We’re Back!

Geoff and I got back on Tuesday night from Colorado Spring where one of my bestest friends, Sarah got married. The wedding was BEAUTIFUL – right up against the mountains, and thunder rolling in just at the end. It was so dramatic. So we got in on Friday night and Geoff stayed in Denver with his friend Gabe while I attended the bachelorette party. Raucous women that we are, we ate Tex-Mex then holed up in a secluded booth at an Iris pub for the rest of the night. It was so amazing to get to spend so much uninterrupted time with Sarah, Sarah, Veronica, and LeighAnn and our new friend Amanda (Sarah’s roommate from undergrad). We realized we hadn’t spent that much time together in five years or more. So although we didn’t get wild, we did wear some pretty ridiculous accessories.



On Saturday, the other bridesmaids (I was the maid of honor) and I hosted a bridal brunch. Because the wedding was so small, we invited all of the women who were attending. All of Sarah’s friends plus some of the women on both sides came and everyone had a great time. I made a whole bunch of stuff for the brunch which I’ll post soon. Veronica organized everyone to bring photos of Sarah and write out memories and advice which we stayed up that night putting into a scrapbook for Sarah. My favorite photo is of Sarah as a toddler with a classic bowl haircut looking extremely skeptical of some vegetables. It was a great opportunity to spend some relaxing time together before the rehearsal that afternoon.



After the rehearsal dinner, which was at a cute old home in Manitou Springs, Geoff and Mike (Veronica’s fiancé) went to watch the LSU game while Veronica, LeighAnn, Sarah M, and I watched a chick flick in our PJs - just like old times! Veronica and I had to be ready for hair and makeup at 7:30 the next morning so we went to bed early to get our beauty sleep. The wedding the next day went perfectly. Everyone cried (I lost it before Sarah was halfway down the aisle) and looked gorgeous. Sarah asked me afterwards “Did that go really fast, or was it just me? It must have taken a while, because me feet are numb.”










The reception was fantastic. The toasts were all so perfect and sincere. The groom’s brother circulated a photo of him potty-training which was quite a hit and Sarah’s dad Steve gave a heartfelt toast about Sarah growing up and some of the shananigans we all got into. My toast ended up going really well and I stood behind Sarah so I managed not to cry. It is really hard to summarize a twenty year friendship in just a few minutes! Mostly I just talked about how joyful and adventurous Sarah is and how much I admire that about her.

The day after the wedding, the dry mountain air caught up with us and we came down with colds, but we took a quick trip to Garden of the Gods and then headed back to Denver.



I had dinner that night with my friend Dee which was so much fun. I think it has been eight years or so since I saw her so it was great to catch up. She is so amazing, super busy doing a gajillion things at once. Sadly I didn’t bring my camera. On Tuesday morning we headed home and I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to catch up. More posts coming soon! If you’d like to see more photos, there is a whole album here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2371010&id=16803882&l=b2fd0a6816

Rollercoaster Week

I’m sorry for the long delay since my last post, the last couple weeks have been really overwhelming. Briefly, for about three weeks now, I have known that my adviser was considering taking a job at another college starting in January. Thursday the 20th he told us that he would be taking a one-year leave of absence from Penn State effective the following Monday. He can remain my adviser but it means that he won’t be around for the last year of my research and my dissertation writing. Thankfully he can still sit on my committee and we are trying to work out how to keep in good contact during this year. My plan is still to graduate next August but I will have to be extra disciplined for the next year. I’m trying to look at this as an opportunity to really take control of my own research and be accountable to myself rather than anyone else.

To that end, I’m trying to figure out what needs to get done and create deadlines for myself. I have a bad habit of underestimating the amount of work I can get done in a day/week/etc., so I have started using this online to-do list that allows me to estimate how long a particular task will take and how much time it will take. (For example, I needed to prepare a bunch of data for analysis and estimated 4 hours, it took 12 hours, but I’m a much better perl programmer for it.) I’m trying to keep the daily estimate under 8 hours. If you want to keep track of what I’m doing (you probably don’t, and I’m fine with that), here is a public link: http://voo2do.com/pub/EQ_research. This week I am working on developing a set of genetic markers that reliably detect stratification in a sample so that it can be corrected for in analysis. Well, that is the long term goal. Really I’ve just been writing perl scripts to manipulate 2 gigabyte text files into something manageable. It’s a mental muscle that I haven’t stretched in a while and I’m finding it oddly satisfying.

In other good news from this week, our junior graduate student who decided to go with my adviser left a TA opening so I picked up a half TA-ship for Intro to Biological Anthropology which equates to a tidy little bump in my monthly paycheck and my NSF funding came through this week!! Within a week or two I should have the budget number to pay for the genotyping I need to do for my dissertation research.

This may sound like a downer of a weak, but though it has been stressful, it has also been productive. But I’ll be back soon with a bunch of fun stories and pictures from Sarah’s wedding. TTFN!

