Too political for this blog

On days that I run experiments, most of my time is spent preparing samples or more accurately waiting on samples. I follow a little printed out microschedule: Do something tedious, wait 2 minutes, tedious, wait 5, tedious, wait 5, tedious, 5, tedious, then finally run an experiment. If I were more effective, better rested or just not scattered in general, I could probably make solid use of that 17 minutes. But, in small increments like that, concentating on something too intently just leads to screwing up the experiment which I think I mentioned is very tedious.

So I cruise the blogosphere in those little moments seeking something new to read. Since "Expectant Waiting" is slow this week, the mastermind of "Never Here Again" is in America where she doesn't have time to put up a post for me and "Erudite Redneck" and "Corndogmatic" can only do so much on their own, I turned to the news and found myself back over at Salon. I think Salon has pretty much taken a nose dive, but good ole Garrison had a new column up. I can't resist linking to it. I particularly like this bit:

"This country is squashing its young. We're sending them to die in a war we don't believe in anymore. We're cheating them so we can offer tax relief to the rich. And we're stealing from them so that old gaffers like me, who want to live forever, can go in for an MRI if we have a headache."

I also like the, "The Current Occupant" euphemism for Bush and I like the "no child left untested" program. What a load of horseshit.

Anyway, sorry for straying here into politics. I just couldn't resist. The blog is supposed to be about parenthood and I am thinking a lot these days about what my boy will get to live in when he is 30, so I feel somewhat justified. Its probably just too much time reading "Erudite Redneck" getting me all hot under the collar. I promise to cool off and get some baby pics up soon.

Where might I find a good price on an incandescent pear?

This week, one of my excellent English speaking, ethnically German labmates expressed his opinion that,"At least in German if you don't know a word you can guess and have a good chance of getting it right. English is so f***ed up that you really don't have a chance." Now I present you with an example of how just how intuitive German really is.

This morning after driving 20 km to find out that I might not have a German driver's license before my American one is no longer valid in the eyes of the German Bund, I noticed that our car had a burned out tail light. Since I drive up and down a fog ensconced mountain everyday with limited visibility, I felt like getting the brake light fixed was rather urgent. Auto parts stores are not as numerous here as far as I can tell, so I thought I would have to search the yellow pages for one. I asked my labmates and they said just go to any gas station. And, they were right; the corner filling station did have a huge array of bulbs including the one I needed.

Before heading over there though, I asked my labmates the proper word for a light bulb, knowing that no gas station attendant would be speaking English. The word is "gluehbirne". This is a classic compound German word. German loves to neither coin a new word nor describe something with a phrase; instead it prefers to just mash several words together.* When I was told this, I immediately thought,"hey, I know those words" and I did. Glueh=to glow (specifically it means an incandescent glow according to one website) and birne=pear. So a light bulb, in German is an incandescent pear? Now, how the hell was I supposed to guess that? To me it actually sounds like something someone learning a new language might creatively put together to fill in for as yet unlearned vocabulary. If that's how it works, can I call tires "steelfilledpetroleumdonuts"and the steering wheel a "turnpretzel"?

*When looking for an apartment here it is often better to run your own ad and let the leasers call you. I was looking at other people's ads of this type and discovered an ad that used a single compound word to describe "older, non-smoking, quiet, pet not having, retired couple".

Last weekend's weirdness

Well, I forgot to post about this last weekend and when I was looking through the pics, I decided it at least deserved a short one. Last weekend was the Kerwe here in Bammental. Kerwe is a local word for Kirchweih which more or less means county or parish fair. We avoided going over to the fairgrounds because of the crappy weather, but that is no big deal because every village will be celebrating Kerwe between now and September 15th so we will get a chance. Judging from the noise that reached our house from the "Kerweplatz" over a mile away, it must have been a pretty good party. The Monday following the Kerwe, they closed a street above us on the hillside for another party, presumably associated with the close of the Kerwe. In both cases, I could here the music well enough to identify songs long past midnight.

The Kerwe parade went by our house, so we got to watch it in the comfort of our own home. This was also a pretty rowdy affair. The parade mostly consisted of old tractors pulling various decorated wagons. The wagons were inhabited by any number of people, some in costume, drinking beer at 10:30 in the morning. As they went, the paraders were jumping on and off of the "floats" to converse with friends in the crowd or acquire a beer from someone's home. Good times all around, I am sure.

There were some really interesting and well kept old tractors in the parade like this little green one which seemed especially popular with the folks in the crowd for some reason. You can read about this company, Hanomag, and their history building steam engines, locomotives, tractors, trucks and other heavy equipment including their most famous vehicle utilized by the SS in the 30s.

