer 1 was the beginning of our love affair with space. In those days you truly loved NASA. Sigh. When was the last time you were excited about watching a space launch?

SO FAR, SO...SOMETHING

Many of you are probably curious about the move and how things are going so far. I will admit that there were some rough times during our moving weeks. There was one day in particular where I was tempted to get in my car and drive very very very far away. But now that we are here and some what settled, things are not that bad. We still haven't gotten completely back to normal. There are still lots of boxes to be sorted through. Also, I've miss-placed a book I need for yoga class. I have no idea where it is (probably with the trash or Goodwill donations). Of course, if I buy a new book, I'll find the old one. Our food situation is another thing still not settled. I usually plan out meals and have a sense of what we are having for dinner every evening. Last week my mother-in-law asked me what we usually have for dinner on Wednesdays. I said "I don't know". I usually know these things.

I forced myself to go back to the gym this week just to get some resemblance of my old routine back. I haven't been to the Y in over a month. The weird thing is I still managed to reach the next level in the Fitlinx system (free T-shirt!). I've also managed to lose about 8 lbs. I think this is because I can only eat half of the things Chris's mom makes for dinner. I think one night my dinner consisted of a handful of sticky rice. Her sumptom (sp?) can melt skin.

Really, things are not that bad. When things do get annoying, I just go to my room and shut the door. I close my eyes and think of the piles of money we're supposed to be saving. Then I say to myself "It's temporary. It's temporary. It's temporary".

TECHNICLA DIFFICULTIES

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Chris is in the process of moving my blog to a new server. Sounds easy, but it's not. The good news is I now have internet at the new house. Yippee! Chris turns into annoying computer guy when I use his. This is why he has to have his own toys. I have big blogging plans. Big plans, I tells ya!

FIRST DAY JITTERS

This was my first weekend of yoga teacher training. I headed into the weekend pretty nervous. What if my yoga wasn’t good enough? What if I wasn’t ready for this? Do I have to meet new people? All those first day jitters that one usually gets with the first day of school came crashing down on me. I left the house early Saturday morning to hang out with Chris (he was on baby-sitting duty) before class and I realized I had forgotten my water bottle. Then I started freaking out because I was going to have to buy a bottle of water and I’d probably be the only person there with an Earth-killing-plastic store bought bottle of water. How embarrassing. But once I got all my yoga gear settled in a spot on the floor and our teacher started us in our first asana class, I was fine. At one point in the middle of it all I almost giggled out loud because it dawned on me that I was in a yoga teacher training course. It was great. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I have homework and papers to turn in every month. I have to learn theory and Sanskrit (which is like learning a new language). But I love every minute of it. I thought I was doing this just to teach, but it’s turning into so much more (which sounds a little hokey, I know).

And you know what? I was not the only one there with a store bought bottle of water. I was not the biggest person there or the oldest. I was not the weakest person there or even the strongest. All of us in the class have our own faults and strengths. This is going to be good. Really good. Oh, and weird fact number 157: Chris went to high school with my yoga instructor. It’s a very strange, small world we live in.

DICTY

I thought today’s Friday Science entry would be about my favorite amoebae and yesterday’s seminar speaker. My boss was the seminar host for yesterday and she invited Dr. Adam Kuspa to speak about his current research with Dictyostelium (Dicty), the same organism we work with. Dicty are a soil amoeba that eats things like bacteria and yeast. They crawl around in the ground individually hunting for food and dividing until they run out of food. Then all the dicty cells in that area migrate together to form a slug (but not the kind of slug that leave the slime trails on your side walk). We are talking about 50,000 cells coming together and moving through the soil until they find a good spot to sort of plant themselves, usually some place kind of sunny. Then they form a stalk with a fruiting body on the end. The fruiting body is full of spores and when the food source returns or conditions are good, the spores can germinate back into single dicty cells. Pretty cool.

There are certain dicty cells in the population called S cells. When the dicty cells come together to form the slug, the S cells are the ones that kind of protect the slug. They act like an immune system eating up all the bad things that the slug encounters as it travels like pathogens and toxins. The S cells get sloughed off and left behind as they fill up with bad stuff. Then as the slug forms the stalk and the fruiting body, all the cells that make up the stalk formation die. Adam Kuspa’s lab studies the hows and whys of how this happens.

I find the topic totally fascinating particularly from an evolutionary stand point. Basically, this is how we started. At what point did the cells decide that it would be better to stick together then roam around singly?

