blog bankruptcy

OK, so I've fallen enormously behind on this blog and I'm about ready to declare blog bankruptcy. Here's my last-ditch effort to get caught up. I last left off in mid-July. Since then I've done a lot of traveling, including:
Toronto, for the Society for Industrial Microbiology annual meeting. Lots of good networking and learning opportunities. I shared a room with my good friend from graduate school and we spent the weekend after the conference exploring the city, including the zoo. We also visited the CN tower and had dinner in its rotating restaurant. Perhaps the highlight of the trip? Randomly being invited to dinner by a wonderful woman we met in the elevator one evening. We all got along really well and we ended up hanging out together for the rest of the conference. Photos here.
South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska on an excellent road trip with my parents. I will have to revisit this at a later date with an extended blog post, as it was too much fun to condense to a few sentences. The highlight? Devils Tower. Photos here.
Sedona, Arizona for Labor Day weekend. My sister and brother-in-law gracefully treated me to a weekend via their time share points. I was hoping to get talked into the timeshare thing, but the resort didn't even try to meet with me. Oh well, I had a nice time anyway. I spent an evening in nearby Jerome, home of a great art colony. This happened to be the evening of their monthly "Art Walk". But the highlight of the trip was taking a "Tour of the Stars" on my last evening. Our guide had checked the timing of the International Space Station and pointed out where it should appear overhead - and he was right! We watched for the few minutes that it was visible. The other items were all cool, but the ISS took the cake. Photos here (sadly, none from the star gazing event).
Lexington, Kentucky. I was invited back to my undergraduate department to speak at their weekly seminar. Though I frequently return to Lexington to visit with family, this was my first time back on campus since I graduated in 2000. It was great to re-visit with my old professors and thank them for giving me a good foundation. But it was VERY strange to give my seminar in the same room where I took so many challenging classes, with the professors who taught those courses sitting at the desks. Strange, indeed. The department has a great tradition of each graduating class putting their handprints on the wall. It was very exciting to re-visit my handprint. Sadly, I didn't get a picture of this. This trip also corresponding (almost) with my dad's 60th birthday. It was great to have the opportunity to participate in the celebratory dinner with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, niece, nephew and aunt.
Dekalb, Illinois. Last week I was invited by a colleague to present a research seminar for Northern Illinois University's department of Biological Sciences. It was a good opportunity to meet new people and learn about their exciting research.
And coming up? Traveling to St Louis tomorrow for a meeting with a colleague. And then off to Nashville in early November for the annual chemical engineering conference. Whew.
And meanwhile I'm teaching the same course that I taught last fall (Material and Energy Balances), and helping the graduate and undergraduate researchers in my lab plan and interpret their experiments. And I'm enjoying my new piano. Busy times, indeed. Now hopefully I'm caught up and can return to a bi-weekly update. Thanks to everyone for their patience!

getting caught up - again

I'm coming up for air after a busy six weeks. Expect to see several posts here in the next few days. There are several fun events to cover - a conference/tour of Toronto, a vacation with my parents across the Great Plains and the resumption of classes. Thankfully, I'm teaching the same course this fall that I taught last fall. It's still a fair amount of work, but not the all-consuming task that it was last year. And just this Monday I submitted a big proposal to the Department of Energy. So I'm enjoying the chance to catch my breath for a few days. I'm looking forward to a trip to the Southwest for Labor Day. Then it's back to work on new proposals, updates on existing proposals and presentations to prepare.
Sadly, summer is clearly at an end here. We are still getting up into the low 70s during the day, but it's been dipping down into the 40s at night. Pretty soon I'll be turning on the heat.
It sounds like everyone is having their own adventures returning to school or helping their kids start/return to school. It's nice to be back in the swing of things here and have a (somewhat) regular routine.

