Memories!

A while back, I posted a scan of my daughter’s fractured elbow — Skatje had gone on a trek across Siberia and broken it, but soldiered on. In case you were wondering, she’s now had it treated: doctors broke it again, put her through surgery, bolted it all up, and she’s now recovering, with drugs and a sling and a supportive husband.

Just think: every time her joints ache, every time alarms go off as she goes through airport scanners, she’ll be reminded of her glorious Russian adventure on the Trans-Siberian Railway.

My kid’s got bones

elbowscan

My peripatetic daughter, during her trip across Russia, took a fall on the ice in Irkutsk and broke her elbow. She didn’t see a doctor, but just kept going, stoically trudging across the vast wasteland of Siberia, no tears or whimpering, fighting off giant bears and the fierce nomadic horsemen of the steppes, etc., etc., etc., and didn’t bother with that doctorin’ thing until she got home.

She has posted the scans of her fractured joint! Now I’m going to have to ground her, or something.

“hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper”

Those are the best things in life, according to Cohen the Barbarian, and I spent most of my morning taking advantage of the middle one. I have been shirking — it has been four years since my last dental checkup — so had a few hours to get a good thorough working over. My morning was spent lying back, getting x-rayed, having my teeth poked and prodded and scraped, getting the occasional metallic taste of blood, being ordered about, open wider, turn this way, bite down on this.

It was terrific. I don’t know why I don’t go more often — probably because I don’t have any pressing dental issues, and it does take a chunk of time — but a good workout at the dentist’s office is so relaxing, and I feel so mellow afterwards, in addition to having a sparkly clean tasty mouth, it’s like a spa day for me. I love the gadgets and the pointy little tools and dental chairs are incredibly comfortable, and it helps to have a bunch of competent professionals I can trust. So I’ve decided to be a responsible adult and made another appointment for the same thing in April.

And now, while I’m all loose and unstressed, it’s a good time to get the next step in my lab prep done for next semester, and finalize those syllabi. I don’t know why Cohen didn’t include a university education in his list…maybe it’s #4, right after the soft lavatory paper.

So, next term I’m teaching our introductory course, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development, and I’m also teaching our Genetics course. I can do these two course in my sleep, so prep is easy, except for the fact that I’m always tweaking something. The challenges I’m facing are:

  • Genetics is horribly oversubscribed. Our enrollments keep going up and up, and this year our required molecular biology course filled up fast (don’t panic for the students, they’ll just take another section in the fall) and everyone who couldn’t get in seems to have signed up, with my permission, for the elective Genetics course. Either that or I’m just incredibly popular.

    So I’m making up extra large batches of flies, and I’m going to be making extra, unscheduled time available in the lab.

  • I’ve taught FunGenEvoDevo many times…but on our weird two days a week, hour and 15 minutes each schedule. This time around it’s on a three days a week, 50 minute schedule. I’m going to have to tweak my timing, but it might actually work better to hit first year students with smaller, more digestible bites.

  • Notice that both courses have “genetics” in the title. This sometimes confuses me: I’m supposed to give the first-years a gentle, conceptual introduction to the basic ideas of Mendelian inheritance, while in the upper level course I can hit them with the wickedly tricky problems and hard ideas. Sometime I might mix the two up, which isn’t good.

Also, so many fly lines. I now have to go up to the genetics lab with my minty clean teeth and spend a few hours setting up dozens of bottles for the first fly lab, in two weeks.

Away in the darkness

There has been a bit of silence here because my mad wife decided she wanted to go camping. In Minnesota. In the middle of January. I know winter camping is a thing, it’s just not my thing, but I went along. So we headed off to Glacier Lakes State Park yesterday, where she’d reserved a snug little cabin for the evening.

Strangely, the DNR link above advertises the place with lots of pictures of beautiful meadows and sparkling lakes and groves of wild flowers. For some reason, they don’t tell you what it’s like in January. It’s like this.

IMG_0295

Skies like spilled milk. The lakes are sheets of ice, covered with snow. The trees are barren and skeletal. Which isn’t unlovely, in its own way, but it’s not how I picture camping (which is more gray, with constant drizzling rain, and bears.)

It wasn’t bad. We settled in, we later went to bed, and we turned off the lights, and discovered something else about the experience.

Total darkness and silence. We were far from anywhere, there were no other campers, the heavy cloud cover meant the moon and stars weren’t shining through at all. I held my hand up to my face, and saw nothing. I waited an hour, for my eyes to adjust…still nothing. There was no wind, and no animals were crazy enough to be out and about, so there was no sound, either. So this is what a sensory deprivation tank might be like.

It turns out I do not cope well with sensory deprivation. I was lying there awake all night, my brain churning away trying to find something outside itself to latch on to, and refusing to go to sleep until it heard a little noise or got a faint glimmering of something. I don’t know whether it was claustrophobia or agoraphobia, but something about being swaddled in dark emptiness was unsettling.

So next time my wife demands that I share her madness, I’m bringing a metronome and a night light. I’m kind of wrecked for the day now, too, and am suddenly noticing more acutely the tick of the clock here at home, the occasional distant swish of a car driving through the snow, and all the clutter in our house.

Our Mad Max future

Oh, the highways of America are going to be so exciting! Here’s a story of two angry dudes responding to driving too closely.

Both drivers pulled into the parking lot of a local car wash and stepped out of their vehicles, according to ABC affiliate WZZM-TV. Witnesses said the tailgating driver fired first, and the other driver returned fire.

When ambulances arrived, the men — Ionia residents James Pullam, 43, and Robert Taylor, 56 — were given medical care and transported to a local hospital, where they were pronounced dead, Detroit News reported.

I demand the right to have a car with flamethrowers and machine guns mounted on it! It’s going to be the only way to navigated the savage wilderness of I94 someday.

Why, yes, I have strong opinions on this matter, but demanding I do something about it will accomplish nothing

I have been told that I must deal with a “misogynistic” statement expressed on Freethoughtblogs by Lux Pickel. They said, “Centering our pro-abortion rhetoric around women is inherently erasing of the existence and needs of trans individuals.“

I have two points to make here.

[Read more…]

Slow down!

Just a reminder for this time of year: drive carefully.

I live where there’s lots of snow and ice, so when I was watching that video, well before there was any accident, I was trying to choke back yelling at the screen. Why are you driving so fast? Why are you trying to pass? Aren’t you paying any attention to the road conditions, you idiot?

The first rule of bad weather driving is…don’t. The second rule is…if you absolutely must, go slowly.

But wait! Before you blow your budget…

…at the Pharyngula store, something desperately urgent has come up: Sarah Morehead is in trouble. Those of you who know Sarah for her gentle activism in the atheist movement should also know that she’s an exceptionally nice person with a family, so these problems are not to be tolerated. I’ll keep it simple: it’s an ugly spousal abuse situation, which has left her and her kids with no support…and really, when you read her story, you’ll see she had no choice but to get out.

She needs help. She needs donations. If you can, get over there and chip in.