The Life we call ‘Ithaca’

Cohabitation carries various tiers of responsibility, and paramount among these is respecting the others’ space.  When these spaces are shared, the best way to respect them is to keep them clean: hence chores.  Ever since living together in Iowa, Sam and I have had weekly chores which we assigned ourselves and made sure we followed though on every weekend.  For Sam, it was laundry and vacuuming.  For me it was mopping the floors, dusting the house, taking out the garbage, taking out the recycling, cleaning the toilets, shoveling when necessary, mowing the lawn, fertilizing the lawn, and shingling the roof as needed.  It was relatively balanced.

Most of these chores remained assigned to their original owner when we moved to Ithaca, however over the past year we’ve been more relaxed on the weekly follow through.  Deciding to get back to order, we committed ourselves to weekly cleanings again…but Sam had grown tired of vacuuming the house.  Actually, she’s been complaining about doing it for years.  So I decided to try something new last week: putting the chores on pieces of paper layed in a salad washer, mixing the hopper, and each drawing out four chores that we’d be responsible to complete over the next couple of days.  I drew clean bathrooms, clean kitchen, clean living room, and…vacuum.  Sam drew laundry.

She’s strongly advocating for this new system from here on out – drawing who does what chore.  I pretended not to hear her over the vacuum noise I’d just discovered.

Nearing 18 months ago I purchased a new phone to replace the aging former, at which point I turned a corner and decided to get a ‘Smartphone.’  I’m not entirely certain just what is required to rubric one’s phone with the ’smart’ cohort – from what I can gather, it just needs to be able to do more than make phone calls.  And while this quality propels many phones to ’smart’ status, there is a vast range in the proficiency of these added tasks.

Senior to the concept of multi-tasking telephones is the drive to make technology smaller, and telecommunications are certainly no exception.  However, the progression of smaller technology with larger phone capabilities has arrived at a number of devices that are too small for their own any good, since you can’t easily navigate the screen unless you, yourself, is a pygmy.

This has been heard by phone manufacturers, and they have answered with mini-mini computers – or alternatively, larger smartphones.  This is especially welcome to someone with large fingers (i.e., me), since I can now reconsider using 80% of the added niceties that I previously couldn’t.

So last night I went to that inept bastion of cellular phone merchandising (Verizon) and placed an order for Motorola’s latest and largest: the Droid X.  Boasting a 4.3″ screen, full HD video camcorder (with mini HDMI output) and 8MP camera, built-in GPS, 24GB of onboard storage (with room for 40GB), AND a phone, it might just be the greatest phone I’ve ever seen.  Then again, the last phone I bought was supposed to be the greatest phone I’ve ever seen…so we’ll just see what happens once I get it.  There’s quite a waiting list, so mine is due to arrive on August 4th.

I grabbed these photos off the internet, from someone who got one of these before the world ran out of them.  Next to it on the left are one of the Lion’s share of smartphones, the iPhone.  I can certainly appreciate the iPhone, save the considerable issues that have been reported with the reception and fragility of the newest model, but true to my word I will never own a Mac product…so back to Motorola.

More to come.

Having read about the above book 3 or 4 times now, and having it recommended to me on as many occasions, I used my Amazon Prime subscription to get speedy shipping on my own copy…which arrived yesterday.  Perusing the table of contents, I realize that most of these projects aren’t designed for construction with an infant who loves to put anything at arm’s length in his mouth (e.g., legos, electronics parts, batteries, etc) – but when he grows out of that, I will be excited to try the following:

A functioning lego lamp made out of (you guessed it) legos and reclaimed parts like CDs and watch batteries

A sky camera that takes pictures from hundreds of feet up in the air

An outdoor movie theater

A wifi signal booster made out of a two-liter soda bottle

and of course, a light up duct tape wallet.

I figure it’s never to early to instill the foundations of engineering, electronics, and creativity in Dale, and hopefully he becomes as interested in them as I was when I was younger.  I certainly have a few years to make sure I have the proper supplies for the projects…which I’ll keep out of his (mouth’s) reach until he’s ready.

When I meet someone for the first time, I run through a standard set of questions which quickly tell me a bit more about them:

1) If you were stuck on an island for the rest of your life, what 5 albums would you want with you – that is, what albums could you listen to over and over again?  (It is striking to me how little people are willing to divulge about their personal music tastes – it’s more sacred than religion)

2) Describe your job or research area in 50 words or less.

Question number 2 is a blast to ask, because in contrast to question number 1, there is no right answer…yet it is still rather challenging for many to achieve.  In science, or that is, in science funded by others, succinct communication is critical; however, many feel the need to make their work appear as recondite as possible.  Perhaps this is to make themselves appear more intelligent, or more likely it is since they don’t have a firm grasp of what they do either.

Regardless, I am always impressed when someone can answer #2 quickly and effectively – clearly they understand the larger question I am trying to get at which is masked behind the original question.  Once I asked a friend Jason what he did in his new job – we were at a restaurant – and he picked up a ketchup  bottle and said, “I don’t make this ketchup, but I know who does.  And the restaurant doesn’t know who makes this ketchup, but they know me.  My job is to make sure this restaurant gets their ketchup without having to know how to find it.”

Superb.

So I’ll give it a go, in 50 words or less:

“I study brain cancer, which only occurs in certain parts of the brain.  Its location might explain why it is able to survive cancer treatments, so I engineer models to mimic the brain environment and study cancer cell behavior with these models.”

And there are even words left over!

So please, give it a shot in the comments section.  Describe your job or area of research in 50 words or less, so that it would make sense to someone you just met.  And if you get the hang of that, it’ll only be a matter of time before I ask you about albums and stranded islands.

I’ve been neglecting the ‘home improvement’ aspect of this website for the past few months, and while it likely isn’t the reason you check in on us, it is something I’d like to revisit.  However, with few boards out of place and no drywall I’m about to attempt in the hot summer with a failing air conditioner, I decided to turn my efforts to a situation that has presented itself in our kitchen since we returned from vacation:

Fruit flies.  An ironic name, because there isn’t any visible fruit in our kitchen but regardless, they pop out of the ethos.   I’ve posted about them before, as well as Sam’s unparalleled hatred for the entire Arthropod family, and in an attempt to merge their departure with her arrival I’ve resorted to the old “vinegar and soap in a glass covered with tin foil perforated with holes” trick.  And as you see above, it clearly grabs their attention.

But not as much as neighboring fruit flies do, apparently.  Why couldn’t these two find one another inside the glass?

I meant to include a picture of the progress – at least 100 flies in the bottom of the vinegar – but somehow I neglected it.  I have no doubt that it was due to the wiggly little helper on my knee, who was enthralling himself with the sounds of my clicking keyboard:

Here he is after I told him that Mom was coming home tonight.  And please note, there are no fruit flies in the picture.

We returned yesterday evening from what was an absolutely fantastic trip to Minnesota.  Except for a few bouts of serious rain (which only lasted a few minutes), the weather was terrific (above).

And on top of that, we got to see lots of old friends.  Above, we enjoyed dinner with the Doyle clan and their adorable girls.

And lunch with Nathan brought me back to my days of working in industry.  Jamarr even flew in from LA for the event.

And we even managed breakfast with Steph and Garrett (many thanks for the long drive over to see us!).

As most trips to Minnesota make me think of summers there as a kid, we took a walk around Lake Ann with my mom and commented on how much things have changed there…

…and how much Dale has grown since the last time she saw him.  Accordingly, she ran over and took a snapshot of him to document his age at that exact moment.  And 200 more for the moments in between.

The trip back was largely good, except for a large scale meltdown in the Minneapolis airport security line (wow, that was a big one).  Now it’s back to the grind.  And back to regular posting (sorry this one is so quick, I’m posting as Dale wiggles all over the place).