Baby News!!!

Well, we tried to keep it a secret, but people started to talk about it and we finally gave in...Taylor, Kaylee, Sam, Jackson, & Thomas will all have a new cousin to play with...

Click To Play Ultrasound Video:

Lucky Break

Nothing like ending your week with a little debit card fraud! We found out this afternoon that someone got Mara's debit card number and charged $650 at a Hallmark store in Kansas City today. Woo-hoo! If I'm stealing a debit card, I am NOT going to a Hallmark store! I'd go to Best Buy, Circuit City, or Alterra Coffee Roasters, but not Hallmark! What the hell did they buy? $650 worth of Precious Moments? :D
We called and got the money refunded, and her card canceled and reordered, so no loss. What we can't figure out is HOW they got it? First of all she has never even used the card, and second, she STILL HAS IT. We have no idea how they got the number, or paid for items without a card. We were just in KC 2 weeks ago and we thought her card would be missing, but it wasn't. Very strange.
Oh well. At least US Bank was really cool about it and we had the money refunded in minutes. Hopefully the catch the people, but I doubt it. Karma may get them before the cops do...:)

First Week Down!

Well, first week for me, but its like the 30th week for Mara...:) It's been a lot of fun to get back into a full time schedule for school, even though I also have my full time job in the lab. As soon as we sell our house I'll get rid of that and have a lot more time to spend at school. The biggest change for me is the time commitment. 7-5:30 at work with 2-3 classes worked in there as well, come home and eat, out the door by 7, study at school until 11 or so, come home and crash, repeat. I finally know why Mara gets tired at the end of the quarter!
It was really fun to study with Mara again. The last class we took together was Biochemistry at UWM, and we always studied good together. We studied together when I was taking my Virology class (and studying for the GRE) and she was studying for the MCAT, but there was not a lot of interactions since the methods for studying for those two tests are so different.
This quarter I'll have Medical Microbiology, Biostatistics, Oral Presentation, Immunology, and Grant Writing so it will be a full, intense 10 weeks, but so far it's been a blast! Medical Micro has been all about viruses and I love learning about those! Immunology doesn't start until mid-April, but Mara is looking forward to that class as well.
Well, we better get back to the books! Hope everyone has a good weekend!

The Inner Life of a Cell

Do we have some nerdy stuff for you! Mara found this animation last night and we stayed up until midnight just watching it! It animates a process called Leukocyte Extravasation which is when White Blood Cells respond to inflammation in a tissue; a very normal/regular activity in the body.

What makes this cool is all the structures are actually what they look like and how they behave. Old animations used ball & stick or ribbon diagrams, this uses what's called space filling and takes into account the electron density of the atoms. One example is Crescentin, which a certain bacteria uses for mobility. Left is the ribbon, the right is the space filling diagrams:

Anyway, this animation was put together by the Howard Hughes Medical Center and a ground called BioVisions at Harvard University and another production company. The video comes in 3 qualities. All have audio explaining the processes:

Super Speed: For fast Internet connections. Watch this one if you can! The detail is amazing! If the audio/video is choppy, just hit pause and wait for the video to download fully.

High Speed: Good quality video

Slow Speed: OK video quality, kind of small though

If this piques your interest, you can see other videos that BioVisions has put together: http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/media.html

This is one of my favorite pictures from the video. It's the actin (fiber) and myosin ("walker") moving a vesicle to the cell membrane.

What Do You Do When You Don't Study?

We are going nuts with nothing to do! We are such nerds we can't even relax! We are sort of frustrated here in K'ville, but we decided to explore a new park, sans puppies, called Sugar Creek. It's a nice 2 mile hike with some really good hills and talk about secluded. There wasn't much wildlife to see, other then birds, but we saw a lot of deer tracks. We also saw the remains of a deer that was probably killed by coyotes or wolves. Picked pretty clean from the picture! We were glad not to have the dogs with us then, we never would have gotten them away from that stench!
We've really needed to get some stuff around the house done as well. I got the gutter cleaned and straightened, Mara did some vacuuming, we rearranged our bedroom a little to put the bed by the window. We also bought a fire pit so we can relax outside with a fire on a cool night, just like we do at Dan & Holly's. We did find some time to throw a baseball around and went for a really good run/workout/racquetball session. It felt really good to burn off some of our anticipation for school!
We also found a new toy for Lucy. It's a stuffed beaver we call Chompers. Like Nate's squirrel he brought to her in Nebraska, Chompers lasted all of about 10 minutes before we had stuffing covering our floor. I do think Chompers won in the end though...
Hope everyone had a great week at work (HaHa). We are heading to Kansas City to hang out with Tim & Allison at her brother Rob's house. Should be a lot of fun! They have a really good coffee place called The Roasterie (FYI, our Alterra Coffee supply is getting painfully low...). Should be a lot of fun to get out of K'ville! Enjoy the pictures!

Also for you amusement, here is Lucy destroying Chompers. The video is sped up (Idea from Cousin Cari) so Chompers lasts all but 1.5 minutes:

Teddy Grahams

I have developed a taste for Oatmeal Teddy Grahams and everytime I open the box the dogs come running knowing I'll give them a few. We decided since they like them so much we'd make them do a few tricks to get them. As you may already know, Lucy is pretty smart and patient while Linus...not so much.

