personal
pharyngula | December 31, 2007I'm saying it a few hours early because when the clock ticks over to midnight I expect you all to be snogging or otherwise partying away, unless you're one of those sensible types who doesn't think having to get a new calendar is anything to celebrate, so you're off to bed for a good night's rest.
Here at Chez Myers, we shall be taking a middle road with a quiet evening capped with our traditional root beer floats. Whatever your happy choice of the day, have a good 2008.
revere | December 31, 2007Year's end. We don't disclose how many Reveres there are or where they are (we don't even correct the rife speculation and usually incorrect assumptions in the Comments), but one thing we/I will reveal: there's only one Revere at a time. So it falls to this one to look back on the past year, which for me, personally, was a year of milestones. A new grandson came into our lives. He is beautiful and 7 months old. It helps make up for the one that didn't quite make it. On the other side of the ledger, my mother died this year. It was the day before Thanksgiving. She, too, was a beautiful person…
clock | December 28, 2007Yup, I had sarma for dinner tonight. It's been a while since the last time I had some, but Mrs.Coturnix fixed it today, inventing her own recipe along the way. It was delicious!
clock | December 28, 2007Here is the fifth and final installment of my Mother's travelogue. Feel free to ask questions. I will try to copy and post her published chapter from the book "We Survived" in about a month from now.
Family
Tuesday, November 13th
A beautiful, sunny day. I am trying to make myself look nice for the re-union with eight members of my family. They are coming from different parts of the country . We are meeting in the restaurant "London" at 10.30. A couple is coming from the North - a far-away kibutz - but that has not prevented them to be the first to arrive. I invited Isabelle to meet…
clock | December 27, 2007Here is the fourth installment in the series - the fifth is coming tomorrow. Please comment and my Mom will respond.
Fulfilled lives of Dina and Jovan Rajs
Sunday, November 11th
The Hotel Dining room could accomodate all 800 participants. Members of the Conference Committee used the oportunity to let Israeli officials, polititicians and scientists address the audience and point out the significance of our gatherings. To me it was an oportunity to watch them all and imagine them as children, like me, who were lucky as I was, to stay alive in spite of all that could have happened…
tlambert | December 25, 2007This was taken on Christmas Eve at the local seafood store. They were very busy inside.
Hope you all had a nice time!
jstemwedel | December 25, 2007The tradition in the Free-Ride family (passed down from my family) is that, on Christmas morning, no one gets to start opening presents until everyone is awake and ready to start opening presents. It doesn't matter how early the kids are awake. Until the last sleepy parent is ready, you just have to wait.
Santa does leave filled stockings on the foot of each bed, so there's something to keep you occupied, but that only keeps you satisfied for so long.
The fact that we are visiting the grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment introduces an interesting complication to the power struggle…
clock | December 25, 2007This is the second part of my Mom's travelogue from Israel last month:
Trauma of baptized Jews
Friday, November 9th
The Conference continues to work in groups. The topics are interesting but I had to choose one for the morning and one for the afternoon. The first group summoned together the people of the same age as me. I believed I had known much about the war and suffering. In the group of about 30 participants from different countries I realized how little I had known. Better to say, I knew quite a lot about what had been going going on here, in our country, but not much about the…
clock | December 24, 2007 A few weeks ago, my mother took a long trip to Israel to attend a conference of Holocaust Child Survivors. She wrote a diary of her trip and it was, in a slightly edited form (omitting most of the recounts of family gatherings), published in the Serbian newspaper Danas (Today) in its popular weekend column. If you click on the link, you can read the diary in Serbian language. She then translated her travelogue into English and asked me to publish it here, on my blog, for everyone to see. I will do this in a few installments, starting with the first one today and the rest will appear here…
pharyngula | December 24, 2007You've got to have something better to do.
We're having the traditional white Christmas here in Morris: a foot of snow on the ground, temperatures around 10 to 15° below zero C, a nice stiff 10-15 mph breeze, and no one with any sanity stepping outside.
Which rules me out right there. I made the drive to St Cloud and back yesterday, in even worse weather, to pick up #1 Son; I get to make the longer drive (but in somewhat milder weather) to Minneapolis to pick up #2 Son today. You might expect nothing but gibbering madness and exhaustion from me for a while.
