Science Monkey

I started on my second knitting project last night, but the first one that I plan to complete. Emma and I went down to our favorite local yarn shop and bought for me some nice, boy color yarn (a deep, rich blue) and a pair of needles. After some preliminary fumbling last night, I remembered how to cast on and then Emma showed me how to actually knit. Woo! The scarf is probably going to be too wide but I don’t care. Well, not too much. I did about ten rows last night and am starting to get it figured out.

I also broke down and ordered my own pair of bowling shoes this past weekend. They won’t be as hot as Emma’s shoes, of course, but I like the way they look. Emma and I have been bowling pretty regularly and really enjoying it. We stink, of course, but it’s fun. Maybe we’ll even join a league one of these seasons?

Okay, time to work. Type to you later.

I’ve been meaning to share these pictures for a while but have been lazy. Emma bought me a knit-a-monkey kit (yay!) and I have started to work on it. Sadly, I think it’s a bit above my skill level at the moment, but I’m excited to work on it.

Here’s me with the kit:

What do you do with this stuff?

Oh! Is chopsticks! Right?

Cast on, huh? I can do that.

This stuff is hard! Or maybe I don’t have great fine-motor skills.

My first night’s progress.

After that step, the pattern calls for increasing by one stitch on the next row. I could not figure out how to do it. Just bumfuzzled me. Oh well. My plan is to learn how to just knit something simple, then come back to this.

Oh, Emma was working on her own monkey at the same time that I was knitting. She, however, can increase.

Late last night I was sitting in my office, playing WoW, and having a grand old time. Earlier this weekend I dinged 57 (yay!) and had pushed myself to within 5k xp of 58, so when I couldn’t sleep last night and didn’t want to watch TV (or actually do any work) my choice of pastime was simple. I ripped through about 20 undead (which seemed appropriate, given how close we were to halloween), dinged 58, and was on my way to the Dark Portal (and Outland). Oooo. Spooky. I hear a quiet little scratching noise behind me but ignore it, assuming it’s one of the cats.

I explored the area around the Portal for a bit and had flown to Thrallmar when I heard the noise again. This time it wasn’t so much a scratching as a cat trying to walk stealthily into my office. Last I saw, both of the cats were asleep on the bed with Emma, so I was curious who had come to visit me. I turned around and…no cat. I look around some more and see this long, white face with coal-black eyes staring at me from underneath a fish tank. “What the hell is that? Is that a ferret? Where’d a ferret come from? Oh…that’s an opossum! Wait a second…why is there an opossum in my office? What the hell am I going to do? Oh! Let’s get Emma. She’ll know what to do.”

I go wake my wife and with her help we managed to herd the possum into a cardboard box. Okay, so mostly she did the herding. And the planning. If it were just me, I think the opossum and I would still be staring at each other, not sure what to do.

So there’s one more reason why my wife is my hero. Emma Caplan: healer of the sick, wrangler of wild beasts, and owner of the cutest new haircut this side of the Pecos.

As you can probably guess from my lack of posts, this has been a busy week with little significant information to share. Work has been plodding along reasonably well which is a nice change. Waradwen got a new pet this morning (two actually, details below). Uncle Dave and aunt Martha were in Florida this past weekend to celebrate Dave’s birthday, so we got to have dinner with them on Monday. Emma had a day off on Wednesday and spent it with Susy at Epcot (pictures to come). Overall, I’d give the week a solid B.

As I mentioned above, work has been decent this week. My last two sets of mouse preps are looking good so far, so we might be able to actually generate some data in the next week, which would be terribly nice. These experiments are just confirmation of what a previous grad student saw (but never repeated and her probe was poorly located) and what a postdoc saw years and years ago (but was never followed up on). Assuming all goes well, we should be able to get a manuscript together pretty quickly, on which I may or may not be first author. Tom said I would months ago, but I haven’t been involved at all in the writing process. The former grad student has written a couple of drafts but Tom says they’re nowhere close to what we want, so he’s declining to share them with me. I don’t quite get it. The first author does the bulk of the experiments and the writing, right? We’ll see how it goes, but I’m expecting that I’ll be second on this paper. Not something to quit over, but yet another time where Tom has said one thing and then done something else.

