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: