Look! A Dandelion!

A few random things:

Yesterday, as on all Thursdays this quarter, I went to my 9 am class, and then to my 11 am lab meeting. Class was good, and during our mid-class break, a group of us decided to sign up for the Shamrock Run 5K as a team. (It's cheaper if you register as a team, and well, we're all starving graduate students so cheaper is better.) There are 5 or 6 of us doing the run on March 16th and we're pretty excited. Our school has no undergraduates so the environment feels more like an office than a school. As a result, students rarely do anything together, so it's nice to see some socialization happening. We've come up with a team name and will be meeting next week to design our team t-shirts. We're "The team formerly known as OGI." See, when the whole tort cap decision came down a few months ago, we effectively ceased to exist as a school. OGI no longer exists. We're getting swept up into the School of Medicine ASAP. (So hurry up and grab all the OGI garb you can get your hands on before it's gone for good.)

The meeting went on significantly longer than usual because our presenter talked quite a bit. After over an hour of listening to details on her project, I couldn't help but phase out and start staring out the window. It was beautiful out! It was beckoning me. Once the presentation ended and we conducted about 5 minutes of lab business, I declared that I was headed out for a run and would be back in an hour. My boss asked if I'd like to take her dog with me. Her dog is a great running dog. I've taken her out before while dog sitting for a week. She doesn't pull on the leash, and she knows to run on the side of me farthest from the road. Anyway, I took my boss up on the offer and headed out with her dog for a great 5.25 mile run. I was thinking I had gone about 4-5 miles, but when I used my GPS software when I got back it came in at 5.25 miles. Pretty good!

Aside from feeling great about having the chance to run outside on such a beautiful day, I also got another treat. While running through a park, I saw the first dandelion of the year. Sure, the dandelion is a definite harbinger of the onset of spring, and that's good and all. But I was more excited about the little "weed" for a different reason: Dandelion Wine! I simply wasn't able to make time to pick flowers and make wine last year and I was pretty disappointed about it. This year, I'm not going to let anything get in my way. Come on Spring!

Mutilated Valentine!!!

I sent out Valentines this year to about 25 people all across the US. They were candy Valentines, and I put them in small envelopes affixed with $0.41 stamps and brought them to the post office. I had a feeling that the single stamp wouldn't be enough to deliver them, since they were heavy with the candy. The nice man at the post office informed me that because of their thickness the envelopes would get stuck in the mail sorting machines. I would have to send each as a small parcel.

"No problem", I thought, and I told the man that would be fine. He then needed to add postage to the 25 parcels and stamp each with "Parcel Post." He had to do this ONE AT A TIME instead of just printing out 25 identical postage stickers. He then proceeded to key in the zip codes on all 25 parcels. "Still fine", I thought. All said and done it was about $1.13 to mail each Valentine, and the process at the post office took about 30 minutes.

Well, Valentine's Day came and went...and I got word from a few friends thanking me for the Valentines. For example, I know one made it to Boston, and another to LA. Still, I was surprised by the lack of response. That was until yesterday when this came returned to me in the mail:


Yup, a mutilated, and de-candied Valentine (recipient name and address have been obscured to protect the innocent). According to the accompanying note, it arrived in Santa Anna, CA missing its contents. Now, if I hadn't have sent the Valentines as parcel post, the damage could be explained by the sorting machine describe by my friendly post office employee. But this was a small parcel...no machine. To be honest, it looks more like a small animal got hold of it than anything else. My favorite part of the accompanying note is where it says "We realize your mail is important to you and that you have every right to expect it to be delivered intact and in good condition." I'd settle for poor condition, as my mail certainly isn't "intact."

So this is the dilemma: How now do I distinguish between the ungrateful Valentine recipients (and think twice about sending them Valentine's next year at $1.13 postage, lol) and those whose Valentines were unceremoniously destroyed en route? My friends talk to each other too. I hope no one thinks I intentionally left them off my Valentine's Day list! The real kicker is that this exact thing has happened in the past with candy Valentines that I've sent. A few years ago, someone I had sent a Valentine to received an empty, mutilated envelope 2 or 3 months AFTER Valentine's Day. And the true irony here: it was the same person who's mutilated, empty Valentine got returned to me yesterday.

V-Day Table

Yesterday was two holidays in one; Valentine's Day, and Oregon's 149th birthday. To celebrate, Ryan set the table beautifully, bought a wonderful bottle of wine, cut up some of my favorite gruyere cheese, and cooked up a fantastic dinner of seasoned steak, garlic bread, and almond green beans. We haven't had a meal that good in a while. It was sensation overload. The steak was juicy and delicious. The green beans are our favorite side dish, but we hadn't had it in forever. The cheese...well...it's gruyere, need I say more? And the wine was one of the best bottles I've had in as long as I can remember. It was a cab sab with overtones of oak and pepper. Mmmmm...so yummy. It was a dinner I won't forget for a long long time.

Tee Birdy!

This week I tried my hand at disc dying for the first time. I made and cut out a pattern from contact paper and put in on a clear blue TeeBird disc. The I floated it in black dye. The next day, I pulled it out and presto! A tee birdy on the TeeBird! I like the way it came out and want to try more discs and make more patterns. The contact paper is just a beginning tool. Vinyl like you buy from sign shops is what works best. I'm looking forward to trying that. In any case, I'm pretty happy with how my first disc turned out.

One month later...

Phew, my last post was exactly one month ago today. It's been a pretty bust month. I had this huge deadline in the lab during the first week of February and that kept me busy. By busy, I meant working 7 days a week busy. Yuck. Once a year my advisers need to fly to DC to meet with the folks from the Department of Defense that funded the project I'm working on. They have to give a presentation about the progress we've made so far. The money started coming in over the summer, but in reality it wasn't until January that we started in earnest. Not for lack of wanting to, but this work is just complicated, to say the least.

We had both of the laptops connected to the PCR machines fry. One wouldn't even turn on again. They're what we like to call "dinosaurs." That's the technical term. The connect to our equipment via parallel ports. No laptop even comes with parallel ports anymore. Working with the IT department (his name is Jim) here to get such issues resolved is painfully slow. The one guy is we have in the entire department and he's stretched so thin we can't even see him anymore. He's see-through. We jerry-rigged a desktop into place while waiting for a permanent solution, but then the camera on the PCR machines weren't aligned. Someone must have knocked the machines. That took a while to trouble shoot. And on top of it all, we didn't even get in the supplies we needed until a month before the deadline. Anyway, I managed to pull it off and have some data to present, but it was exhausting.

Other than work, I started playing disc golf a little more often. Played a tournament called "Festivus" in the pouring rain. I've never been so miserable golfing in my life. No more winter rain golf for me. But I won the tournament, so at least I didn't walk away wet, cold, and empty handed.

With the weather getting nicer and nicer by the day, I'm looking forward to getting out more and hiking and golfing and running. And with the deadline passed, hopefully I'll be able to make plenty of time for all those things.