getting caught up

Three new posts in a new, that's a record for me. But seeing that it's been almost two months since my last posting binge....
Things are going well here, I'm just staying very busy with work. And I've also been doing some traveling. I made a great weekend trip to Nashville to visit with one of my dearest friends. We had a great time together, hanging out, catching up and eating. It was funny to read our old yearbook entries - 15 years later and we are still talking about the same stuff! I also visited with family and friends at Mammoth Cave -there's a post about that below this one. And I have two more trips coming up. Next weekend I'm leaving for the "Society for Industrial Microbiology" conference in Toronto. The conference lasts Sunday - Friday and then a grad school friend and I are going to tour the city for the weekend. Then in mid-August my parents and I will be making a road trip through South Dakota. My dad is doing a great job planning that trip.
Otherwise I'm mainly busy with work. A major part of my research involves "CBiRC", the Center for Biorenewable Chemicals. It's funded by the National Science Foundation and they came out for a visit in early May to make sure we were using their money properly. It went pretty well, all things considered. A collaborator and I submitted a proposal to the National Institute of Health in mid-June. We won't hear a response until early next year, but it was helpful just to get our thoughts written down. And now I'm trying to finish up my "CAREER" proposal for NSF. NSF has a great program for young faculty where you can write a proposal for a 5-year project. You have three chances to submit, and I'm going to try this year. I'm not very hopeful of getting it, but at least I'll get some feedback for my next attempt. That's due on Wednesday and I have a ton of stuff left to do - which is why I've spent all of today doing housework and blogging. Makes sense, no? I also learned a very important lesson with the CAREER proposal preparation. I had this great project all written up, had found the references, made the figures and THEN did my budget. And found that I was 30% over the maximum allowed budget. So then I had to go through a cut a lot of stuff and I was really mad about having to cut things that took a while to formulate/write. So now I've learned that I need to start thinking about the budget BEFORE I write the whole darn thing. And that's the important thing, right? That it was a learning experience?
I do have one small project that's been awarded funding. It's a collaboration with an Ames-based nutraceutical company. They've been great to work with so far, now I just need to hire a postdoc to work on the project! I interview a great candidate, but they ended up taking another job. So now I'm looking for more applicants....
Who's seen the newest Harry Potter movie? I caught on showing on Thursday. It was good, but just couldn't hold my attention. And I missed the fun of standing in line in Hollywood and the campy atmosphere. Tonight I'll be catching a showing of "Angels and Demons" at the local second-run theatre. Has anyone else seen it? Enjoyed it or no?

Mammoth Cave visit

Recently I had the great opportunity to catch up with grad school friends AND family by making a visit to central Kentucky. My grad school friends and I had decided that we should all get together for a trip sometime during the summer. Mammoth Cave National Park was the decided-upon location. This is the longest cave system in the world. I visited many times as a child, as well as last Thanksgiving, but none of my friends had been before. None of them had even spent much time in Kentucky before. So it was great to share the experience with them.
We all met up at the Louisville airport. It was interesting to see the discrepancy in our travel times. Four people had direct flights, I had to get up at 3am in order to catch my flight out of Des Moines, and Katherine and Linh had to take overnight flights from the west coast. Once we drove to Cave City, the real cultural experience began with a visit to Cracker Barrel for lunch.
We took two great cave tours - the "Star Chamber Tour" through the main section of the cave by lantern light and the "River Styx" tour, which goes through some of the twisty-turny passages and goes down to the lowest level of the cave. Both were very impressive.
We also checked out a more commercial cave in nearby Bowling Green. The "Lost River Cave" takes visitors on a boat tour through a large cave. There was an interesting difference between this tour and the ones given at Mammoth Cave National Park. At Mammoth Cave, they practically beg you not to go on the tour. They list all of the possible health concerns (weak heart, bad knees, etc) and warn patrons that a medical evacuation could take up to two hours. And then it ends up not being bad at all. But at Lost River, there were no warnings whatsoever. But once they had us all loaded in the boat and floating away from the dock, we went under this super low spot where you practically had to put your head between your knees to keep from knocking your head off. Crazy. The visit to Bowling Green also enabled another cultural experience - a visit to Waffle House.
We also had time for a nice hike, even though the trail was wet and had some obstacles. But the best part was just getting caught up and hanging out. We played some old favorite games (mancala) and learned some new ones. Hopefully we'll be able to get together again next year.
After 3 days of fun, my friends left to head back to the airport. And then 10 minutes later my parents arrived at the cabin, quickly followed by my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew. And then we spent 2 fun days together as a family. We took a quick cave tour, went horseback riding (Tiffany, Abby and I), and I even got my parents into a canoe! We also made a trip to Bowling Green to see a minor league baseball game. Overall we had a great time, only throwing two temper tantrums at the local fast food outlets (me at McDonald's, dad at Wendy's, I learned from the best). It was a great few days away from my computer and the stress of work, and it's always good to visit with dear friends and family. There are more pictures here.