Tiger is getting increasingly confident in her ball. She ran down the hallway last night, then came back to us. I don’t think that she’s just running blindly around, either, because she’ll go towards specific objects. Or cats. Heh. Last night we had the front door open because the weather was so nice and poor Rory was sitting, looking out through the screen, when Tiger charged at him. I’m actually a little happy about that…I’d prefer it if the cats had a healthy fear of Tiger, because I think they could eat her in about three bites if they decided to.

We also figured out a good way to give Tiger her baths. Chinchillas take sand baths, where they roll around in the dirt to get clean. Nifty, eh? We bought her a chinchilla-shaped ceramic…well…bathtub but she never seemed to really like it. This week we went lower tech. We bought a large tupperware container and found a place online selling large quantities of the sand. What we’re doing now is putting a nice layer of sand on the bottom, then putting her in with the lid on upside down (so she can, you know, breathe, but not run away). She freaking loves it. Yay! She digs down into the dirt then flops over and rolls around, then repeats herself. Very cute to watch. The container we bought has clear sides so we can watch her and one of these times I’ll remember to set up the video camera.

Much of my free time this week has been subsumed by Warcraft. For those of you sane enough to avoid the game, it’s Brewfest, which has been a heck of a lot of fun. There are racing games you can play for tickets and when you earn enough tickets, you can buy an epic mount that’s only available during the fest. The quests are repeatable, but only once or twice a day, so it’s taken a while to earn all of the tickets. I averaged about 70 a day, I think, so it took me ten days to earn the 600 tickets. I totally borked up the beer run last night and was six tickets short, so of course I had to get online early this morning and finish. I’ve been saving money from my arcanite transmutes (10g a pop, minus about 2.5 for the mats, so that’s not bad) and bought both the epic mount and the regular mount. I can’t use the epic mount until level 60 (and after I improve my riding skill which costs another bomb) and the regular mount was only 10g (compared to the 100g for the epic), so I went ahead and bought it. I realize it’ll live in my bank after about a month or so, but that’s okay. I’ll have fun with it until then. Plus, I had the money. Just barely, but I had it.

Now poor Wara’s flat broke. I sold some redundant junk in my bank to make a little money and I have the mats for more arcanite transmutes, but for the moment I’m basically penniless. Oh well. I can always bum money if I really need to, or I can just earn it again. Plus, as I understand it, money is easier to come by as you get higher up, which will be nice. At least I’m pretty set with gear and weapons for a while so not having money won’t be a huge inconvenience. Pretty soon I’ll be able to cross into Outland, whence the easy money, as far as I can tell. Well, easier. Until then I’ve got some reputation grinds to work on (Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle, to be specific, so I’ll be alternating between opposite corners of the world).

Enough nerding out. The sooner I get back to work, the sooner I’ll be done. The sooner I’m done, the sooner I can go home and get playing. Yay!

I turned 31 on Friday and had a lovely birthday weekend, despite being called “old” by my mother. My mother! Emma and I celebrated my birthday by going out to breakfast. We usually go out to dinner, but she had to work Friday night, so we went out to breakfast instead. Yay! I got some great gifts from her, including a new bird feeder and a pirate ship model kit which is going to be fun to put together. After breakfast I went in to work and did a little bit of stuff at the lab including running a test gel of a recent DNase treatment which looked pretty nice. Not perfect, not necessarily even great, but nice. Happy with my success and in celebration of my birthday I left early (not super-early, like 2:30) and went home to play WoW until my eyes bled! Actually, that’s not entirely true. I played a little WoW, then took a nap, ordered my favorite dinner (pizza), then played WoW until I couldn’t stay awake any more, minus the beer run at about 9:30. Yay! I’m so lame.

Saturday was a beautiful day in town and Emma and I did a lot of work in the backyard. We’ve let the backyard go wild this year (not really on purpose, we’re just lazy) and are now paying the price as we try to reclaim it. The lawn mower and the electric weed whacker aren’t quite cutting it back there (no pun intended). I don’t remember quite what else we did during the day on Saturday…she probably slept and I think I played more WoW, then we went over to our friends’ house to watch the UF-Auburn game. Stupid Auburn. Stupid Gators not playing the first half. *sigh* I mean, I didn’t really expect them to go undefeated this year but Auburn? After losing to Auburn (and only Auburn) last year? Good grief.

