We started Water Babies last week at a city pool in Cedar Rapids. Meg was trying to put her face into the bathtub water, so I figured it was time for us to figure out how to do that without either of us freaking out. So far, she’s loving watching the other kids in the pool and splashing, but does not appreciate going under water or floating on her back. I’m sure we’ll have lots of swim lessons in our future and this is a fun start!
There were various blog and Facebook posts bouncing around over the past few weeks discussing the year that was 2010 and the potential for 2011. I decided to spend those first few days not really posting much, mostly out of laziness, but also out of reflection.
2010 is going to go down as a seminal year for me, personally, as well as our family as a whole. It was a year when I defended my dissertation, culminating in the completion of a Ph.D. and, therefore, the end of my tenure as a student (23 years in the making…). It was a year marked by leaving the bustling city of St. Louis for the more laid-back trappings of rural Iowa, coinciding with both Brooke and I leaving our previous jobs (if you count being a graduate student as a “job”…) and starting new positions in Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, respectively. There was also a 10 year high school reunion in there.
The move to Iowa brought quite a few other changes. We now live in a house, not an apartment. I now have to (get to?) mow a lawn. Brooke gets the garden she’s always wanted. I have a longer commute, plus a bus ride, in getting to work. We had to find a new church and have become more involved that we planned to (but this is how it always goes…). We had to come to terms with the fact that it’s pretty hard to go out to eat once a week when you can’t just walk to Joanie’s for happy hour after work. And we live on a gravel road now. Oh, and it’s a lot colder in Iowa – nice in the summer, crazy in the winter.
Brooke and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary in 2010. In many ways, we interact just like we did back when we were first married, if not as we did before. Of course, the obvious big change in that area is the fact that we added a new member to the family, Meg, who was with us (outside of her mother, at least…) for nearly 10 months in 2010. It’s been a wild ride learning to be a parent (still learning…), but we’re both getting better at it and slowly figuring out how to handle the problems that go with it.
So, when I say that 2010 was a “seminal year,” it’s because of all these things. Lots of big change that will influence the course of our collective life that we’ll be able to look back on with fondness in a few short years.
What’s in store for 2011, you ask? Who knows. Seems hard to top the year that was 2010 when you look at that list. I’d be just fine scaling the big things down for a bit so we can coast and enjoy the changes we just went through for a bit longer. I don’t really see much coming over the horizon except for settling down a bit further, and that’s just fine with me. A few things off the top of my head would be that I’ll find out if my grant gets funded, which will determine how long we’re staying in Iowa; we’ll try a family vacation with a 1+ year old; Brooke will almost triple the size of her garden and get some chickens; and I will brew close to 60 gallons of beer.
Sounds like a good start. 🙂
I must say, it’s easier to get into the Christmas Spirit when there’s snow on the ground already. It always seemed that, growing up in Missouri, we were lucky to have much or any snow on the ground in the month of December, let alone this early in the month. Of course, with the move to Iowa, we are significantly closer to the North Pole, where the snow will stay on the ground through mid-June… But yeah, it’s kinda nice driving around listening to Christmas music on the radio with the sun shining and snow on the ground, knowing that Christmas is still a few weeks away. Somehow the snow is a bit less worrysome for me knowing that it’s still December. Of course, this only foreshadows the pains we will go through in January and February, but for now, it’s pleasant.
We did have highs in the mid-teens over the weekend, and lows in the single digits. Glad we got our propane tank filled on Friday…
Regardless, we were expecting the First Big Snowfall Of The Year this past weekend (3-5 inches), but we only ended up with less than 2 in. It was enough to cover the ground and was kinda nice to wake up to on Saturday morning. We didn’t have much trouble driving around and the streets were quite clear, thanks to Iowa’s relatively decent road crew.
As a result of our busy-ness in the upcoming weeks/weekends, we also went and picked up a Christmas tree. This year marks the first time we picked up anything larger than a “Charlie Brown Tree,” as we now have a bit more space to use for one. Brooke had seen a place up near Cedar Rapids that we could go, so we headed up there on Sunday and cut one down. It ended up being a little over $20 for a 5 ft tree, so I was rather pleased. I’ll take a picture or two of it once I figure out what’s going on with the auxiliary flash for our dSLR…
On another note, the power supply went out on the web server last week, explaining the absence of the website for a few days. I was concerned that the motherboard/processor had died, which would have ended up being a more expensive fix in the same month that we bought 250 gal of propane gas and Christmas presents, but thankfully, it was just the power supply…only a $50 fix, in the end. It has gotten me thinking about the server upgrade that I’m planning, hopefully for 2011, so now I’m in the mode of searching for the best deals and “bang for your buck” on computer components. Dangerous thinking, to be sure, but at least I can put off a large purchase for a few more months.