Also, I’d really like to see dicty in the wild. Stalks and fruiting bodies are clearly visible on plates. I want to see them in their natural habitat.

I DON'T EVEN KNOW THAT GUY!

88% Mike Gravel
87% Dennis Kucinich
79% Chris Dodd
77% Barack Obama
76% John Edwards
74% Joe Biden
72% Hillary Clinton
68% Bill Richardson
44% Rudy Giuliani
32% Ron Paul
28% John McCain
24% Mitt Romney
22% Mike Huckabee
20% Tom Tancredo
15% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz Stolen from the Ninja.

FOOD CHAINS

We’ve all been taught about food chains in high school biology and it’s always represented in a very simple diagram. Plants get food from the sun. Cows eat plants. People eat cows, that sort of thing. I think we really take for granted just how complex the food chain is and the importance of the interdependence of species. Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues have been studying the interdependence of species in Africa focusing on the Acacia tree, ants and herbivores. The acacia tree is the most common shrub of the savanna and despite the long thorns provides sustenance to animals like elephants, giraffes and zebras. The acacia tree has struck up a sort of bargain with a certain species of ant who build their homes in the hollowed out thorns of the tree. In return for a place to live and some food the ants defend the tree from really intrusive herbivores.

This is where it gets complicated. If there are no elephants or giraffes nibbling on the tree, the acacia stops producing the little ant houses and excreting the sweet nectar that the ants eat. By spurring more growth, the acacia tree becomes a home to another type of ant. These new ants, Crematogaster sjostedti, are not nice ants. They don’t defend the tree at all. In fact they depend on bark-boring beetle larvae to build their homes. This causes the tree to die twice as often then when they are regularly being chewed on.

So, simply put, tree needs good ants for defense against herbivores which it also needs to keep bad ants away. This is why every organism on this planet is important.

FORGOTTEN

Lately, Chris and I have been driving to work separately. It’s just easier because Chris doesn’t have to be there until 8:30 and I like to get to work earlier. Also, he has to stay until 5:00 and there are lots of times when I don’t. But yesterday we rode to work together because I had seminar that wouldn’t get out until 5:00. I got back from seminar a little later then expected and I noticed that Chris hadn’t called and when I called him, the call didn’t go through. So I thought he must be in the parking garage. He immediately called me back laughing because he was at home. He forgot me. He searched all over our 800 square foot house for me and it was on the tip of his tongue to ask me where I was when he realized that we had ridden into work together.

I don’t think I’ve been forgotten since kindergarten.

FRIDAY SCIENCE, BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND

That’s right. I thought it was high time to bring back the weekly installments of Friday Science. Today’s science tale is a gruesome one and will make you see Thomas Edison in a whole new light. We all know Thomas Edison as the inventor of many things like the light bulb, phonograph, and electric power distribution. But what many may not know is that Edison was a shrewd business man. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company was the most evil Wal-Mart company of the time and Edison would stop at nothing to maintain his monopoly of electric power distribution.

Edison invented a power distribution system that relied on direct current (DC) and opposed all technological advancements that went against his business model, advancements like alternating current (AC) distribution invented by Nikola Tesla. AC distribution is more efficient then DC because power is sent in very high voltages to transformers and then sent over thinner, less expensive wires to the users.

Well, people started talking about AC and how much better it seemed to be then DC. So Edison started a propaganda campaign in 1887 to convince people that AC was too dangerous to use. To prove his point, he electrocuted small animals like stray dogs and cats, even some cows and horses. Then, on Jan 4th 1903, Edison electrocuted Topsy the elephant. All this was filmed and released as Electrocuting an Elephant. I don’t recommend watching the video. It’s bad enough just knowing that thing exists.

I’d like to think that heads of big corporations would never be able to get away with doing this today, but somehow I’m not so sure. I mean, in the end electrocuting Topsy didn’t help Edison save his precious DC. AC of course proved its superiority in less lethal ways to become our standard form of electric distribution. But it still makes you wonder. Remember the electric car? I didn’t think so.

THINGS I'M GONNA DO WHEN THIS GIMPY FOOT HEALS

The foot was feeling much better until I went back to the doctor today. He finds a new way to inflict pain on my foot every time. Yesterday I was feeling so good, that I walked the mile and a half to my car instead of riding the shuttle. Today, I’m back to being gimpy. The good news is the doctor says that I don’t have to come back unless it really starts hurting. No more follow ups! That means this was the last time for him to scrape and dig around inside the wounds on the bottom of my foot (yes, it’s as painful as it sounds). I have big plans for when this gimpy foot of mine heals (besides the yoga teacher training thing). My friend Craig is running in a half marathon in September (I know, long way off) and since we’ve always talked about training for marathons and actually running in one, I thought I’d train for it too. A half marathon is a good start.