Sunday was a fairly somber day in town. We went out to dinner at the Paramount with my folks and had a nice dinner. It’s still probably Gainesville’s best restaurant, but they’ve been doing essentially exactly the same menu for the past…I don’t know…five years. And apparently they don’t stock their cupboards over the weekend because my grandmother had the last can of Sprite in the entire restaurant, they were out of the duck, and they couldn’t find an un-prepped chicken breast in the kitchen for my grandmother. Although, she claimed she didn’t want the crab that was stuffed into the chicken, but she seemed to enjoy it. And my tuna was quite good. I guess I just expect a little more innovation.

Two pieces of media to share with you before I sign off today. First, my Monday Morning Screenshot. I was having fun dancing over the corpse of a raptor in Un’goro Crater yesterday and decided that’d make a nice picture. Plus, I’m in the always-enjoyable Moonkin form. Second, I found a video of the dragonfly on YouTube. I’m not nearly as good flying mine, at least not yet.

And my last posts were how short? Uff da!

Life has been pretty good here in Heggestad/Caplan-land. We’re enjoying the company of our newest resident, Tiger the chinchilla, who is un-fucking-believably cute. I put some pictures up on my Flickr page and will get some more up probably later tonight. She’s so so cute I just can’t stand it sometimes. The cats have been remarkably tolerant, too, which has been nice. Although…I am a little worried that they’ve been *too* accepting and am starting to question their observational powers. Maybe they don’t care because their lives are not too significantly disrupted. The only resource that Tiger competes for is our attention, and, well, they’re cats. As long as they have food and comfortable places to sleep, they’re pretty much okay.

I’ve been playing a little less WoW than previously, but I’m still progressing nicely. Waradwen’s up to 51, so woo-hoo! I ran Zul’Farrak this weekend with some guildies and the lovely and talented hunter Linada which was totally a blast. I sort-of screwed up the timing of the run, though, because I missed the season premieres of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Sigh. Family Guy sounds like it was great enough to go look for online. Hmm…anyway. No real progression in my tradeskills recently. I’m at 300 herbalism and 295 alchemy and can’t go higher until I get to Outland, which isn’t for a little while. I know I could buy a port there, or beg my guild friends, but I’m not in a hurry. Then again, it’d be nice to progress in the skills…I’ve been lax in my Monday Morning Screenshots of late because there hasn’t been a whole lot of change. I took a picture yesterday afternoon with my new hat and it’s at the bottom of this post. Do you like my hat?

Work has been okay the past few weeks. Nothing terribly exciting. No significant data or anything. I’ve got a committee meeting a week from Friday and am freaking out to a minor degree given my recent dearth of data. Maybe…maybe it’ll have to get rescheduled for some unknown reason. That’d just be tragic, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can push it back to…like…November? I should have some data by then. Oh, probably not.

Enough rambling for now. More work, less goofing off. Yeah, right.

A family portrait from our Orlando wife:

I’m working today! Really!

I have a bunch that I want to write about but don’t want to think about enough to write coherently, so real content posts are going to be a bit limited for the time being. As if the past month hasn’t been obvious.

Emma helped me start reorganizing my office yesterday. We swapped the weight bench from my office for the futon in the “guest” room. This should result in a better use of space.

My office before the move:

My office afterwards:

Still need to clean a bunch, but we made good progress. Better, right?

I’m in a good mood this morning, and I can’t really explain it. I didn’t sleep well last night. Since Emma’s out of town, I’m eating fairly poorly. I’m certain I’m not getting enough exercise. The weather is pretty ugly, with it being overcast and drizzly all night. *shrug* Whatever it is, I guess it’s working for me. I actually feel moderately cruddy but am still in a good mood. Maybe I’m just happy it’s Friday.

I’m even feeling fairly charged up about work, which makes almost *no* sense whatsoever. We’re mired in some pretty nasty weeds right now, to mix a few metaphors, and it seems like we fix one problem to find two more new, worse ones on the other side. The current major problem is that our Southern blots aren’t working correctly. Sweet Jebus, Southern blots! How much more fundamental can you get? Our signal-to-noise ratios have plummeted in the past few weeks…I think that both sides are a problem. That is, we’re getting weaker signal for our bands *and* we’re getting more background noise. Both in- and out-of-lane background, for the two of you who know what that means.

