Oh yeah

I've hit my third trimester!

how to not impress a pregnant woman

I've done all the usual things during this pregnancy including signing up for email updates about how big the baby is etc., etc.. Many of these come with links to reviews of products in which a pregnant woman might be interested. Most of the time it's useless crap, every once and a while the reviews are actually useful and then there are these:

V2 Supporter

Your hoo-ha helper.

Just when you thought you'd experienced the last of the crazy pregnancy symptoms (Hello, nipple hair!), along come varicose veins on your hoo-ha. Doesn't that just beat all? Of course it's the last thing you want to talk about, but when your insides feel like they're about to bottom out, it's pretty much all you can think about. Stop the insanity with a little well-positioned support.

V2 Supporter

When your vajingo needs a helping hand, the V2 Supporter lends one in all the right places. This stretchy cotton band is fully adjustable to give you a lift where you need it most, taking care of painful swelling and pressure. It's true the contraption looks strikingly like a lace-trimmed jock strap—but if it provides you with a pain-free cha-cha, we're betting you don't give a rat's patootie.

Now if you go to the product link, you will see that this is a potentially useful item (although I am exceptionally grateful to have not known this prior to the ad; apparently vaginal varicose veins are not common in first pregnancies (a sufficient reason to stop at one as far as I'm concerned). However, the person who wrote this review apparently has a really hard time with the phrase vaginal varicose veins and instead feels that throwing half a dozen (okay, it's only three but still!) euphemisms in is more appealing to the readers. Personally I'm frightened that someone who has to resort to such language has actually had sex, and even more concerned that this sex likely resulted in the creation of a human being that this person was responsible for raising. If you can't write the word vagina, you probably shouldn't be using yours for pleasure or reproduction.

bellies!

This past weekend we had a not-a-shower for my friend Janet (on the right in the white shirt). She's just over ten weeks ahead of me in the whole baby making process and since this is their second, she claimed she didn't need a real shower. She and her husband said that the only thing they needed were diapers so people just brought tons of those as gifts. We did a basic potluck with S. African style pancakes (something like a cross between a crepe and those massive Ethiopian pancakes) and fillings. It was co-ed and we didn't do baby games like guessing what candy bar someone had mashed into a disposable diaper and everyone had a great time.

It was also the first time I got to see my friend Leo (on the left) since she recently found out that she is now expecting as well and is due about ten weeks after I am. Both Janet and Leo work at the college and it didn't occur to them that if they hired a bunch of female faculty in their 30's we would all start getting pregnant. At least the hr folks are getting really good at dealing with maternity leave.

I know I'm wearing essentially a bag shaped dress so we also took a photo from the side with Janet's husband Curt pulling my dress tight so you can see that there really is a belly under there. The butt sticking out in back is also a hint that there is WAY more up front than my poor spine is used to handling.


So here we all are at about 3.5, 5.5 and 7.5 months.

5 months!

So I hit five months this week. It's amazing how fast time is passing. Helena is kicking up a storm and no one is embarrassed to ask when I'm due because it's obvious that I'm pregnant at this point.

In fact, that's the oddest bit about it all. None of this process has gone the way I expected. So many women romanticize their pregnancies, even after the fact, that I did assume certain things would happen that just haven't. Granted I also assumed I'd have terrible morning sickness and managed to skip that as well fortunately.

However, these days the thing that impacts me the most is body dismorphia. I'll catch a glimpse of my profile as I walk past a mirror or a window and just think, "What the hell?" I do not recognize myself anymore when I catch glimpses out of the corner of my eye. I know I look pregnant but the reality is a very different thing. I've never fantasized about being pregnant or how I would look so this is all of a bit of a shock to the system even if I knew it would happen intellectually.

It has got me back to knitting finally though. I'll post photos as I finish things. Not everything is for Helena though. It seems that my world is full of pregnant women these days so I have many babies for whom to knit over the next several months.

