Science Monkey

Most of my pictures are now online for the Colorado Reunionfest. I’m still working on the descriptions and such, but they’re at least viewable. Hope you enjoy!

If you’re reading this, I suspect you know Emma and myself. I’ll try to simplify everybody’s relationships, but it’s a bit of a muddle, to be honest. Hold on tight.

Abby: Emma’s mom and essentially the nucleus around which this reunion formed.

Mike G.: Abby’s first husband.

Larry G.: Abby and Mike’s older son. His son, Max, wasn’t able to come.

Deborah G.: Abby and Mike’s older daughter. Her son, Ben Z., was there, but her husband, Mike Z., couldn’t come.

Jenny K.: Abby and Mike’s younger daughter. Arranged the entire event (Yay, Jenny!) and attended with her husband, Brad K., and son, Sam K.

David G.: Abby and Mike’s younger son. Was there with his wife, Lorrie G., and children, Joseph G. and Sarah G.

Vince L.: Abby’s current husband and Emma’s dad.

Teresa S.: Mike’s second wife. Attended with her wife, Susan J., and their twin children, Isabelle (Izzy) and James.

Billy and Eli D.. Two of Abby’s cousins.

Susan S.: Another of Abby’s cousins. Attended with her s.o., Stuart.

Priscilla C.: Abby’s sister. Attended with her daughter, (”the older”) Sarah.

Ellen: Mike’s sister.

Judy: Mike’s current wife.

Ben: David G.’s friend, who came to join us for the last few days. His partner, Bruce, came up for the last evening (with his tuba).

Barb: Jenny K.’s friend, who also came up for the last few days.

Is that it? I’m sure I’m forgetting somebody. Hmmm. At any rate, counting friends and children, that’s 30 people at the reunion, at varying times. I think we averaged about 25 at the llama ranch over any given night.

At one point late Sunday morning I found myself literally shivering as stress and anxiety washed over my body.

Friday night: the backup air conditioner died. After a few fruitless calls to friends and family in search of a couch for the night and the realization that a motel would cost at least $50 each night, we drove to Lowe’s at 8:30 PM and bought a new wall unit for the converted garage. We took out the old, dead unit, installed the new one, and insulated with rolled-up blankets. Not ideal, but sufficient, and enough to allow us to sleep comfortably, even if it was for less time than we might have chosen.

Saturday morning: After breakfast, Emma and I went back to Lowe’s to buy new molding and insulation to finish the a/c installation. We had just started to figure out how we wanted to do it when Emma’s cell phone went off, saying she was late to work. Work she didn’t know she was scheduled for. Work that took away her first day off in two weeks.

Saturday afternoon: High point of the weekend. I did a little work and played a little WoW. Emma got some sleep, before having to work the overnight shift.

Saturday night: Nightmares. Recurring dreams of being paralyzed and unable to speak, presumably linked to anxiety over my looming committee meeting.

Sunday morning: Lowest point. Tiger dies. Racking pangs of shock and sorrow and grief. Much of the rest of the morning is a blur. I know we eventually took her cage outside — having the empty cage was clearly going to be too heart-wrenching — and had to find some food before Emma collapsed. In an attempt to keep ourselves moving (I would have chosen to lie down on the couch and done nothing), we went back to Lowe’s and bought the materials to close up the hole around the a/c. By Sunday afternoon we found ourselves out at my folks’ house, who have been wonderfully helpful and supportive. Emma had a good nap and I floated in the pool for an hour, doing and thinking about nothing.

Sunday evening: We buried Tiger under a Korean dogwood, next to the garden. We gave her lots of treats, her favorite chew toy, and a lot of sand, which she loved to play in.

My committee meeting went decently on Monday, which was a huge relief. They seemed pleased with the progress I’ve made in the last month and want to see me again in another month. Work harder, work harder.

The air conditioner installers were out at the house this morning to replace the main unit. Naturally, we won’t be able to replace just the outside unit — codes, you know — so at the moment I’m waiting to hear from the credit union about financing. If approved, they’ve offered us an 11.5% interest rate, which seems like a decent sign that we’ll be approved, but we’re still waiting. Once the financing is approved, it will take about three days to get the unit ordered, delivered, and installed. In fact, if I can get this ordered by 2 PM tomorrow, we can have the air conditioner installed on Friday. I can live with that.