This year marked our annual trek across Missouri for Thanksgiving, but the first time we’d done so with a nearly 9-month-old. We’ve done this every year since being married, but until now, we’ve only had a dog to deal with. This time, we had a baby…plus the carseat and luggage that goes with her. Needless to say, I’m glad we have a different car now, as all the stuff filled up the back to the point where we couldn’t see out of it any longer.
Regardless, we went to Hannibal for the Thanksgiving holiday where the majority of the Poor/Baumann clan typically goes. Meg did great, for the most part, but didn’t sleep terribly well the second night. As usual, the food was great, the company was fun, and the “Poor Women” entertained me with their video game shenanigans (this year, some fun with “Just Dance 2“…and yes, we have video evidence…). On Friday, we continued our Tour of Missouri by driving to my parent’s house in Columbia where we hung out with the immediate family. Again, Meg did pretty well the first night…and not so well the second night… But overall, again, good food had by all, and a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit on Saturday night.
Either way, it was a pretty good trip. We made it back to Iowa by mid-afternoon, so it allowed us to clean up a bit around here and prep for the upcoming week. Christmas is going to get difficult, I imagine, as we were already pressed for space in the car on this trip. We’ll need to pick up some kind of roof rack bag in order to make space for everything. That, or Edie will have to spend Christmas with Sam… 😛
On a side-note, we didn’t do much Black Friday shopping. I did pick up a few games online, and Brooke and I grabbed a new All-In-One printer from Wal-mart for $44. Great deal. And it works wonders. Wirelessly. It’s glorious. 🙂
And, on another side-note, I was looking to see if the Dave Matthews Band performance from the 2010 Grammy Awards was posted anywhere and, low and behold, it’s up on Youtube. I tried finding it the day after the awards and the only place I could find it was iTunes for $3. Outrageous! Therefore, I post it now. It’s, perhaps, the best live performance of them I have seen and, by far, the best performance of any group at the Grammy’s that night. They should have won.
A few years back, I was at home for Christmas break and had a gathering, of sorts, with some folks from High School to attend. We happened to have family friends staying with us, who had two young children. One of those kids, apparently, had some kind of sickness, ’cause that very night, I came down with one of the worst viral infections in recent memory…and it only lasted a few hours, enough time for me to miss the party. Figures.
Since then, I’ve been particularly wary of babies and the diseases they carry. Sure, babies are cute, but they’re breeding grounds for a variety of viral and bacterial infections, especially when they go to day care and are exposed to a wealth of things that the other kids are exposed to. The immune systems of babies are heavily taxed during the first few months to years, as they are being exposed to all kinds of things that they’ve never seen before, let alone the fact that their immune systems aren’t even fully operational yet. My sister had quite a few ear infections during this period, largely because she was teething and her body simply couldn’t handle all the stress (and Meg has no teeth yet…). So yeah, it seems like whatever you get from them hasn’t been knocked down in the least, so you end up getting something even worse than you would have had you contracted it from someone older. (I have no scientific basis for this assertion…just observation…)
I typically refer to these as “Demon Baby Diseases.” Not necessarily because they come from “Demon Babies,” but because they’re so bad, they surely must be borne of some evil not known of this Earth. They’re bad. Truly bad.
In general, my immune system is pretty spectacular and I don’t tend to get sick. Sure, I’ll get a cold once a year and usually have a non-productive cough for a few weeks in the dead of winter, but aside from that, I don’t get viral or bacterial infections. I’ve always found this somewhat remarkable, and it probably has something to do with genetics, as to my knowledge, my Dad doesn’t really come down with much of anything, either. Brooke, on the other hand, is a bit more likely to come down with things. Granted, I usually work in somewhat sterile environments, so we’re all pretty attuned to the idea of keeping things clean. Brooke, however, deals with many other individuals in different environments, so she’s hit from all sides with a variety of different things.
