A flower for every post I would like to write

I am so back logged with posts I would like to write that I am just going to resort to the (long) bulleted list. If you stick with it, there is a treat at the end.

Career Bullets:

• I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
  
• I spent some time last week out to dinner and at work with an elder statesman of my field. At the end of it, I concluded that I am too conservative in my work and need to actually try some of my wilder ideas. He was very complimentary of my work and the fact that I took the risk of coming to Europe and trying to become a better biologist.
• How do you figure out what you really like to do when you spend so much time doing your current job that you don't have time to try anything?

Random Bullet:

• While waiting for Rachel to run into the store I was bored and started flipping through our insurance plan guide book and noticed that we are entitled to funeral coverage. Maybe we should try to squeeze that in while we are over here on the good insurance.

Family Bullets:

• On Saturday we all went down to Heidelberg to have lunch with some Americans who have recently moved to Mainz and will be doing as we did and having a baby in their first six months in Germany. They were nice and down to earth and I hope we get a chance to see them after their baby arrives.
• I am really missing my dog.
• It has rained for 4 straight days over here and the whole continent feels saturated. The fog is so bad going over the hill that we have about 10 meters of visibility.
• I bought a book (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) on a coworkers advice and the fact that it was cheap and in English. When I realized what it was about, I was a little disappointed but now that I am reading it, I am finding it to be pretty enjoyable.
  
• Ellis has completed Phase I of the baby fork training program. He is now qualified to use the safety fork to move prestabbed food into his pie hole. See for yourself.
  
• He actually seems to think this is a game as he will hand the fork back to me to stab the next piece for him. We must have done 25 cycles with strawberries tonight.
  

zahnartz

Trey and I both went to the dentist this morning. This was our first experience with the dentist over here and we were both fairly overdue for a cleaning (like a year-oops!). Would it be too weird if going to the dentist were one of the things I like about Germany? First, because of the language barrier, the hygienist only tried to convey the minimal information to me ("just put your hand up if you need to spit", "almost done", etc) and there were no attempts at small talk while my mouth was stuck open. Second, the dentist was friendly and, because of the generally poor state of people's teeth here, told me everything looked good with my teeth, despite my woeful inattention to flossing. Third, sonicating dental picks are amazing! I don't think many dental practices use these in the US, but the cleaning goes super fast and I found it much less painful. The hygienist told us they prefer these over here also because they are much less tiring to use. They also use this slightly flavored- baking soda and water spray after they scrape. Sicko that I am, I actually kind of liked the taste. Not like I'm going to be drinking it instead of lemonade or something, but it was definitely preferable to nasty bubble gum or mint flavored polish that I usually get.

Oh yeah, cavity report- Rachel:0, Trey:1. Hee hee.

weekend in Salzburg

We headed for Salzburg on Saturday morning and were pleased with ourselves for getting a good deal on direct train tickets since most people had started their weekend on Thursday as Ascension Day is a holiday throughout Catholic Europe. We were looking forward to a relaxing 4 hour train ride that would deposit us on the edge of the Austrian Alps. Just a little over half way through the trip though, the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and it was announced that there had been an accident and we were waiting for emergency personnel to arrive. Eventually, a German man on the train explained to us that "accident" meant someone had committed suicide by jumping in front of the train. Apparently, though, it's fairly common as the same man then said "It'll be about 2 hours; this happens a lot in November, not so much in May." And indeed, we were delayed just over 2 hours while police cleaned up the scene and a new conductor was brought on board (the previous conductor was badly shaken and "seeing white mice").

Despite the sad, slow start to our trip, we were very happy to meet up with our friends Ben and Elissa in Salzburg. We walked through Mirabell Garden, picking out the various spots made famous by the Sound of Music. Ben and Trey begged us to book a Sound of Music tour but Elissa and I refused. We agreed to take their photo in front of the appropriately painted cow, but you can see that they are disappointed and pouting. We crossed the Salzach River and headed toward the previously mentioned Augustiner Braustubl. This is a beer garden owned by a monastery, although there are no monks to be seen. The monks still make the beer but it is served by ...civilians...laymen? Anyway, the neat thing about this place (besides the beautiful shady beer garden and the good Maerzen) is that the monks have made it possible for several vendors of traditional food to set up on site. You walk through shopping ala carte and then head out into the beer garden for a picnic. I can't really describe the array of available dishes adequately, but there were 20 cold salads, at least a dozen meat choices, a dozen side dishes (besides the salads), two dozen bakery items and a few additional snacks. We couldn't get enough of the ribs (maybe Ellis had more than we thought) and we also had an excellent smoked ham hock in addition to several dried sausages. The ribs came with a potato with quark and chives and a cold cabbage dish that was crispy and cold like slaw but sour like kraut. We also sampled some pickled herring, garlic olives and a very old fashioned concoction of smoked and then pickled onions that were excellent. We had some strange dumplings filled with meat as well and a traditional beer snack of thinly shaved white radishes with lots of salt which was surprisingly good, but could have used even more salt. The braustubl had an authentic, less touristy feel (the vendors didn't speak English), so it was a fun, relaxing start to our trip.