Best of all, I plan on riding my new bicycle. Chris paid our friend Brian to rebuild an old Schwinn for me. I’m in love with my new bike. Its perfection right down to the Om symbol on the side. I just need a bell and a basket and maybe a helmet and I’m off! You know what would be great? It would be great if we had bike lanes or even decent sidewalks. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike.

PLANS

Everyone is blogging about their plans for the New Year and it got me thinking about my own plans. I try not to make any resolutions because that automatically sets me up for failure. Instead, I usually list out a few things that I will try to accomplish. I looked back to see what I’d try to accomplish in 2007 and apparently I didn’t think I should attempt to accomplish anything because I didn’t blog about anything goals related. This year I plan to get rid of a lot of things. This will probably be the easiest goal since we are in the process of moving. Plus we have got to pair down if we are going to fit in our new space. That means pairing down on everything, even the stuff we are storing away until we really move. I’ve already added some more elephants to the Goodwill pile and I’ve got them down to four Rubbermaid containers. Mom’s going to hang on to these until we move into a place where I can set them all out again.

Probably the most difficult thing I plan to do this year is to be kinder to myself. I tend to beat myself up for lots of silly reasons like skipping out on the Y or not cleaning the house or getting the laundry done by a certain time. I need to let things go. Having a gimpy foot has really wrecked havoc on my ability to get things done around the house. At first I felt really guilty about it, but then I thought “hey…I can’t walkâ€?. That stuff can wait until I can move around better. I need to learn to take care of myself first or that other stuff will never get done because the doctors will have to amputate my foot because I didn’t take care of it.

I guess that’s about it. Oh, of course I want to lose 10 lbs and get super organized and yada, yada, yada. Those aren’t really resolutions as much as things I’m always trying to do. I hope that everyone has a great wonderful New Year.

THE SAGA CONTINUES

So, it’s been a week since the wart removal and I’ve been feeling pretty good. I can get my regular shoes on and I can gimp around a little faster. Still can’t put too much pressure on that part of my foot, but it actually doesn’t feel that bad. Or I should say it didn’t feel that bad. My follow up appointment changed everything (except the shoe thing). When the doctor cut out the warts, he filled in the holes with this stuff that turns all black and gross; I think its silver nitrate. Today he removed the black tar like crap to reveal what he referred to as wounds. I like to call them gaping hideous holes (GHPs). The removal of the tar hurt…LIKE A MOTHER F*&#R! I held it together fairly well until I got to my car and then cried like a baby.

Up to now, I hadn’t looked at the bottom of my foot. I had no desire to see it or know what was going on down there under that bandage. Today the doctor made me look at it. He wanted me to see the horror of it all. Ok, he did this so I would know what was going on, but still, didn’t want to see it. The doctor was very pleased with the GHPs. He said they look great (WTF?) and he could see no sign of any left over wart cells. He told me to keep the GHPs clean and dry (I can take real showers again!) and I’ll see him again next week.

My foot has once again been tortured and left throbbing in pain. The sucky part is I really do have work to do today. Perhaps I was little ambitious in planning out today’s experiments.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Chris bought me Dance Dance Revolution for Christmas this year. I've been harping about this game ever since he got an XBox. He bought it for me before he knew I would be having foot surgery and he almost didn't give it to me this morning. It is a bit of a cruel gift. This gimpy foot better heal fast 'cause I got some dancin' to do! Hope you all have a wonderful Christmas.

OUCH

The warts have been removed. The worst part about the procedure was the numbing part. The doctor had to inject the numbing stuff under two different areas of my foot. That part was really painful. The rest was easy because I couldn't feel it. It was a little disturbing to see the doctor pick up something that looked like a melon baller to "scoop" out the infected areas though. It's also really hard to drive when you can't feel your big toe or the bottom of your foot. The totally sexy orthopedic shoe they make wear doesn't help much either. The doctor says that I should be better in a week. He said that its surprising how fast these things heal. But for now, I'm gimpy. The bottom of my foot kind of feels like I've been beaten with a scalding hot hammer.

Well, at least I have a really good excuse for laying around on the couch all day.