So why do I write this now? Well, we had a nice weekend up here in Iowa sans Meg, as we shipped her off to hang out with Brooke’s parents for the weekend. By all accounts, the weekend went well: Brooke and I went out to dinner Friday night and went to a winery on Saturday, and Mark and Diana very much enjoyed having their grandbaby with them, and Meg was good the whole time. But when we got home Sunday, Meg wasn’t feeling well. She felt warm when we picked her up in Hannibal, but she slept most of the way back home. She was acting mostly fine, but still felt warm right before bedtime. But bedtime didn’t go so well. Really, it didn’t “go” at all. Brooke and I probably got 4 hours of sleep that night, as we traded off with a crying baby, which is, thankfully, not something we typically have to do.
Long story short, Brooke was home with her Monday and Meg didn’t get much better. We traded off every two hours over Monday night, and I took off work Tuesday and took her in to the doctor, as her fever hadn’t subsided. Turned out it was strep. Eeeeeesh.
The doc got her on amoxicillin and, shockingly, by Tuesday night, Meg was already feeling better. She wasn’t 100% or anything, but she was able to sleep (which, for a kid that had only slept a few hours over a period of 2 days, was much needed…you know…’cause they’re supposed to sleep something like 14 hours a day or something…). I stayed home with her again yesterday and she was acting like her normal self, although she was a bit “clingier” than usual. Last night, again, she slept relatively well.
So I’m back at work and Meg’s going to daycare again today. Generally, things are back to normal…but now Brooke thinks she may be coming down with something. Probably not strep, but still something. And, most likely, a direct result of a near complete lack of sleep over those few days. Thankfully, so far, I’m unaffected, but I’m ever vigilant. Always watching for the next Demon Baby Disease.
In recent weeks, Meg has gotten quite a bit better about sitting up. This, I’m told, is typical of most babies in their 6th month of life, so I guess it shouldn’t be all that surprising. The crazy thing is just how quickly she seems to be developing! Within the past few weeks, she has started getting much more “tactile” in her interactions. She still doesn’t quite understand that her hands are, necessarily, “controllable” by her brain, but she has realized she has them and that she can pick things up with them.
The most interesting part to me, however, is how she has started to grab my face and grab Edie. She takes such an interest in touching my face, almost as if she didn’t quite realize that I was alive, or that I was “real,” for the past few months. As if she now has a different sense of me, or of people in general. Maybe as if she treated all the people around her much like people on a TV screen: they’re there, but they aren’t really “there,” if that makes any sense.
Meg has always paid close attention to Edie, watching her walk through the house and so on, but now she can actually reach out and touch her. Thankfully, Edie is just fine with this. Meg reaches out and will hold onto Edie’s skin (more than the hair). Meg just stares at Edie, possibly wondering if she’ll move or run off.
Regardless, it’s been fun over the past few weeks watching her. It’s just cool to watch someone learn things for the first time, things that we adults tend to take for granted. Not even relatively simple things like “walking” or “sitting,” but just the realization that people exist and that you can actually interact with them, rather than watch them.
This coming weekend marks my 10 year Hickman High School reunion – The Class of 2000. It took me awhile to find the Columbia Daily Tribune’s article about it (way back in their “archives”…that aren’t what I’d call “searchable”), mostly so I could remind myself of the statistics these kinds of things tend to include: 619 graduates, 73% of which were going on to four-year colleges, 13% to jobs, and the remainder to two-year schools or the military.
We’ll be heading down to Columbia this Friday to attend this year’s Hickman Homecoming Game, and hopefully we’ll get to see my old marching band play some of this year’s show while we’re at it. Otherwise, the general “plan” is for people to get together for some Mizzou tailgating (which I won’t do, in favor of frolfing with Stu…) followed by a group dinner at Boone Tavern on Saturday night. RSVPs for all of this were done over Facebook, so while I have some idea who is attending, I don’t know exactly because the invites were only sent to “fans” of “Hickman High School Class of 2000.” If you weren’t a “fan” of that particular Facebook Group, you probably didn’t get the invite. So yeah, to an extent, I have no idea who’s going to even be at this event, besides a few specific people I’ve chit-chatted with in the past few months.
That all aside, we’re due for a visit to Columbia. We haven’t been down there for a few months now and Mom is itching to take Meg shopping for some winter clothes (which is good, ’cause Iowa is COLD).