With full tummies we headed to our lodgings, a rather large pension about 4 km outside of the town center. Other than a distinct old cheese smell, we were pretty happy with the accommodations. However, 10 minutes after removing my socks I learned that we were sharing our room with several other guests: mosquitoes. Poor Ellis ended up with several bites on his face. Two days later, the owner of the hotel informed us that the mysterious air freshener- type devices in our rooms were actually mosquito repellents. We had neglected to plug them in, fearing they were the source of the cheese smell. The next morning at breakfast, we discovered the real source of the smell. You guessed it: cheese. It was seriously vile stuff that Elissa speculated was produced by routinely marinating it in the "juice" squeezed from dirty sweat socks.
The next morning we took the funicular railway up to the Festung Hohensalzburg and toured the inside including the marionette museum. Since the fortress is situation high on a hill, it also afforded great views of the town and surrounding mountains. After a quick lunch at a Chinese buffet we headed down to the river for a boat tour. While we waited, we sampled the delights at a fortuitously located gelato stand. Though I have never been a fan of Salzburg's premier confection, Mozartkugeln, the chocolate-pistachio gelato flavor based on it is quite delicious. The river boat cruise was a nice chance to sit down and relax, but otherwise not especially inspirational. These boat cruises are fairly new, as the Salzach River is shallow and fast moving, so many passenger boats cannot navigate it. Last stop of the day was Hellbrunn Palace and gardens, just outside of Salzburg. It is famous largely in part for its trick fountains, which are "surprises" operate by the tour guides. More interesting to us were the clockwork type figures that were powered only by water/ gravity, but this places seems to be mostly all about getting the tourists wet. Hilarous.

For our final day in Salzburg, we decided to follow the self-guided walking tour on the Old City as described in one of the guidebooks. One the subject of this, I must mention that I found it very funny that Elissa derogatorily referred to Rick Steves as "Steve" whenever she disagreed with his recommendation or did not enjoy his humor. Salzburg has several impressive churches and most were either built or refinished in the Baroque style. We learned that this was because Archbishop Wolf Dietrich was trying to recreate Salzburg in the image of Rome. We visited the Dom, Franziskanerkirche (one of the city's first cathedrals, which was later ceded to the Franciscan monks), and the Stiftskirche St. Peter and it's graveyard/ catacombs. It was amazing to see so many beautiful churches in such a small space and we didn't even get to the Kollegienkirche. Another important stop on Monday was the Cafe Konditorei Furst, home of the original Mozartkugeln. Though I do think theirs were better than the mass produced ones they were nothing compared to their delicious cakes, which included Austria's signature sachertorte and Mozart torte that, like the gelato, was better than the candy that inspired it. We also visited the overwhelming shop Easter in Salzburg, which features handpainted eggs for all seasons. Finally, we stopped by a market to purchase fruit, bread, cheese, and sausage to eat on the train ride home. We were fortunate to have fairly empty train cars for most of the ride, so once Ellis finally gave into sleep, we sat around comfortably and had a nice chat with Ben and Elissa.

Ellis was a pretty good little traveler this trip. He's learned to drink fairly efficiently out of both regular cups and sippy cups. When given the sippy cup in the stroller he was able to amuse himself with it in the following fashion 1) drink water until no longer thirsty 2) shake cup rapidly, spraying water everywhere until all the water is gone 3) repeatedly drop cup off side of stroller and grin when some Mom or Dad bends over to pick it up. He's also developed a habit of saying "whoa" a lot. I'm not sure that it's anything other than a noise he likes, but it was cute when he's pull himself up against the train window and make a sound that seemed to convey so much wonder and awe.