Tortilla Madness is Spreading

Inspired by my post, my friend Veronica tried her hand at making her own. Since Veronica doesn't have a rolling pin, she improvised by rolling the tortillas out with a cup from QuikTrip which I think shows Mission:Impossible levels of ingenuity. She says they weren't as thin as she would have liked, but you will notice that hers are pretty much round, not amoeba-shaped like mine were.

This Isn't What I Signed Up For

Let me start out by saying that I really am not complaining. I do love my job (most of the time) and the fact that I get to be the first person to ever know something about the genetics of human beings is unfailingly cool - even though it is usually something that other people wouldn't find that interesting. But it comes to my attention quite often that the reality of research is very far away from the concepts and challenges that first drew me to science.

Punnet squares transfixed me when I was 12 and I first came to love genetics. Now instead of Punnet squares, I apply statistical algorithms of varying degrees of complexity to determine the likelihood of two brown-eyed parents having a blue-eyed child yet I tell my students that it is 1/4 (just the way I learned it was 14 years ago) even though I know that isn't true. Once I reached undergrad, I got to spend my time running PCRs and determining genotypes by gel electrophoresis. It was like a miracle every time I mixed clear liquids together, heated and cooled them and then ran them through some glorified jello to produce glowing pink bands that told be about a person's DNA. Now I spend my time in front of a computer writing bits of code (with about a 5% success rate) to manipulate the genotype data I payed someone else to generate.

The point is this: I came to grad school because I love genetics and now all I do is statistics and computer programming. While these aren't my favorite things, I have no beef with statistics or computer programming the problem is that I thought I would be doing "Genetics" - amazing things like what I read in my text books. What no one tells you is that the breakthroughs that make it into textbooks are the culmination of an entire lifetime of work boiled down to half a paragraph. Only Darwin and Mendel get whole sections. The reality of any job that we dream of, even ballerina and astronaut, never quite matches the way we imagined it. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor something I'm just now realizing, but it is something that I have seen strike many of my friends and colleagues.

People who loved school and pursued degrees in art history, theater, meteorology, anthropology, English, and so many other exhilarating subjects found that there aren't really jobs where you get to "do" English or art history or anything else. For a few of the lucky ones, there are jobs that use their skills but usually not in the way that they had hoped. For an even more select few, we get to do what we wanted. And because I am one of those lucky few, I am truly grateful. I do get an occasional rush from research that I don't get anywhere else. But it was a knowing smile I gave my student the other day when he came in to talk to me about double majoring in Anthropology and Philosophy. I hope he enjoys writing copy.

Is it Worth it?

I wish I were making more of my own food. I have friends who make most of their own bread, cheese, yogurt, beer, and other essentials. For the most part, my friends make these things because they find that the quality of the food is better not to mention the fact that you know what is in it. This later issue has had me thinking as I have read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan which was recommended to me by Laurel. The simple premise is that we should be eating food, a radical idea only once you consider how much not-food there is in what we buy at the grocery store. To wit, this list of ingredients in Wonder Bread:
1. Whole wheat flour
2. Water
3. wheat gluten
4. high fructose corn syrup
5. soybean oil
6. salt
7. molasses
8. yeast
9. mono and diglycerides
10. exthoxylated mono and diglycerides
11. dough conditioners (sodium stearoyl lactylate, calcium iodate, calcium dioxide)
12. datem
13. calcium sulfate
14. vinegar
15. yeast nutrient (ammonium sulfate)
16. extracts of malted barley and corn
17. dicalcium phosphate
18. diammonium phosphate
19. calcium propionate (to retain freshness)

You may be familiar with calcium sulfate because they make drywall out of it. When I make bread, it contains:
1. flour
2. yeast
3. salt
4. water
5. honey (sometimes)

Beyond not putting weird things you don’t know what are in your body, it may actually be cheaper to make your own. I read an article several months ago in Slate magazine indicating that you can make less expensive, more delicious bagels, yogurt, crackers, and granola at home (although cream cheese and jam are about the same). So with all of these things rumbling around in my head, I’ve decided to start a semi-regular series that I’m calling “Is it worth it?” There is a long list of foods that I frequently buy that I want to try making myself. Bearing in mind that I am trying to complete my dissertation within the next year, a major consideration is how MUCH better is something given the amount of effort that goes into it. So without further ado, the first review is here.



Is it worth it to make your own flour tortillas? YES! Absolutely hands down. Homemade tortillas are chewy and flavorful (did you know tortillas could taste like something?) not to mention that their thicker texture saves you from the devastating burrito rupture. I made mine based on this recipe from the apartment kitchen and it was a snap. Mix everything together, wait 30 minutes while you assemble the rest of your fixings and then roll them out and cook them in a dry pan. Super fast and easy – the hardest part is rolling them out. I’ll admit that most of mine looked like a central African country, but they sure tasted like Mexico to me.