How does your garden grow?

Another very out-dated post that I've been meaning to type up for ages...

One of the first things we did after moving to our new duplex back in April was to plant a garden in the back yard. I was so excited to try out gardening now that we live practically in the Garden of Eden in terms of getting things to grow. I remember my parents attempting to garden in NM and it just didn't work out--poor soil, no rain, hilly yard, and DRY air just don't add up to happy growing things. (And many of us in the Tonks family seem to have anti-Green Thumbs, which doesn't help either. Keeping houseplants alive does not come easily for many of us.)

So, the tales people told of just being able to stick seeds in the ground and watch them spring up and grow with virtually no effort required here in IL were intriguing. We had a ready-made garden plot from the last people who lived here before us, so we decided to move forward with full speed ahead and get some veggies a'growing.

We planted (almost) everything as seeds rather than buying seedlings. Then, just a day or so after we planted the seeds, we had TORRENTIAL rain which probably swept the seeds away in rivulets to new locations in the garden in some cases. So, when thing started popping up a few weeks later, they weren't in neat little rows for the most part and I often couldn't really tell what was weed and what was vegetable. We got a few HUGE sunflowers growing--those must have been from seeds leftover from last year, since our neighbor told us that the former residents had planted a bunch of sunflowers. One of them grew taller than the roof!

There was also a row of what turned out to be tree seedlings, plus a bunch of plain old weeds. I let them grow because I thought they might be something I planted--they sprung up so tall that I thought for sure they weren't weeds (most of our weeds are low and sprawly it seemed like). In the end I pulled them out, but not before they dumped a bunch of weed seeds everywhere--I guess next year's weeding will be intense.

Anyways, it turns out that most of the stuff did grow pretty well, without *too* much work. I rarely had to water--in fact, we had a very cool, wetter than normal summer, so most of the time there was too MUCH water around. I DID have to weed a fair amount, however. And it turns out that harvesting the vegetables is a lot of work in and of itself.

It was a great feeling, the first time I brought in my bounty straight from the backyard. I even took a picture of my firstfruits--er, firstveggies? of my garden efforts. (I rarely get out the camera, so obviously this was a big deal.)

We had beans coming out of our ears for a while, and PLENTY of zucchini (including one monstrous one that was hiding for a long time before I finally picked it so I let it get too big). We had some lettuce, some bell peppers, and (later in the season--they took FOREVER to ripen because it wasn't as hot as usual), oodles of tomatoes. Rounding things out were a few eggplants, some summer squash, and various herbs.

Since I am working with the Young Women's organization at church, I am trying to complete the Personal Progress Program that the teenage girls I work with are doing-- I decided to make my garden one of my Value Projects (the one for "Faith"). The instructions for the project said to think of faith like a seed as I plant, care for, and harvest a garden. So here are some of my thoughts on what I learned about faith by planting and growing seeds:

• Early torrential downpours can be dangerous for the newly planted seed. Of course the seed needs water, but too much all at once is overwhelming. ("line upon line")
• Sometimes you have to wait and let things grow before you can tell if they are "good" seeds or bad seeds (like the wheat and the tares). But as soon as you recognize something as a weed, you need to pull it out fast.
• You may have a "legacy" from your forebears--things you have been taught as a child, etc. In some cases this is great--fun sunflowers springing up unbidden. But in some cases they will turn out to be weeds (wicked traditions of the fathers...) and will need to be removed and replaced with truths.
• It can seem to take forever before the first plants produce their yields, but eventually you'll have more zucchini than you know what to do with. (my cup runneth over!)
• Weeds are much easier to pull out when they are small. (Repent early!)
• Weeds are easier to pull in moist ground-- we have to nourish our faith carefully, and then it is easier to root out sin and deception.
• It is easier to grow things in good soil (a good background, family, etc.) but even poor soils can be improved with work and compost.
• It takes work to harvest it too (a lot, actually)! The fruits of our faith may be waiting right there for us to pluck, but we DO have to actually pluck them.
• If you let the veggies sit on the plant in the garden without using them, they rot. (Faith cannot be stagnant--it needs to be used!)

The Turkey and the Trotting

Let's not beat around the bush. I ran an 8k on Thanksgiving! I am immensely proud of myself--it was my first real race, and I finished with what was (for me) a very good time. 49:39 to be specific--just barely under 10 minutes per mile for about 5 miles. There were something like 3,000 people running that day, so it was quite the rush to be there in the thick of things. And, it helped me to eat lots of pie with abandon later in the day.

Above is me after the race, still with my awesome "bib" on. If you reeeeally want to see a picture of me crossing the finishline, I will direct you to this page. But be warned that it is not exactly a flattering angle, and this on top of the inherent un-glamor of a very sweaty and tired me.

The race was the Raleigh Turkey Trot. Kevin and I went to Raleigh, NC to visit my little brother for Thanksgiving (and met my parents there too, who had also come for a visit.) He's been living there for 2 years, but we'd never been out to see him and his little house. I have a cousin living in Raleigh also, so we got to visit with her too.