Gardening Update

Our garden is coming along very well. Already we've made good use of the rhubarb, snow peas, broccoli and TONS of fresh greens. I just made a batch of pesto from the basil and packed five lunch salads from the greens. We've had the pleasure of at least tasting a few cherry tomatoes and raspberries, hopefully a taste of things to come. But over the past few weeks the real excitement has begun - the butternut squash are growing like crazy and baby eggplants and this morning I found five little melons. I'm extremely excited about the melons because for the longest time they showed no indication of life whatsoever. The sweet potatoes have been the biggest disappointment - we planted three "slips". One is doing OK, a second is at least growing and the other 4 are hopeless. There are progress pictures here, but here are a few of my favorite shots from this morning.

Game of Thrones

Another recent joy in my life - HBO is making a mini-series out of the first book in my favorite series. The series is called "A Song of Ice and Fire" and the first book is "Game of Thrones", by George R.R. Martin. They recently announced the first official cast member, and it was for one of my favorite characters. I think they made a wonderful choice. This reminds me of the early days of the Lord of the Rings movies and how much fun it was to hear the various casting announcements and the excitement of seeing the first trailer. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this turns out well. And I highly recommend the books!

The Secret Path

Now that the weather is warm, I can consistently walk to and from work. It's only a mile each way. And sometimes I try to come home for lunch. The activity points that I earn walking almost pay for the candy that I eat out of the jar on the secretary's desk. Here's the path I usually take:

View Larger Map
My neighbor previously told me about a secret path through the woods with a "scary" bridge. I've seen people ducking in and out of the woods, but was holding off exploring until all of the winter ice and mud was gone. On Monday I decided to try the trail. What a treat! Instead of the sun-exposed sidewalk on the busy, noisy streets, the trail through the woods is quiet, shaded and green. And yes, the bridge is a bit scary - not only is it missing a few planks, but it also has a general tilt. So I only take this trail when I'm wearing sensible shoes. But it's still a nice change of pace. I don't think it's any shorter or quicker, but it's a delight.

Life is Grand

Life has been especially pleasant the past week. Nothing major has happened, but just lots of small joys.
Here are a few that are forefront in my mind
1) Spring has arrived in force here. The lilac bush in my front yard has provided fresh blooms to take to my office. They smell great. The flowers I planted in my yard are coming up - the gladiolus and sunflowers are doing especially well. Yesterday I planted more flowers - including foxglove, lily of the valley and violas.
2) The garden is making enormous progress. This week we planted so many things - greens, beets, sweet potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, green peppers, sweet potatoes tomatoes and basil. The potatoes we planted last week are coming up already. We still have squash, melons and hot peppers to plant, just waiting to finish digging and weeding the third bed. Hopefully I'll have some pictures soon.
3) I've made some great friends here in Ames. The book club, stained glass class, Ames Women's Meetup group, my neighborhood and workplace have all put my in contact with some wonderful people.
4) Work is going very well. Without the need to prepare for class lectures, I have been able to devote more time to setting up my lab and working on proposals. I have one project that a local company is interested in funding. And my collaborator and I will be submitting a proposal on another project next month. The students working in my lab this summer are wonderful - one of them managed to repair an old incubator this week. His work saved me the $1000 to TRY and repair the darn thing or the $2000 required to replace it. And there are two more students arriving in a few weeks. Both are participants in an REU (Research Experience for Undergrads) program, which means they are good students and I do not need to pay them! And my teaching evaluations came in from the spring semester - it was good to get overwhelmingly positive comments from my students.

