Hard to believe, but 2 years ago…oh…right about now, Meg was born. And just like that, we no longer have a baby, but instead have a little girl running around.
Last week was pretty busy, in general, but thankfully I think we were able to enjoy the celebration yesterday. Brooke made an excellent cake (additional post forthcoming), and soup, and all kinds of other things. Mallory and Rachel came over Saturday to help get the bulk of the work done while I entertained Meg. Our family and some friends came over, crowding into our living room to help celebrate the day. It would have been nice to be outside, but it was about as good as one could ask for with an early March birthday.
Regardless, it’s been a wild two years and I’m sure it’s only a prelude to what’s to come. We’re looking forward to what’s ahead!
Now that we’re a full month out from Christmas, I thought I’d share our “homemade” Christmas gifts with you. Our house was a mess from the time we moved in in late October until… ummm, actually, there are still boxes that need to be unpacked. But, we managed to give some pretty cool and personalized gifts. In the end, I don’t think we saved very much money, but the gifts we gave were definitely worth far more than anything we would have been able to purchase for the same amount. I thrifted/repurposed/cleared out my stash for most of these projects, so not only did we end up with a fairly inexpensive gift list, but also with a very “green” holiday! Helped to offset our vapid consumerism the rest of the year, I suppose! We probably won’t go to this extreme in the future, but will definitely add homemade touches and do a few things here and there!
The list:
Handkerchiefs, both two sided with flannel and unhemmed hand dyed knit
Pocket squares
Shaving cream
Wool cooler cups/koozies (I learned how to do a blanket stitch for those!)
This is an India Brown Ale in the tasting glass you get for attending the event. Mmmm!!
We went to Schlafly’s annual Cabin Fever event this past weekend at their Maplewood restaurant, the Bottleworks. It’s always held around this time of the year as their Winter Festival, featuring somewhere around 30 of their beers.
Generally, you pay $25 for a ticket (or $30 at the door, but it’s always sold out if you wait that long) and, in exchange, you get a nifty tasting glass and eighteen 2 oz samples of various beers. As it’s wintertime, the beers tend to be “high gravity,” meaning they’re a bit heavier and tend to have a higher alcohol content. They always have a few of their lighter beers on tap, too, but the big draw is their other fare.
Now, you say, “well Andy, that doesn’t sound like very much beer for the money you’re spending.” To a degree, you’re right, but the kind folks doling out the beer are kind enough to a). “forget” to bring along a Sharpie to mark off your ticket, and b). start at 2 oz of beer, and as the afternoon wears on, the volume increases. So in the end, you can get plenty of beer and taste just about anything you want to.
In the Picasa album that’s accompanying this post, you’ll see pictures of the list of beers that were available, including a brief description of each one, and my own marks to show which ones I had. You’ll see that I actually did get all 18 beer tastings…
…but my ticket only had maybe 5 of them marked off… 😛
There were quite a few great beers on that list that we tried. The India Brown Ale (pictured above) was probably my favorite, as it was pretty different from others I’ve had before. The similar, yet different, India Wheat Ale was also pretty good, but the hops didn’t seem to gel as well with the “wheat beer” flavor as it did with the “brown ale” flavor as before. The Raspberry Coffee Stout was also exceptional, with a flavor leaning closer to the “raspberry” than the “coffee,” yet not as fruity as you might expect. I had figured I’d prefer the Strawberry-Cocoa Porter over the Stout, but alas.
The Southern Hemisphere IPA was also shockingly good, mostly because it tasted recognizable, yet different. I mean, it was hoppy, as you’d expect, but the hops they used were something from Tasmania called “Galaxy,” so it turned out to have a very different flavor profile than other IPAs I’ve had in the past. Believe you me, I hope they put that beer in bottles so I can get more of it!
Regardless, the event was quite fun. Granted, the weather turned out to be cloudier and cold(i)er than the forecast had led us to believe, but with some good friends to crowd around and some strategically placed fire pits, we weren’t bothered all that much. That, and high gravity beer tends to keep you all warm and fuzzy on the inside.
