Man-by-the-Sea

Guess what? The Atlantic Ocean is WARM(ER). ER than the Pacific Ocean. Surfing in the Northish Pac requires a wetsuit, a parka, and a healthy dose of poor judgment. Swimming in the Northish At requires a train ticket to Manchester-by-the-Sea, some sunscreen, and a good book. And a swimming suit, of course. Singing Beach is a quick half-mile meander from the train station and it has plenty of room to relax in the soft sand and relax with some beach reading. (i.e., not reading about Chlamydia, which is the bacteria my first project deals with, well maybe Chlamydia because the two main characters in my novel got a little too serious about halfway through and I had to put it down, stupid book.) Anyway, here's a shot of the rocks looking towards Gloucester, Mass. It was basically a perfect day.

Out on the grill.

Wow, look at me all busy with being social. Tonight I invited two of the girls in my ward plus two of my roommates to enjoy an evening out on our back deck in Charlestown and grill up some pizzas. I had bought some lights at the Target a couple of weeks ago so it was time to put 'em up. The grocery store in our naybahhood is called Johnny's Foodmastah. Although their organization takes a bit getting used to, they do sell delish pizza dough for $1.29 that'll make two good sized pizzas. So I got some basil, mozzarella, pep, and etc. to work the grill. It was great to be meeting new people because I learned from Seattle that perfect strangers aren't as sympathetic to your stupid protein problems as your dear friends are (obviously!). Naw, it was fun, check out the results:Obviously I'll need to be meeting some men at some point but I just found out that there was a whole handful of men in our ward from Missoula, MT that just moved out and away from Boston. Hey universe, that's just mean. And funny. Feany?

Straight outta Cape Cod we're keepin' it whale.

Since I turned in my grant to the Harvard somebody-or-others yesterday and so it can get submitted to the feds on Monday, it was time to relax after three straight weeks of 12-13 hour days of writing. It felt wonderful to be busy again and it feels even better to start exploring this beautiful piece of the United States that I live in. Today, I went whale watching. Okay future tourists of Boston, get this. The New England Aquarium runs a whale watching cruise (3-4 hours) out of Boston Hahbah. They take you out to the Stellwagen Bank Marine Sanctuary where we saw two cow-calf humpback whale pairs an additional humpback and a few minke. Seeing 'em spout off water because (as the naturalist pointed out several times) whales are mammals so they breathe air. It was a straight up stunna. On the way out, we had the Codzilla following us. Here's what it looked like with my roomie Alex trembling at the approach.Here's a really bad picture of a whale. We did see a couple of tails come out and of course you can see 'em down in the water . . . but no, we didn't see any of them jump into the air. Hopefully next time.And on our way back into the hahbah, there were dozens of sailboats. As Isak Dinesen said, "The cure for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea". I think I've got the first two down so it's definitely time to get myself sailing a boat.

And I'm close to family!

Rochester, NY is the home of my brother's family with three adorable kiddos. I drove up to Rochester recently to visit the fam and we checked out a few hikes (so, what's with the bugs?) and Fort Oswego. The hike was really beautiful and it was fun to spend time out in the woods. Although admittedly, I'm grateful for my orienteering training, I got a little worried at the end that the hike was going to be a LOT longer than I was planning when HUZZAH! The parking lot! Here's the two oldest checking out the lake on our hike (Lake Ontario? So, by "Great Lake" you mean, "Lake that is so immensely big it has it's own weather system and could be mistaken for the ocean"?We visited Fort Oswego where I'm fairly certain that my niece Grace has found her calling as either an Annie Oakley impersonator or as a future member of the NRA. Probably both.Further proof of this is that she's apparently already Pavlovian conditioned her older brother Isaac to stick 'em up at any slight provocation. Yup, I just said that I was going to take a picture. This pose was all his own.

And I love my palatial digs.

So if science doesn't work out, I could pursue a career as an interior decorator a la Doris Day in "Pillow Talk" but the problem is that I only have one style---mine. And, I'm not sure how transferrable it is. I'm guessing not so much. At any rate, I wanted a little bit of Seattle in my home in Boston so I promptly got rid of the purulent med school scrubs green:And went with something that would accurately mimic the soft sunset that illuminates the Hoh Rainforest in the Olympic National Park after a rainstorm. I think I got the color just right.I have so much room in my room, I've left the middle third empty because I don't know what to do with it.I'm thinking of installing a rat/raccoon/possum/squirrel/crow habitat to make sure I don't forget all the animal friends.

I LOVE MY JOB!!!