We had a fantastic time. He gave us rides in his Porsche (yes, PORSCHE) and I helped him do some interior decorating (his house is OBVIOUSLY inhabited by a bachelor--virtually nothing on the walls, etc.). AND, we got my Dad to play Rock Band with us, which it turns out he really liked. (For anyone who knows my dad, this will be a humorous revelation.)

And of course, the feast itself was splendid--thanks to Mom! *Sigh* It is so good to have Moms around for holidays! But not just for the baking--it was good to visit with her and with everyone, especially because I won't get to see any of them at Christmastime this year.

Scooped

Doh. Doh. Doh.

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/46/19381.full.pdf+html

Share the Road!

So the other day I was biking home from my lab, as I often do. Actually, it was several weeks ago--it has gotten too cold for me to brave biking of late. But as you may have noticed, I often get a tad behind on updating my blog. Since I find the incident highly blog worthy, however, I will tell it despite being immensely tardy.

So, there I was, biking home like I always do. I was on a four lane stretch of road (two lanes each direction with a little island in the middle), approaching a stop light up ahead, shortly before which the right hand lane becomes a right-turn only lane. As always, I was in the left lane at this point because I needed to go straight through the light and didn't want to be stuck in the right lane and forced to turn right. I have found that it's best to get over to the left lane early, because changing lanes on a bike with any car traffic around can be tricky (I can't go nearly fast enough to merge into a different lane easily with cars around.)

As I approach the light, I see a lady crossing the street. She is not too far from a crosswalk, but is nonetheless blatantly jaywalking. She is walking reeeeally slow, and I can't quite tell if she's trying to wait for me to pass before she finishes crossing or not. I slow down also, so I can gauge what she is doing and decide whether to go past or stop (in the case that she doesn't stop for me.)

Suddenly, she looks at me and says, "Excuse me." I stop, mistaking the forcefulness in her voice as her desperately needing help of some kind. (I think she was just angry at me, it turns out.) She has a strong accent (Russian, I think) and so I am thinking maybe she is new or visiting and needs some sort of help. "Yes?" I say.

"Do you know the rules of bike riding?" she asks. I look at her, confused. "You are supposed to be riding in the right lane!"

"Oh, well I need to go straight through the stop light, so I'm in the left lane," I explain.

"NO!" she scolds me. "You must cross there, were the pedestrians cross." She points to the crosswalk to the right of the turn lane.

"No, bikes follow the same rules as cars," I insist, feeling extremely defensive.

"NO!" She barely lets me get a word in edgewise. "I am a bike rider too, and I know you should be here by the curb. I didn't see you as I was crossing because I didn't expect you to be there. You almost hit me!" [By the way, I did NOT almost hit her. I was going very slowly, completely prepared to stop if she did not.]

"You're not even in the crosswalk!" I protest.

"That doesn't matter. You should be on the right. It's not safe!"

Let us pause for a moment here, to savor the full irony of the situation. Here is a woman accosting me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD (yes, we're still stopped on the road--luckily no cars were coming just then) to give me a lecture on bike safety whilst jaywalking herself.

At this point, I notice that the light has turned green and get back on my bike. "I have to go," I say.

"You look up the rules on the internet--you will see I'm right!" She yells after me.

I turn and yell back. "I will, but you look it up too! And you should get in a CROSSWALK!"

Okay, so I did not display a lot of grace at the end of this interchange. But the audacity of this lady had me steaming mad. I mean, who does that? She may have had a (slight) point in that I had changed into the left lane earlier than necessary. However, she was dead wrong that I was supposed to cross the intersection in the crosswalk! And even if she was 100% in the right, I think stopping a biker in the middle of the road to lecture them equals complete lunacy.

Okay, rant over. You may all now commence in telling me how right I am. :)

Halloween '09

Can you tell what we are? Ten points to the first person to get it right. We had fun at our Halloween party at church, but were disappointed that not a one trick-or-treater came to our house, even though we live in a neighborhood and I know there are kids around. I even put up some pumpkin garland things and turned on the porch light. Ah well. More Reese's peanut butter cups for me...although that's not necessarily a good thing, at least as far as fitting into my pants is concerned.

Gum Sutures and Broken Bumpers

So, today I had gum surgery. It was to remove the "excess tissue" that grew in my lower right wisdom tooth area after the tooth was extracted and which has been getting irritated and infected every so often since then. (Some of you may recall the horrendous nightmare of a wisdom teeth extraction I had a couple of years ago. They were very infected and difficult to remove. In some places I had big lumps of tissue grow back where teeth had been--because of the trauma in the extraction? I don't know.) The surgery went well--just local anesthetics, and it only took 30 minutes or something.

