Our Life in Ithaca

Hey Folks - really sorry for the lack of posts lately; so much has happened it has been impossible to find time to post at all.  A trip back to Minnesota and Iowa was sufficient to complete a 10 year college reunion and a 6 year graduate degree, and upon my return home it would seem I’m older and wiser.

Friday through Sunday was reunion, 10 years since I left Carleton.  A number of friends made it back for the affair, but not enough - nor were there enough events to keep us entertained.  Sort of a let-down really, but I’m still glad I went.  I never get tired of that place.

On Tuesday I finally defended (successfully) my Ph.D., an event which brought my entire family and Sam’s parents to my old stomping grounds.  Honestly, the most nervous I’ve ever been in my life, but it went fine at the end of the day.  Most of my friends who I started graduate school with made the post-party at our favorite stomping grounds, Bo James.  It was marvelous seeing everyone.

I’ll go into more detail about my defense soon, which I’ll write as a YourLife submission with a “what I’ve learned since college” theme.  Also, as my friend Matt threatened to never visit again if there wasn’t a Michael Jackson post, I need to write about that too.  Don’t worry Matt, I’m just waiting for some of the fervor to calm so my piece isn’t lost in the mix.  Soon though.

Great to be posting again, and looking forward to being social once more.

PhDavid

Lots of reading in preparation for my defense lately - and the best one I’ve come across to date:

“I have no idea where you…happen to stand on the issue of stem-cell research.  It’s a complex, multi-faceted question, and there are two distinct camps: progressive intellectuals (who tend to favor stem cell research), and backward-thinking, antiscience, troglodytic imbeciles (who tend to be against it).  Both arguments are valid.”

- Chuck Klosterman

It’s rare that an author is willing to state it as straightforward as that.  Thanks, Chuck.

So after countless hours (specifically, too many to count and I’m tired of counting at this point) of formatting, corrections, and recorrections, on Wednesday I submitted my thesis to my committee.  Wow.

The picture above shows how many trees went into the first round of corrections - about 2.5″ worth - but that didn’t take up nearly as much time as other parts of the thesis.

My office paid the price for hard work, concentration, and apathy, and above is a glimpse of the paper-pulp city I’ve created, complete with supporting studies, methods as described previously, and figures after which to model my own.  Thanks folks.

And here is where I’ve been sleeping.  Sometimes in the sleeping bag, other times not.

But despite the blood, sweat, and tears of 6-years worth of work, the most challenging part - by far - is formatting the table of contents.  Here is me trying to ensure that the left margins are aligned (4th attempt)…

…and here is me trying to ensure that the left margins are aligned (12th attempt).  Trust me, it’s not as easy as it looks - not by a long shot.  MS Word gets a mind of its own when you start messing with this stuff, and after about 4 hours I think I finally have it right.  I think.

Now all that’s left is to defend the beast…in 11 days.  The final countdown?  For sure.  The final editing of my thesis?  Highly unlikely.

I predict my middle finger ruler will be used in the near future.

Some things you may or may not know about the OurlifeinIthaca staff (and I’ll leave it to you to decide who’s fanatical about what):

1) We’re obsessed with pristine audio

2) We’re obsessed with milk and Peanut Butter Chewy Bars

3) We’re obsessed with backing up data and memories

4) We keep track of The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, American Idol, Samantha Who?, Brothers and Sisters, Dancing with The Stars, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice - and record it when we can’t watch it live.

5) We have a higher-than normal standard of safety.

Perhaps you could guess most of those, but it may come as a surprise that #5 sort of applies to both of us.  Safety Sam is named as such for obvious reasons, but I have a firm belief of 2 safety issues: Have lots of fire extinguishers and have lots of flashlights.  Above are some of those in the house, and we’ve got at least a few more lying around.

You never really know when you’ll be without light: or more accurately, when you are, you’ll probably need it.  So we stock up.

But as the adage states, more isn’t necessarily better, sometimes it’s just more.  In light of this (that one was for you mom), I decided to do a comparison of the flashlights labeled 1-6 in the first photo and take 13-second exposures of the soft (also above) when illuminated by different light sources.  Here are the results -

Flashlight 1: (MicroMaglight)

Flashlight 2: (Mini Maglight)

Flashlight 5 (Big Maglight)

Flashlight 3: 200-lumen LED light (runs on 3 AAA batteries):

Flashlight 4: 900-lumen LED light (runs on 2 camera batteries):

Finally, the gargantuan floodlight (Flahslight 6):

As it turns out (and it might not have in the above pictures), the brightness of the lights was (greatest to least): 4, 3, 6, 5, 2, 1.  On top of it all, the LED lights last 10,000 hours and are as lightweight as they come.  You really should pick up a bunch of these (#3 above)- $12 a piece!!