Okay, this is basically to point out that life is wonderful. Even if you spent a lot of years moving around microscopic amounts of liquid from tube to tube and jostling bits of atoms around on a computer screen and got to the point where you realized that you should have just skipped straight to Montana without passing GO! where GO! equals any sort of education past the third grade or maybe college at the latest, this happens. A good three weeks of work. Totally enjoyable, despite the fact that I should have been stressed and rushed getting a grant out the door right out of the gate, it's great. Wow. I never ever ever would have guessed. And Boston is rockin' by socks. Even if the next six years is a total mess, I don't care (cough, right now, cough) because this has been so so so much fun. Yes, that's right, science is FUN! And this photo, this is my neighborhood. I'm four blocks from the monument on Bunker Hill and seven or eight from the USS Constitution.

On the road again!

Okay folks, here's a condensed version of the road trip. It was 3200 amazing miles. I went from Washington to Idaho to Montana to North Dakota to Minnesota to Wisconsin to Iowa to Illinois to Indiana to Ohio to Pennsylvania to New York to Massachusetts. Apparently, we live in a REALLY big country. Here's some highlights of the things I saw. I didn't include any photos of Washington, Idaho, or Montana because in the first two, I've taken lots of photos and have talked about them lots in the past. In the third, it's too painful of a reminder that I don't live in Montana yet. But I will, I will! Here's me outside North Dakota. Turns out, this is home of the famous song "Home on the Range".Where not only the deer and the antelope play, but also apparently giant rat alligators. Ratalligators? Ratocodiles? What the? No wonder Teddy Roosevelt (best prez ever!) was so ready to shoot big things in Africa (not the best practice). He'd been fighting off these at his ranch! And those of you who scoff at North Dakota will have to deal with me. Look at how beautiful this is. It's Theodore Roosevelt National Park.Also in North Dakota is a place called Jamestown that has albino bison and apparently four types of meat bbqs. Is one type albino bison and another flavor regular type. Mmmmm . . . bison. Not as gamey as buffalo.In Minnesota, it rains. Whitney said, "Oh my gosh, look at those clouds, that looks really bad" (pointing to an immense thick bank of black fog). And I said, "Oh Whitney, I don't think it looks like much at all. It's just cloudy. Hello!" Well, it turns out that it can rain so much that you have to stare the white line in the right lane to stay going straight. Also in Minnesota, since the rain might keep people inside for a while, there's time to collect twine.While outside Minneapolis, and boy I wish I had a picture, we hit construction. Which was hot and tarry but okay since the construction men in MN do not wear shirts at all. Seriously, it was hilarious. Really boys, it's sooooo hot that you must just sport a small orange mesh vest? I wish I had had my camera out. But maybe this distracted driving is what led to me hitting something on the road and it ripping up the undercarriage, i.e., my rear right brakes that had to get fixed in Madison, WI for a whole day. This turned out to be fantastic because we stayed across the street from this beauty:Yup, the Wisconsin State Capitol. And I also ran into the most delish thing I've ever tasted: beer battered cheese curds. No wonder everyone in Seattle is railyard skin, they don't have access to food like this.And, we had enough time to check out PBS which was showing a special on "Star Wars in Concert". Looking up online, it turns out that it was in Moline, IL the NEXT day. So of course we backtracked west to make sure we saw Anthony Daniels (C3PO) narrating, the original Han Solo in carbonite prop, and listen to all the music with a full orchestra, choir, and big LED screens. Here's me channeling my force.And here's me admiring Harrison Ford circa 1983.Okay, I'm just going to skip over the next bit because it turns out, the northern halves of Indiana and Ohio are horrible. I have a fondness for Ohio because of a college friend is from there, but it can't be the freeway across the top could it? Here's what I found when I got to Massachusetts: Rain! Lots of it! Awwwwwww, a welcome just for me!And all of the cosmos' thanks go to Whits for sitting shotgun in an old pickup truck with no air conditioning for 3200 miles. SAINT!

Last weekend in Seattle.

Hmmm, goodbye my beautiful home. Seattle was great. I can't begin to express how much I'll miss the people that live here, the friends I've made, the trees, the mist, the four-part trash/recycling/ composting/glass, the 88 SBUX within 5 miles, and everything else. What did I do with my last weekend? I went to the Lowe's in Rainier (I like living in Danger with a capital D) to pick up bungee cords for strapping my bike to my truck and doing cartwheels on the lawn outside 2323 Massachusetts Ave on the way back. I also stopped off at Habitat to see the house that I installed the subfloor on and dug a gazillion trenches. Besos Seattle! (My eyes are closed in that picture because I'm hiding back the tears. Naw, but I will MISS ALL OF YOU!!!)

More from the Sage N' Sun.