More photos here.

the hills are alive with the smell of meat

We are back from Salzburg and had an excellent time with Ben and Elissa. There were beautiful churches, beautiful mountains, and yummy things to eat and drink. Trey's number one destination in Salzburg was the Augustiner Braustubl (more on this in future posts) so we went there for dinner our first evening. Ellis, with his preternatural love of meat, was pleased to sample the many heretofore unseen types of cured pork. As you can see, he comes by this obsession honestly.More pictures and stories from our trip soon.

Throwing it all away and starting over

I had commented this week to a few friends that I was doing some biochemistry that I was a bit under qualified for and it had been going pretty well. You might remember my recent complaints that my lab doesn't keep good protocols, nor is there any way to get trained to use some of our very expensive equipment. So I nagged and pestered my way through 4 days of biochemistry to arrive at today, when it was all, literally, washed down the drain.

My task was to purify a pesky protein that we had made in bacterial cells. The protein should form dimers--each one of them should find one buddy and they should stick together. But we thought that maybe it wasn't doing this. So we expressed a ton of it by sticking another little protein to it to aid in the expression, with the intention that this little protein, the Z-tag, could be cut off later. I got through the primary purification of the protein and managed to successfully cleave off the tag. The next step was to use gel filtration-a technique where molecules of different sizes flow through a fluidized bed at different rates--to simultaneously remove the little tag protein from the solution and also show that the protein of interest was a dimer. We were generally successful this far, but the cleavage of the tag was only partial, so we tried to cleave again overnight and then perform a second gel filtration. We learned in the second filtration that the method we use to cut the tag off needed to be optimized but also that we clearly had a dimer. But, our fraction collector, the device that catches small bits of the solution (the fractions) containing the proteins of different sizes, crashed because the person who had used it between my two runs had changed the resting height of the head. As a result, I lost everything. All and all, this isn't as terrible as it sounds. I know exactly what will work next time because of all of the data accumulated this time.

I don't want to get into all that followed, but it has been made to a look like I used this 60,000 Euro device without proper training, when really, I had a qualified user doing everything. There was an ugly confrontation in German in front of me (about me) and I will be having a painful conversation with my boss tomorrow, where, I will likely be taking responsibility for the broken piece of equipment (which, however, is already fixed).

Besides the lost protein, I am disappointed for two reasons around this. First, I came to the place I work to work with and learn from biologists. But, as I have said before, there is little or no written protocols and everyone is too busy to train anybody on how to do anything. The arrival of a new physics oriented post-doc has made it plain to me that the problem with training new people in the lab, is not unique to me. Second, I feel like I have gone out of my way to train people very carefully in the use of the things I know how to do, attempting to, at a minimum, write things down and follow the mantra of "see one, do one, show one" as often as possible and not asking anyone to do it on their own before they are ready. This is, of course, time consuming for me to do, but is also why we have never had a serious calamity with my microscope: the people who use it know what they are doing and get my full attention until they do. So, to some extent, I am feeling a bit taken advantage of over this time I spend working with people that isn't reciprocated. Next month, I have to rebuild a microscope (because I am the one who can) and the new features will not benefit my experiments at all. I think I have decided not to do it until this paper that needs this filtration is done.

Warning: This post is an excuse to put up baby pictures

We have been so busy lately that we have hardly had time to post. Work is going at an outrageous pace. Ellis is growing at an outrageous pace. He learned to clap, is showing some signs of understanding the signs we are trying to teach him and is climbing every chance he gets.

Ellis was slightly disappointed that his mother thought we should take a different approach to Mother's Day, rather than going out to dinner. She suggested, instead, that we head over to IKEA and get a bed for Ellis and some porch furniture for ourselves after she had followed Ellis's suggestion that she sleep in.

So while she slept in, Ellis got up with me and we played downstairs. When Rachel got up, Ellis and I left her to read her email and have her coffee in peace while we hit the grocery store for the weekend supplies. There we found a coworker and father executing a similar plan. Ellis insisted on at least getting Rachel flowers, for Pete's sake, so we stopped in at the flower shop where we ran into the same coworker, executing the same plan. When we returned Rachel oohhed and ahhed over her yellow lilies. Then, we were off for IKEA where we got everything we had hoped to find, for quite a bit less money. Ellis got his bed, we got our furniture, we got it all in the car and then it was home again, home again, jiggity jag.