Kansas City trip

I wanted to do something special to acknowledge the close of my first academic year. Originally my mentor and I were going to see a James Taylor concert in Des Moines. But the affordable seats sold out too quickly. And then I saw that through some crazy alignment of the stars there were two great opportunities in Kansas City this weekend - the orchestra was performing the "Lord of the Rings" symphony (music from the movie) and Fleetwood Mac's "Hits 2009" tour. Could I ask for a better opportunity to indulge two of my favorite long-running interests? [I should confess that I have indulged these interests before - I've seen symphony performances of Lord of the Rings twice (Hollywood Bowl, Tampa) and caught Fleetwood Mac on their 1997 "The Dance" tour in St. Louis.]
So I made the three-hour drive down to Kansas City on Thursday and got to the symphony just in time. It was a good performance. Unfortunately, I know every note of that music so well that it's jarring for me when the performers interpret it differently. But I was pleased that this performance perfectly matched the brass part on "Bridge of Kazad-Dum", one of my favorite passages. It's the musical selection on the link above. As with previous performances, they had a beautiful accompaniment by Alan Lee's artwork.
On Friday I wanted to explore some of what Kansas City had to offer. It was raining, so I headed to Union Station's Science Center. Blah. It probably was a good exhibit, but was overrun with school groups. The rain had stopped, so I headed to the zoo. Same situation there - lots of school groups. Overall it seemed like a nice place. It had a HUGE African section and a great chimp exhibit with a large group of chimps (about 15 according to the signage). The chimp exhibit was so large and lush that you couldn't see the back of it. Or the chimps, sadly. But it made me happy to see that they had such a great exhibit. Realizing that I was NOT having a good time at the zoo, I called it quits after the Africa section.
I still had most of the afternoon to kill, so I checked the map and found some cool museums between the zoo and my hotel. The Toy and Miniature Museum was amazing - way too much stuff to take in there on a single visit. The colletion mainly consisted of old dollhouses and miniatures, as well as the largest collection of marbles in the midwest. And it was nice and quiet....
Then I visited the "Money Museum" at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. It wasn't really a museum - just a chance to come in and see the money sorters at work. After passing through the security and background check. And they had this $5000 bill on display. Visitors all received a free bag of shredded money ($164). It was cool. And quiet and FREE.
I also popped in at the National World War I museum - about 30 minutes prior to closing. There was a ton of good material there and very interactive exhibits - the even had these cool sound booths where you could go in and listen to voice recordings from the time. I listened to part of a speech by Lenin. I can't say I had ever heard his voice before. There is also a memorial tower there that you can ride to the top for a good view of the city. This museum would be a great place to spend a hot summer afternoon, but I don't think it has much, if any, appeal for young children. Sadly I didn't get to do much except quickly walk through the exhibits.
Then it was on to dinner (Kansas City BBQ at Famous Dave's) and then the FABULOUS Fleetwood Mac concert. It was the most fun I had had in a long time. They sound so great together and they played so many of my favorite songs. My only disappointment is that they didn't play "Say You Will". But they DID play "Storms" - an extremely haunting and melancholy song that I never expected to hear. Steve Nicks actually said that they had never performed "Storms" live prior to the current tour. They did a great job of mixing their emo solo songs with fun ensemble pieces. For example, "Storms" was followed by "Say You Love Me".
I made friends with my neighbors before the concert started and we all agreed that "Silver Springs" was on our must-hear list. And as the concert went on, I started to get nervous that they weren't going to play it. The concert ended with "Go Your Own Way". Of course, there would be an encore. And they came back and played "World Turning" and "Don't Stop" and left again. My heart almost stopped - were they really NOT going to play "Silver Springs"? And then thankfully they came back for a second encore and Silver Springs was instantly recognizable from the first note. In the youtube video that the audience is all singing along - that's how it was at this show too. I never realized that I knew the lyrics to so many of their songs. What a wonderful end to a great evening. I'm seriously considering making a trek across country some weekend this summer to catch another performance of this tour. I'd hate to wait another 10 years to see them again. Anyone up for Atlantic City on June 13th?
But for now it's back to work on proposals and the garden project. Heidi and I may get some stuff planted this afternoon.
Happy Mother's Day everyone!

