Welcome to the booger house

Last week, we had to take the turtle to the vet because she had a runny eye. Apparently it was not an infection, but a winter vitamin A deficiency which is normal in Normal and other cold climates. Yesterday, the dog started having a boogery eye. He has some allergies, so we are keeping "an eye on it," for now. Joseph just got another ear infection, and has been put on antibiotics again. He missed dinner because he fell asleep in my desk chair with his butt in the air. What is going on around here? I'm going to have to buy extra tissues this week.

What does Susan do all day?

It occurs to me that it's been a while since I discussed my secret other life as a biologist. From outward appearances, I am either sitting in my office with crickets in boxes and the light off, or sitting in my office doing something at my computer with the light on. So what am I up to?
1) getting my dissertation chapters published. So far, the first chapter has been published (Ethology), the second and third have been accepted and are in press (Evolutionary Ecology Research; Behavioral Ecology), the fourth has been submitted (Evolution), and the fifth is in prep. Every time that I think that one of these bastards is gone for good, I get another letter saying that my figures are either too low or high in resolution, or the publisher has lost the previous two copies of the publishing agreement that I faxed (yes, faxed).
2) writing up my first paper from my post-doc work. I think that it is pretty close to being ready for submission. It is about how males do not prefer novel partners. Woo-hoo!
3) doing experiments. I am currently working four experiments at the same time and I am about to start a fifth. I have one experiment each with three grad students, one with a postdoc and one random experiment on my own. Some of the experiments deal with how females are able to distinguish novel from familiar males, and some deal with immunity. One experiment uses sagebrush crickets, and the rest use outbred and inbred decorated crickets. For some experiments, I am doing the actual work. For other experiments, I am training the grad students and hopefully they will be able to take over soon. For each experiment, there is a cloud of minutiae to do like ordering equipment, taking care of hundreds of hungry little animals, washing dishes, etc.
4) random human interactions. You know: going to meetings about stuff and junk. I am also on master's student's committee, which is pretty exciting.

Happy Casimir Pulaski Day

This is the last straw: for the last two weeks, one kid and then the other has had a day off from school because of a teacher work day, and Monday, BOTH kids have the day off for Casimir Pulaski Day. Who the hell is Casimir Pulaski? When I asked that of Joseph's teacher, she was shocked at my ignorance of important Polish war heroes. According to Wikipedia, Pulaski was a Revolutionary War hero known for his contributions to the US military for training its soldiers and cavalry.
I don't know how people with kids are supposed to get any work done. I have noticed that "day care" is a dirty word around here, and even people who use it pretend that it is some kind of special educational/social enrichment. Clearly, there is supposed to be a mother quietly sitting at the kitchen table with crossed hands waiting for these random days off to take care of the kids. If Danny didn't work at home, we would be in pretty bad trouble. However, all these days off make it hard for Danny to work, and he has to work nights and/or weekends to get everything done.

Stretched

Ha! Although various people have given me a hassle about it, I NEVER STRETCH before I run. I run at least 6 times a week for years, and I rarely have any soreness, etc!
So read this article!

Attractive offer

Joseph's consistently favorite toy has been Magnetix, which is a magnetic construction toy. He has constructed two figures: "Ziggo," and "R2D2" that he carries with him everywhere in a small metal candy tin.

Unfortunately, I now find out that several children have died by ingesting TWO unglued Magnetix magnets. Apparently, the tiny high-powered magnets managed to attract each other as they passed through adjacent loops of intestine, causing holes and death/emergency surgery. The manufacturer of Magnetix is very squirrely about all of this: they claim to have recalled the defective product from stores and changed it to prevent magnets from coming loose (and thus small enough for ingestion) in the future. However, they have never released any information about which sets have been "corrected" and which sets are still harmful, so I have no way of knowing which one we have. I went online and found out that Magnetix is actually a cheap knock-off of Geomag, a similar but superior magnetic construction toy which is made so that the magnets can't come loose. So, I ordered a bunch of Geomag, and managed to convince Joseph to retire the Magnetix and reconstruct Ziggo and R2D2 from the new set. He seems OK with it.