Ellis was a big help with the furniture assembly. Clearly he is management material. He made many suggestions as to which tool should be used when. At left we can see him instructing me in the proper use of a hammer.

He seems to like his bed for rumpusing, and is sleeping there for the first half of the night which makes our bed feel huge compared to when we share with him. The furniture came with enough cardboard that I made Ellis a play castle for the porch and put it on his new outdoor rumpus rug.

That afternoon, an American friend got in touch and ended up coming out for dinner with her daughter. We switched away from our planned Mother's Day supper and had lasagna instead. We saved our Mother's Day dinner for Sunday. When I got home from work on Sunday we had Kasseler (German smoked pork chops) with spatzen and broccoli to close out our Mother's Day weekend.

This week work has been crazy, but this weekend we can look forward to a short trip to Salzburg to see our friends Ben and Elissa. We lucked out with cheap train tickets and a cheap place to stay. The train trip along the Alps should be beautiful. We will keep you posted.

a (mostly) photo essay of reasons to stop bitching

During Ben and Elissa's brief visit, they gave us a late Christmas present handmade by Elissa.
One benefit of an older baby: mininimal parental involvement required for snack procurement. And a couple self-explanatory ones...

abridged list of things to be sad about

• After weeks of waiting for rain, the garden was finally fit to plant yesterday. Today I discovered that a slug had eaten all the leaves off all but one of my tiny lettuce plants.
• I have no friends over here.
• Our good friends Ben and Elissa are visiting from America, but were only here for 6 hours before they commenced their European tour. (I cannot begrudge them this as they have been waiting 2 years for their honeymoon and hope they are having fun in Paris.)
• There is no chocolate in the house.
  
• This is the worst one: My baby is almost not a baby anymore. I have not paid enough attention to his first year and now it's almost gone.

Toddler Book Meme

Well, Dan over at "All That Comes With It" has tagged us with a toddler book meme which requires us to discuss our six favorite books that we read to Ellis. Since Ellis is pretty little, we will have to discuss a couple we like and a couple we are looking forward to when he is bigger.

That's Not My Tractor
This is a board book with a tractor on each page and in each case the tractor has some touchy feely spot like a "bumpy engine" or a "scratchy seat" and this attribute excludes it from being my tractor: "That's not my tractor, its engine is too bumpy." Finally, after a great deal of suspense we find our tractor with its shiny headlights on the last page. Ellis really enjoys this one, which, of course, is why I like it too.

Where the Wild Things Are
This is of course a classic with great art in the illustrations. Ellis loves the pics and the story is sweet without being ridiculous. I remember hearing the author a few years ago saying he didn't like to do book signings because it upset kids to have him write in their books after years of their folks telling them to color only in their coloring books. He tells one story of a kid being shoved toward him at a signing and refusing to hand over his book for until his parents goaded him into it. As he handed it over he looked Sendak in the eye and said, "Mister, don't crap up my book."

The Lorax
Ellis is a little young for this one yet but he clearly likes the Lorax a lot. He won't take the time to listen to the story, but each time we turn the page he puts his pointer finger square on the Lorax if he is in the picture. This is a nice rhythmic book with an environmental message and I always think of the animated short and sitting up at Top of the Park in Ann Arbor watching it.

Oh Wie Schoen ist Panama
This is the story of Tiger and Bear as they leave their cosy cohabitation in search of Panama, because they found a box with the label "Panama" that smells of bananas and assume the whole place will have this lovely aroma. They have their little adventure on their circular route that brings them back to their home where they see the box top and assume it is a sign labeling the place as Panama. So they move back into their new-old home believing they have made it to Panama.

Winnie the Pooh
I have always liked these stories.

I am especially looking forward to him being old enough for chapter books. I wasn't read to a lot and even now as an adult, I like being read to sometimes when I don't feel well. I look forward to Harry Potter, although I am not one of the adult devotees of these stories. "Golden Compass" I also look forward to and eventually the almighty, Lord of the Rings.

Oel wechseln

A week ago, I had the oil in the car changed and the new oil came with a couple of little stories. First, motor oil is outrageously expensive here, on the order of $20 a quart and, like gas, most of it is tax. An oil change for our 2.2 liter engine was 110 Euros. About 85 Euros of that was oil and the rest was the filter and labor. This was no fancy oil either. It was plain old 10W-40.