Famously (or infamously), I avoided the Harry Potter franchise. Not quite to the same degree I refuse to watch Titanic, but perhaps similar. I jumped on the Lord of the Rings bandwagon and figured I’d put off Harry Potter until Meg would be old enough to appreciate the books.
Well, she’s not quite old enough, but now that all of the movies are available on DVD, we figured it had been long enough. Brooke had never seen them either, though she read all of the books, a few more than once. Last weekend, Meg was visiting my parents, so we borrowed the early movies and watched them, starting last Friday night.
Between Friday and Monday, we watched the first five movies. The next three we spaced out due to Netflix DVD travel time. Therefore, in a period of 9 days, we watched 8 Harry Potter movies.
Kinda nuts, I know.
Regardless, I must say that the movies, overall, hold up quite well. The first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, was released in 2001, so I expected the various CGI effects to have aged to a significant degree, however I found them to be surprisingly decent, even 10 years later. This isn’t to say that the effects didn’t improve over the decade these movies were coming out: the last few, Deathly Hallows Part I and Part II had all the effects trappings of any other big-budget blockbuster.
The acting was always good, yet still improved over the years, likely because the three primary actors, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson were all 11 or 12 when the movies were released. By the time they reached the end, they were all doing very well in their roles and had likely surpassed the adults that had been alongside throughout the series.
Each movie had its own “flavor,” of sorts, to contribute to the franchise. Some focused more on the school experience at Hogwarts, others focused on some specific activity, like the Triwizard Tournament, and later movies (and the books, of course) laid more of a focus on the Good vs Evil aspects that run throughout the series. Thus, the latter movies tend to be much darker than the earlier movies. Also, I felt that the earlier movies were better at being “standalone” features, while the latter movies (Order of the Phoenix and later) flow into each other to some extent.
Speaking of which, Order of the Phoenix was probably my favorite in the franchise. This movie featured a level of “political upheaval” in the fiction of the series that I found to be interesting, and I wish they could have explored it further. Brooke says that there was quite a bit more of the Ministry of Magic (the group that acts as a sort of governing body over wizards and witches) in the Deathly Hallows (the final book, separated out into two movies), but very little of it remained by the book was translated to the silver screen.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I
One interesting bit about watching all of the movies in sequence in a short time like this is that you can observe all of the kids growing up. I suppose it’s part of why these actors were chosen in the first place: their characters first attend Hogwarts when they turn 11, which is right around the age when the actors took on the roles. Each book is supposed to represent an additional year at the school and, while they couldn’t quite keep the movies churning out each year, they still stayed close enough that the actors could have passed for 17 in the last story. If my math is correct, Daniel Radcliffe turned 17 during the filming of Order of the Phoenix, which is the fifth book/movie of the series. Still, looking at the pictures I’ve posted above, the actors have obviously aged during their tenure in the roles.
Overall, I was pretty impressed. I’d expected a bit more “kiddie fare” throughout the series, but in actuality, it was really only persistent in the first movie, and followed into the second one to an extent. The characters “grew up” relatively quickly, so the movies didn’t get bogged down in young-minded storylines to the extent I’d anticipated.
The latter half of the series, though, really seems to ape the “Star Wars” franchise, with Harry being Luke Skywalker and Lord Voldemort as…well…Lord Vader. Much as Luke and Vader were connected by family, history, loss, good/evil, and so on, so were Harry and Voldemort. I kinda wanted a bit more out of the Voldemort character, honestly. He was present the whole time, and he was certainly bad, but somehow, he just didn’t seem evil enough to me. They would constantly talk about their fear of “He Who Must Not Be Named,” yet the scenes we saw him in, he just wasn’t doing much that was particularly…evil. Granted, it’s a children’s series, so you can’t get too dark, but I can’t help but think more could have been done. Watching the movies, I was more disturbed by Dolores Umbridge, the teacher sent from the corrupt Ministry of Magic that is trying to sweep the return of Voldemort under the proverbial rug. I’m sure the books make Voldemort seem more evil than he turns out to be in the movies, but I found him to be a bit lacking. Perhaps it’ll take a few more viewings of the last two movies before I really settle on why that is.
