Fortnight

I have so much to do in lab over the next two weeks. It's going to be crazy. I need to plan something to do at the end of it so I have something to look forward to. I usually find that's the best way to get through a hectic time. Any suggestions?

Adam's adventures

My husband has taken up exploration. Especially what he calls "urban exploration." He goes into old buildings and under-ground drainage systems of cities and takes photos. I think he's a little young to already have had a mid-life crisis, but what do I know? The thing is he's hooked. Completely hooked. If we drive by anything that looks interesting, we absolutely have to stop and at least "scope out" the place. It's almost like there is no choice in the matter; some unknown force compels us to stop the car and give notice to places that everyone else seems to be able to just ignore. I have mixed feelings about the whole thing, not that it matters. He's going to do it anyway. I do worry that he is going to get hurt, but he tries to be as careful as one can be exploring a condemned building. I have kindly informed him that if he kills himself doing something stupid, I will never forgive him. Not for all eternity. I refuse to become a widow due to something stupid and preventable. I'm not sure if this makes him more cautious, but I sure hope it does! I must admit that he does take some pretty neat photos. If you are interested, check out his flicker account here.

Glacier National Park, Montana

Here are some more photos from our trip. These ones are all during our family reunion at Glacier Park. We did a lot of hiking, and it was beautiful!

Several of us went on a long hike one of the last days we were there. My brother John packed his daughter the entire way. What a stud!

You can see lots of mountain goats if you hike in the right places.

Alberta

OK, so I promised a few photos from my vacation in July. I'm just going to do the part where we were in southern Alberta right now. My mom grew up in Cardston, Alberta so I grew up going to many of these places and they hold a special spot in my heart!

These photos are of the one-room Chief Mountain School house, where my grandma was the the teacher for a little while-- probably in the late 1930's.

Here I am at the top of Bear's Hump in Waterton park.

One of the few remaining old style grain elevators in the area.

Adam hiking up Red Rock Canyon in Waterton.

If you want to see more and are friends with me on Facebook, Adam posted a ton of photos for me on my profile!

Crazy Summer

Well, it's been a crazy summer. In mid-June my co-advisor Craig got seriously ill and was admitted to the hospital. He had an infection called necrotizing fasciitis. He lost his left leg to right above the knee and nearly died. Luckily, he has pulled through the worst of it and is on his way to recovery. His only immediate family are his sister and parents who live in Toronto. Since we are quite close and I live near him, I have been doing a lot of the "family" type work that needs to be done when someone is taken suddenly away from their normal life and ends up hospitalized like that--plus there are still months of recovery ahead. Needless to say, it has been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster and at times physically and/or emotionally exhausting. That in combination with the fact that I just don't seem to know what to blog about can explain my long absence from posting. However, I did get away to take a fun trip with my family where we visited southern Alberta and then swung down to Glacier National Park in Montana. I have some fun photos and will try to post some of those later, but for now I have to finish up some lab work and then go home and get ready to fly to Phoenix where Adam's brother is getting married on Friday. Yea for Seth and Janette!

Just in case you like to be bored....

My dad asked me the other day about my publications. I often say I don't have any scientific publications, but that's not quite true. I just don't have any first author publications. In the scientific community when a paper is published, the order of the names on the publication is pretty important. The first author listed probably did all the work. The last author listed is the boss. He/she oversees the project but most likely didn't do a single experiment themselves. The people in the middle all did something, but not necessarily very much. In the case of my two publications I must admit that I probably did about the least amount of work one can do and still be considered an author. I think the experiments I did are both explained and then listed as "data not shown." Oh well, at least I did something, right? I'm still waiting for the day where I get that first author publication, where the article will be cited as "Winsor et al....." It will happen sooner or later. Hopefully sooner.
In case you really want to bore yourselves, the articles were published in an open-access scientific journal:
Yeast Screens Identify the RNA Polymerase II CTD and...
Comparative Genome Wide Screening Identifies....

That second article was actually published today, which is probably why I was thinking about it...

Facebook Dilemma...

I love connecting with friends, but sometimes Facebook can also be a curse. I've often struggled at whether or not to accept friend requests from someone I don't remember, but they are listed as going to my high school, or someone I know but barely, etc. However, today I got a Facebook request that has left me with absolutely no idea what to do. I remember this person, perhaps a little too well. It is from the only mission companion I had who I am convinced absolutely hated me. Let me call her Sister X. I half expected Sister X to murder me in my sleep. She was meaner to me than anyone has been since Greg C. harassed me in front of all the boys in the 6th grade. I am not saying I was perfect, but we talked as a companionship about what was going wrong, and I tried my absolute hardest to work on all the problems she had with me, and all my efforts were flatly rejected. We were actually in a threesome at the time (I know, now you think it was being in a threesome that was the problem; that's probably partly true, but I was in 11 different threesome's on my mission and several of them were very good companionships). The other sister (Sister Y) somehow got along just fine with Sister X. However, even she told me in confidence once that Sister X wasn't being fair to me. Looking back I realize that the problem was Sister X was emotionally abusive. Trust me, I wouldn't say that lightly; I thought about it a lot. Anyway, I think she felt threatened by me for some reason and her lack of self-confidence lead her to constantly rag on me. I was always doing stuff wrong, and ruining everything, and I was pretty much completely worthless according to Sister X. She liked to remind me of these things often; at least when she wasn't too busy ignoring me.

So back to my initial problem; today I received a friend request and a message on Facebook, "Hi Sister Sabin, this is Sister X!" I'm just not exactly sure what to do with it. I don't exactly hold a grudge against her; I've just spent a lot of time forgetting her all together. I liked it that way. For the past six years since I've been home I have been quite happy to think of her almost never. Now that she seems for some odd reason to want to be my Facebook friend, I have no idea what to do. Do I accept her friend request to be nice, and then just try to forget her again? Do I simply ignore the request and move on? Do I send her a message saying, "why in the world do you want to be my Facebook friend anyway?" It's crazy. Like she has absolutely no idea how incredibly mean she was to me. Actually, that's probably it. She probably doesn't remember at all. However, with someone that manipulative, I wouldn't put something more conniving past her. Maybe she just wants to be able to rub something in...
What do I do? Advice please!