The boy is an American

Well today was Ellis's big day. We got up early and headed up to Frankfurt to make him official, at least in the eyes of the federal government. Of course, there is no way we could have executed such an operation without me getting annoyed and saying something out loud that I should have kept to myself and thinking other things I didn't say. There were lines and waiting and more lines and waiting and angry people and lots of window dressing security and a short period where we thought we would be rejected. Fun all around.

The website warned that parking in the neighborhood of the consulate was poor. It even recommended parking somewhere else and taking a bus. We were both skeptical but remarkably we found a spot on the street nearby for only 50 cents an hour and it was a good thing, because I only had to go back to the car twice to get through security, but that is getting ahead of myself.

First we walked up to the first guy with a gun we saw to find the customer entrance. He directed us away from the great big open gate, guarded by only his measly butt with a single rifle, maximum capacity 20 rounds, and toward a little guard shack with two big lines. We were already late for our appointment so the dread was growing. But when we got in line an employee of the consulate came to us and asked what our business was and told us to go to the front since we had an appointment. He then asked what was in my pockets and sent me back to the car to dump my cell phone. When I got back, we headed for the front of the line and immediately you could feel a little bit of electricity in the air as those we were moving in front of got annoyed. The guy who had formerly been first in line asked what we were doing, we told him what we had been told and then he chose to question the existence of the guy who had told us to skip the line. Fortunately, the questioner's wife pounced on him and shut him up, saving me the trouble. Then we were told to go to the front of the second line. And, again it was easy to see that we weren't making friends with all of this cutting in line.

Once inside, I had to return to the car again because of my memory stick in my pocket. Doh! Rachel made the right choice, shedding me as dead weight and going on through hoping that I would figure out the security on my own and catch up in time to sign the papers. Once I got back from the car, I had to again go to the front of the line and now people were expressing their annoyance. Once back inside, I had to take everything out of my pockets and give up my belt for the sake of security. And, got yelled at by the guy for not collecting my stuff fast enough out of the X-ray machine and then I was back on my way.

I found Rachel sitting and waiting. I was pretty annoyed at this point, mostly with myself for not realizing that these items would be contraband. (I did learn, though, and leave my remote keyless entry fob in the car on the second trip, without even being told.) I had just run 200 yards back to the car twice to satisfy security. The whole time I was doing this, 100 meters away was the big open gate guarded by a single (German, I think) police officer. His gun was hanging from a strap and he had both hands tucked inside his pockets. In fact, it was hard to get close enough to ask the guy a question, without the muzzle being pointed at your midsection, due to the way it was hanging. He wasn't even checking every single vehicle to go through the gate. When I finally got through to Rachel, I couldn't resist explaining to her how ridonkulous this was, in my annoyed voice that carried all over the consulate. Unfortunately, I started the sentence with, "This security if f***ing ridiculous, if you wanted to blow this place up you could just drive your ass right up to the the door." Fortunately, no one seemed to notice, as I obviously should have kept this to myself. My email wasn't working when I got home though...hmmm...probably Gribbled myself.

Then we had to take Ellis's picture in an automated machine that was designed for adults. Since the passport requires a white background, I couldn't just sit and hold him but had to cantilever him out over the picture area. In the end, he is hunched up in his photo and my hands and the corner of my stubbly chin are apparent as well, but they accepted it.

Once we finally got to a person who would help us through the process it went pretty smoothly. Ellis, like his papa, had had enough by the time we got upstairs to the office where our appointment was, but since both of us were there one could walk him around while the other dealt with forms. Perhaps Ellis found "American Soil" disagreeable. We had a brief scare where at the end of the second phase of things, the clerk said, "Okay, that is everything. All you have to do is be sworn by the deputy consul and show proof that you have resided in the United States for 5 years, 2 of them after age 14." Doh again! The clerk swore up and down we had been told to bring this, but we didn't know. I searched my wallet for evidence and thought to myself, "Well, I carry a pocket knife, a leatherman and a church key all of the time. I bet not one person in the world who hasn't lived in the Midwest for five years has those three things in his pockets at all times. That's the best proof I got, but you a-holes made me leave it in the car. I can cuss in a manner that only the son of an American construction worker can. Is that good enough for you a**holes?" After the previous scare, I kept this to myself.

At any rate, we went to the deputy consul and all she asked was about our education and where we met and this was good enough for her. I imagine that whatever her official training and the State Department policy, there is probably some amount of racial and demographic profiling that goes on in how she handles people in our position. If one of us hadn't been a citizen or if we didn't look like red blooded Americans, it might have been a problem.