Here are some more pictures from the Sage N' Sun Festival in Ephrata. It was amazing! First up are the amazing acrobatics of the Seattle Cossacks Stunt Drill Team. Yes, not your average motorcycle drill team, they're serious business. Kids that are on a unicycle drill team and made fun helmet ornaments out of manilla folders with school supplies attached (?)And the Red Hat Society (right?) that though I don't know what they do, I'm pretty sure I'm going to belong. Unless it in anyway involves adoring penguins or eating fish or watching penguins eat fish. In which case, I'll decline.All in all, one of the best weekends ever, oh Ephrata, you're wonderful, well all of Washington is!

Ephrata!

This past weekend I went out to Ephrata to run in the Sage N' Sun Festival Fun Run. This is the 101st running of the festie and even though I've now written the word "run" in some form three or four times, we only ran up the hill and then walked the remaining 1.9 miles. I feel that at my young age, it's my responsibility to help the forty and overs (so, not too much older than me now) feel real good about their pace. And that means walking. A lot. Well, we also had to conserve our energy for other fun things. Like swinging with Rachel's little gal. And we also had to go soak up some sun at Splash Zone. I find that I'm pretty excited to be getting sunburned. I might not be as excited in eleven years when I'm forty and look 98.And our road trip to Dry Falls. Driest Falls? Um, big canyon from the Ice Age Falls? I don't remember what it's called. It's on the way to Grand Coulee Dam and is big. That about sums up a lot of road trips right?And like road trips that I was on, there was a little bit of car sickness from Rachel's poor little girl. Man, you know how your parents secretly hope that you'll have to go through what you did to them? Well if that's true, I'm going to need to buy piles of dramamine and put it in as a bonus treat in the trail mix. Is drugging kids bad? Seems like it's something you're not supposed to do.

There's two zoos in this town?

So one of my first months here in Seattle, I got a little lost. A lot lost. Yet I was so overflowing in the delusion that I was right, it got to the point that when I drove past the Woodland Park Zoo, I thought to myself, believing that I was somewhere in the UDistrict on the other side of the freeway, "there's two zoos in this town?". Well, ah, no. There's just the one. Tucked just north of Fremont along Phinney Ridge. Well, I've never actually been to the zoo. And after seven years, today was the day. What! Rich, Michelle, and Baby L were in town for the week and so I met up with them to check out the penguins (devil birds!), meerkats (they're meerkute!), and jaguar. And gorillas, eagles, hippos, giraffes, grizzly bears, and river otters. Incredible. We have an amazing zoo though we could have nothing else here in Seattle, the animal rights activists would torch the place if it were anything less than a Grand Hyatt. Which, torching aside, is a good thing to have a good engaging space for the animals. Afterwards, we went to Kidd Valley where Baby L got a taste of her first garlic fry. Good luck baby!Here's a picture of Michelle and I. There were more awkward poses than this in the batch but due to the fact that Michelle has a picture of me in my jammies with a red bath robe under an ottoman (seriously Michelle, what was I doing?), I won't post them.And yes, that is me wearing a scarf on the first day of June. Listen friends, it's still cool out here. Though I understand that Boston might be a little more variable in temperature.

Boca! Boca! Boca! Boca!

Tonight a few of us headed down to Qwest Field to cheer on the Boca Juniors, one of the winningest football clubs in international play in history. They hail from the docks of Buenos Aires and I could hardly have two close friends hail from those same docks (or close enough) without cheering for Boca over the Seattle Sounders (a pretty good club by the way). As pointed out by wikipedia and Adam, they're only ranked like 55th in the world this year and tonight, they looked more like 5.5 x 10^55. Sloppy passing, slow jogging. But, who cares, it was a great match. I went and tracked down some alfajors (Argentine shortbread/dulce de leche cookies) that were triples no less, from a Salvadoran bakery in White Center. I was a little hesitant since my last experience with Salvadoran takes on Argentina were not so great (see pictures of empanadas below).But, they were heavenly delish and gave us more than enough energy to paint our faces and scream for CABJ! Huge thanks to Tomas for picking up the tix and to Boca for agreeing to get paid outrageous sums of money to entertain some Americans . . . and be so obliging as to not try at all against the Sounders so that the Sounders Band could play "Uprising" by MUSE so that Megan and I could dance all the way off the pitch and into crowds outside.

Apparently I'm pretty good at goal-setting.