But back to the Reunion. This will be the first time most of my “Group of Friends” from high school meet Meg. In a few cases, this will be the first time they meet Brooke! I guess part of the fun of going to a 10 year High School Reunion is “reconnecting” with friends you haven’t seen in years (or a decade), but it’s going to be fascinating to see what trajectories we all ended up on. I was friends with a wide variety of folks in high school, ranging from valedictorians to band geeks to space station simulators. To date, I’m the only one I can think of from high school that was part of that group and also has a child. I’m also one of the few that is married (although most have “significant others,” to some degree). Considering 10 years has passed, I find those particular milestones to be rather interesting, as I’d argue that the preceding generations had a higher percentage of individuals that were married and had at least one kid 10 years after graduating high school (my Mom had 2 kids within 10 years of graduation).
I guess I’m just reflecting on how I ended up here, as compared with others from my graduating class. Whether it was always subconsciously in the plan to be married, have kids, and have a Ph.D. in time for my 10 year reunion. Whether that notion was part of other people’s plans, or whether their lives took them in completely different directions than they’d otherwise intended. Whether I will be considered the odd-man-out, or whether someone else’s shocking revelation will trounce anything I could come up with in this post.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not worried about going to the reunion. On TV, you see people fretting about going back to their high school reunions, usually that they’ll seem somehow “less successful” than their brethren, or that they have memories of the “high school experience” that no one else remembers like you do (think of the season three 30 Rock episode, “Reunion“). Despite my questions above, I’m just genuinely intrigued by the idea of how my experience differs from the experiences of the other people I hung out with in high school. Personally, I think if we were to rate attendees based on their “successes” post-graduation, I’d rate fairly highly. I guess I’m just wondering if I meet the expectations that my friends had 10 years ago, and if they will all meet mine.
I guess I just find it all to be “curious.”
About a month ago, the FUTURE in Biomedical Sciences group here at the University held a forum, of sorts, to help answer questions from graduate students and postdocs regarding what it takes to get a job at a Liberal Arts institution, especially in the State of Iowa (where these four individuals reside). The FUTURE group, now in its second year, has multiple professors from Liberal Arts schools across the state (this year’s participants came from Loras College, Drake University, Morningside College and Wartburg College) come to Iowa City to do research for the summer, learning some new experimental techniques and generally expanding their horizons beyond what they can do at their respective institutions. The forum was very informative, covering a variety of topics including how to write up your resume, what kinds of places to apply to, what to look for in a school, when to start looking for jobs, and what the jobs tend to be like. More than anything, however, they all stressed the need for experience: the more experience you have on your application, the better chance you’ll stand against other applicants. I’m not really looking for another job yet or anything, but it’s really good to have this information at the back of my mind as I keep building up that resume. Hearing them talk about their jobs makes me want to get to that stage even more, providing me with some much needed motivation to get a few things done while I’m here!
Thankfully, I already have a leg up on that one. Back at SLU, I had the good fortune of getting to teach in “Drugs We Use and Abuse,” a course run by the graduate students of the Pharm/Phys Department. It is team-taught each Fall to around 50 non-majors (e.g. Business majors, History majors, etc.) and generally centers around…well…just what it sounds like. If you ever wanted to learn what meth, cocaine, opiates, depressants and caffeine do to your body, then this is the class for you. I taught in it for 3 years: I was a section director for 2 of those years and course director for 1 year. The experience was very good, so much that I decided I want to do it full-time as a career: teach at the undergraduate level.
When I took the position here at the University of Iowa, I asked my mentor if it would be alright for me to continue teaching occasionally alongside the rest of the research I’m doing. He was kind enough to allow it (if anything, he was excited that I’d take a few lectures off his hands). This October, I’ll be teaching two classes of Advanced Toxicology, one talking about neurotransmission and the other talking about neurotoxic agents (e.g. cocaine, methamphetamine and ecstasy). Both of these subjects are within my proverbial wheelhouse, so they shouldn’t take up all that much preparation time. That, and I have the previous year’s lectures in a Powerpoint file to help me throw something together. While Drugs We Use and Abuse was directed at non-major undergraduates, this class is for graduate students and there are only 12 in the class, so the dynamic will be quite a bit different than what I’m used to.
I will likely get the opportunity to teach in the Spring as well. That course is in our department, Medicinal Chemistry and Natural Products, and is also targeted at graduate students (and will likely be just as small, if not smaller). Not sure when we’ll get that going, but it probably won’t be until January, knowing how things go around here.
Either way, I think I’m doing a reasonably decent job at preparing for what’s ahead, with regards to that whole “career” thing. At the very least, getting to add a few “guest lecturer” points on my CV is always a welcome addition.