This whole experience also cost us $150. The usual amount for the passport and then another $85 to register the birth. This seems a little steep to me, but there isn't much choice if he is going to see his grandparents at Christmas or live with his parents in the future. On our way home, I told Rachel she could have whatever she wanted for lunch. I was not at all surprised and very agreeable when she said she wanted a Big Mac. Man are those things good when they are a treat and not a default food as you drive the 600 mile round trip to see your wife every week. And so ended our American adventure. I was so exhausted that I just took the afternoon off and took a nap with the boy. That was even better than the Big Mac.

The tires are the things on your car that make contact with the road

Well, first I want to tell you all that I found out today that at least one batch of my kinesin protein is indeed funcitonal, very functional. I was able to use a standard motility assay to verify that the motor protein works. Unforunately, this assay won't let me do any research, it is just a verification and it means that there is something incredibly subtle wrong with my research assay. Hmmmm. But at least I can dig into working on the assay with knowledge that the protein is okay and that my microscope is okay. Phew.

In other news, I have to dig into working on the car a little bit. The tires aren't in great shape and are about due to be replaced. In fact, because we have to drive up to Frankfurt tomorrow, I even checked the tire treads. They are still legal with a good bit of tread left above the wear indicators, but they clearly are about due. I wasn't so worried that they were too unsafe to drive on in the rain or something. More I am worried about the possibility of getting caught in a "control". This is what the Germans call a random roadblock that in almost every case in which it is applied here would be illegal in the states. Basically these serve three purposes. The first is to look for illegal immigrants. The second is to catch car theives. The third is to verify that people aren't modifying their vehicles in ways that make them unsafe, illegal or would require the owner to pay more tax. So at these stops they usually look at your personal I.D. first, your Fahrzeugbrief second (this is a second title that you carry on your person, but shouldn't leave in your car because then the thief would have it and would be able to get through a control) and third they seperate a subset of the cars for a detailed inspection of tires and and the exhaust etc. This can get a bit lenghty, and in some cases the police give you a note that you were held up in a control that is admissable as an excuse for being late to work!

I needed a bit of break from dealing with things like tires over here which is why this isn't already taken care of. Germans are very weird around their cars and there are somewhat crazy tire laws here that require people to use winter tires in winter. These tires are softer with more open treads. Gas is expensive enough that the lost mileage gets most people to switch back to summer tires, but not the people who owned the car before us. Nope they went all last summer on them never rotating or nuthin'. So when I got the car, I just decided to let it go until I had the mental space free to deal with it. Now I have back tires with a year's more wear on them and front ones that are ready for the dumpster. The car came with two summer tires also because at one point they ran them for so long without rotating that they ruined the front two summer tires as well. The rear summer tires are in great shape.

I assumed that this pattern of tire destruction wouldn't be the case on a German's car. Surely they are more careful. But tonight I did an informal survey on my way to the Eis Cafe and found that many cars have horribly worn front tires and nearly new rear tires. Then I looked online and found that tires are generally sold here in pairs. So maybe this is just how they do it. You have front tires and you have back tires and that is how you replace them..

Anyway, barring any controls or other hold ups, tomorrow we will go to Frankfurt and make Ellis an American. A full report will follow.

Here I sit with a broken heart

Here I sit with a broken heart.
Expressed a protein, that wouldn't start.

Today, I discovered that one of the key components of for my current set of experiments is mysteriously rotten. These experiments are inteded to study a motor protein called kinesin. Kinesins are like semi-trucks powered by cellular chemical fuel called ATP which can be hooked to any number of trailers (vesicles to a cell biologist) for transport along microtubules, the cell's roads. My goal is to understand how kinesin deals with traffic jams, an inevitable result of the massive transport necessary to support long neurons in our bodies.

In my case, I do not use a kinesin that has been purfied from tissue, but instead I trick bacteria into producing the protein (which is actually from rats) for me by slipping the DNA for my protein into the bacteria's puny genome. Actually, my protein isn't even from rats if we are being totally honest. It is called RK-555-EGFP-HIS. No, that isn' the license plate number of a cellular semi truck. It stands for "Rat Kinesin, first 555 amino acids, enhanced green fluorescent protein, with a histidine tag". What that really means is we took the minimum number of parts from the rat kinesin (555 amino acids) and added to it an enhanced version of a luminescent protein from a sea creature and then stuck on a short sequence of six amino acids of the histidine type for the sake or making purification of the protein easier. For those of you who like the analogies, we basically kept the engine and fuel tank and then we eliminated the hitch that would hook to the big box trailer, replacing it with a green spot light (EGFP) and new hitch that can only be attached to a trailer full of nickels.