A WART STORY

If Tiffany can tell us about her “up the noseâ€? pimple, I guess I can tell my wart story (kind of sounds like a new program for TLC). I have two plantar warts on the bottom of my right foot. The first one showed up at the beginning of summer. I tried all the over-the-counter medications, but it wouldn’t go away. It would seem like it was going away, but then it would come back with a painful vengeance. The second one showed up around October. This was when my sister said “Oh those are corns, not wartsâ€?. So I tried a different over-the-counter medication (essentially the same stuff). They did not go away. In fact, they hurt even worse then before. At this point you’re probably wondering why I didn’t go to the doctor and I will tell you. It’s because I’m a scared baby. For the past several months I have walked around on two very painful warts and essentially ignored the pain. I thought that they would magically go away on their own. All I needed was a little pixie dust.

Then Chris finally put his foot down (Ha!) and made me go to the doctor. The doctor told me that they were indeed plantar warts. I could have picked them up anywhere, most likely place being the gym shower room (always wear shoes!). In order for my foot to be healed up in time for yoga school, the doctor is going to cut out both warts tomorrow. Yes…I said cut out. I will be left with two M&M sized holes in the bottom of my foot. Oh, they will eventually heal and apparently it’s not that big of a procedure because he said that I would be able to drive myself home. But I’m a little scared. I’m thinking about being a big baby about it all and make Chris take me so I don’t have to drive.

Can I also use it as an excuse to not do the laundry, clean the kitchen and pack more boxes? I will most definitely not post pictures, so don’t ask.

ALL SYTEMS GO

The power's back on! The power is back on! Hallelujah, the power is back on! You can't see me right now, but I'm doing "the power is back on" dance. I get to sleep in my own bed tonight. I get to get on the internets. I get to watch TV while sitting on my own couch. The down side is we had to toss about everything in our refrigerator and freezer. But now we have a really clean fridge.

POWERLESS

Our power went out around 10:30 Sunday night and its still not back on. The people across the street got their power back on Wednesday. Our side of the street is still in the dark. We’ve been staying with Chris’s mom and you would think this would be good practice for things to come, but OH MY GOD! Chris’s brother and sister-in-law and their two kids are also staying there because their power is out. That’s five adults, two kids, and one dog in a small three bedroom house. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the house wasn’t already cramped. We’ve been cleaning out rooms and moving furniture. There’s still a lot to sort through, so just about every nook and cranny has a box of crap in it. The kids have been out of school all week and are about to go crazy. I’m on edge watching the dog because he doesn’t like little kids. I’ve told Jessica (the youngest) about a million times to leave Hooper alone. He will bite you! I think I’m just going to let him bite her next time. We’re all just ready to sleep in our own beds. I think Aimee (sister-in-law) would have slept in their freezing, powerless house just to be in her own bed last night.

The power is going to be on by the end of the day. I don’t know this, but this is what I’ve been telling myself everyday for the past week. The local news channels said that it may not be until Sunday before some of see electricity and another big snow storm is coming in today. The power will be on by the end of the day. Just say it with me. The power will be on by the end of the day.

THE THINGS WE WISH WE DIDN'T HAVE TO DO

My blogging has been sketchy at best lately. I've sat down and typed up several posts, but I just end up deleting them all. We've just been so busy and under a lot of stress and I wish it was just the regular Holiday stress, but it's not. I can't even really believe it's Christmas. I told Chris the other day that it just seemed surreal to see Christmas lights up. Is it Christmas time already? I feel like I'm continuously talking myself out of a panic attack. Chris has a lot to deal with because his dad hadn't prepared for anything. Who knew there was so much paperwork involved when someone dies. He's so consumed with the paperwork, his mom and keeping up with his job that he doesn't have time to grieve let alone deal with a freaking out wife.

Chris's mom is having a difficult time with it all, so we're moving in with her to help out. We see it as a reeducation process for his mom, teaching her to live on her own. She knows that this is a temporary arrangement and that we will be moving in two years (I don't know where yet). So, for now, we are cleaning out her house and packing up ours and I'm doing my best to be a good sport and keep my chin up. But it is hard. It's really hard. But I will keep telling myself that its all going to be OK because I love my husband.

GIVING THANKS

I am thankful for my husband and my family (which of course includes Hooper, our wonder dog). I am thankful for the wonderful friends that bless my life. I am also thankful for my great job. I am thankful for the small things like the million times a day that Chris makes me laugh. I am (slightly) thankful for this cold weather only because it's the only time Hooper will lay still on my lap for hours. I am thankful for the roof over our heads and the food we are about to eat. What are you thankful for?

Hope you all have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.