awolnation hits Plum Street

The harvest

Here's our potatoes we grew this summer - no fertilizer, no nothing.

They are delicious.

Jokes Bu.

So I was in the shower the other day thinking how nice it is to be secular when a joke boiled up from my under developed funny cortex:

What do you call a Christian who follows three atheists?

A Non-Secular!

(Its funny because it sounds like you say non sequitur)

Anyway I thought it was good.

Yo Annie

Check it out, you've got famous company:

Bill Clinton is a vegan!

Also he weighed 185 pounds when he was 13!

On Saturday Paul and I had a big day. We went to all the thrift stores except one. At EcoThrift the cashier kept looking at me funny as I was shopping until he rang me up. Then he said, a St. John's graduate I see (I was wearing my red intramural tshirt). He had gone to Santa Fe for one year a loooong time ago and we had a little convo about that, never minding all the other people wanting to buy shit. Even though he had only gone one year he still loved it and thought about it and got requests for money from them. Yay school!

Paul found himself a galileo's thermometer and a wicker basket his fellow teacher may use for a crow's nest, while I had found some new clothes. Like I needed them...

The other stores were boring except one had a birthing stool! And an ancient toaster where the toast isn't popped in and out but instead the sides flap down. Paul did find a lot of good things for his classroom too.

Somehow we were shopping for four hours! Why?! When we got back I treated myself to a refreshing little nappy.

Later on we were all hanging out in the back yard and I mentioned that a fire pit is only $50 from Target. This prompted Eric to immediately begin digging out a pit, and he then coerced Paul into moving all the dirt from the pile that he had made into the garden. Then they burned some scrap wood and then they burned some freshly-pulled thistles. Thistles do not have a pleasant burning smell at all. And they are wet! and smoky! And it was not chilly out at all!

It has gotten a little chillier lately, at least less oppressively hot, and some of the aspen leaves are turning. The wind is making a more rustly sound in the trees too, and school starts next week! So maybe this firepit thing will work out after all...

last day

So this already happened a while ago but it's worth remembering.

1) We woke up, and packed, and checked out. The shuttle wouldn't be ready for half an hour so we went to breakfast in the hotel. I requested a bagel but they were out of bagels so I had my choice of bread substitute free of charge (I chose an English muffin). I put all the jam I could on that sucker.

2) We got there. We actually saw some of the minisymposia! We went to the very end of one on cell walls and heard someone talking about CesA10-12 and all the different activities of these enzymes. Meh. Then we saw all of one on metal ion issues. The first girl presented on iron-phosphorus homeostasis interactions. The text of her talk was very clear and the logical reasoning was well presented, which is rare, but she was a very nervous speaker. Someone asked her a question at the end and she could barely say that she didn't know the answer. Then someone else, amazingly, asked her another question, and she lost the use of her tongue entirely. Fortunately no one pressed on, although more interesting questions could have been asked.

The next speaker talked about the search for an iron transporter in the mitochondria - which remains to be identified. She found a protein located in the mitochondria but the evidence for iron transport activity was weak. She spoke incredibly loudly and forcefully, particularly in the introduction when she discussed how important iron was for human health.

The next speaker was a chemist who talked about different ways to trace metal uptake and overaccumulation in Arabidopsis. She used radiotracers to examine different mutants to see if their iron or uranium or mercury content and localization differed.

The last speaker was amazing. She works at POSTEK in South Korea and was extremely poised and confident and thoughtful. She talked about arsenic overaccumulation and had found a mutant that allowed more arsenic to be sequestered in the vacuole, so the mutant could grow in soils with higher levels of arsenic. She showed one of Lianne's figures on hyperaccumulation!

Eric was surprised that most of these speakers were graduate students or post-docs presenting their thesis research, instead of being professors as is the case for the symposia. The topics are even just as important and broad as those for the symposia but for whatever reason it is like a fancy poster presentation (and most people did also have posters) instead of a serious "talk".

3) Whew! On to lunch! We went to a sweet cafe in the other direction from the hotel for once. It was called Jerusalem's and had delicious Middle Eastern food. Our waitress had curly hair done in a mohawk and giant dangly earrings. She, like all our other servers, was super friendly and helpful. We sat out on the patio which had a grape-vine ceiling, and talked about the future of the world while we munched on falafels.