We purify the protein by opening the bacteria (in a device known as a "french press", I don't recommend that you make coffee in this one) and then supply a slew of chemicals to prevent the bacterial components from destroying each other or my protein. A series of steps produces a relatively clear solution containing my protein and all of the other soluble proteins normally found in the bacteria. Then we take advantage of the histidne tag by putting the whole soup into contact with an engineered material covered with bound nickel ions (our trailers full of nickels). Our protein grabs on via the tag and we wash away the others, or most of them. Then we change the environment around the material and all of our kinesin lets go and we collect it up.

Our motor protein is then further purified by allowing it to interact with the roads. Unlike a truck which sits on the road due to gravity, kinesin will only sit on its road if it has the right fuel. If the tank is empty, it has no interest in the roads. If the tank is full of ATP it will sit on the road and motor on down it. If the tank is full of say, AMP-PNP, the molcular equivalent of sugar in a gas tank, it will sit on the road but won't go anywhere. The really far out thing is that if you provide it with the right fuel, ATP, there is a slightly increased chance that it will run off the road as well. So we take advantage of this. First we put the kinesin into a solution with the roads and sugar in the gas tank and we collect all of the roads which are now covered like a lot behind a truck stop. Then, we swap the sugar for the right fuel, ATP, and the kinesins start to move. Due to chemical principles, enough of them fall off that if we again collect the roads we leave behind a lot of the motor protein. In theory, this motor protein that is left behind should be nearly perfect because this purification method puts it through its paces.

But in my purification, this isn't the case. Following this step, my motor won't run anymore and just sticks to the roads like there is still sugar in the gas tank. This is probably due to the fact that the kinesin is like a really old car in a lot of ways. It is very finicky. It doesn't like it to be too warm or cold or for their to be too much salt around in solution with it, nor does it want to be too concentrated or for their to be too little salt around in solution with it. And, all the extra stuff like the EGFP just make it worse. Plus we have to freeze it which ruins almost a third of it. So, now I have to dig in and try to figure out where we have gone wrong and killed our little trucks. I would rather fix an intermittent electrical problem on the Blazer. And, I mean it.

Turning points

Seven years ago this week, I quit a job as an engineer in the auto industry to go to graduate school. At that time, I was sure that I finally understood what I wanted to do with my life. I was 24, had never lived outside of Ann Arbor and had held one "real" job in my life for about 2 years. But, I was sure that the life of an academic was for me. I spent the week between work and classes fishing in my favorite trout streams in the northern lower peninsula and looking forward to settling in to the life of a student again.

Seven years later, I have never been more confused about how I should trade my time for money, because that is what every career really is, even for a fancy academic. My current certainty over two things makes my certainty of 7 years ago seem as strong as wet toilet paper. Those two things are being a father and a husband. If the only use I ever make of graduate school are those two things, I shouldn't complain. However, I owe myself and many others, including my wife, apologies for the way in which work and career was able to take over our lives in the last years of my degree. We skipped weddings we should have been at and lived apart for an entire year for most of which Rachel was pregnant. I didn't take time for us or vacations and let work infiltrate occasions as rare as Christmas Eve at the farm. I haven't fished in 4 years and have missed the last 3 deer seasons. All to stay home and work on things that others would have figured out eventually. And, it wasn't just work, it was angry and tired pursuit of a false idol that left me too tired and angry to enjoy even the littlest pleasures life has to offer. And I am ashamed to admit that Rachel, others in our families and some coworkers bore the brunt of that anger and exhaustion on too many occasions even as they supported me through it.

So where now? An unusually wise professor told me grad school was probably a necessary side trip for me. On good days, I can believe him.

bzzzz

In Germany, or our part of it at least, every house seems to have the same type of window. The guest house had them, our apartment has them, and just about every residence or business (including the little trailer structure our bank has set up while their building is under construction) has them. They seem to be essential and are really pretty nice. They have two panes of glass and can both swing in to fully open or be tilted in to just let a little air in. Also, they are always equipped with very heavy shades on the outside of the window. The shades lower down to let in just a little light or close completely to let in no light whatsoever. What these nice (and likely expensive) windows lack are screens. That means that people here can hang their pillows and blankets out the windows everyday- "airing out" is a big deal over here. Or they can hang their entire upper bodies out the windows and have conversations with their neighbors across the street.

When we got here I asked Trey about the lack of screens and he told me it's because they don't have the bug problems we have in the US. He is such a liar. While it's true there are very few mosquitos, our house is frequently invaded by a number of other insects. In the spring, we kept waking up with bug bites and had an argument about whether it was midges or no-seeums or whether those were the actually the same things with different names, before finally discovering it was nasty little flying ants that were feasting on us nightly. Luckily that passed and I've tried to be philosophical about the 3-4 bees that daily take up residence in my kitchen or the cloud of fruit flies that collect on the tiniest amount of leftovers on a plate or -heaven forbid- the remains of a glass of beer. I am much less patient with the giant flies that always seem to light on Ellis's head, waking him up after I spend half an hour lulling him to sleep.