Lucy's a quick learner and we moved on to more advanced training. She was able to do the Double Teddy G and the Nose Teddy. Who knows what she's capable of now!


The video/pictures were obviously taken before her nearly debilitating camping injury. Hopefully this won't destroy her new-found abilities.

Another whirlwind vacation!

We should have known it was going to be bad when first thing Sunday morning our coffee carafe exploded sending shards of glass throughout the kitchen and destroying the last few cups of coffee. Not good to start a vacation low on coffee. Intent to start our vacation we left the shattered remains in the sink...
The ride down was uneventful and it only got warmer out the further south we drove. By the time we got to Lake of the Ozarks (3 hours south of Kirksville) it was 65 and sunny, perfect camping weather!
We got camp fully set up and were headed out on our first (& only) hike by 4pm. The trail along the bluffs above the lake was gorgeous and there was little wind. We hiked 1.5 miles only to realize the trail brought us directly back to our campsite. We turned back around and hiked back to the car. On our way back Lucy was hunting whatever moved and found a log quite interesting:

After running to town to pick up some firewood (apparently nothing in the State Park is open on Sundays...) we came back to camp to relax and fix dinner. Waiting for the fire to warm up we took Lucy down to the lake (10yds away) and threw her stick a few times. We noticed her holding up her left front paw but in her excitement she didn't seem to favor it much.
During supper we noticed her licking her paw a lot and got up to take a look. She had nearly torn her dew claw off and the gouge was so deep you could see the muscle. We made a make shift bandage (McGuyver style) from a sock, a bandaid, a baggie, and the tie from our tent. This bandage lasted until she ran on it and shredded the baggie necessitating a quick run to town for antibiotic spray, proper bandages and tape. Here's a video of Lucy clomping along shortly before the baggie got destroyed. (the song is from Jackson's toy pony, coincidentally Michelle's favorite song)

With Lucy bandaged and drugged (we never hike without puppy pain relief) we reassessed our trip and decided that our hiking trip wouldn't be much fun without the hiking part. We had the car repacked less than 20 hours after we arrived.
We removed Lucy's bandage when we got home and the wound had closed. We applied some antibiotic ointment and rebandaged her. We'll watch her pretty close the next few days for signs of infection and increased pain but all in all our patient is doing quite well. Linus is pretty jealous of the extra attention she's received but it's good for him not to be the center of attention all the time.
Here are some pictures of our trip, hope you enjoy them!

We're not quite sure what we're going to do the next few days but it won't be hiking with the dogs!

2nd Quarter is OVER!

February seemed to last forever, and with 25 tests/quizzes in 29 days it was TERRIFIC!

Linus & Lucy can be pretty needy when we're super busy and the following video is of Linus helping me study for my last Histology final. As you can see, I took a quick break to torture him.

I survived 2nd quarter relatively unscathed and I've already got my books & notebooks set up for 3rd quarter, I'm like a kid super excited for the first day of school! It will be fun to have a couple of classes with Mike this quarter as well, we'll be taking Medical Microbioloogy & Immunology. As you can imagine the conversations will only get dorkier!

Dynamic Mars

NASA just released some pretty cool photos (2,400 in all!) from their High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera orbiting Mars. Click on the pictures to see a larger image.

The first is just a cool shot (10.03.2007) of the Earth and the Moon from Mars (zoomed in slightly). Nothing incredible, just something to show our insignificance...:)

It reminds me of another picture of the Earth & Moon from the Mars Odyssey orbiting spacecraft (2001). It's a little grainy, but it still looks cool. The Moon is a little speck on the right side of the picture, you'll have to click on the picture to see it in full size:

Wonder why the moon looks like it's different distances in the two pictures? They are taken at different times in the moon's orbit so it's just an optical illusion...:)

The last one is the first picture of an avalanche (Ingrid's Avalanche-02.19.2008) taking place on another planet! The pictures zoom in from left to right. You can see in the top right picture the debris cloud on the right, and the white debris behind it:

ENJOY YOUR TUESDAY SPACE PICTURES!

FORE!

Well March 1 marked the earliest I have ever played golf...:) The Kirksville Country Club opened at Noon today and I was the FIRST one to tee off for the season. The first hole was a dog-leg right and I drove my tee shot through the fairway. Not a great shot, but good enough to be straight and long. I had a couple of good shots, a couple of great shots, and the rest were a little rusty. The course had a little ice/snow on it still, but with it hitting 60F today, that should mostly be taken care of. I took a few pictures with our camera phones so they are a little grainy, and the white balance isn't that great, but they get the job done.
Here is my ball in the 6th hole sand/snow trap:



One thing that cracked my up was some of the holes had ice in the cup so some of the flags couldn't be set in. Here is my ball sitting on the ice after a nice long putt:


The course was a little soggy, OK, it was REALLY soggy, but it didn't bother me one bit. I was just happy to get outside and enjoy the day's weather for a couple of hours. Here is a panoramic shot of our 5th hole, 325 yard par 4. The lake is still frozen, the grass is still brown, but it's 60F, and I can't complain...:)


I do want to thank everyone who pitched in for my early birthday present, and paid for some of the membership fees for the Country Club. It's really great to be able to enjoy golf without playing $40/round like in Milwaukee...:)