In the end, I still prefer the Lord of the Rings series over this one, though the Harry Potter series was fun, interesting, and well-produced. In many ways, the effects in the first few movies hold up better than the effects from LotR, though they were definitely less complicated (e.g. putting a light at the end of a wand is a bit cheaper than modeling Gollum, let alone developing the technology to create the character in the first place). Order of the Phoenix was my favorite of the movies, though I really liked Chamber of Secrets, despite it being an “early” movie. The later ones got quite a bit more confusing, but it’ll make more sense when I re-watch them in a few years, once Meg’s old enough.
From the Linsenbardt family to yours, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Be safe and have a good time with family and friends this season!
I’m sure I’ll have more to report on in the future, but for right now, I can safely say that I’m settling in at the new job. I’ve been telling people for awhile now that there would be a definite “learning curve” with the science carried out here, and believe you me, I wasn’t kidding. I’m having to re-learn basic circuit mechanics (i.e. resistance, capacitance, voltage, etc.) from physics class 8 years ago in order to comprehend the bulk of what I’m doing, so that’s where much of my learning is coming from. The rest of it is coming from the actual manipulations of cells in order to collect meaningful data.
Basically, what I’m doing now in the lab of Steven Mennerick in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University, is termed “electrophysiology.” It’s a technique used to record changes in current and voltage across the membrane of a cell, in this case, hippocampal neurons from mice. I’ll write more about this in a Primer sometime after I get more settled, but in short, the process involves attaching an electrode to the interior of a cell, and then a second electrode outside the cell in the surrounding fluid. Depending on what drugs and ions you have present in the two locations (intracellular and extracellular), you can record peaks that look very much like ECG recordings from your heart. These peaks will tell you whether sodium, potassium, calcium, chloride, etc. are entering or leaving the cell, which in turn tells you about how the cell functions. Specifically, it gives you insight into neurotransmission, as the process of a cell receiving a neurotransmitter (e.g. dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) must involve some change in the flow of ions across the cell membrane.
The rig pictured above is the one I’m learning on. It’s a large microscope with some tubes and electrodes running up to the state where the dish of cells sit. Then, you use some little knobs and widgets to move the electrodes very slowly toward the cell so you don’t kill it by “popping” it. So yeah, this takes some practice. You have to make sure you don’t break the cell open, you have to make sure you don’t damage your electrode, and you also have to make sure you’re doing everything fast enough so that certain components of the system don’t “go bad” to the point where you need to replace them. There’s a healthy balance between speed of operation and “care” of operation in all of this, for sure.
Aside from learning how to actually puncture and gather data from the cell, I’m having to learn about the aforementioned physics of circuits. Good thing my Dad works with circuit breakers, just in case I ever need some help.
I’m definitely making progress, though. I’ve been able to successfully puncture (or “patch,” as the technical lingo goes) more than a few cells, so right now, I’m working on consistency more than anything. I’m hoping to get some more reading done today or tomorrow so I begin to understand why I’m doing some of the things I’m doing.
Needless to say, this past weekend was somewhat hectic. We got the truck loaded on Friday night with the help of relatively few (yet extremely helpful) people, which was shocking in and of itself. At our parent’s suggestion, we ended up switching to a 26′ truck from the 22′ truck we had originally reserved.
Yeah. That wouldn’t have worked. We have far too much stuff.
In any event, we got it loaded and I drove the truck down from Swisher on Saturday morning, with Sam riding shotgun. I pulled up to the new place (pictured above) just after 2:00, so all things considered, I think I made reasonable time.
We got the truck unloaded relatively quickly, this time with a bit more help than we had loading on Friday. Had some problems with getting furniture up our narrow staircase to the upstairs, though. Sadly, my orange swivel rocker won’t fit, and neither will the box spring for our full-size bed. The mattress itself barely made it up there, so that’s something, I guess. Meg’s room is mostly set up and the guest room is pretty much full of boxes, and will surely be the last thing to be completed.
The back yard. Nice covered porch and much, much less grass than I had to mow in Iowa.