I took Tilbert, the master mechanic who owns the shop, a muscle car calendar from the Napa auto parts store in the states that Rachel's dad sent over. He thought it was pretty cool and we talked for a while about his classic cars, which, are often on display in the office area of the shop. He has a '72 Toyota and a '74 Opel that he described as "Muscle Car Look-a-Likes". He said that back then GTOs and Trans Ams were just a dream because gas was more expensive than now. Instead the Toyota and Opel knockoffs looked like American muscle cars but came with modest 2 liter engines and sizable turbochargers. The result was available power but not the cool low growl of a great big motor waiting to be unleashed.

A New Title

Well, we considered your suggestions. "Ellis's Restaurant" was a close call but we worried what we would do when the next kid wanted something named after them. We also looked at some pretty good quotes from Mark Twain about German and Germany, but they just didn't strike home.

The new title is taken from a Greg Brown song where he extols the joys of having Daughters. There is something very American, midwestern even, about his music. I was listening to him a lot when I started to date Rachel, especially the songs about our loss of connections to our community and each other. The song, Hey Baby Hey, was on repeat quite a bit as I imagined that we would be family before long. So we are giving his song lyric a little German twist as the new blog title in honor of recent homesickness and Ellis's second favorite food and in the hope that we get a lot of air and sun in the coming months over here.

Baby pics, traveling adventures and rants will continue with their usual punctuated equilibrium.

Moving

Faithful readers who have found their way back,
We have had to move the blog to a new location. It will be staying here at trachel.blogspot.com.

Please, if you know of someone we may not have emailed, let them know of the new blog location.
If you link to the blog on yours, please update.

We also need a new name. Please feel free to make some suggestions in the comments.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

XI

We are coming up on a year of parenthood. Ellis is now 11 months old and he is developing at lightening speed.

His interest in food is growing exponentially along with his ability to feed himself very quickly. At this point it would be hard to come up with a list of favorites. Recently, he has gotten to try potatoes in a couple of different formats (mashed and hashbrowned) and he found both to be truly excellent. His love, in general, of meat, is unbelievable. Even with 3-5 chunks of three different things, the meat gets chowed first. Fruit is still a favorite, especially pears and mango. He also appreciates a slice of ripe avocado. He hasn't experienced much cheese, but he found Parmesan to be pretty yucky. The only other things he has ever spit out are hard boiled egg yolks and lentils. Otherwise it is all good.

For a while, he was good at nibbling off a bite from a big chunk, but with his bigger appetite he has taken to sticking bigger chunks in whole, like a piece of scrambled egg the size of my thumb, for instance. Hopefully, the molar or bicuspid he has coming in will make chewing easier and help break up these huge chunks. Drinking from a cup is getting easier for him, but the sippy cup is easier for us. We have mixed feelings about using this convenient little device. The problem isn't so much the drinking as what he does when has finished drinking: throwing the cup up in the air.

He is lightening quick cruising around the furniture and his crawling speed is pretty quick as well. His hand eye coordination is ever improving, probably since it is associated with eating. He has fallen in love with a pinwheel that he will carry around with himself for hours as though he is trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for "longest period hanging on to a pinwheel". Today at a kinder flohmarkt we got him a wooden box with cut outs and pieces to fit through. He can almost do it. I showed him how it works and he can get things in through the cutouts, but not necessarily the correct shape just yet.

While he is an expert cruiser, he hasn't shown much interest in letting go and walking. His balance is quite good--we can stand him up, let go and he will stay upright for several seconds until he realizes he is on his own and falls down. He did try the stairs at Aunt Bridget's but didn't make it too far before someone saw him. At home, on our weird stairs, he hasn't really worked up the nerve to try it, and that is fine with us.

He loves the guitar especially when I play loud, fast blues music. Sometimes he even bounces like he might be thinking he is dancing. He also coos along with his singing mother, often waving his pinwheel as he goes. He likes to slap the guitar body to hear the thonk it makes. He likes the strings but hasn't quite figured out that pulling them alone doesn't make them sound.