Time for some good news

I know I've been MIA since Ruth's death. We've had quite a bit going on this summer and now this fall. However, I finally got around to scanning a very important image.

I'd like to introduce you to Helena Sofia.


I'm due the first week of March.

Ruth

I've been thinking since Wednesday about how to describe Ruth for those who didn't know her. We met through a online fiber group (spinning, weaving, knitting etc.) and met in person when I was living in Santa Barbara and she was down in LA.

I moved down later that year to teach at Claremont and Ruth immediately took me under her wing and made sure I met as many people as possible. I didn't know anyone in town other than Marius and was just getting to know the folks with whom I worked. She made it a much easier transition for me as it normally takes me a year in a place to start to meet people and I only had a year in LA.

Other people have already written about her enthusiasm and her great capacity for joy. I want to write about the rest of her because I think it is a side some people did not quite fully realize existed. She was a particularly amazing person because she was full of insecurities. This does not sound like it makes sense but give me a second to make my point. I get the impression from others that she did a great job of hiding this but she always wanted to be one of the cool kids, even as an adult, and never felt that she attained that status. But instead of those insecurities manifesting outwardly as snobbery or cruelty or even just self-absorbed pity, she did everything in her power to help other people feel like they fit in. She completely understood how isolated someone could feel when they were new to an area, a hobby or a group. She welcomed everyone as though they were her best friend and that did not change even when they let her down periodically. I still remember talking to her about a friend who had been using her rather blatantly and Ruth still wondered if maybe this friend would change their ways. She always wanted to give folks the benefit of the doubt and she hated to think that she was the cause for the end of a friendship. Her joy and enthusiasm made her fun to be around but her compassion and empathy are what really made her an exceptional person.

In memory

Ruth Schooley, a kind soul

hiking in 104 degrees

There are just times when you won't ever go outside if you don't go outside when it's hot here. Of course, one isn't stupid and you don't go for long hikes. Today we went out to Santa Clara to see some of the petroglyphs.

Petroglyphs seem to be the current theme for our hikes. Last weekend we went with a group to an area that it basically in our backyard (if you count thousands of acres as your backyard) to see petroglyphs there.

Sometimes you hear the nicest things

I was out the other night with some of my colleagues and one of them told me that she had one of my previous students in a class. This student was not doing well in my friend's class and she failed my class. This student actually confessed to my friend that my class was the only other one with which they had had problems (which makes you wonder what their other classes were like).

Many of you know I had a pretty rough semester in the spring with an unusually whiny group of students and I've been kinda down about it all although I have figured out some things I can do differently to try and prevent a similar situation in the future (or so I hope)! The reason I am mentioning all of this is because my friend then told me that this student had explained that she really liked me but that my tests were really hard (which is sorta what we aim for in our department). So I'm feeling a bit better about things. When you fail a student and they still appreciate you as a teacher you know you aren't completely screwing up.

ummm...

So I was going to post pretty photos of another trip but I have my priorities.

Have you seen this yet?

Oh yes my friends, you too can own this stylish handbag. It's even on sale. Go figure.

(for the record, I adore grun and I'm thrilled that such a fun little shop exists in St. George, but armadillos?)

Costa Rica finally

We had a great time in Costa Rica this spring. A geology professor at school does a continuing education class nearly every other year and we got to go along this time. He has the director of a private field station organize nearly everything so we got to do some really fun things in locations that weren't crowded by Americans.

We started out travelling around the country and our first stop was at a local market to practice our nonexistent Spanish. The produce was worth it though.



We were lucky enough to be around for an oxcart festival/competition.







Of course we were the only gringos around and so we got lots of funny looks. These folks take some serious pride in their carts though so they were all very nice about letting us photograph them and their art.

We spent the second half of our trip at a field station located on the Pacific side and had to take a rather interesting boat trip to get there. I don't have any photos but we got to see flying fish on the trip and when we took the boats out again to a national park.