Anyhoo, If I gave anyone's kids Magnetix as a gift, please let me know--I will buy you some nice new Geomags.

As an aside, did you know that cows are intentionally fed a "cow magnet" to keep bits of barbed wire and metal debris from passing all of the way through the digestive tract? The magnet is retrieved when the animal is eventually slaughtered.


What The Onion has to say about toy recalls

Champaign dreams

We took a road trip to Champaign this weekend. Although Champaign-Urbana is/are not a large city/ies, it is/are much more cosmopolitan than Bloomington-Normal is/are. Oddly enough, during this trip, I was reminded of some of our international travels from yesteryear. (Perhaps living in Normal makes any trip anywhere a trip to the *BIG CITY*)
The purpose of the trip was for me to get a winter coat on sale. I found a coat, as well as some waterproof boots.

We had an excellent French dejeuner at Carmon's. This place has savory crepes that reminded me of an excellent dinner that Danny and I had on Île de Groix in Bretagne about a million years ago. We also had some French onion soup and French cidre. The kids liked the Bananas Foster crepe OK, but I don't think they really had their horizons expanded in any substantive way.

We also stopped at a huge Asian food store. I found something that I was not at all expecting. When I was living in Kunming (also about a million and a half years ago), the staple starch in all the meals was er kuai ("fish bait") which is fried/boiled/steamed slices of rice dough. It has the consistency of super al dente pasta or an unusually big chunk of pad Thai noodles. I have never seen er kuai for sale at any restaurant or food store in the US. The Asian food market in Champaign had vacuum-packed Korean rice dough that I hope to cook into something like er kuai later in the week.

On the road again

The stunningly beautiful landscape of the fly-over region--it just goes on like this as far as the eye can see..

Invent new games with a runny nose!

TaeKwonDo videorama

Sam takes TaeKwonDo very seriously and practices hard. Today he tested for his orange belt and did very well! Danny brought the camera and took some video. (Sorry for the glut of videos--they are each less a minute long.)
Here's Sam breaking his board. He tells me: "I'm pretty proud of myself!" He broke his board on his second kick, which is pretty amazing. The fact that he is being observed by judges doesn't seem to phase him.

Here is Sam sparring with Kelly (she is also a Master's student in the Saki lab).

Here Sam is sparring with Kel. Kel is a green belt and larger than Sam, but he is trying not to knock Sam out.

Here Sam is demonstrating his orange belt forms.

Drier beware

Yesterday I found a giant booger on my bath towel.
Children are such a gift! (At least I hope that it was from one of the children).
It reminds me of the story "Detectives" from David Sedaris' Naked:

It was one thing to sit in front of the television, second-guessing a third-rate detective program, but quite another to solve a real case. We were well into our summer reruns when our household was shaken by a series of very real crimes no TV detective could ever hope to crack. Someone in our family had taken to wiping their ass on the bath towels.
What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all of our towels were fudge-colored. You’d be drying your hair when, too late, you noticed an unmistakable odor on your hands, head and face. If nothing else, life in the suburbs promised that one might go from day to day without finding stool samples in their hair. This sudden turn of events tested our resolve to the core, leaving us to wonder who we were and where we, as a people, had gone wrong.
Soul-searching aside, it also called for plenty of hot water, gallons of shampoo, steel wool, industrial scrub brushes and blocks of harsh deodorizing soap. The criminal hit all three bathrooms, pausing just long enough to convince the rest of us that it was finally safe to let our guard down. I might spend twenty minutes carefully sniffing the towel only to discover that this time they’d used a washcloth.
“Well,” my mother said, thumbing through the newspaper one Sunday morning, “The person doing this is one sick individual. That much we know for certain.”
“And they eat corn!” Lisa said, patting her head with a t-shirt.