So when I was about 7, I had a dream of moving to Seattle and becoming a scientist. 20 years later, PhD? Check! Seattle? Check! So, er, now what? Well, I've been trying to answer that question for the past 12 months and now I finally have an answer. Flying by the seat of my pants, I had a job interview in Boston at the beginning of the month and to end the suspense for anyone who doesn't already know, I'm moving to Boston. When I showed up, the PI enthusiastically waved, said "I'm so excited that you decided to look into my lab, this is wonderful! Why don't we go into my office and chat for a bit?" Then, when I was coming back from dinner, "basically, I talked to my people and they love you. We want you to come out here and do a post-doc. Anything we can do to help you make the decision to move to Boston, please let us know. I think you have a unique skill set that will serve you well in this field and I'd be delighted if you chose our lab to come work with us." Then, when I was chatting with him about start dates, "I appreciate that you are wanting to get an early start. I value your work ethic. But really, I want you to choose whatever date works best for you. I know you have a lot of non-science things you need to wrap up in Seattle and I want you to be comfortable and stress-free with the move. If you need anything at all, don't hesitate to contact us. And if you can't find housing for July but only starting August, we'll put you up in a hotel for the interim." What! Basically, the lab is absolutely spectacular, I get to choose my own project (scary and fun. Scun? Fary? An adventure either way.), and it's in Boston which is pretty okay in my book. I'll miss you terribly Space Needle, but Bunker Hill is calling. This is the nautical little bed and breakfast in Brookline that I stayed out while I was interviewing. It's so nautically Boston. Time to take sailing lessons (which I'm doing here in Seattle next month) so that I can find myself a man with a yacht. Or at least take the next level of sailing out in Massachusetts Bay (is that spelled right? I'm going to have to learn how to spell that state now I guess). Oh, and that little pic up there? That'll be my view as I walk to work every morning. And apparently all grad students do turn into their PhD advisors, I'll be right across the quad from where Roland started his PhD.

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's amore!

This is what I was singing (out loud) during my trip to the cannery today. With demand through the roof, the Humanitarian Aid of the church has dispensed with food storage canning assignments and gone straight to production. The Kent Cannery is in charge of producing all of the tomato sauce for the effort. The tomatoes are grown in the sunny suns of the Sacramento area, turned into tomato paste, packed into oil drums, and shipped up to Kent. Up here, we pipe it into a huge mixer and just add water. It's then piped to kettles and brought up to 185 degrees and then aliquoted into cans for individual use. I usually get the job of packing the cans into the drums for autoclaving which gives a great core workout. This time, I got assigned to the lids, a semi-stressful job since you also have to move the cans into position at the same time or the system will jam. (For realsies, I turned my back to grab more lids and a can slipped under a bar and jammed the line, the sneaky devils.) Anyway part of the process is a rotary tamper that pushes excess sauce out of the can before its sealed. This means that tomato sauce is pouring onto the floor and splattering over anyone who is close. In this case, me! Tomato sauce was lapping up and over the top of my slippers. I had a great time though I wish I had worn my rain boots!

An adventure in four time zones.

So this month, I traveled from SEA>DEN>SFO>DEN>ATL>ROC>DET>SLC>CAN>SLC>SEA in just 19 days. Most everyone has heard what a spectacular trip I had visiting my sister's family in Denver, interviewing in San Francisco,visiting my brother's family in Rochester, and then going to Cancun for a week with my parents but here are some highlights of the trip, from West to East. In the Pacific Time Zone, I interviewed at Genentech, an extremely successful biotech corporation flush with cash. I had an absolute blast chatting with the Dixit Lab. They study inflammasomes which are little molecular tripwires that alert the cell that the sterile inside of a cell has been compromised by bacteria or viruses and to activate the adaptive immune response. It was a super long day of interviews with 14 people in row with an hour break for me to give a seminar. I had a gnarly head cold and with so much chatting, I was totally spent by the end of the day (10 PM). The thing everyone told me is how much money they have. It's not the draw but I hear that money is nice to have from time to time. I mean, they literally have their own bus system. LITERALLY! In the Mountain Time Zone,I visited my sister's family in Denver and of course saw my parentals in Orem. In Denver, we had Easter dinner and dyed Easter eggs for FHE. Now that's what FHE should be! We also went and ate at a giant hot dog nestled among the Rocky Mountains. As is evident from this picture below, eating at giant hot dogs is what America is all about. The best part was really just hanging out with my lovely sister and watching her be the most spectacular mom. Also, watching Gene Kelly and Judy Garland sing and dance about pirates, especially where the dastardly Black Pete pirate turns out to be her fiance and bows awkwardly by swinging his leg out and around, was pretty good too. In the Central Time Zone, the lovely peninsula of the Yucatan can be found. There's buckets of sand, it pours sunshine (and rain too, but the warm sweet kind), and there's a serving of flan at every meal. Heaven on earth.In the Eastern Time Zone, I spent time with a beautiful princess, the Blue Arrow superhero,
and a charming little court jester whose job is clearly to make everyone laugh and smile with his infectious giggles and grins. We played frisbee golf, hiked to some waterfalls, stopped at a Mennonite market (incredible good stuff to find), and sampled way too much of Jeff's Nutmeg Cake. (I want the recipe pronto my brother!). "Thanks" can't begin to express how grateful I am to the entire gang for letting me come disrupt and bother them all!!!