Well, it was all very lovely and scenic until we had to land. Apparently they had not seen such large waves in quite some time. One of the folks helping the group ended up underneath the boat at one point. The worst thing that happened is that several folks got VERY wet and had their pride bruised but it was one of the more "interesting" parts of the trip. Yes interesting would be a euphamism here.





The field station and surrounding areas were great for nature photography.

The sloths are fuzzy because I had to take the photo through a spotting scope using my point and shoot:








Check out the bit of red in the coati's mouth. It's eating a crab.



We did try to be a bit educational and trapped bats. Often you can just set up a stationary net and the bats will just fly into it because they can't see it. However, the bats we were interested in live in caves that open onto the ocean so we had to stand there and actually toss the net over the poor things since there was no place to set a net. Marius was particularly entertaining to watch.



We spent one day out at a national park. I went on the long hike where we were supposed to see lots of wildlife, while Marius went on the shorter hike that was supposed to end in a swim. It turns out Marius got the better deal but there was a price. The group had two massive trees fall over and land right behind them on the trail.



No one was hurt and it was great hearing how much closer the trees fell to the group as the trip progressed.

There was also some shopping of course and they did a really nice job of making sure we got to see things being made before we bought them.



Including the organic coffee we got:



I never planned on going to Costa Rica because it all seemed very touristy to me based on the trips that others have taken. I have to say that Kelly (the geo prof) and the local guides did a great job of minimizing the touristy crap and we had a great time.

I'm still here!

I just went a bit domestic over the past few days and decided that 103 degree days were the perfect time to get back into baking and such.

I've owned Dough for over a year and have not really had the time to do anything with the methods Bertinet describes. He advocates a really wet dough and then "kneading" it without dusting your work surface with flour. I don't have any photos to show you the mess because my hands were completely covered in dough. Essentially he has you stretch, slap and fold the dough to incorporate air until it (eventually) firms up.

Now I think I added just a tad too much water to the mix which may explain some of my problems. You are supposed to pick up the dough by spreading your fingers and sliding them under the dough. You then flip it all so that your fingers are on top (fast enough that the force stretches out the dough). The biggest issue I have with this is that the dough goes flying off at this point. I don't mean the entire batch, but I am still finding little specks of the stuff all over the side of my kitchen exposed during the process. Bertinet includes a DVD with the book and shows how he does it all. I didn't see dough flying off there. He also managed to very quickly get things into a cohesive and relatively non-sticky dough. I found that I could only do that if I let the dough rest periodically al la no knead bread.

After about an hour of on again-off again dough slapping, I finally had something that was approaching usable. In the book, Bertinet only gives baking instructions for the dough I made if you bread the batch into smaller bits to make rolls, breadsticks, baguettes, or other fun shapes with the exception of a gruyere and cumin loaf that sounds yummy but not what I wanted. I wanted a regular old loaf so I had to wing it a bit and ended up overcooking the loaf a bit and didn't get enough cornmeal on the stone so it stuck causing a great deal of swearing in the kitchen. In the end the bread came out fairly nicely though. I didn't get much of a crust but the crumb was wonderful.

The other thing I've been doing in my kitchen is making yogurt. I ordered this fun toy which I've been lusting for every since we taught our intro. biology labs about fermentation by having them make yogurt. Very few of the students were brave enough to eat their yogurt. I don't think many of them eat yogurt and, if they do, I seriously doubt they have ever had plain yogurt. We do provide them with all sorts of good things to add to their yogurt to make it palatable to them but the initial smell of yogurt seems to put them off. If you add enough syrup and crap to yogurt, it doesn't really smell like yogurt I suppose. It all smelled great to me and it showed me that you can make a fairly firm yogurt at home. In the past, I have read reviews of homemade yogurt and "yogurt makers" that suggested that it was fairly soupy. It turns out that you only have to boil your milk or add dry milk to the mix and it is perfect.

