splishy splashy

We're Brothers!

I wonder if my brother felt this way when i got married

upright posture

He'll do anything for a cell phone.

weekending

Saturday morning this is what we saw:

Future pope?

Hell no!

Then he went crawling around on the floor even though he's in a sleep sack. 

We also saw some nice creatures in the back yard.

We went to the garden store that's open now even though it was flooded, and bought lots of bulbs. Then I had to make a new garden to put all the bulbs into. Oscar helped. He ate a lot of dirt, and sucked on a lot of mulch.

Last night there was a thunderstorm, and now the wind has changed. Goodbye Mary Poppins - hello fall.

further progress

Oscar now has two teeth, definitely. He even seems to have paused in drool production for the moment. Not only that, but he thinks he can stand all by himself. He's wrong, of course, but we indulge his delusions.

Just drove past this on my way home

~20 miles down the highway.

interesting times

What's up with the extreme weather, Colorado?

Eric's stuck in Castle Rock for the near future. Whenever the sun peeks out he might get some painting done. I'm ensconced at home - I definitely don't want to get stuck at school! The roads have all been dry, with no gigantic puddles. I think nothing should happen to our house. There is no indication that Horsetooth Dam is in trouble. The sun is out right now which makes all the talk of 5 inches of rain in an hour sound absurd, and yet I do hear that this is in our forecast for tonight.

Right now I'm working on a fellowship proposal that I do not want to do. But since I'm at home anyway I guess I might as well... It will not incorporate any of the nice images I've been taking. And, when I went to the store, which I only did because our cupboards were empty, and which was so full of people buying jugs of water already at only 10am, I forgot to get any candy!!! I've been eating Oscar's arrowroot cookies instead for brain fuel. I hope he won't mind.

Anyway, on to the good stuff. Oscar sleeps in many goofy positions, which we can see thanks to the video baby monitor. Eric likes to document these. It used to look a lot like an ultrasound when the camera was pointed at the side of the crib and you had to interpret whether the lump was Oscar's head or his butt, or just a wadded-up blanket.

Eric also likes to make fun of Oscar's robe, because it's ridiculous for a baby to have a robe! That may be true, but he does look adorable in it.

I have a suspicion that he's getting a second bottom tooth to keep the first one coming. Stay tuned! Further updates as events warrant!

tomato sauce

Eric's parents can grow some righteous tomatoes. Eric brought the ripe ones up with him last week, since they were on vacation, and I used them to make a just-right tomato sauce. The recipe is here:  http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2011/08/naked-tomato-sauce/

In brief, blanch, peel and de-seed three pounds of tomatoes and let them simmer for 45 minutes. Meanwhile, slowly (like, over 45 minutes) bring 1/4 cup of olive oil to a simmer with a clove of thinly-sliced garlic, a pinch of CRP, and a bit of shredded basil. Strain the olive oil and add to the tomatoes.
Cook the pasta until it needs one more minute to be done, so super al dente. Add the pasta to the sauce with a bit of pasta water and cook for that one more minute. Add a glob of butter and more basil and dinner is served!

The peeling and de-seeding part did take forever. However, the results were just right! I can easily see how people become obsessive over certain foods (Jiro and his sushi, for example) since it is unclear which of the many variables involved is crucial for achieving just-rightness. I am going to investigate the canned tomato avenue and see if that saves any time...

These are the hair cells (trichomes) on one of my transgenic plants. They're polka-dotted! Since the fluorescent protein is called tdTomato I thought it was appropriate to include here.

A plethora of milestones

Oscar is growing fast!  The past few weeks have been exciting, filled with teeth, crawling, and doctors appointments!   Evidence of his new crawling skills:



We are now on full alert when Oscar is un-caged.  He especially likes cat food and their water fountain. Every time he is set free he makes a b-line for a quick snack and refreshing splash.

The doctors visit was also a success.  He is healthy with no signs of pneumonia lingering.  He was happy to grab the doctors stethoscope.  He was measures and weighed as well.  His weight was right in the middle of the chart but boy is he tall.  This  is a copy of his growth curve:

The doctor was surprised at his agility and height but happy that he was bright and healthy.  Such a good baby.

gone fishin

Mendelian statistics

I now have a single-insert, homozygous, transgenic plant line! This is a big deal because I can let plants of this line self-fertilize and all the progeny will also be transgenic, forever and ever. These plants will let me graduate!

I know because I counted the number of plants in each generation that grew in the presence of an antibiotic. In the first generation, there was just one plant, the parent of all the following generations. The seeds that this plant produced were mixed: 70% grew, and 30% died on the antibiotic. This was good news, because it meant only a single antibiotic resistance gene was inserted into the genome. Sometimes, with the methods I used, the resistance gene can be inserted more than once, which makes tracking the genotype much more difficult. If that had happened, more like 90% of the plants would have grown, and 10% would have died.

So of the 70% of plants that were resistant in the second generation, I saved 15, and let them self-fertilize to produce the third generation. Each of the 15 plants produced 10-40 seeds, and I sowed all of the seeds on media containing the antibiotic: about 500 seeds in all.

I counted, for each second-generation plant, how many seeds were resistant or not. Six of the 15 had all resistant seeds: they were homozygous. Nine of the fifteen had mixed seeds, with 72% resistant:  they were heterozygous. Now I am growing up plants from the homozygous bunch to get lots of seeds to continue experimenting with.

It is interesting to see how the statistics play out in real-life. According to Mendelian rules of inheritance the resistance of heterozygous lines should always be 75%, and probably, if I had used more like 200 seeds, I would have seen that percentage. But with only 40 seeds to sow, these numbers look pretty good. If I want to be most rigorous, I will have to apply the Chi-squared test.

It is also interesting because I have followed this procedure not with just one plant line (meaning a first-generation plant) but 12: 6,000 seeds! And this is for just one transgene - I have 4 so far that I am making: 24,000 seeds! Each seed is placed by hand (my hand!) on the media. And this number of 24,000 is not quite sufficient to determine if the plant line is single-insert and homozygous just from counting the number of resistant plants. If I had plenty of seeds, I should look at 5 times as many: 120,000 seeds!

Mendel was a very patient man, and I am glad I have the Chi-squared test to rely on.

just stumbling along

it's still hot

but not quite so hot as before. The crystals hanging in the window in my room have started casting rainbows on the walls again. And I'm interested in oatmeal for breakfast. Soon Oscar will have to start wearing clothes when he's at home! To keep warm! Here's what he thinks about that:

Can babies have disgust?

yoga boy

Oscar had a nice way of eating Cheerios while we were in Maryland. He doesn't do it so much any more, though, especially now that he's got some sharp edges in his mouth! They are very sharp.