The family hung out into Sunday, so we made a good deal of progress toward unpacking, though there’s plenty more to do. We mostly chilled last night and watched the Cardinals game. Brooke went to work today and Meg and I hung out, getting a few things done. I did some work organizing the pantry, our bedroom and other miscellaneous areas of the house. Meg was a bit fussier than usual, though I’m sure this is because a). her Mom had to go to work, and she was awake when Brooke left, and b). she’s finding herself in new surroundings.
So, we went to the park!
This park is about 2 blocks from us.
Thankfully, there’s a nice park very close to our house, well within walking distance. There’s a playground, as well as benches, a field, and so on. In general, a nice resource to have nearby, especially as we don’t have a really good place for her red swing. Good thing the park has swings fit for Meg. 🙂
"Wheeeeee!"
Meg didn’t get to swing much this week, so she was eager to get in. I kept asking if she was “all done,” and all she’d say was “no.” Well, that and “wheeeee.” We stayed at the park for a good 20-30 min, checked out the slides (which were a bit wet for my taste), and then walked back home for lunch.
In all, a pretty good day, despite Meg’s mood. Nice having Brooke back now, too. New “Dinners” posts forthcoming. 🙂
Back on June 24th, I was informed that money was getting tight and that I should start looking for other opportunities elsewhere. Obviously, this news wasn’t exactly welcome, as the timing of it effectively prevented me from being able to jump directly into a teaching position somewhere (as those positions are almost all filled by the end of June). As I’ve posted before on the blog, we made the decision that Brooke would go back to work in St. Louis in mid-July to help ensure that we would have health insurance in case I had to leave my position in Iowa before I found something down in St. Louis.
Long story short, there weren’t many options. I may write at greater length about this in the future, but basically, most industry positions want people less qualified than I am. As in, folks with bachelor’s degrees. I applied to practically every industrial company in St. Louis that did pharmaceutical work, including some generic chemical companies, but in the majority of cases, I never heard anything back. I did have a strong option with Monsanto (that I will definitely write more about later), but that fell through after the third interview.
Thankfully, I came upon another option at Washington University, so last week, I accepted a position as a postdoc in a lab in their Department of Psychiatry. I’ll be doing work that is radically different from what I’ve done in the past, so there’s going to be a steep learning curve, even moreso than the one I had here at Iowa. Still, I will continue to work with catecholamines, so at least some of the work will be familiar to me. I’ll write more about this once I’m down there.
This post is mostly with regards to the timeline. My position will start November 1, so the current plan is that we’ll be moving down to St. Louis on October 22 to a house off of Kingshighway in south St. Louis City. The house is a shade smaller than we have now, but it has a two-car garage, a fenced in yard for Edie, and has enough bedrooms that we can surely find room for everyone, as well as have guests over from time to time. And the pantry is huge. And it’ll have a dishwasher and a garbage disposal (which we’ve lived without since living in Iowa). Brooke will work that following week while Meg and I get our bearings and take a little time off. Meg will start at her new daycare on October 31.
I guess we’ll have to send her in a costume on her first day?
So the plan is set in motion. We’ve got a few weeks to finalize everything, and my Dad and Brooke’s Mom were very helpful in boxing lots of stuff up this past weekend, so I think we’re on pretty solid footing for jumping state lines again.
Almost 4 months after getting the news, and after 3 months of living most of the week apart, we will be back together in St. Louis again.
As Hannibal Smith is so fond of saying: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
I remember watching “Three Men and a Baby” more than a few times growing up. Pretty sure we had it taped on VHS. I didn’t watch it as much as “Ghostbusters” or anything, but definitely more than a few times. For those that don’t remember, “Three Men” involved a set of bachelors living in a New York high rise when a baby is left on their doorstep. Not knowing what to do, they try their hand at taking care of it, learning more about child care than they ever thought they would.
Granted, I have a bit more experience than Tom Selleck (and no mustache), but there are times I can relate.
When we first started this little adventure of ours, we didn’t know quite how long we’d be doing it. As of next week, it will have been two months of Brooke being here for the weekend, and Meg and I alone four nights a week. Brooke typically gets here mid-evening on Thursdays, though a few weeks there, it’s been closer to 10:00. She will then be here through the weekend, keeping busy making sure the produce from the garden is processed and that Meg and I have something to eat during the following week, and then she leaves after putting Meg down for a nap on Sunday afternoon.