At any rate, it’s frustrating. I think I’m going to spend the next week or so getting my hands dirty and really trying hard to solve the problems we’re having. We have an undergrad who has been doing most of the Southerns this summer so I can focus on some other experiments, but we’re having enough problems that I think I need to step in. She had lovely results while Jixiu was still around, but since then they’ve gone downhill. I don’t think it’s a buffer issue, because I’m using the same buffers for my LMPCR which is going reasonably well right now. I’m not as good as Jixiu yet, but I’m not bad, either, so I think our buffers and equipment are okay. That leaves technique, basically, as the problem. We spent all of lab meeting yesterday discussing the problems and I think we have some tweaks to the protocol that will help. I’m going to run a few Southerns myself this next week and we’ll see how they turn out. I’m optimistic.

Things are going well at home. Emma is out of town until Saturday, in Kansas City at a family medicine student and resident conference. She went a few years ago and had a really good time so I hope she’s having fun again this year. Her program didn’t get the best of residents in this recent class — it’s not that they’re bad, they’re just not quite as good as Emma and her group for whatever reason — so I think they’re going to try and recruit harder this year. I suspect that Emma will end up as one of the Chief Residents next year, which will be good and bad. I think it’ll be good for her because she really enjoys being in a teaching and supervisory role and I think she’s really good at it. It will also mean more responsibility and time which will be bad for both of us. Perhaps not “bad”, but harder. More time at work = less time at home.

I’m rambling, so I’m going to stop now and get back to work. My centrifuge must be almost done by now, so I should go attend to that. Happy Friday morning, my friends. I’ll type to you soon. I’m planning on eating Chinese take-out and playing Warcraft all night, so come find me on Arathor. I’m getting close to level 40 and that mount…

PS: Before I forget, I wanted to clarify something I wrote the other day. Emma didn’t really yell at me for playing Warcraft. She had just had an extremely frustrating experience at Walgreen’s and snapped a little. Not a big deal, not a fight. I just thought it’d be funny to write that we had our first fight over Warcraft, but I might have been mistaken. Okay. I’m off. Laters.

As I may or may not have blogged previously, my in-laws have essentially moved out of town for the next few months. My father-in-law is working for the next three months in Akron, OH and my mother-in-law, who has just retired, is taking a long vacation. We’re not sure when she’ll be back, other than it’ll be before Thanksgiving. They’re planning to be away so much that they’ve moved the cat up to Akron to live with Vince.

Since they’re going to be gone for so long, they allegedly had hired a housesitter, someone from Abby’s work, to stay in the house and to keep Emma and I from having to get the mail, etc. daily. Actually, I think the mail is being forwarded, but that’s beside the point. I say allegedly because neither Emma nor I have seen any evidence of this housesitter actually being at the house. Neither of us have seen a strange car in the driveway and I never saw anybody at the house in all the hours I’ve spent working on the computer systems. I was even there after 9 one night, with no sign of anybody else being there.

Emma and I stopped by the house on Saturday morning after breakfast, because the router was acting flakey and Vince asked us (me) to reset it, when we had a chance. We stop in about noon and there’s still nobody there. This time, however, we notice that the house is freezing (the A/C was set really low) and Emma notices a bunch of odd food in the fridge. “My crazy mother,” she exclaims, “has left a loaf of bread on the counter and some really odd things in the fridge. Like lettuce. There’s no way that this isn’t going bad before she comes home. How crazy.” I may be paraphrasing a little there, but that’s the gist. And the bread isn’t even a kind that Abby would buy, which makes it exceptionally odd, given that we don’t think anybody’s living in the house. So we fix the router, make sure the computer is back online, and take the bread and a few Diet Cokes with us when we leave. The bread was going to go bad! At least it could go feed the chickens, right?

Yesterday morning, after breakfast and errands, we drove by the house again. This time an outside light was on. One that was distinctly not on when we left. Whoops. So now we’ve stolen someone’s bread (and eaten some, by that point in time) and Diet Cokes. More than just one or two…I had a couple when I was working late on the computer and we took a couple with us when we left and I think we split another one when we were resetting the router… At any rate, we’ve now stolen a bunch of this poor stranger’s food. What should we do?

I think that we’re going to replace the food, but be funny about it. We’re going to replace the loaf of bread with another, different kind. Something similar, but not the same. It was white bread, so I thought we’d leave some multigrain. Or maybe a box of crackers. And we’ll leave a two-liter of soda in the fridge. That’d be funny, right? Sheesh. We feel pretty bad.