..but THEN, I went out to the car to drive home and pulled out of the spot in the parking garage. I guess I was distracted by the fact that half of my face was numb and my mouth was stuffed with gauze, because I failed to notice the large post on my left and ended up hitting it with the front bumper as I swung around. There was a horrible crunching noise, and then the bumper fell off! Well, almost--it was still hanging on by one corner. I called Kevin and he came and helped me tie the bumper back on with some rope and then drive it straight over to the body shop where we had the door fixed just a few months ago.

*Sigh* The gum procedure is turning out to be pretty pricey after all! I guess it could have been worse, though. At least I only damaged my *own* car and not someone else's. It sure was embarrassing, though. I couldn't even smile at the people who stopped to ask if I needed help due to my half-numb face and droopy mouth.

A Hopeful Turn of Events

As my friend Beth recently reminded me, it's been a long time since I've posted anything at all on my blog. And even though I'm not traveling anywhere cool, I suppose maybe some of you are curious about what I'm up to...so here we go on a brief tour of Mindy's life for the last 3 or 4 months! I guess, now that I'm done gallivanting around the world, I can take up the banner of the Boring again. ;)

Let's see, what did I do with the rest of my summer? Well, I somehow forced myself to go back into my lab again and do some research. It was hard. Really hard, actually, after having so much fun seeing spectacular places, to have to resign myself to my icky blecky life of frustrating lab work. But, I was already treading on thin ice with my advisor, having taken SO much time off this year for travel, so I had no choice but to show up and get to work. I can't say I worked particularly hard all summer--it was a constant trial to force myself into work every day, but I did at least show up.

I've been working on a new strategy to get my project to work. It's basically the last idea I have for what to try on this project--the last glimmer of hope for getting anything out of the last 4.5 years' worth of research. Actually, I still think it has a chance of working, but I ran into some snags (as always) as I was trying this new strategy. It involved building a whole new confocal microscope setup, which was giving me weird data, so I had to do some controls which also turned out weird, and now I have to do controls to figure out why my controls failed...you get the picture.

Some of you may be wondering why I have been working on one project for so long. Basically, it's because my advisor doesn't like to consider projects that aren't very high impact (meaning they can get published in Science or Nature, or maybe PNAS). And high impact ideas usually mean super impossible ideas. Such is the case with my original project. It would be a very big deal if only we could get it to work, but obviously getting it to work has not been a walk in the park. I've asked a couple of times, admittedly without much forcefulness, if I could pursue some interesting tangents or side projects that have come up along the way (which could have yielded papers in some lesser journals, but hey, at least it would published!), and each time my advisor has said he'd rather I just worked on the main "big" project and get it working. It's a good strategy for him to advance his reputation, but it stinks for his students because it means we have all our eggs in one basket and most of us aren't getting the publications we need to graduate. While my advisor is a good guy in general, he's also not that useful in terms of offering help and practical advice. But I won't go into all of the reasons why our lab is dysfunctional just now. Suffice it to say, it's been frustrating.

But, the good news is that I have recently (like, just a few days ago) acquired a new project which has much more promise. This is what happened: Paul (that's my advisor) saw a couple of interesting papers that he thought we should talk about at group meeting, and assigned a couple of my coworkers to give presentations about them. During one of the presentations, Ben (currently the most senior student in the lab--he started a year before me) suggested a couple of simple experiments we could do based on the ideas in the paper. Paul got really excited about these experiments (you never can quite predict which ideas will get him excited and which he'll turn down flat, but I digress...) He said if any of the new students (who didn't have real projects yet) were interested in working on them to let him know.

I thought the new project looked very promising--and simple, with a good chance of actually working (kind of a novelty in our lab). This is the kind of projects we dub as "gimme" papers. I was jealous of this gimme paper being given to some new student, but I didn't think Paul would really let me switch projects since he's so enamored with the idea of getting that original one working. But, with some encouragement from Ben (good old Ben), I decided to ask Paul if I could work on it. Ben's reasoning was thus: even if Paul said no (which we both found likely), I would have at least put my oar in, and in a few months when my original project (probably) finally bit the dust, I could ask more forcefully for a simpler project, pointing to his earlier denial to help me make the case that he owed it to me now. But, to my surprise, Paul thought it was a great idea for me to work on this project and handed it right over. (And, it turns out, Paul said no to another student--one who is not nearly as senior as me but is not new either. Which makes me feel specialer than him. Ha!)

I'm excited about it. Hopefully, it actually pans out. If not, at least it will be obvious in the first few months and then I can abandon it as opposed to spending years on it before knowing if it's ever going to work. I am not actually giving up on my original project yet--I'm going to work on that too, and train one of the new students on it in the process (which I think means Paul is thinking I will graduate relatively soon and that he still wants a student on that project after I leave, which is a good sign--the fact that Paul is thinking about me and graduation in any sort of proximity of time).

It is a little sad because the project is on an entirely different subject than my original one, and there's a whole huge body of research I have to get familiar with, and FAST. But at least it's interesting and, dare I say? even exciting! for once. I haven't felt excited about my research in a veerrrrrry long time. So, hold your breath everyone, and say a little prayer for meee!