Finally, we are experiencing some sleep regression with him, perhaps due to the tooth, or a recent belly illness or possibly the rapid development that happens as they approach one year. Settling him down for bed is getting harder and harder as he prefers to run full speed ahead until he winds down like toy running out of batteries. This has resulted in some funny sleeping positions but it can really wear out the parents when the boy is between them in the bed rotating like the second hand on a clock. On these tough nights, usually the best thing for us to do is to turn out the lights and be still. This usually slows him down sooner. But, as soon as we turn the lights out, he brings his face right up in ours as though he is trying to see if our eyes are really closed. If they are, you usually notice his hot milky breath first and, opening your eyes find that he is nose to nose with you.

I finally have access to a computer that will allow us to download video and get it to the internet. This week I hope. We have some great clips of his crazy eating style and how he loves the guitar.

High tide

I spent today, Saturday, at work trying to get the tide to come in on this project. And, I figured it out, but the answers are tough ones.

As you may know, I study motor proteins in vivo and in vitro. In this assay, I am working in vitro on a motor with its cargo and a regulatory protein in the mix. The important experiment compares the motor protein alone to the motor protein with these additional proteins. Like a semi truck, the motor moves slower with its cargo attached, but unlike a semi, it isn't very good at going down the roads unless it has cargo. The regulatory protein was even more of a mystery. The questions I needed to answer were how these two extra proteins (which we call "the friends" in our lab) change the motor: do they kick it out of neutral? Do they show it the road? Tell it which way to go?

Preliminary data showed that the motor could find the roads on its own but found them much more often with the additional proteins and demonstrated that the third protein (not the cargo) was the signal that showed the motor the entry ramp to the freeway. Then, suddenly, the previous condition that had allowed it to find the roads on its own didn't work.

Today I figured out the problems. First, my coworker stored the motor in a dangerous buffer that is slowly killing it, so that each day there is a little less good protein in there and I have to use a little more to do a reasonable experiment. We have evidence that the part of the motor protein that normally binds the cargo is inhibitory to motor function when the cargo isn't present. Imagine if the fifth-wheel on a truck, when there is no trailer attached, could wrap around and plug the ignition. That is how this motor keeps itself off of the roads when it has no cargo, thus preventing wasted trips down the roads. Now with motors of this type, their interaction with the cargo and the road is due to electrostatic interactions between the proteins. Compared to covalent and simple ionic bonds, as in salt, these interactions are terribly weak. Because they are charge based, adding ions (salt) to the environment changes how they interact with the road and their own cargo site. Imagine if a big pollen bloom or pollution changed how well your tires gripped the road and you have a general idea. Someone looking at single motors has to use a very low salt condition to the get them to interact with the roads at all. In this case, that same low salt condition allows the empty cargo site to be extra sticky to the ignition. So, we have a Catch-22. If I lower the salt so they can find the roads, they inhibit themselves and don't move at all.

Today, I discovered that there is a very narrow window where I can break the inhibition and still have the motor go down the road often enough to study it. Between rounds of experiments, I had run out of an important solution and remade it, very, very carefully, to maintain minimum salt. The new solution must have been a little lower in salt than the one made by a coworker. Hence, nothing worked in the new one. When I moved the salt up it worked. But this amount was so little that no one in the motor field would have expected any effect. In fact, the way most buffers are prepared in our lab, the difference is easily in the error of the preparation.

It is good that we have figured this out and it will get this paper finished off pretty quick. The tough part is that we wanted to continue to study this system in greater detail and now we know we have our work cut out for us: the motor must be prepped and stored much more carefully than other motors and all of the buffer solutions have to be painstakingly accurate. Needless to say, I am glad that this new buffer was prepared in a large batch. Probably enough for 50o straight days of experiments, so we shouldn't be running out again.

A Mother's Day Invitation

Mama,
It might surprise you that I write so well. I was surprised too, since when I open my mouth, thoughts turn to grunts. At least now we know that it isn't that I don't have thoughts, its just that my speech center isn't developed yet.

Anyway, I have discovered that I can afford to take you out for dinner for Mother's Day. Brunch is an option if you prefer, but not breakfast since you will be sleeping in on that day. Papa has offered to make reservations since, as noted above, I cannot communicate through speech. Elia's dad made several suggestions including two places in Dilsberg. Papa also thought that Gilbert's Golden Adler in Handschusheim could be nice. Papa says that all the places offer meat and noodles, so the whole family should be satisfied with the choices. Please leave a comment here with your preference so that Papa can take care of things.
Love,
Baby Ellis

Low tide

Today, work really fell out from underneath me. I had to admit that an assay I have had working for weeks is failing, for any of several reasons. This is a problem because we are trying to submit a manuscript next week with some data from this assay. I will be spending the weekend trying to squeak out the last few bits we need with limited protein. There are many problems at hand here, none of them of my own creation. The project has been terribly rushed and the excellent biochemist I work with has been taxed to the edge of true exhaustion. The result is that he has made some uncharacteristic mistakes such as accidentally mixing tiny vials of protein juice from different preps of radically different quality and following the wrong recipe for a buffer he gave me. His experiments are done and I am running clean up with my assay and I am now the victim of his errors. Of course, I blamed myself first, but now it seems like this isn't really my fault.

