The Knot   Registry: Bed Bath & Beyond | Target

On the up side for yesterday, Mark taught Meagan to make his gumbo, which is quite delicious. I think it made up for the terrible movies, and also helped with the cold that I currently have to go along with my putatively broken toe when we had it tonight with Meagan's family. It also could have been helped by my mother's delicious cooking when we had lunch with my parents and brothers at my parent's house today for lunch. It's always nice when all of us are able to sit down and have a meal together.

Other than that, things have been pretty standard for the past couple of weeks. Meagan and I had a nice Valentine's home-cooked meal, and look forward to our dating anniversary this Tuesday, which, although we're married and have that anniversary now as well, is still important to us and brings back lots of good memories. My wonderful girl is still amazing me after 8 years.

31 January 2012, 6:45 AM
Maybe with Facebook and Twitter now, blogging isn't necessary anymore, I'm not sure. Maybe there's still a place for it, though. A quick update since September: everything is good and pretty much the same, work is good, school is good, etc etc. Meagan and I are continuing our quest towards the American dream by doing things around our house here and there. This weekend we'll have the exciting task of building a shed in the back yard. The bad thing about that previous sentence is that, we actually are excited about it (at least I am) because it means that eventually we can get all of the outside tools and stuff out of our basement, which means we can eventually overhaul the basement and have an awesome movie pit down there or something else equivalently awesome. And I might get to build a spiral staircase to go down from my office, which I guess would be pretty cool.

Now, for some more specific updates. On work stuff, things are about the same. Again, I'm limited in what I can say here, but I'm excited about the systems I've been working on and I think we'll start getting a lot of good data out of them soon. School: things are generally good on the school side of things, I'm only taking one class this semester, a drug discovery course for the Howard Hughes program, so I've got a pretty open semester to work on my research stuff. It's nice, I only have 9 elective hours between me and never having to take any graded classes again (besides pass/fail classes), unless of course I did something silly like decide to go to med school after getting my PhD, but I think that's a long shot.

Now, on to the topic of the last post. I'll touch on one important point in science which is why we care at all about studying flies and worms. I'm thinking about this because of an interesting science paper that came out in Science recently (you can read an article about the paper here if you aren't at a university and thus don't have access to Science papers). I think this is a really interesting paper laying down some cool ideas about one mechanism that may be in place to help keep memories consistent, and it's a study that's done in flies. Clearly, important work is going to follow in mice and other more relevant models, but this paper makes a very nice first step and does it in a system that one may not think would allow insight into how memories are formed. However, because of the (relative) ease of looking at things in flies, it's possible to ask insightful new questions like this.

That's all for now, just thought I'd jump in a post a few tidbits. Off to the lab now...

25 September 2011, 11:38 AM
My goodness I guess I've sort of abandoned blogging. I suppose I should find new things to write about. The progress of house projects could certainly be one topic. Also, perhaps, could be writing about what it's like to be a grad student in the life sciences, as I realized the other day when speaking to Meagan that most people probably have no idea what we do on a day to day basis. I suppose it was not too long ago when I was in a similar boat, and was intimidated by papers with three line long titles lacking any normal english words. I will have to be careful, because some of the things I'm doing I actually can't talk about in detail, but I think I can safely talk generally. I'll start today with a big overview of what me and my friends in similar positions do. Basically, we ask some questions about how biological systems work based on work that has previously been published, then we figure out ways to answer those questions in a well-controlled experimental setting. The immediate response to may have to how to answer these questions would be, well, just have a look. And sometimes, that's possible, but it's confounded by the fact that we're often looking at things that are super tiny, sometimes smaller than microscopes can get us. So, we're left with using outcome measures that may be less concrete than just taking a look. That's where the well-controlled part comes in. The other thing, especially for my work in particular, is that often times if no one has asked a similar question, the systems needed to have a look have not been developed yet. So, a significant amount of my time currently is spent developing systems to eventually do experiments with. You've probably got quite a few questions, such as how to various systems work that we use to make these measurements, what sorts of experimental manipulations do we do, why is it important to see how things happen in flies and worms.... don't we care at all about humans?, and other perfectly reasonable questions. Stay tuned, I'll get to it eventually. I think I'm going to put together some stuff next on how we take a look, on some imaging techniques. It's something I've taken an interest to beyond simply what we use it for in the lab, because there's just some really cool stuff that goes along with it, including some pretty pictures. More to come.