This weekend though, the insects finally reduced me to tears. There I was innocently washing dishes and I started rinsing out a bowl yogurt remains. Suddenly, I felt a stabbing pain. What was it? A paring knife left as a booby trap? An errant thorn from the blackberries we'd be picking lately? A tiny flailing bee body soon showed the truth. At this point I starting yelling "Oww! Oww! A bee! My finger! I hate Germany!" So much for my philosophical attitude towards living in a different culture. Trey helped apply a little baking soda paste to it and calmed me down. Soon it was just a little itch and I was thinking rationally enough to realize that the fault for my bee sting lay not with German construction standards, but with Trey who had 1) left out the bee attracting yogurt and 2) promised to clean the kitchen but failed to do so, at least on my time table.

Must finish this post now and return to hermetically sealing up the house.

I put a spell on you

"Oh mama, 'what's time to a hog'*, that's a good one. It's funny cuz the one guy meant the time of the farmer, not the hog's time, oh, that is funny."

"As the youngest apprentice ever in the Order of Striped Wizards, I hope to make a good name for child and baby wizardry and right the myths and half-truths propagated by J.K. Rowling and her wretched Harry Potter."

"For my first spell, I will make the left one chocolate and the right one strawberry. HAZAAA!"

*For those of you not on the inside, this is the punchline to several old jokes that go more or less like this one:

A city slicker is driving through the sticks when he sees a farmer with a pig on a stick that he is straining to hoist up into an apple tree where the pig is happily munching on fresh apples.
City Slicker: Hey old timer, just what are you doing?"
Farmer: Well, what does it look like?
City Slicker: Lifting that pig up in the tree so he can eat apples, I guess?
Farmer: Sho' 'nuff, I am. Gotta problem with it? You one of those animal rights folks?
City Slicker: No, no, no. But, um, doesn't that take one hell of a long time to feed a pig that way?
Farmer: I s'pose so, but, what's time to a hog.

Pie Hole IV

We are overdue for a pie hole post, unless you count my recent comment over on corndog's site.

Our food related adventures continue over here as we search for cheaper and better ways to shop and get what we want to eat. The food at work has definitely not been as good through the summer, although we did see an upturn this week with calamari and leg of lamb in the same week. Also, I have confirmed my suspicion that no one at work understands how the price of your plate is actually determined. This week my boss and I had nearly identical lunches of calamari, roasted vegetables and sweetened quark with blackberries. I paid 3 Euro. He paid 4. Hmmmm.

Our last stone to overturn in the quest for better food in our village was getting better acquanted with the butchers. This was a bit of a challenge for me and more difficult for Rachel because you have to ask for everything and these folks don't speak English. Over the last few weeks I have been trying the products of the butcher at the end of our street and trying to ask a few questions with each visit. Today I was the only one in the place and was able to bend their ear(s) for a little longer. I confirmed that they do all of their own processing except the inital slaughter. Until this year they even did that. Their smoke house is in a building on our street. I asked if this was the case because we often smell smoke. They asked if it bothered us, because others have complained. I told them that, to the contrary, the worst negative effect might be to make me a little homesick.

My favorite product from these guys are the small dried snack sausages. The ones in the picture are dried polish mettwurst. They have similar ones flavored with garlic and Hungarian paprika. If you have ever had something called "Jagerwurst" at a German club party or from a sausage maker, then you have an estimate of the flavor and texture. If not, I would describe them as, more or less, being what a slim jim would be like if it was made by hand with some skill and actual meat. The texture might be a little too raw for some folks, but these are definitely cured and safe to eat. Sometimes they grow a little bit of whitish mold (many salamis do this) and in that case, the person at the counter at the butcher just wipes it off when she sells it to you. They run about fifty eurocents a piece.

Beer exploration continues. While my German isn't much better, my ability to communicate in German has improved with a few new key bits of vocabulary and a better understanding of how to get my point across. Today I had a lengthy conversation in the beer store with some excellent results. I managed to find a new Kellerbier to try from Dachsenfranz as pictured above. This company imports to the states so you ought to be able to get your hands on it if you want to try it. Compared to the Schmucker Kellerbier, I would say this one has a deeper malt flavor but it has a lot less yeast which I really enjoy. It also isn't quite as hoppy. But it is pretty good and it comes in swing top bottles with the little wire and the ceramic (yes, real ceramic not plastic) plug with the rubber seal. This allows you to loop your finger through the wire and carry your beer with only one finger, leaving other fingers free to catch spit up or support the baby's head.