You don't need a special toy to make yogurt though. There are fairly good instructions on how to do it in your oven or in a cooler but it will require a bit of babysitting. That being said, I should have babysat my own yogurt a bit better. The instructions suggested incubating for seven hours but that was too long for my batch and a few came out with whey pooling on top. I'll show you the process the next time I make a batch so you can see how easy it is.

Wow, where have the past four months gone?

I've been really bad about posting so I'm going to try and do better and catch folks up on some of the fun things we've been doing.

The spring semester was really hard for me. I taught a brand-new course and had a group of very difficult students but I survived and I have learned a few things that will (hopefully) minimize such problems in the future. However the process of getting to this point involved quite a bit of hair pulling and beating my head against the wall.

There were some really great points in the past four months though. We went to Costa Rica for ten days in March and have some really great photos that I will share in my next post (which will be in the next day or so instead of in another four months!). I also went to Cambridge, Vienna and Prague with a group of humanities professors from my school (I was one of two token scientists) which was an amazing experience and I'll try to post photos from that trip before the end of the week. In between and ever since, we've been hiking and canyoneering like crazy people. Unfortunately my last camera died in a canyon right around the time of my last post. This may be part of the reason I haven't posted as much. I got a replacement in time for the trip to Europe but haven't taken it in a canyon yet. I have already begun to rectify this with a short trip to the north rim of the Grand Canyon but it will probably be next month before I get any additional photos to share.

Why next month? Because last week we did Fat Man's Misery (the wrong way) on Wednesday and then Orderville on Friday. These are both beautiful canyons. Orderville is a very easy canyon that then feeds into the Narrows of Zion. However, Fat Man's Misery, while normally not easy but doable, turned into quite a challenge for us because we parked the cars in the wrong place and ended up hiking the normal ~4miles to and through the canyon and then (what I estimate) nine miles upstream in a river and another mile overland to get to the car instead of the 2.5 miles we were supposed to do after the canyon. Not only did we have to hike that extra distance but we had to hustle out of the canyon because we started to hear thunder and you DO NOT want to be in a canyon if there is a storm because of the risk of flash floods. In fact, we probably should not have been in there at all that day but the weather predictions were a bit off and the sky looked clear when we started out. Fortunately we only experienced cold rain but it still made for a miserable day of slogging through the river and at the end of it all I developed runner's knee.

Yes, I developed a condition called runner's knee from canyoneering. I am nothing if not creative in how I get my injuries.

So this means that I am out of commission for a few weeks while this thing heals. This is a bummer since the summer is the time when we get to go canyoneering without freezing our butts off. It's also the only time we really have to travel. In reality, I've been pretty lucky. We had some really awful conditions for going into a slot canyon and the worst thing that happened is that my knee is a bit inflamed. Am I allowed to feel old in my 30's?

Who knew?

There is a magazine out there that is "the voice of the independent flockmaster."

Evolution vs. Creationism

Given that I'm a biologist, you can imagine where I come down on the debate about teaching anything other than evolution in science classes. However, I figure there are plenty of folks out there who may not know the amazing amount of data we have supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection (and keep in mind here folks that scientists use the word "theory" differently than lay people, theory= long standing idea with LOTS of data backing it up; theories are not just educated guesses -those would be what we call hypotheses). Recently the National Academy of Science released a free publication summarizing some of the most interesting data and how our understanding of evolution has led to dramatic developments in fields such as medicine and law enforcement. I've put a link to the booklet over on the right side of this page. It is currently free to anyone who wants to download it.

For those who want the movie version you should check out NOVA's special on the court case in Dover over teaching intelligent design. The film is in two parts and is called Judgment Day. If you watch this, keep in mind the fact that the Dover school board really screwed up when they mandated that i.d. be taught by including language of a religious nature in their documents on the subject. As a result, the Discovery Institute (the organization fighting to have i.d. taught in science classes) basically abandoned any attempt at defending the school board. Instead they are waiting for a school board that is smart enough to keep religion out of their documents for their big court battle on the issue.