26 June 2011, 5:12 PM
Oh my it's been a while since I've updated, shame shame shame on me. Meagan and I just returned from vacation with the Rockett family in Panama City Beach Florida. We had a wonderfully relaxing week at our beachfront condo where the most difficult decisions were along the lines of what to have for lunch, what kind of beer to have next, and which direction to walk on the beach. Meagan and I celebrated our anniversary on the 19th with a wonderful dinner at Firefly, a restaurant that we thoroughly enjoyed, followed by a friendly putt-putt competition (I won, of course :) In other news since the last update, we've finally succeeded in purchasing our first home, a place we're quite pleased to be enjoying a few blocks from UAB's campus near UAB Highlands and Dreamland. It's quite a place, as it has a history as a multi-family home. The main floor where we live is completely finished, with rag-tag apartments in both the basement and attic that we'll enjoy overhauling as optional projects at some point in the next few years. Our most immediate project will be getting the back yard up to snuff along with the side and front yard. We'll likely be putting in some Emerald Zoysia sod in the back. I suppose I'll have to post some pictures of this place sometime soon. We feel that we're making progress at a good clip, we just got a new dining set this weekend, and perhaps will get a King sized bed sometime soon after getting spoiled to one on vacation... we'll see. We're getting ready to have dinner with Meagan's family in a bit, and tomorrow I'll have to return to work. Meagan will be starting her first day of rotations for Genetic Counseling tomorrow, so she'll get a bit of preview both of what it's like to work full time and of what her eventual profession will be like, I know she's looking forward to the experience. I'm also ready to get back into working, though the break was nice and it's always good to have some time off to step back to a 30,000 foot perspective. That's all, I promise to post some house pics soon.

13 March 2011, 6:49 PM
Meagan and I are enjoying a very stress-free day. I've had a test over all the material we've covered so far in my class, and she's on spring break now. We're preparing a delicious vegetable quiche for dinner along with an arugala salad. Yesterday we enjoyed being a part of my brother Brock's wedding to Nicki. It's great to see him so giddy with excitement, and I know they are looking forward to starting their lives together. Other than that it's the same old thing going on for us. We were glad to see all of our extended family at the wedding, it's always good to see everyone together all at once. Well anyway, I suppose I should go help Meagan with dinner now. I'll post next time something interesting happens, I guess. So maybe not very soon :)

12 February 2011, 11:19 AM
I guess if I'm going to keep this site around I should probably update from time to time, so here goes. The semester is in full swing, and classes are going OK. Work is going well. Besides that there are several things coming up that we're both looking forward to. First, the recruiting weekends for my program and Meagan's program are both coming up, so that should be fun. And second is of course Brock and Nicki's wedding, which is coming up on March 12th, which happens to be just one month away. I'm excited to see my brother so happy and ready to enter the next stage of his life. I've thought about a couple of times now that I should probably put some helpful stuff linked to in the bar on the left, or either get rid of it since I don't really use the site much and if I do it tends to be just to give a quick blurb update. I suppose I probably will start adding some more stuff, though it will probably be summer once classes have slowed down a bit. Maybe we'll put up some cooking stuff since we love to cook but probably don't as much as we would like to, then that would be motivation to I guess. Well anyway, I'm going to go get ready now to go meet Rebecca with Meagan for lunch. We haven't seen her in a while so that will be good, then Meagan and I will run some errands and hopefully have a somewhat productive day.