I also had some luck getting a special order of Schneider Aventinus wheat doppelbock. I have had this many times in the states at three dollars a bottle but couldn't get it here where it should be cheaper. The guy who runs the beer store said he would try to get it this week for me and didn't ask for a deposit. We will see if he comes through. He suggested some other beers for me to try if I like the Aventinus, one of which was the Rose' Bock by Schmucker which I mentioned previously. I told him it was one of my favorites and he gave me one for free. Even,Ellis was good for his mama while they waited on me in the car."Papa, which hole is my pie hole? You mean my milk hole will turn into my pie hole? No way."

Will the boy ever sleep?

Well, I have a chance to post because even being held will not comfort the boy tonight. He is in his swing and for the last couple of hours now, that is the only thing that will settle him down. He just punched and kicked his way through a delicious snack from mom and I sent her off to dream land while I try to get him to sleep. I thought I would come down stairs and watch a dvd while rocking him, but this met with disapproval, freeing my hands to supply you with this endless drivel.

Tonight, he really seems happiest in the swing. So why do I feel so crappy for letting a machine comfort him instead of me? Why isn't he sleeping better tonight anyway? He hardly napped at all today so he should be totally exhausted. But, as with most days where naps don't happen, neither does bed time. I keep telling Rachel that occasional bad days are to be expected and lots of babies spit up like old faithful on speed, but it isn't always easy to believe it myself. It is easy to start to think that every baby is easier than ours, but I know it is impossible to know because you don't see every spit up and every long night in other people's households, just like you can never really know what goes on inside someone else's marriage.

So far we really don't have grounds for a complaint. Even at his worst, Ellis never resorts to inconsolable screaming. It is difficult to watch the minutes of lost sleep tick by though and think how many are left before you have to get up. I would like to use this time productively to work on getting my manscript back out, but I am already too tired to write anything better than this, so I guess I just have to hope that all of us will get to sleep in the next 20 minutes or so.

75% puppy dog tails, 24% snails and less than 1% spice

"Hey Papa, where did you show me to put my mouth for the most
realistic fart sound. Is this right, above or below the elbow?"

"Look, I told you I don't do interviews during my bath. If you don't get that camera out of here, my Aunt Lindsey will sue you until the only way you can make a picture is with a box of crayolas ."
"Pants! Finally, a place to put my wallet. Can I have my own leatherman now?"

"The fist is the symbol of baby solidarity not because we can make it from birth, but because it is the universal symbol of struggle against oppression. Raise the fist in pride, or by accident, and we will know that you stand together in strength with Babykhan."

time, and that i spend so much of it thinking about myself

Since Ellis has been here, it's been so hard to count the days. And everyday is so much the same: nurse, wash diapers, make dinner, feel bad for not making a more concerted effort to learn German. Several times I've had to ask Trey what day it was. One time I actually argued with him-I was so sure it was Wednesday. Nope. Friday. Imagine my suprise then that, after weeks of face-meltingly hot weather, it's suddenly become rainy and cold and feeling suspicously like fall. I can write this off to fluky weather, but Ellis is also growing out of his clothes at a frightening rate. Doh! Turns out time IS actually passing.

So, now I fear I have to think about going back to work, or rather, work for money. Before Ellis was born, I was having mixed feelings about putting him in daycare and going to work. The idea of him spending so much time in the care of someone else was definitely a cold prickly. But I was anxious to find a job over here to make some more money for us and convince myself that my career wasn't over before it started. Several people either hinted or explicitly said that I was wasting my education if I "just" stayed home with kids. Now, if I heard those people say that about someone else, I would happily attack them all day. Yes, I can hear myself now, "Education isn't just about training someone to add to the GNP... raising kids IS a very important job...we should be happy so many woman have a choice to do these things...maybe it would be easier for women to do both if fathers could work fewer hours or employers/society were more creative in making it work...blah blah blah."

But it's not so easy when I hear it about myself. I feel a lot of pressure to live up to my *potential*, whatever that is. This was made worse, I think, by being identified as a gifted child and even attending a magnet high school. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly thankful for all the opportunites that school, and more importantly, my parents provided me. But when so many people are telling you what you should or could be, it gets tough to feel like you're ever enough. It feels like you ought to push yourself a little harder, because just think what you could do if you didn't spend an hour every evening watching reruns of The Simpsons. And now even writing this, I feel like an ingrate because I am talking about being blessed with intelligence and an education as if it were a problem. The real problem is that I feel I owe myself/ the world/ the people who helped educate me something more. US tax money paid for me to get a PhD. I was supposed to use that to help cure arthritis. Is it okay for me to help Ellis with his math homework instead?