4) Zip! Back to the conference! Eric really wanted to skip it, as did I, but my conscience said since it was the last set of talks and it was on biofuels we really should check it out. I think now that we might have skipped it and happily read our books at the airport, or in the park. But some sweet drawings did come out of it.

Speaker one was the Undersecretary for Science. He told us about energy in the US generally, and said how we will never have energy security as long as we rely on liquid fuels. The UK is apparently energy independent and yet their fuel prices fluctuate based on the world price which is still set by OPEC and the like. So electric is probably the way to go. But, the grid needs overhauled in that case. And depending on the source of electricity, the grid would need to be redone in different ways. Also, planes still won't be able to run on electricity, so some renewable fuel options are still worth pursuing. Heavy trucks, too. But, light duty trucks and other cars have just had the fuel standards revised. The light trucks especially have been getting heavier over the years without decreasing the fuel efficiency, which means it will be very easy to increase the fuel efficiency by simply making the trucks lighter. The point being, the energy situation overall sucks, but there are some easy options for making it a little better. Another good thing is energy efficiency in buildings - very easy to improve that without adding to the building's expense just by doing things like adding working blinds and windows that open.

Speaker two was Maureen McCann, wife of Nick Carpita the current ASPB president. She works at a biofuel research place in Illinois doing crazy things like engineering plants to have metal binding sites in them so that the same inorganic metal catalysts that are used for refining petroleum could be used to refine plants. She is very good at explaining things and I hope to get her to speak at CSU.

Speaker three was Dick Sayre, recently at the Photosynthetic Antennae Research Center. They are manipulating microalgae there to have different photosynthetic efficiencies, something people thought nature had already engineered to a T. But, it turns out nature is not entirely focused on energy capture but also on preventing competing organisms from successful energy capture. So the algae absorb all this radiation that they are unable to use, thereby preventing the other lower down algae in the culture from getting as much light. This also means they have to use their metabolism to dissipate all the unusable light energy as heat to prevent damage to their photosystems, and ultimately makes them less efficient at energy capture and storage. Crazy!

Speaker four was Robert Blankenship but Eric and I were so wrapped up in drawing things on the laptop and generally goofing off that we left after fifteen minutes. Also everything was running super late again so we thought we might as well go.

5) To the airport! We walked to the light rail station and rode in to the airport and everything went smoothly. We found the gate, nothing special was happening there, so we got some food and fresh margs at the Tequilaria. I called Elizabeth while we were there and had her check my email and learned that my grant application was not selected for further consideration. This was for the C2B2 Seed Grant program. Oh well. Also Eric called around all his friends trying to find someone who could pick us up at the airport, but they all came back with lame excuses, even though they would get reimbursement from his travel grant. Finally Josh discovered Kristina would be at the airport already anyway - perfect!

6) We landed, taxied up to the gate, everyone's getting off quick as they can. This airplane and the one we took there had weird overhead bins that were extra deep but also extra shallow so there was much squishing of bags to get them in and then pulling like demons to get them out. So it was going slowly. Then the plane's power went out and for a second we were completely in the dark, no air blowing, totally quiet. Eric and I were seated in the next to last row and there was still quite a crowd in front of us. Fortunately the emergency lights turned on and widespread panic was averted.

7) Home at last! Go team! I don't think either of us will go to a conference like that again, at least not for the full length of the conference, unless we're both well-funded and it's a secret vacation. Minneapolis was really cool though and I would like to go back and see the lakes and the sculpture garden with the giant spoon with a cherry in it, and of course Mall of America, the largest indoor mall around.

It took a while to realize that I was falling asleep in all the talks not because I'm dumb or bad at paying attention but because these people are really bad talk-givers! Totally unaware of the audience and their requirements, etc... It was like when I first started reading papers and realized the ones that are really hard to understand are actually just very badly written. Once you have a little background in a subject the scientific jargon becomes less of an obstacle so that well-written papers explaining something complicated don't seem so terrifyingly obscure, and it becomes clear that if the paper is terrifying, it is the fault of the writer and not the reader.

We made it home!

These are some of the pictures I drew on MSPaint during the boringest talks. Wiley, this one is for you. I had a dream about you having a very successful tshirt printing company, and I was trying to start my own but was unable to model the wares properly. Your best seller was a lavender hoody with a black owl printed on it.