The magic of LED light sources (shown above, taken from one of the flashlights) is paving the way in other areas of electronics - LED screens, flashes, and street lights to name a few.  Most importantly, they are a technology that makes us safer.  Just like pristine audio.

I kept glancing at the plastic bag occupying the passenger’s seat to see if it was moving: it wasn’t.  Rolling to a stop as the sign on my right commanded, I opened the bag slightly and peered inside - and he, too, wasn’t moving.  “Wait until Sammy sees this!” chanted in my head like the chorus of the song on the radio…but for now, music had taken back seat of my attention.

“Thanks for getting the groceries!” welcomed me as I opened the door to the house, and in the kitchen amidst piles of cut vegetables and fragrant shallots was Sam: knee-deep in the preparations of Thai lettuce wraps.

“Sam, you’ve got to see this moth I found at school! He’s huge! I put him in a bag so I could take some pictures”

“Did you remember the peanut butter?”

“Yes, two of them, but they were out of the reduced fat kind.”  I waited for her frown, and then: “just kidding.”

I presented her with her requests, and then opened the last bag to introduce her to my friend, excited for a response that I couldn’t predict like I had just moments ago.

“Oh wow, that’s a Luna moth. Actias luna.  He’s very pretty” Sam says as she wipes a tear from her eye.  The shallot cutting had been brutal.

“Are they rare?” I asked, gaining confidence in her authority of the subject? Sam’s far-reaching intellect had long-since ceased to amaze me.

“They aren’t rare, especially in the Northeastern states, but you just don’t see them that often.  They belong to the family Saturniidae, and they only live for a week.  Can you imagine only being born and realizing you have seven days to live?”  We were just in the middle of watching the Mysterious Case of Benjamin Button, and the topic of life had obviously been coursing through her mind while she worked away in the kitchen.

“Saturniidae?” I questioned, wondering if it had any significance or if Sam was merely showing off her smarts.

“Yes, that explains the short life span.  See, they don’t actually have mouths, and don’t eat during their entire life.  Their sole purpose is to mate and die.  And they only mate once a year…well, twice in this part of the country.”

“Seems odd that the species even exists, if they only live for the sake of reproducing?” I thought I’d stumped her.

“Do you really think it’s that odd?” she retorts.  “How is that any different from any other species on the planet, including you or I?”  Sam stopped tending to the shallots and looked up at me.  I stared back.  She then smiled and began cutting more confidently knowing that she had made her point.

“Noli irritare leones, dear.”  I hated when she said that.  We both knew she was right, but did she have to seal it with a Latin proverb?  I never should have dared her to master that language.

“Anyway.”  Damn it.  All I came up with was ‘anyway.’  “What else can you tell me about these guys?”

“Well, their eyes are where you’d expect them to be, but they have pesudo eyelets on their wings to suggest to predators that they are larger then they really are.  Take a look in your baggie again.”

She was right.  Fake eyes.

“That’s how you can tell male from female incidentally. Can you help me with these shallots? All this talk of eyes while I’ve been cutting shallots has made mine water.”

So I stopped looking in the bag as the woman on my right commanded, and the chanting “Wait until Sammy sees this!”  slowly faded away as the chopping of vegetables hopped in the passenger’s seat.

The trip was short, but this past week Sam and I got to spend time with our good friend Darren who was in town from Iowa consulting with Cornell and managed to get away from it all for dinner.  D has changed and he hasn’t - all for the better - and in no time we were reminiscing over old-time lab shenanigans.  We had a couple of dinners with him and showed him the town, which was somewhat familiar since he’d been here once before.

On our way to dinner, we parked next to this car, which is the perfect 1-pic encapsulation of what is Ithaca.  Allow me to describe:

1) Subaru Outback - the poster child of this town. You’ll run into a dozen on a drive through town, and 25 coming home from the gym to our house (I’ve counted).

2) 19 bumper stickers.  One of them (right of license plate) is green and says “Ithaca is Gorges.”

3) One of the stickers is pro-Obama.  We are the only county in the state of NY that chose the current president over Clinton during the primaries.

4) One of the stickers is anti-carnivore.  Actually, at least three of them are.

5) One of the stickers is anti-war.  More like three if them are, but the point is made.

I can only speculate that the owner of this automobile has a beard too, since that can’t be captured on a chassis but is widely supported by most of the people in town.  I’m glad that D was able to witness first hand what we’ve been talking about for the past three years.