Since Ellis has been here, though, I am starting feel a bit differently about needing to return to work. It's not so much that I'm having a harder time thinking about leaving him with someone else-that seems about exactly as unattractive as it did when I was pregnant. It's more that I don't feel that urgency to get out there and prove myself professionally. More and more days, just taking care of Ellis and keeping the house running feels like enough and like I'm enough.

But not everyday.

More on this later-like it or not.

You keep coming back?

How long will you keep coming back when there isn't a new post for you to read? I looked at statcounter today and you keep coming back in the long lulls between posts and those dry spells when the posts are about poop. No doubt, the hope of a new baby pic is like the hope of a fisherman each time he sets his fly on the water. The fisherman knows that trout don't rise to dry flies in the noon sun, especially in August, but he decides the four mosquitos over the river constitute a midday mayfly hatch and he puts on a self-tied hair ball and presents it like a cannonball. You know that by 8 p.m. in the states we have been in bed for hours (god and Ellis willing) but you peak at the blog one more time inflating our hits and our egos, but find the same poop post as you read during the day while you should have been working.

Some days, I just can't figure out what to write about so I do what I am doing now and just start. I tried to get a post together about work, but instead ended up writing about how I hate my career but like my job. "How can that be?", you wonder. Well, maybe that post will see the light of day yet. I tried to write about the Aldo Leopold essays I have been reading, but I keep coming back to just wanting to say, "He told us so, and 60 years ago, he told us so." And, I can't keep putting up pictures of dinner because that is just bragging and you have to be a better photographer than I am to make a picture of dinner look as good as it tasted.

I thought about following Corndog's example and asking the readers what they wanted to read about next, but this seems unfair like those places where you pay more and cook your own steak or something. I guess I would still have to write the post so maybe it is more like asking you to peel the potatoes for your fries. So why not? If you want to, there is a sack of potatoes in the corner, have at it and I wll do my best with the steaks.

For your trouble, a vintage Ellis pic from the archive:

"Mom, I'm just gonna rest while you peel me some grapes.
Could you send in the fan girls, it is a bit stifling in here."

a virtual advertisement for visiting us

You might like to check out the blog post here, in which Elissa details their visit with us. Plenty of cute baby pics too.

Oh no, not Papa

Rachel has suggested that I put up a post about the best and worst of my two months of parenthood. These aren't the things that I like or dislike about having a son so don't get upset that the best isn't full of mushy stuff. It is about how I am feeling about my skills and doing it here in Germany.

The worst:
5. Getting him to sleep. The kid just doesn't want to go to sleep for me. For some reason he is already a mama's boy. I can understand, I love his mama too. I keep telling myself this isn't uncommon when they are small, but when he makes his nuclear frown at me, it is pretty hard to take.
4. Wipe technique. It took the first seven weeks to learn how to do the diaper wipe oragami that allows Rachel to wipe him 43 times with a single wipe while managing not to get it on herself or reapply it to him.
3. The poop dip and stamp. More than once, I have opened the diaper, needed a moment to regroup and in that moment he has managed to dip his heel into the contents and stamp me on the pants.
2. Incomplete diapering. Twice now I have forgotten to put a diaper cover over the cloth diaper meaning that it only slows down things getting wet. Fortunately, Rachel caught it both times. Last night I reached a new low. I got him into his sleeping outfit without putting a diaper on him at all and noticed only when I thought to myself, "hmm, I better be careful I don't get his penis caught in the zipper of these pajamas."
1. Germans worrying about him being out in public without a hat. I can't tell you how many times we have been told to cover him up even on a 65 degree day in the five o'clock sun. This wouldn't be so bad if pediatricians and obstetricians and coworkers weren't telling you how important vitamin D supplements are for his development. Don't these people know that the human body, when exposed to the sun, will magically produce adequate amounts of vitamin D? Not to mention, aren't the germans supposed to be all about butting out.