Earlier this week we had a meeting and I showed the final data for one condition and the preliminary for another. At which point my boss battled the other authors to include this second difficult condition, that looked completely doable based on my preliminary data. Then, after two days of attempts, it doesn't work right any more at all. While this is probably the fault of the biochemist, I am the one likely to take the heat for saying I could do something that now I can't. Additionally, this could be quite embarrassing for my boss and could mean that all of my hard fought data and two weeks of time will never see the light of day.

I am telling myself that this is low tide and after low tide comes high and inevitably low again. This is just what research life is like. It is its own little bipolar life where you oscillate between elation with new results and huge disappointments and some of those come near the end of projects when things should be working. The main thing to remember with this one is that the technical problems aren't my inability, they just come with a poorly planned shotgun project. On the other hand, I could have stayed less involved and not committed so heavily to something I couldn't control, as is evident from the last post.

bullets from Ireland- sorry, it's this or nothing people

• We are back; Ellis seems to be feeling better. Bridget was the consummate hostess, as always. She is not the consummate blogger at present, thus there are no pictures from this visit available. If I didn't know how busy she was these days, I'd tell you to go bug her about it.
• The Irish are so freaking friendly. I thought it was a stereotype- it's not. Or maybe it just seems like they are so gregarious because the Germans are so not.
• We went on a pretty cool walking tour of Waterford. To me, the most interesting thing was seeing how the various religious and civic sites evolved right along with the people that occupied Waterford. Most interesting was Reginald's Tower, built by the Vikings and still in use. It was amazing to think about all the people that have come and gone from Ireland- Celts, Vikings, Romans, Normans, English. Makes you wonder what connection there is between their friendliness and their history of the constant threat of invasion.
• We saw two Sheela-na-gigs (this Wikipedia article has a picture of one that we saw) in Fethard. Well, we almost missed them- they are very worn, so even when you know what you're looking for, you stand around squinting for a while. It's interesting that no one really knows whether they were pagans hold-overs or made by Christians to show how disgusting female lust is. The other hypothesis is that they were used to ward away evil spirits because everyone is afraid of girl bits.
• Silas and Ellis got along really well, except when they didn't. When they weren't getting along it was usually because they both wanted the same toy. Occasionally, Eli wanted to horn in on Bridget reading a book to Silas or go Godzilla on Silas's train set. Silas responded by screaming "No baby" or maybe it was "No, baby." Generally, though, Silas was always on the lookout to make sure Eli was getting a bite of cracker or fruit.
• Silas also made the connection that I am Ellis's mom just like Bridget is his mom. He even called me "Mom Rachel" and brought it to my attention whenever Ellis was crying. Silas would typically suggest that I pick him up or give him milk. Amazingly, those are two of Ellis's favorite things, so I guess babies do have a secret language.
• Bridget and I toured Holy Cross Abbey, which has a splinter of the cross and very moving stations of the cross in it's courtyard. The relief sculptures show only faces, not full depictions of each station.
• Irish radio is totally wacky. RTE2 is Ireland's national, second largest station. The vast majority of what I heard was a DJ "analyzing" the news (= scanning the papers and taking call ins) and reading people's text messages. Bridget says she has heard people text in with requests for road side assistance or just to bitch about a personal problems. There seems to no actual format to the show.
  
• Turns out there are several places around Clonmel where itinerants or Irish travelers, often dwell. They do their day to day traveling in small, horse drawn rigs. Orrin told me that he'd heard that the government offered them permanent housing and they turned it down because they wouldn't have a place to graze their horses. That sounds totally wrong to me. First, seems like they would have plenty of better reasons not to give up their long held way of life. Second, there is no way Ireland is short of pasture land. There are still entire villages that were abandoned in the potato famine- how can there be a land shortage?