For the most part, it’s gone shockingly well. Certainly, it isn’t an ideal situation, but all things considered, I haven’t damaged Meg in any permanent way. 🙂
We generally stick to a routine, which thankfully works well for Meg and for me. I get up at 6:00 am, then I wake her up at 6:30. I give her some milk and we hop in the car, so she’s at daycare by 6:50, putting me to work only about 15 min later than I normally would get there. I pick her up anywhere from 4:30 to 5:15 pm, then we come home and eat. She likes hot dogs and bananas, but I’ve had some luck giving her bits of whatever I’m eating. Her new love is cottage cheese (blech…). Then, we go outside or watch some TV, or just play with toys for awhile until she goes to bed at 7:30. After which, I finish cleaning up, do some laundry, and either watch TV or play video games. Rinse and repeat.
Regardless, it’s been an interesting experience, one that, in some ways, I’m glad I’ve gone through. It’s good to know that I can take care of a small human without hurting it and that she’ll still prosper and thrive under my guidance. If anything, I think we’ve “bonded” a bit more than we would have, otherwise. Obviously, these aren’t the circumstances I would have chosen for such things…
Meg still misses her “Mama,” though. They talked on the phone a bit tonight. 🙂
Fun Fact: “Three Men and a Baby” was directed by a young up-and-comer named Leonard Nimoy. I learned something new!
The headline on September 12th from the New York Times
I actually started composing something a week ago about September 11th, reminiscing about that day and the general mood of the country prior to the attack on the World Trade Center. As I paid attention to some 9/11 coverage during the past week, I was reminded of what the country was actually like, and that I was really viewing it with rose-colored glasses. Hey, I was a sophomore in college; I’d only just started paying attention to the world around me.
Thus, instead, I reflect on September 12th, or really, the initial days that followed September 11th.
Much like the JFK assassination and the generation(s) before me that were actually alive at that time, I remember exactly what I was doing at the time it all happened. I was in my dorm room and had just gotten up to read my Yahoo! News feed and see that a plane of some type had hit the first tower. I woke up my roommate and turned on CNN just in time to watch the second plane hit the second tower. On live television.
What followed over the next few hours, and few days, and few weeks, was a series of feelings. Confusion. Fear. Shock.
Then Focus.
Then Togetherness.
Then Direction.
This country went through a terrible tragedy and, from it, came a sense of direction that it hadn’t had in awhile. My initial blog post was looking to those years before 9/11, and that it was a time that I wish we could all return to. However, in many ways, the country was already on a downward spiral of divisiveness, with the Lewinsky Scandal and Impeachment proceedings in the news. With a Dot Com Bubble bursting. With a Housing Crisis already in the works.
Really, a decade on, I’d like us all to reflect on where we were 10 years ago today, rather than 10 years ago yesterday. Sure, yesterday was incredibly important and it is equally important that all those lives were lost. At the same time, I think it’s essential that we remember how much of the country actually came together for a common purpose. Eventually, that purpose was misdirected toward other political goals. That purpose was used to divide the country even further than it’s ever been, certainly in my lifetime. And today, on September 12, 2011, we are about as divided as we could be.
But on September 12, 2001, we were all together. In grief. In searching. In wondering.
Yet also, in a desire to root out evil. A need to be together in service to our communities. To be together in solidarity and in support of our firefighters, policemen and EMTs, but also in support of each other.
Case in point: I read on Facebook that over 100 people from our church in St. Louis went to East St. Louis to be in service to others on September 10th as part of the Serve 2011 project. That’s the kind of feeling we should be getting from 9/11. Not only focusing on the attack itself, but also on the need to better ourselves that followed for the first few days and weeks after it. The thing that was designed to tear us apart that actually helped bring us together, even if only for a few short moments. Where we weren’t rich, poor, black, white, man or woman: we were just American. And we were all the same.
And that’s what we need to work toward finding again, 10 years later. Ten years after September the 12th.