This one Eric drew of me.

This one was on the plane.

And this is the best of all.

penultimate day

Today we slept in but forgot to bolt the door shut, only having the privacy latch shut. Housekeeping woke us in a timely manner. The only shuttle available brought us there after all the morning talks were done, so we went for lunch straight away at Brit's Pub. There is a bowling green on the roof of this establishment. We thought to eat up there but no one was bowling and it was quite windy, so we escaped back to the indoors. They had fine British beers on tap, and the most excellent fish and chips I've ever sampled. Eric even ate the tartar sauce!

We prepared ourselves for the symposium of the day, on Plant Carbon Cycling. The first speaker was an Australian who seemed like a nice guy and tried to make it interesting, but he just didn't make any sense. He was using equations to discuss modeling of photosynthetic rates in shade leaves versus high light leaves so making sense is a tall task. No one had questions for him.

The second speaker seemed like a business man with a plan for saving the United States - all you have to do, it's very simple really, all you have to do is - instead of planting all this corn for ethanol like you're doing now, well, just plant miscanthus or switchgrass instead.

There are several problems with this simple idea from a business perspective, including, resistance to change, resistance to planting perennial instead of annual crops (because you can't change what you plant if the markets change), no biorefineries in the area, and no cheap conversions of lignocellulosic biomass into liquid fuel. However, from an ecologist's perspective, it's great! The land becomes a carbon and nitrogen sink, so that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, and the biodiversity of the landscape increases from 2 plants (corn and soybean) to 3 or maybe even 4. He got one question.

During the coffee break we sat in the hall and read our books. Eric is devouring the Collected Sherlock Holmes, while I am whizzing through the Anne of Green Gables books. I'm already on Anne's House of Dreams, and I remember some key plot points that I'm just waiting to have divulged. So we reluctantly began to pay attention to the third speaker, Paul Falkowski. I have read his work before on photosynthesis and already had a sense that he is a crank. He told us about the two carbon cycles in the evolution of Earth. The slow cycle is very slow and ancient, and caused all the carbon stores of the Earth to be locked up in rocks. Soil carbon sequestration or biomass turnover mean nothing compared to the carbon content of these rocks. The fast carbon cycle is based on photosynthesis and also relates to oxygen availability. He spoke very quickly and determinedly and I stayed awake for the whole thing. His biggest point was that oceans are an amazing store of carbon as part of the slow cycle - but it's only good for carbon sequestration if inorganic carbon is entering the oceans, such as limestone. The rate of production of carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels is unable to be countered by normal oceanic absorption, so if we don't quit it with the fossil fuels we're fucked. Thank you for your attention.

He got many questions.

The last speaker is convening the next international panel on climate change, and reminded me a lot of Pat Reeves. He showed us how we have very good ways of measuring carbon fluxes in the air and the ocean, as well as overall, but carbon flux on the land is just "whatever's left". This is an embarrassing situation for scientists, so he showed us some new tools that might help alleviate this problem. Nevertheless, he agreed with Paul Falkowski that burning fossil fuels is definitely not helping anything.

And that was that. Eric had to do his poster session now, which meant standing by his poster for two hours so that no one could talk to him. This was the even-numbered poster night. I looked in the program for any interesting posters I might check out, and they were all odd-numbered. So I wandered around very bored eating popcorn. Eric had popcorn too, and some people did talk to him - a busybody lady with purple rimmed glasses and a purple backpack and a purple sweatshirt tied around her waist, who told him the only way to get to know people at a convention was to talk to them, and who told him she didn't know anything about copper or laccases. Then a drunk guy talked to him about the drunk guy's project (there was a cash bar set up in the poster hall, so people could get to know each other easier). And a lady from Cold Spring Harbor told him that his microRNA target prediction was all wrong and her way is much better.

But then it was done, and now Eric can take the poster back and hang it in the hallway and put it on his resume. It was a very awkward and boring time all around.

We went back to Brit's Pub to celebrate, and this time it wasn't windy at all and people were bowling on the green, mostly wearing white, which looked very nice. We had some drinks and then the shuttle took us home. Our previous drivers had all been African immigrants but this dude had pink Ray-Bans and a creeper mustache and was very white. He still wore a suit-jacket like the other dudes so it wasn't 100% creepy but still...