And maybe I’ll even have a little fun doing it. 🙂
One of my favorite video game genres is the “Real Time Strategy” game, or “RTS.” In such a game, you generate resources in order to build units that the allow you to conquer the other player. Starcraft II is, perhaps, the most recent example of such a game, and one I’ve been playing a great deal of recently, however the Age of Empires series is, perhaps, best-suited for explaining more clearly. In an RTS like Age of Empires, you start the game with a few units (Villagers) that harvests resources for you, like wood, food, stone and gold. These four resources help you to produce other Villagers, but also Military units. When you’re starting out in the Dark Ages, you primarily need food and wood for “Clubmen,” but as you advance toward “Swordsmen,” you need more diverse resources like gold.
These games are generally part of a larger game mechanic called “resource management.” Basically, you begin a given game with a finite amount of resources and you choose how to spend those resources. Some of them should go to more resource-generating (e.g. investments), while other resources should go toward the ultimate goal of the game. It’s up to the player to decide to what degree they go in either direction. If you want to win quickly, then you pour more resources into building military units so you can take out the other player. If you want to “tech up” to a more stable position, but take longer doing it, you pour those resources into investments.
As I said, I’ve always liked this kind of game. But I’ve never been terribly good at it in real life.
Brooke and I have never made huge amount of money, but the move to Iowa cost us a great deal. Brooke was unemployed for the first 3 months of living here, and she’s still only been able to get work part-time (but that’s going to steadily increase). That combined with the fact that we have a baby now means that our collective (limited) resources have been directed in other avenues than what we are used to. Child care alone is a ridiculous, but necessary, cost. Therefore, we’ve been doing our best to maximize our available resources as best as possible. With various payments that one has to car loans, student loans, life/auto insurance, etc., that only leaves a relatively small percentage of cash that you can adjust for whatever purpose is required.
A few summers ago, we started with helping limit our energy costs by getting a single-room A/C unit for our bedroom. That helped save us $100 in a single summer, paying for the A/C unit itself. We’ve been using it in our house in Iowa now, helping to limit the excess cost of cooling a much larger space than we were dealing with in St. Louis by only cooling our bedroom(s) at night, as opposed to having our central A/C running too heavily. Thankfully, Iowa summers are substantially cooler than St. Louis summers, and the house is in the shade enough that it rarely heats up to a significant degree. We’re already talking about ways to limit the amount of propane we’ll use in the relatively harsh Iowa winters, trying to defend against the northwest wind by insulating specific windows. We’ll probably spend more time upstairs, as the heat will collect there. We’ll probably try keeping the house cooler than we had it in St. Louis, as well.
We’re also trying to limit travel to some extent. When we can take Brooke’s Scion xA on longer trips, we’ll take it (37 mpg), but when we need a larger vehicle, we’ll have to use the Sportage (27 mpg). I’m driving the Sportage to and from work every day and, on those trips, I’m doing my best to stay around 65 mph, as an engine runs most efficiently within that range. Doing so, I’ve been able to help limit my gas costs to a reasonable degree. I’ve also started getting up earlier, getting to work around 7:00 am and leaving around 4:00 pm, thereby allowing me to miss the traffic that frequently causes me to speed around people.
Brooke has done an excellent job over the summer growing vegetables and canning them for later months. We’ve been able to save a pretty decent amount of money on food already, but those savings will continue on into the winter months. So far, Brooke hasn’t had to buy much solid food for Meg, either, as the carrots and squash she’s been eating were grown in our garden. Brooke froze down more of it so she can make more in the next few weeks. As Brooke already posted about the cloth diapers, we’ve already saved a pretty large amount of money over disposables. Otherwise, we still shop at Aldi, as always, but are making a more concerted effort to limit the “extras” (although, Brooke has already demanded that her ice cream allotment not be limited).
Our entertainment costs have dropped dramatically, as we don’t have cable anymore and our internet connection is fast enough that we can Netflix or stream everything we want. I’ve seen one movie in theaters this summer and have decreased the number of games I’ve purchased, as well. We also aren’t going out to eat as often, partially because we have to hold Meg and would rather have her in a high chair or something (which she isn’t…quite…ready…for…).
We’re still looking for improvements, but I think this is a helpful, albeit stressful, experience. As in RTS games, if you build up your resource-generating units early on, you get a strong economy that can then provide you with better military units later in the game, allowing you to conquer and win. It takes keen resource management to do this, as you have to be very, very efficient with the military units you do build early in the game, while instead putting those resources into things that can help you later on.
Let’s hope we learn something now, so that we’re prepared for later stages of the game.