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.

A family portrait from our Orlando wife:

I’m working today! Really!

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.

My father-in-law is a computer engineer (embedded systems design) and runs his corporate servers (web, email, etc.) from his house, using a static IP address and a DSL connection. For the next three months, however, he is living and working in Akron, OH, so isn’t around to maintain the system. Because he’s sure that the system will go down at some point in the next three months — power outage, hurricane, whatever — and because he doesn’t want to burden anyone (namely me) with having to maintain the system — it’s an older Sun and I’m certainly not that good at Solaris…I can boot it up and check simple things, but that’s about it — he decided to buy colo service from his ISP, atlantic.net. (I’m not going to link them out of frustration, which will be explained in a few moments) It costs more than renting a dedicated server, but it’s far easier to set up. All someone has to do is to physically move the machine from his house to their data center, less than two miles north. Enter me.

He arranged all of the details of the move with someone at atlantic.net and my job last night was to shut down the machine, drive it to their data center, and bring it back up. Not a big deal. In fact, he even shut it down remotely, so that part of the job was taken care of. I go over to the house about 7:40 last night and make sure the system is down, then call the 800-number for atlantic.net to let them know I’m coming over. The data center is open 24/7, but it’s after normal business hours so I figured I’d just make sure someone was there and available. No problem. The engineer I talked to was very friendly and helpful, knew about the transfer, and all was well. “Do you know where we’re located,” he asked me as we were concluding our conversation. “I sure do,” I overconfidently replied, since we had done this move at least once before, after all of the hurricanes a few years ago. I lug the box out to the car, grab a keyboard, and hit the road.

Five minutes later, I’m at the building. Sure enough, the atlantic.net logo is still on the building sign, so all systems are go. The engineer said that there’d be a call box I’d have to use to call them, and they’d come down and escort me in. No problem. Well, no problem until I can’t find a call box. As the primary part of the building is a bank, I don’t want to act too suspicious by rattling all of the exterior doors so I call the engineer back. “No problem. I’ll come down and let you in. Are you at the main entrance?”

“I guess so. I’m by the drive-through.”

“Be right down.”

Five minutes later, nobody has shown up. My phone rings. “I just went downstairs and didn’t see you. Where are you again?”

“By the entrance,” I reply, getting rather concerned at this point. “You’re still in the bank building, right?”

“The what? Bank building? What street are you on?”

“13th street.”

“13th? No, we’re out on Kennedy Boulevard.” Kennedy Boulevard? There’s no Kennedy Boulevard in Gainesville. “You must be somewhere downtown.”

“Not really,” I reply, warily. “Where are you again?”

“13th street? You must be in downtown Orlando…”

“Um, no. I’m in Gainesville.” D’oh.

So, you see, it turns out that they had closed the Gainesville data center “years ago,” and apparently the salesman my father-in-law talked to neglected to mention that detail, and either didn’t hear or ignored him when he said that he’d like to colo in Gainesville. How terrible! How amusing now, after the fact, but how frustrating!

I call my father-in-law back and explain to him the problem, then drive the machine back to their house. He’s frustrated, I’m frustrated. Not terribly fun. I manage to get the box back to the house and running — not before a fsck had to be run, naturally — and we were eventually back online. He got concerned while I was running the check that he couldn’t ping the router, so he was convinced that the whole system was shot. Somehow, magically, it repaired itself once Timucuan, the server, came back online, but the end of the story is that he’s frustrated with and angry at atlantic.net and I’ve wasted the evening shlepping the Sun box around town. Which is not light, I might add. Oh well. It seemed like a good plan, but I really should have learned that nothing goes easily when it comes to his computer system. Nothing is quite as straightforward as it ever seems it should be.

Emma thought the story was very funny, incidentally, when I finally got home. “Why,” I asked her, “do I ever think that working on his computer is going to be as easy as it sounds?”