We realized that we were still hungry so we finally succumbed to the Wendy's across the street and enjoyed many fine selections from the dollar menu. In Fort Collins just before leaving they all had Wendy's and the fries had so much salt on them they were literally inedible - except to Tai who thought they were a little salty. Stupid guys being tough! These fries, though, were just right, as were the Frosties and the sandwiches.

The pool at the hotel was full of noisy kiddies again, including the hot tub, so we forsake that pleasure in favor of hot showers. Eric has now finished the Collected Stories of Sherlock Holmes and has only the Memoirs left, which he will save to start tomorrow.

Monday, monday

Well we got there. First we heard about protein targeting to the chloroplast via the Toc/Tic complex, and particularly Toc 159 and its variants, but I fell asleep before we got to hearing about chloroplast biogenesis. Then there was a talk by Roger Hangarter which was awesome. He also told jokes and showed funny pictures and also serious pictures, and also movies. He studies chloroplast movements in response to light. The effect has such subtlety that you can shine a greyscale image on a leaf and after about thirty minutes you can take away the image and view the leaf in normal light and there it will be in greenscale.

So those were cool, and he also had microscope movies of chloroplasts moving within a cell in response to different treatments. He has a postdoc position open but I won't be graduating for a while yet...

For the coffee break we went to a real coffee shop and had breakfast, too. A new crazy lady appeared in our lives, she was very quiet but her eyes were very squinky and her jaws were very gummy. Every time I looked up from the table she was squinking at me, but maybe that's just how her eyes were. She looked like a mumbler when I first saw her, but then once she sat down with her drink and her muffin she was like an ordinary person - except for the eyes.

They had tic-tac-toe games on the paper napkins at this coffee shop, and Eric taught me a few things about x and o strategy. He even let me win a few times. We decided we weren't interested in any more organelle activities, but there wasn't a shuttle from the hotel for a while, and we weren't going to make the mistake of trying to walk again. So we found the bus, and the walk up Industrial Boulevard was actually quite nice without any roller bag to haul around.

Then I took a nap, and Eric read Sherlock Holmes. I woke up in time for us to get back for the Minisymposia but then I decided I'd rather sleep some more. Eric had just gotten an email from Rien saying that the big symposia wore him out and we should be sure to take some breaks, so we felt quite justified in staying in. When I woke up for real I felt a little guilty, because one of the sessions was on Fertilization and Embryo Development, which is what most of Pat's research is on, and another was on Biofuels - except, biofuels in this case meant lipid production from algae. Is this how most professors deal with this conference? Do they pick and choose and have hours and hours every day free? Do they spend a lot of time writing in their hotel rooms, free from distractions? Or do they force themselves to sit through every session and go to all the events? One striking thing is that people rarely ask questions at the end of a presentation. So what are they doing while they're sitting there for half an hour or so? Wool-gathering while looking respectable? It's very frustrating, I'm not sure what we're doing here or what we're supposed to get out of it, especially when truly entertaining talks seem to occur at random. Who would have thought that "Regulation of light-dependent chloroplast movements in leaves" would be so interesting?

But it is our first time at a conference, and no professors are here except Dan Bush who is schmoozing all the time and not taking us out to lunch, so I suppose we can do as we please.

An aside: Rootabaga Stories are available on the Kindle - no illustrations, just the text, but still - I made Eric listen to the first story about Gimme the Axe and his family traveling to the Village of Liver and Onions, and he neither fell asleep nor flew into a rage, so I guess he's a keeper.

Another aside: On Sunday, the second speaker about RNA was utterly unmemorable except for his habit of saying "per se" at the end of every sentence. It was making Eric quite squirmy to hear it after a while, although then he adopted it himself and uses it quite freely now. Per se. I wonder how you would even pick that habit up.

aspb day 2

Wealll we had room service first of all. What! Fresh toast delivered to my doorstep or threshhold or what-you-will? I'm in! But I had to go swimming in the pool when I awoke, so Eric was left to be roused from his slumber by a demanding door-man. When I got back - with two coffees mind you - Eric was already awake (bonus!).

We feasted and took the free shuttle in to the Convention Center in time for the first talks on regulatory RNAs. I cannot even remember the first two talks because I was dying of sleepiness. I began to think swimming so early might have been a bad idea.