First School Year Down

Well, I survived my first academic year. It was rough at times, but I'm very optimistic about the coming years at ISU. My co-workers are great and so are the students. I had two great teaching experiences - a sophmore level core course in the fall semester (4o students) and then a graduate-level elective course in the spring. The graduate-level course was an elective and dealt with my speciality (Metabolic Engineering). There were 6 enrolled students and three auditors. The two classes were very different, but both were a great experience. Next fall I'll be teaching the same sophmore-level class and I'm eager to do a better job than I did last year now that I'm not so nervous. The teaching assignments haven't been made for next spring yet. I'm supposed to have one semester with no teaching somewhere in my first four years; but there are two other new hires with the same deal, so I'm not sure how we're going to co-ordinate the details on that.
My research program is getting off to a good start as well. I'm now supervising one masters student, two PhD students and one full-time lab technician. There were also 10 undergraduates working part-time on various research projects. This summer 4 of those students, plus 2 new ones, will be continuing to work. They are all very dedicated and it's rewarding to see them learn and get good results.
I've got three big proposals going out this summer, plus a few smaller ones. It will be nice to have more time to spend on research since I won't be preparing for class.
This year was great, hopefully things will only get better.

April update

Hello everyone. Sorry again for the long delay between posts.
As always, I've been busy with work. The end of the semester is in sight and I'm looking forward to a productive summer. My class this semester has been great - I've been teaching a graduate-level "Metabolic Engineering" course and we've covered a lot of neat topics. I have 6 enrolled students and 3 auditors, so the students are comfortable speaking up and asking questions. They all did a great job on their first project and I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle their second project. The first was a summary of published papers and for their second project they are supposed to design a series of experiments. Next fall I'll be teaching the same sophomore-level class that I taught last fall. I'm eager to go back and do a better job than I did last year.
We are also making progress on lab work, slowly but surely. I had a new full-time lab technician start last week, so hopefully that will be an improvement. And a second graduate student will be starting at the beginning of May. So over the summer there should be many hands producing lots of useful results!
On the non-work front, I am continuing to enjoy the stained glass classes. We just finished our second project, a window hanging using the copper foil method. The third and final project is another window hanging, but we use the lead method instead of copper foil. I am eager to pick out my pattern and glass for the new project. And I will be doing a two-Saturday workshop in May where we will put a mosaic-type pattern into a birdbath. I will then put the birdbath outside the bedroom window where the kitties can watch. There are progress pics here.
My neighbor, two friends and I are working on a garden in my neighbor's backyard. We are being VERY overly-ambitious, with plans for herbs, greens, 7 varieties of tomatoes, squash, melons, potatoes, beans, beets, leeks.... So far we have started some seedlings in a greenhouse and are clearing space for the garden. The real fun (digging!) will start soon. There are progress pics for the garden here.
What else... this week I will be attending a performance of STOMP with some of my co-workers. I'm quite excited about that.
Look for more updates soon. Hopefully I will have more adventures to report as the weather improves!

Spring, at last

Spring has finally arrived here in Ames. There is still a little bit of snow hanging around in a few shady spots, but for the most part the days are getting warmer (up to 70 a few times), the birds are out in force and bits of green are starting to poke out of the ground. I can't wait for the trees to start budding.
This past week was Spring Break at ISU. The break from preparing lecture notes and managing undergraduate researchers was nice. I was able to spend a lot of time thinking about projects, getting caught up on ordering and paperwork and working in the lab with my graduate student. Still, it's sad that classes start back tomorrow and I didn't accomplish anywhere near as much as I had hoped.
Yesterday I finally saw my first in-theatre movie here in Ames. One of my book club friends and I saw "Duplicity" and then got some Thai food for dinner. We had a great time. A strange thing happened though - we arrived at the theatre about 20 minutes early to make sure we got good seats. We were sitting there chatting during all of the pre-trailer commercials and some grumpy old man actually asked us to "take the conversation outside" because he couldn't hear the commercials. It was quite a shock and I had to fight the urge to apologize after the movie for distracting him from the Coke commercials.
I've been dog-sitting for my neighbor for the past week and have had a lot of fun (heh heh) "walking" two 75-lb dogs. Sometimes it feels more like driving a team of horses. One evening we went to the local woods and all three of us got sooooo muddy. That's a great spot for them though because I can take their leashes off and let them run. We all had a great time, despite the mud.
I'm still taking the stained glass class and we are well into our second project, a window hanging using the "coppper foil" method. There are progress pictures here.
I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying spring wherever you are.