So go do something with family or…
jstemwedel | December 24, 2007Having filed grades and extricated myself from the demands of my job, at least temporarily, I have come with my better half and offspring to the stomping grounds of my better half's youth.
Well, kind of.
The grandparents-who-lurk-but-seldom-comment actually live a couple towns over from where they did when my better half still lived at home. In fact, they only moved from that house a few years ago, so I'm much more familiar with the immediate vicinity of the childhood home than I am with the environs of the current house.
But we do this thing that folks in this part of the country are…
clock | December 23, 2007On Friday morning, there was a bang on the door and the UPS guy shoved a little cardboard box into our hands. Yeay! Our first XO laptop arrived. It is my wife's, and she named it Svetlana, after the character played by the commediane extraordinaire Iris Bahr. I took the opportunity to try out my present, the Pentax Optio T30, to take pictures of the grand opening. Then, in the evening, there was another knock on the door and my daughter's XO also arrived, so I had to take a few pictures of that as well (all under the fold).
The two of them have been chatting between each other and…
jstemwedel | December 23, 2007As I mentioned earlier, the sprogs and I decided to try our hands at building an entry for the contest to build a gingerbread house using sustainable building design practices. We read up on principles of sustainable design and stocked up on unsulfured molasses and powdered sugar.
Here's what we did and what we learned.
Every engineering project involves working within constraints. For starters, there are the contest rules:
Everything must be edible.
However half-baked (har har), there must be at least FOUR identifiable sustainable building design elements.
Your design must include a…
terrasig | December 23, 2007Well, what I mean is that I am back from my hiatus in me ol' stompin' grounds and now have a reliable internet connection.
I'm not one for posting pictures on the blog, especially when they have nothing to do with pharmacology. However, these should at least be of interest to fellow bloggers, Shelley and GrrlScientist. Plus, these are at least related to biology and science: I'm excited to note that during my travels, I came upon a nest of a southern bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus leucocephalus) family. The photos don't do it justice but this was the closest I could get without…
sciencewoman | December 22, 2007I think I've been tagged at least seven times for the meme where you are supposed to reveal seven unknown facts about yourself. But since I've been baring my soul on this blog for 2.5 years, I'm not sure I can come up with seven things I've never revealed before. Here's my best shot.
I have a case of the imposter syndrome with research. I think it is exacerbated by being very broadly trained and never feeling like I know as much as the specialists in any of my fields.
I enjoy reading blogs more than I enjoy writing my own. But I also have imposter syndrome when I write comments and posts. I…
drorzel | December 21, 2007Tomorrow, Kate and I will be heading off to Scenic Whitney Point to spend a few days with my family. Part of this will be the traditional Christmas Eve dinner with my father's side of the family (described in more detail below the fold). It occurred to me a little while ago that this is the one real tradition that I've never missed. At least, as far as I know-- it's possible that there was some year when I was an infant that we didn't make it to the Christmas Eve dinner, but as far back as I can remember, I've never missed one. Every year, we've gotten together with that side of the family,…
jstemwedel | December 20, 2007The grades are filed! I have officially dodged the bullet of delaying the family's get-away with my incessant grading (since it turned out to be cessant, I guess).
It seems only right to mark the occasion with a meme -- the "seven random things about me" meme, for which I have been tagged twice.
Here are the rules:
Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
Share 7 random and or weird things about yourself.
Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog…
sciencewoman | December 19, 2007I did this last year, and apparently it is to be another year-end tradition. Here are the first sentences to each month's first post. January - September will take you to the old site, but don't forget to come back here eventually.
January: While many people went on holiday over the past two weeks, a few people kept their regular blogging habits going strong. (While you were out...(women in science)) Back in the pre-Scientiae, pre-Minnow days when I had the time and energy to keep track of all the women in science blogospheric going-ons.
February: I got an email yesterday from chem guy - a…
jstemwedel | December 17, 2007Grades are due this Friday. Last Friday, the grader assigned to one of my courses was supposed to get me the grades for the online reading discussions that he was weeks behind on grading.
He didn't.
Nor has he responded to the emails I've sent him since then inquiring as to when he will give me these grades.
Nor has he been answering his cell phone, on whose voicemail I have been leaving increasingly frantic messages.
There is a real possibility that I will have to do this grading that the "grader" has already been paid for (since he is "salaried" this term -- as my grader). This could well…