I believe the earliest we’ve ever been out on the water is April.

This was back in Minnesota, where cohabitating with slimming icebergs was seen as customary rather than outlandish, and nobody looked at you differently for assuming the part.  We haven’t figured out the timing so far in Ithaca - well, we know it isn’t April - and thus this past Memorial holiday we consecrated Ms. Green on Cayuga Lake.

The sunny sky and thermometer suggested a cozy trip out - low 70s with a slight breeze - but the water temperature indicated that those slimming icebergs weren’t out of the question here either.

Safety Sam has a bizarre streak in her, that being the requirement to get out on the water at first launch, and since she is perpetually cold she needed to dress  appropriately on Saturday:

She ordered prosthetic limbs from Overton’s, and her fake hands are near-perfect resemblances of the ones she kept in the boat.

Even her fake head with intoxicated smile looked like the real thing.  We were missing a few screws (aside from the ones absent when she chose to go on the water) and couldn’t manage to make the head stay on straight.

Once she finally did get in the water it was business as usual.  While the chop of the water made Sam-esque tricks difficult to execute, she managed the jumps handily.  In fact, the above is part of a three-minute jump she held just to keep her body out of the frigid water.  She claims it’s all in the timing - and in the picture above, she’s checking her watch to see how long she’s been up there (46, 47, 48…).

Kim, who appears to lack the nerves that sense cold, hopped right in for a quick swim while we all stared in shock and took bets on hypothermia.  This is a tradition for her as well, and despite her British accent we’re convinced she’s a Minnesota native.

The day was great, and being on Ms. Green once again was comfortably familiar.  Looking forward to warmer temperatures and the end of the icebergs, we anticipate a splendid June.

It was only a matter of time before I succumbed to the allure of high definition and began researching 1080p technology.  Known to most as ‘Blu-ray’ or ‘the format that beat out HD-DVD,’ I’ve been hesitant to embrace the advance because until this year, it seemed as though Blu-ray was actively trying to commit techno-cide.  $1k players and $30+ movies, on top of $500 Blu ray recorders and $25 blank media?  No thank you.  However, precipitous drops in the cost of players - $150 today - as well as the movies (as cheap as $5 a flick), have forced me to reconsider.  And research. And get one.

Oppo, the best value in optical players, period, has recently released their first truly universal player which - on top of playing Blu-ray - can also read SACD.  This was absolutely essential to me, but the option is near-impossible to find except for old Sony PS3 game consoles (and those are loud and run hot).  When I received an email from Oppo telling me I could reserve one of the first units, we jumped at the chance - and last week it arrived in the mail:

Of course, purchases of this caliber require considerable negotiations in our household, and Sam agreed that we could get the player with the understanding that it was my graduation gift from her.  I haven’t graduated yet, so it currently sits under lock and key in the living room.

The caution above should read: “Handle with care - in fact, don’t handle at all.”  I had to sign a contract that guaranteed I wouldn’t open the box until after I defend in June.  The contract is on the refrigerator to remind me, but still Sam checks the tape on the box daily to ensure my veracity.

In the meantime, eBay and other media outlets have allowed me to populate our Blu-ray collection, and above are some of the best titles presented in the 1080p format.  Planet Earth should also be arriving any day.  Exciting times await our listening room…but wait they must for another month.

…you have to bring it outdoor plants because of a frost warning. Sigh.

Sam informed me that “we’ve got to bring in the plants tonight” which, according to our wedding vows, translates into “what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine, and we’ve got to means you.”  So after we moved in the herbs and flower pots, the above remains.

Not everything can be solved with heavy lifting, however, so we covered up the remaining flowers with tarps and pieces of boat lumber (chocking the wheels).  Speaking of boats, good thing we haven’t dewinterized yet!!

While surveying the scene I came across a nest of - well, I have no idea what this is a nest of but I don’t think I’m going to allow it to stick around.  No, mom, I’m not going to kill them…I’m just going to transplant them into a neighbor’s yard across the street who we feel is ‘more appreciative’.  Definitely not you guys Billy and Joe, but you probably know who!

What are these creepy crawlys?  Any ideas?

Hopefully the potential frost won’t spell trouble for our apple tree, which has been in full bloom for a week now.  Fingers crossed for the next couple of days.

Two of my favorite foods on the planet: Pulled Pork and White Castle’s Sliders.  Now someone - undoubtedly from the NASA program - has decided to merge them into one.   Pulled Pork Sliders: and there isn’t a Whitey’s in New York.

Somebody, please, tell me what they were like??