8 January 2011, 10:39 PM
And so it begins. The first week of the semester is through, and I already feel behind. We're in class with the dental and optometry students, so the professors are teaching us as if we've had anatomy, embryology, etc. Of course, they have all had it, and many of my classmates have had similar stuff as well, but I haven't, so it's all new to me. Meagan and I have had a pretty lazy day, but we're getting going on some school stuff this evening, both of us are trying to get started early with stuff and stay on top of things the best we can. I don't think it's a new years resolution so much as a requirement for the programs we're in, but I guess it's nice to be forced into not procrastinating. I finally updated my resume tonight, that's been needing to be done for a while. Anyway, I'm going to stop putting off studying by updating the site and get back to it.

2 January 2011, 10:52 AM
So, this is what 2011 feels like. I guess not so different than 2010, so far. Meagan told me that I had to update or cancel the site, since I don't ever seem to update anymore, but I suppose there's not too much to say, nothing too terribly interesting going on. I'm loving work, getting through class, and enjoying the time that's not those two things, too. We had a good time over the holidays with our families. Meagan got me a fancy schmancy new monitor to use at work and the new AppleTV so we can do the Netflix streaming thing. We also had a nice new years eve with some of our UAB friends, and a nice new years day full of greens, black-eyed peas, etc at my Parent's house. Resolutions for 2011.... hmmm... I dunno. Maybe I'll quit playing hold 'em tourneys online. I do so much better in Omaha, might as well stick to it. I should probably also do some type of exercise thing or eating thing or something too, but those never seem to work out for people so I don't know. Anyway that's all, I'm gonna go now. Happy new years to all.

30 October 2010, 2:01 PM
Hanging out at the lab waiting for an exposure to finish up. Meagan and I went to the farmer's market this morning and picked up some stuff for the week after sleeping in, which was wonderfully nice. Watched Rocky Horror picture show last night for the first time with Meagan Mark and Becca at Mark's house. It was interesting, a little odd, but interesting. I can imagine it may be cooler at some sort of theatrical production. One thing that was nice about last night was Mark's Limoncello, a delicious lemony alcoholy treat that mixes quite well with whiskey and soda water. This afternoon Meagan and I will be cooking up a delicious batch of chili while watching Auburn destroy Ole Miss, then we'll be joining in the Hallow's eve festivities tonight. Nothing too interesting has happened in the past two weeks, though we have started our Neuro-specific classes which is really nice. I have my eyes in several books at the moment, including The Vertical Farm by Dick Despommier, a co-host of This Week in Virology, one of the podcasts that I'm likely to be listening to on my morning walk from the north to the south side of Birmingham. It's an interesting concept, I suppose. I'm looking forward to going to San Diego in a few weeks for the SfN annual meeting. It will be a nice break between rotations, and I'm sure I'll see and listen to some cool stuff while I'm there. Time to go develop my film, over and out.

14 October 2010, 10:26 PM
I finished In Defense of Food today. It wasn't really anything special, same old stuff, nothing really new. Although, it is always interesting to see stuff re-hashed through someone else's eyes. Life keeps moving on and on, my alarm keeps going on every morning, and I keep rolling out of bed to generate some data. The work I do is tedious, but how it fits into the big picture is pretty exciting... we're working on drug discovery for Parkinson's in the lab I'm in now, and I may be doing some similar preliminary work in my next rotation starting in November. Somehow, I've managed to remain in the middle of the B range in my classes, which is good because I want to be exposed to the information we're learning in these general bio courses, but I'd rather spend more time at the lab than studying, at least until I get into my neuro-specific courses. More and more I'm realizing that this is certainly the right place for me to be. The drug discovery stuff I'm working on is a good synthesis between science and engineering, especially if I can be a part of some of the scale-up processes to high throughput screens for some of the stuff we're doing. Robots are neat :) I don't mind having to go in at night or on the weekends since we're so close, and It's nice to have flexible hours so I can take a little extra time to have a nice lunch with Meagan during the day, which we've been doing most every day. Anyway, I'm going to return to my evening of getting some things done with the hum of Meagan's television marathon in the background. Over and out.

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