The best:
5. Public diaper explosion, handled like a pro. We were in an open air cafe and he overflowed his diaper (and enjoyed doing it). There was nowhere to go, nowhere to turn for help or a changing table and people were eating brunch all around us. So, we went behind some shrubs and changed him. This was before my enlightenment and Rachel managed the limited number of diaper wipes like a master while I held him by his ears.
4. When he liked it (for the first two weeks) I was an excellent swaddler. The midwives at the hospital even made fun of me for wrapping him up so tight. But he sure loved it. Now he is like baby Houdini. He can escape from almost any swaddling job and he has energy and attention left to be crabby while doing it.
3. Despite my occasional lapses mentioned above, I am an efficient diaper changer. Since we switched to homemade, washable diaper wipes, I even figured out how to put them into a roll that makes it easy pull a single wipe from the roll with only one hand. (Allowing the other hand to prevent the poop dip and stamp.)
2. I almost don't care about being spit up on. Ellis is responsible for this by continuing to push me to new levels. First he spit up on me. Then he spit up a whole lot on me. Then he spit up mostly digested cheese curds on the me. The other day he spit up on my arm in such a way that it ran down inside my clothes and it felt so gross that I was thankful that most times my clothes are there to soak it up. A friend tells me that one day he will spit up into my mouth when I am playing with him. I expect this will be like a Buddhist reaching enlightenment and at that moment I will hear the sound of one hand clapping.
1. And a little mushy stuff. It is wonderful to come home at the end of the day and have them both waiting for me. Then we have our little night time routine that includes a shower for Ellis and his baby massage, which is the one thing he does seem to prefer, or at least not dislike, when done by me.

some new technology

Well, new to our blog at any rate. First, Ellis in video! I'm trying to get a video of him smiling and making cute little noises, which he does when well rested with a full tummy. So far, trying to get that on video has been a little like that cartoon of the singing frog: he stops as soon as I get the camera out and starts again when I give up. However, he is experiencing some technological advances of his own...finding his hand. Here he is working on that (I apologize for how dark it is- I promise to improve). Second, finally got some links up; making it look how we wanted was a little more difficult than we'd hoped. Not sure why it's not part of the template to begin with.

Ellis is 2 months old!

So we were hoping this blog would be a way to keep in touch with everyone, but we also wanted it to be a bit of online journal. Especially, I didn't want to forget Ellis's first year and with a private journal or baby book I would only be accountable to myself (=very infrequent entries). Therefore, sorry if this is boring, but feel free to stop reading.

Height: 23.5 inches
Weight: 13.5 lbs
Eyes: Still haven't made the expected change over to brown; very nice shade of grey-blue like his Aunt Lucy's.
Hair: There's a little bit of it. It's dark.
Favorite song: 500 Miles by the Proclaimers, but really, anything with a strong downbeat. Trey is attempting to direct him towards rockabilly and away from 80s Scottish pop bands.
Favorite hobby: Eating more than he should and spitting up. It's unreal. Like his papa, he likes hobbies to match: tie flies, fish with flies.
Motor skills: Pretty much non-existent; there's plenty of kicking and punching, but completely random in direction. He's smiling a lot, but that also seems pretty random. He's starting to take some interest in the dog, but prefers to stare at bright spots on the wall.
Health: Excellent- not even a diaper rash, knock on wood.
Disposition: Very good; he really doesn't even cry that much and, if he does, a snack or fresh diaper usually fixes it. Yes, there are crappy days when he refuses to take a nap longer than 15 minutes. And yes, it's still early and he could turn into the amazing colic baby next week. But, as the oldest child of oldest children of oldest children we were expecting someone a lot more neurotic. After a couple of crappy years of disappointment, bad decisions, and over-reaction, we got exactly the baby we needed. I'm so grateful he came into our family.

adventures in baby wearing

Here's a couple of pics of us with Ellis in his carriers. First he's riding with Dad in the "baby bag." Ellis really likes this one when he's ready for a nap. Plus it's made of fairly heavy canvas so it protects from the elements. He's really sitting up and looking out in the picture, but usually he snuggles way down into it. When he was a few weeks old and my mom was visiting, we went to a museum exhibit and backpacks weren't allowed inside the exhibit. One of the employees tried to make Trey check our bag. Trey embarassed her a bit when he showed her that our baby was in there. Another time a woman expressed concern that the baby could actually breathe when he was in there. So, yeah, you don't see a lot of babies in slings here- a few people downtown. The strollers here are over the top with all kinds of crazy features so maybe that's why. I use mine when I go shopping because carrying all the groceries plus 13 pounds of baby is too much. But a lot of the shops have steps up into them and no ramps (no ADA over here I guess), so it's not always the most convenient.

Often, Ellis really likes being all folded up in the baby bag. However, he doesn't like it if he's at all gassy or wants to look around and I wanted to be able to carry him around the house and it was hard to work with him in the baby bag. So my mom was nice enough to make and send me a mei-tei style carrier. This one is much prettier than what we really needed (thanks for making it so nice, Mom!), but it also works great. It's much easier to work in and Ellis prefers being upright sometimes. When I first put him in, he seemed a little nervous and starting grabbing at my shirt and scratching my chest. Since I am really bad about keeping his fingernails trimmed, this hurt! Then he started to calm down and 15 minutes later he totally passed out. Now, this is what usually happens. Here he is peeking out in a rare conscious moment!