“Because you’re gullible?”

Greetings, friends. I know I said I’d write a real post yesterday, but clearly it didn’t happen. Hopefully this will start to make it up to you.

Today is Emma and my fifth anniversary which amazes me every time I think about it. Five years? Really? That’s like half a decade! That’s longer than high school! How bizarre. I mean, I’m thrilled and don’t think that I could be where I am now without her support and occasional kicks in the pants, but I’m still having a little dysmorphia (dyschronia?) when I think that we’ve been married for five years already. Yay us!

We’re not doing a lot to celebrate other than going out to eat. We’ve decided that the recent purchase of a new car is our anniversary present to each other, because everybody knows that the fifth anniversary is traditionally rubber and gas. Heh. We went out to breakfast this morning at our favorite breakfast place, the 43rd Street Deli on 13th Street, and I think we’re going to go out to the Top for dinner tonight. Maybe we’ll just eat at home, though, ’cause we’re lame like that.

On a completely different line of conversation, I’ve been getting a ton of hits to my blog the past 48 hours. So, welcome, all of you visitors. Hopefully you’ll enjoy what you find here and will come back again from time to time. By a “ton” of hits, all I mean is that my numbers have gone up about five times. I typically see about 10-ish hits per day (not including my own), but yesterday I had 70 hits and today I’m over 50 already. How odd. I wonder if I’ve recently bumped up a little in the Google search results or something. *shrug* Hopefully I’ll keep you guys entertained enough to come back.

You know what it is? I’ll bet it’s because I posted that picture of my friend’s avatar in those gaudy, hot pants. That must be it. Heh. Apparently WoW pr0n sells.

Enough typing for now. I’m off to do some more work and then we’re allegedly having lab meeting today, for the first time in a month. I’ll believe it when I see it.

I don’t know what I did on Saturday to cause it, but my sleep schedule was completely screwed up yesterday. I played WoW Saturday night (naturally) with a friend until about 10:30, then logged off and watched a little TV. I saw the opening to SNL (a repeat, Dick and Lynn Cheney reading Valentine’s Day cards…quite funny) then went to bed. I woke up for about an hour at 3:30, then slept until 10:30! I never sleep that late. I had fully intended to go to yoga, but clearly it didn’t happen. Emma came home about 11:30 and I took a nap with her until about 2, had lunch, then essentially went back to sleep until almost 6. Consequently I was up until about 1 last night and woke up about 5:30 this morning. We’ll see how today goes, but I’m moderately pleased with myself that I came in to work rather than going back to bed.

Emma and I are going to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary in four days. And by “celebrate” I mean wish each other a happy anniversary and then go about our regular Thursdays. We’ve decided that the new car is our anniversary present to each other. If I were a good husband, I’d probably buy her some flowers and a card though, eh? I should do that. So, Emma, if you’re reading this, forget that last sentence and at least act surprised on Thursday.

My parents are leaving on a week-long road trip this Friday and I’ll be slightly surprised if they both come back. Or at least come back together. I wouldn’t be too surprised if mom flew home early. Heh. They’re driving up to Stoughton for some closure for dad, I think, then coming home via the upper peninsula of Michigan. Yeah, not really on the way, but the weather should be nice and it should be a good drive. They’re also planning on stopping in Lansing, MI, so I guess it’s either north through the UP or south through Chicago and Detroit. UP sounds better to me, too. Dad went to grad school at Michigan State and mom hasn’t been back since he graduated. It sounds like a nice trip to me but doesn’t really sound like their type of vacation. They’re more the two-week-cruise-across-the-Atlantic vacationers. We’ll see.

Time to work. Well, time to do some more work. I’ve spent about an hour writing this, interspersing writing with work, but now it’s time to really get into the grind. Have a good Monday, everybody, and I’ll type to you later. Before I leave you for this morning, here are two screenshots of my main characters. As of this morning, Waradwen is at level 27 (I’ve almost leveled my age) and Warmi is at level 12. She got a pet raptor yesterday which is pretty sweet.

Waradwen:

Warmi (and pet, Slash):