Catch up time

So we had a lovely holiday. We had three weeks off between semesters which really didn't amount to three weeks of vacation. I spent the first week off in training and the last week prepping for a new course I'm doing this semester but the holiday was still nice.

We spent five days in D.C. with my family but before we left santa had to make a visit. M got me this for Christmas.



Isn't it beautiful? It's much more beautiful in light of the fact that my Mario Batali dutch oven has a big crack in its interior enamel after less than a year of use. It's a shame since I'm always a big fan of less expensive alternatives.

Of the few photos we took during our trip, this one must be my favorite.


My mom. Santa was VERY good to her this year.

the universe really just likes to mess with your mind sometimes

I was at a holiday party just before Christmas where a number of colleagues were guests and I met several faculty I had yet to meet. I'm having a lovely conversation with a grumpy old English professor (not really grumpy but I'm pretty sure he'd be pleased if people viewed him that way) about my sweater (the silk garden tie-dye number for those who have seen it) and trading pedigrees as academics are wont to do when he looks at me and asks "Do you want to go on the trip?"

I of course stared at him blankly in reaction to this complete non-sequitur and then proceeded to give many looks suggesting that he should continue since I hadn't the foggiest clue on what he was talking about (I'm sure the lacking a clue bit dominated most of the looks). Well it turns out that this guy has a grant from NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) to take faculty from our little college on trips. They go once a year and each trip starts out with a seminar series at Cambridge (including as many Nobel prize winners as they can dig up apparently -Hawkings has participated) and then traveling with the seminar speakers to two other locations. This year the trip will include Vienna so that we can go to the opera and ballet and then Prague just because it sounded like it would be fun (his words). Apparently nearly everyone else in the room at the time knew about it since they were primarily in the humanities (and have right of first refusal for these trips), but every year they grab a few folks from other disciplines to round out the group. The guy in charge loves nothing better than to find unsuspecting new faculty who seem like they might be fun and to invite them to come along. That would appear to be me this year.

The grant pays for everything during the two weeks except for souvenirs and he just followed up his invite with an unofficial, once-all-of-the-humanities-folks- are-signed-up-and-it-isn't-unseemly-to-invite-the-outsiders-I'll-get-the-formal-invite, written invitation to go on the trip.

Holy shit! Karma just can't possibly explain this one...

the end of the semester

Phew. It's nearly over.

I have a couple of marathon days of grading and then I'm done. I know students think that studying sucks, well grading sucks eggs big time.

Not only is it the least enjoyable part of teaching but it can be downright painful when a student you like does poorly.

There are always bright spots in a black humor sort of fashion. I am still amused by the fact that a student showed up to take my exam that I didn't know. Now, I sometimes mix up the names of a couple of my students but I know them all by the end of the semester. This kid had literally skipped all but the first couple of weeks of class including the three semester exams and all of the weekly quizzes and homework assignments. He could have qualified for a WF which is an automatic withdrawal (but failing) for which students who disappear before a certain date qualify but he disqualified himself by showing up for the final. I haven't graded it but it would be really sad if he does well on it and fails anyway.

That's not what was funny about the interaction though (perhaps obvious given that it is rather sad). What's funny is that he walks in and says that he is there to take the final. I ask him for which class. He gives me the call number for my class (at intro. and non-majors levels we have up to eight lecture sections for a given call number) so I ask him who his professor is. He tells me that it's me and so I ask if he's been in my class during the semester. He tells me that he's been in and out (yeah, right). Ultimately I have to ask his name. Amazingly enough I remember his name from the list of students who vanished so I gave him an exam. This is probably a situation where you had to be there but seriously, it was the most surreal exchange I've had in a while with a student.

Can you imagine the balls this kid has? He hasn't shown up for months and then pops in to take the final. Apparently this happens regularly here and so all of the faculty had a good laugh over how far I took my questions. Apparently they are all in the habit of handing out exams to anyone who walks in for finals and then they check to make sure the name isn't that of a student that they know.

my week

I've had one of the more interesting weeks of my life.