Then there was the coffee break, at last! A woman tried to cut in front of me and I told her, Excuse me, we've all been waiting. She was quite chastised and I happily got my coffee in front of her. Then we stood around for twenty minutes and I felt really dumb for fussing about the line. I had another cup to soothe my nerves.

We went back in and listened to Pam Green, whose lecture I also don't remember, but I do remember her because she was the only woman and she was the organizer. I started feeling like a big failure at this going to conferences thing. Next was Leslie Sieburth, a man, who claimed to have exciting videos related to mRNA decay, so I prevailed on Eric to stay so that we might see these exciting videos. I have no idea how exciting they might have been, because half-way through Johnnie called.

He said he had big news, and I said with my normal volume voice in the hallway devoid of people to absorb the sound waves, Oh, Rachel's pregnant! He said I wish and then told me the real news. I had to walk outside to hear it. Then I had to call Mom.

Mom agreed that the giant symposia on subjects not to your interest sounded sucky, and said I should get her a postcard, so that I would have a mission to fulfill. Instead I took a nap on Eric and then we got lunch at a fancy restaurant.

We made it back in time for the next symposium, on Vegetative Development. The first speaker, Jocelyn Malamy, talked about lateral root mutants and what sort of signals affected lateral roots. It was interesting to look at her pictures of roots until she started talking about the mechanisms. Then Tobias Baskin talked about polarity in roots. He actually made a joke, and spoke with modulated tones, so Eric and I liked his presentation a lot. The next speaker had just gotten a faculty position and was just setting up her lab, so she told us a little of her post-doc work and of what she hoped to do in her lab. This could have been an exciting talk full of potentialities and theories instead of just boring data, but instead she whispered to us about the body plan of mosses. I was out.

We went into the sunshine and light and thought it was such a nice day we might as well walk back to the hotel, especially since it was just 2.7 miles. Again there were the crazies, and the angry young people, and lots of smokers. No one smokes in Colorado, I realize now. We went past the ING building which has crazy patterned marble slabs all around the outside, and many fountains, including one that is a long trench going from the building, which is set back a ways, right up to the sidewalk. The water is carried along several feet above the ground until bam! It falls right in front of you in a glorious sheet.

We walked over the Mississippi River, and I spat in it for good luck. There were apartments on the far side of the river with balconies, and I envied them their umbrellas and their beer buckets and their view. By now we were ready to be done walking, but we were only halfway there. We moved further and further away from the downtown but fortunately the neighborhoods didn't seem too run down. There were also no grocery stores where we might have gotten some food supplies. We saw a couple who had clearly just come from the grocery store, but when we looked down the street they came from it was blocked off with a concrete wall....

Eventually the houses ended and we were back to old Industry-Land. But finally, finally, we got there. Aahhhh. I checked on Google maps and it was 5.2 miles from the convention center to the hotel what?!? So we took our tired feet down to the pool where a family was throwing a ball back and forth, and the one 11 year old boy was dying for their incompetence at keeping it in the air, and letting us all know. The hot tub was closed too.

So we got dinner at the hotel restaurant and thought about what would happen the next day, and rested comfortable in the knowledge that at least we did something with ourselves this day.

aspb 2011!

So Eric and I are at the American Society of Plant Biologists' Conference here in Minneapolis MN. Minneapolis is a pretty nice town, granted that we're seeing it at its best. Very clean, lots of "ambassadors" to help people find where there going and to help keep it clean. Neat architecture - a few Frank Lloyd Wright houses hiding around. You can look at the outsides of these houses but since people actually live in them there are no tours. Also, and most amazingly to us from Colorado, there is water Everywhere. Fountains and reflecting pools and lakes... In the actual city there are mostly fountains and they are spectacular.

They also love their beer here, not so much the microbrews like Fort Collins although Fat Tire is available at the finer restaurants, but beer generally is adored. The local beer is called Grain Belt Nordeast, a pleasant, unoffensive light beer, and we walk past its distribution center on the way to the hotel.

Now the hotel is interesting. Eric booked it the week before we left. First he wanted some other hotel, that only had smoking rooms and No Pool! that was a little closer to the convention center. I luckily was there to supervise and said No, no, this won't do at all. So we found this place, which is only non smoking rooms and a pool, and 2.7 miles from the convention center. Fine. It's on Industrial Boulevard. Fine.