Many of you know I was offered a position at Dixie State College of Utah (name will be changing in the next few years for those confused by the Dixie bit, we'll be the Univ. of Utah, St. George). What some of you don't know is that while they tried to offer me a tenure track position without interviewing me, they found out that it was sorta against all of the rules. So instead I've been working on a one year contract with the promise that they would do a formal search. First the search was supposed to happen within weeks of my moving out to Utah but that didn't happen. Then it was supposed to happen in early fall and they even did an entirely new search for that one. Of course, faculty being who they are, the process of going through the applications took months longer than they had planned and so I finally got to interview for my job this past Thursday.

Maybe I'm letting my ego get carried away but I wasn't too worried about being offered the job based on the fact that they had already tried to give it to me (and everyone was being excessively supportive and encouraging about my chances of getting it with the formal review process). What I was REALLY nervous about was making all of these lovely supportive folks who had been reassuring me that they wanted to keep me around, regret it. I really am a fairly decent teacher most of the time (and a really excellent one sometimes) and I wanted my talk to reflect that. So I put a ton of pressure on myself to try and do a really nice and polished talk as part of the interview to the point that I was making tiny little changes the morning of my interview as I was practicing.

Here is where everything goes south of course. I normally allow my students access to my lecture slides before class so that they can print them out and bring them to class if they have a hard time concentrating while taking notes, so I printed out the final version of my talk to hand out to the audience. What I didn't do was save that final version to my thumbdrive. Yup, that's right. I opened up my talk and hit the second slide only to find that the heading wasn't quite right.

There wasn't anything incorrect in the talk, it's just that the final version was a little bit smoother and less prone to repeating information than the slides I was projecting. Oh yeah, and the slides I had up didn't match the handouts of course. The talk went fine aside from the minor differences (literally just a title on one or two slides and a rearrangement of topics for another two slides) and the fact that I went a bit over the alloted time. Everyone was very complimentary about it but I spent the entire afternoon kicking myself over the mistake with the files.

I was so ticked off with myself that my stomach even hurt. I got home that night and realized I hadn't eaten all day but couldn't eat anything even though I heated up some soup. So I went to bed in the hopes that it would all get better with a little sleep. I woke up at 2am with a raging fever and it turns out that my stomach pains were because I went and caught a stomach flu that Marius had had earlier in the week. It's the sort of flu where you feel intermittently fine and crappy but you feel like you need to die if you eat anything. As a weight-loss diet it's highly effective; I've lost five pounds in 36 hours. For everything else (like being alive) it sucks.

Of course last night an interested third party got the low down on the job and called to find out if I had gotten the call yet and I could really only muster an "oh good" upon hearing the good news. I'm sure it was highly gratifying for her, poor woman.

Grading entertainment

I have a large number of students in my non-majors class that have been raised in a Creationist or semi-Creationist form of faith and so I make a big deal about evolution.

As a homework assignment I ask them to describe the theory of evolution by natural selection and summarize the evidence supporting it. There is more to it but that is sufficient to enjoy this little quote given as an example of evolution. Try and get past the really poor writing, this really was written by a fairly intelligent student although you wouldn't know it from this assignment. I've added the ellipses to cut out the less entertaining bits.

"...for example two big guerrillas their offsping would probably also be large... if that large of guerillas could either scare off the smaller guerillas [sic] and ensuring that their offspring would also have that advantage. Continuing in this thought experiment, those smaller species of guerillas [sic] by chance find a new environment where their smaller size might help them survive and adaptive radiation would occur and in if the population of guerillas became isolated for a long enough time sympatric (should read allopatric) speciation would occur..."

I just have this image of really fat (or buff) and really petite guerrilla fighters competing for resources, reproducing and evolving to form new species of guerrillas.