Our neighbor on the plane here was a Knights of Columbus charity organizer, very friendly, who said there's lots to do in Minneapolis at night but if as newlyweds we just had sex all night that's fine too. He also said we should take the light rail to downtown and then a cab to the hotel.

We took the light rail to downtown and then asked an ambassador for help, and he pointed us to the 61 bus, which went right to Industrial Boulevard.

The bus arrived, the bus dropped us off, and we were left to walk to the hotel. This proved daunting because Industrial Boulevard is home only to distribution centers for 3M, Nordeast, Restaurant Food Supplies, etc., and they found sidewalks unnecessary. It looked like we were walking to the middle of nothing on a fine Friday afternoon - but at last, the hotel sign was sighted, we were checked in, all was well. Eric nobly handled the roller bag through the industrial jungle.

We ate at the hotel and the waitress was from somewhere much warmer in Africa, but she was very cheerful nonetheless.

The next day we took the free shuttle (!) from the hotel to the Convention Center, got Eric's poster set up, and assessed the situation. There was nothing to do until 12:30, when the inaugural speeches began, so we wandered around the downtown area. The KoC dude on the plane told us about a sweet sculpture garden not far from the convention center, but we haven't made it that far yet. Instead we just walked down Nicollett Mall, where there were an astounding number of crazy people. Mostly this manifests as shouting. There was one dude shouting at the street maps next to the bus stops, just "AAAAAAA! AAAAAAA! AAAAAAA!" while holding a shopping bag, mind you, much like the dude in Toronto that Johnnie showed us on YouTube, so upset that the mall was closed, although in this case the source of his frustration was more mysterious. There are also many street performers like a dude with dreds wearing a dress playing the accordion. Fine. Not harmful, not begging neither.

We looked in a rare books and art store, and the guy tending the store vacuumed around us the whole time we were in there. We took it as a sign that we could afford nothing - quite true - although much of the art was just awesome. Hand done sketches of fowl for hunting, or Dr. Seuss prints, or triptychs of hens and ducks - for example. So he effectively chased us out with his dust-sucker, and we took refuge in Barnes&Noble instead, where I found some nice stationery for all the thank-yous we have left to write. (No refuge for Eric, in other words.)

Then we wended back to the Convention Center in time for the opening remarks, which were amazingly embarrassing. First, Nick Carpita (the president of ASPB who I met in Brazil) told us that "We have a lot to learn about plants and the kind of people they are." I wrote that one down. Then a Lakota dude chanted and wailed on a tom-tom, and then spoke for a long time in gobbledy-gook. He tried to translate it for us but kept getting distracted into asides; the gist was that this was Lakota land, right where we were sitting now, and plants were considered a sovereign nation by the Lakota. When they gathered any of the four plants used for big medicines, they prayed to the plant nation. Also, there are plants that he recently learned about that will let people fly, and others that will let women stop their menstrual cycles. We should really check that one out, he said. His whole deal was supposed to take 5 minutes but it took more like 30. Then an ASPB member, also Lakota, and Nick Carpita wrapped him in a blanket that they had made for him, to symbolize wrapping him in the gratitude of our society.

The awards were given next, and then the first symposium of speeches by last year's award winners happened. It was all very boring and we fell asleep alot. Once we had eaten and returned to the hotel we took a little break at the pool yay and got ready to start over the next day, fresh with no mistakes in it yet.

TBC...

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Yo-Yo

Its been a while. Just an update in case ya'll aint keepin up we have another blog you should check out. Surprisingly we manage to post on it even less then this one but it does have some sweet stuff to check out. Pat Reeves our band leader manages it and is always posting new versions of LDS songs (that's Lay Down, Sister...our band for those of you not in the know). If you stop over their you can here some of our tunes with many more on the way. They are in varying stages of completeness from single take recordings to multitrack, 100 hour edits so you never know, like I said if we get new take we usually upload them. There is little else to do oover there but comment. If people start checking it out it will also encourage us to be more active. Anyway that was long and boring so go listen to some garage power country over at:

http://laydownsister.blogspot.com/

Please comment and check back whenever you want to give us virtual high fives.
Kirk out.