Many of you are probably curious about the move and how things are going so far. I will admit that there were some rough times during our moving weeks. There was one day in particular where I was tempted to get in my car and drive very very very far away. But now that we are here and some what settled, things are not that bad.

We still haven’t gotten completely back to normal. There are still lots of boxes to be sorted through. Also, I’ve miss-placed a book I need for yoga class. I have no idea where it is (probably with the trash or Goodwill donations). Of course, if I buy a new book, I’ll find the old one. Our food situation is another thing still not settled. I usually plan out meals and have a sense of what we are having for dinner every evening. Last week my mother-in-law asked me what we usually have for dinner on Wednesdays. I said “I don’t know”. I usually know these things.

I forced myself to go back to the gym this week just to get some resemblance of my old routine back. I haven’t been to the Y in over a month. The weird thing is I still managed to reach the next level in the Fitlinx system (free T-shirt!). I’ve also managed to lose about 8 lbs. I think this is because I can only eat half of the things Chris’s mom makes for dinner. I think one night my dinner consisted of a handful of sticky rice. Her sumptom (sp?) can melt skin.

Really, things are not that bad. When things do get annoying, I just go to my room and shut the door. I close my eyes and think of the piles of money we’re supposed to be saving. Then I say to myself “It’s temporary. It’s temporary. It’s temporary”.

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Chris is in the process of moving my blog to a new server. Sounds easy, but it’s not. The good news is I now have internet at the new house. Yippee! Chris turns into annoying computer guy when I use his. This is why he has to have his own toys.

I have big blogging plans. Big plans, I tells ya!

This was my first weekend of yoga teacher training. I headed into the weekend pretty nervous. What if my yoga wasn’t good enough? What if I wasn’t ready for this? Do I have to meet new people? All those first day jitters that one usually gets with the first day of school came crashing down on me. I left the house early Saturday morning to hang out with Chris (he was on baby-sitting duty) before class and I realized I had forgotten my water bottle. Then I started freaking out because I was going to have to buy a bottle of water and I’d probably be the only person there with an Earth-killing-plastic store bought bottle of water. How embarrassing.

But once I got all my yoga gear settled in a spot on the floor and our teacher started us in our first asana class, I was fine. At one point in the middle of it all I almost giggled out loud because it dawned on me that I was in a yoga teacher training course. It was great. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. I have homework and papers to turn in every month. I have to learn theory and Sanskrit (which is like learning a new language). But I love every minute of it. I thought I was doing this just to teach, but it’s turning into so much more (which sounds a little hokey, I know).

And you know what? I was not the only one there with a store bought bottle of water. I was not the biggest person there or the oldest. I was not the weakest person there or even the strongest. All of us in the class have our own faults and strengths. This is going to be good. Really good. Oh, and weird fact number 157: Chris went to high school with my yoga instructor. It’s a very strange, small world we live in.

I thought today’s Friday Science entry would be about my favorite amoebae and yesterday’s seminar speaker. My boss was the seminar host for yesterday and she invited Dr. Adam Kuspa to speak about his current research with Dictyostelium (Dicty), the same organism we work with.

Dicty are a soil amoeba that eats things like bacteria and yeast. They crawl around in the ground individually hunting for food and dividing until they run out of food. Then all the dicty cells in that area migrate together to form a slug (but not the kind of slug that leave the slime trails on your side walk). We are talking about 50,000 cells coming together and moving through the soil until they find a good spot to sort of plant themselves, usually some place kind of sunny. Then they form a stalk with a fruiting body on the end. The fruiting body is full of spores and when the food source returns or conditions are good, the spores can germinate back into single dicty cells. Pretty cool.

There are certain dicty cells in the population called S cells. When the dicty cells come together to form the slug, the S cells are the ones that kind of protect the slug. They act like an immune system eating up all the bad things that the slug encounters as it travels like pathogens and toxins. The S cells get sloughed off and left behind as they fill up with bad stuff. Then as the slug forms the stalk and the fruiting body, all the cells that make up the stalk formation die. Adam Kuspa’s lab studies the hows and whys of how this happens.

I find the topic totally fascinating particularly from an evolutionary stand point. Basically, this is how we started. At what point did the cells decide that it would be better to stick together then roam around singly?

Also, I’d really like to see dicty in the wild. Stalks and fruiting bodies are clearly visible on plates. I want to see them in their natural habitat.

88% Mike Gravel
87% Dennis Kucinich
79% Chris Dodd
77% Barack Obama
76% John Edwards
74% Joe Biden
72% Hillary Clinton
68% Bill Richardson
44% Rudy Giuliani
32% Ron Paul
28% John McCain
24% Mitt Romney
22% Mike Huckabee
20% Tom Tancredo
15% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

Stolen from the Ninja.

We’ve all been taught about food chains in high school biology and it’s always represented in a very simple diagram. Plants get food from the sun. Cows eat plants. People eat cows, that sort of thing. I think we really take for granted just how complex the food chain is and the importance of the interdependence of species.

Zoologist Todd Palmer and his colleagues have been studying the interdependence of species in Africa focusing on the Acacia tree, ants and herbivores. The acacia tree is the most common shrub of the savanna and despite the long thorns provides sustenance to animals like elephants, giraffes and zebras. The acacia tree has struck up a sort of bargain with a certain species of ant who build their homes in the hollowed out thorns of the tree. In return for a place to live and some food the ants defend the tree from really intrusive herbivores.

This is where it gets complicated. If there are no elephants or giraffes nibbling on the tree, the acacia stops producing the little ant houses and excreting the sweet nectar that the ants eat. By spurring more growth, the acacia tree becomes a home to another type of ant. These new ants, Crematogaster sjostedti, are not nice ants. They don’t defend the tree at all. In fact they depend on bark-boring beetle larvae to build their homes. This causes the tree to die twice as often then when they are regularly being chewed on.

So, simply put, tree needs good ants for defense against herbivores which it also needs to keep bad ants away. This is why every organism on this planet is important.

Lately, Chris and I have been driving to work separately. It’s just easier because Chris doesn’t have to be there until 8:30 and I like to get to work earlier. Also, he has to stay until 5:00 and there are lots of times when I don’t. But yesterday we rode to work together because I had seminar that wouldn’t get out until 5:00.

I got back from seminar a little later then expected and I noticed that Chris hadn’t called and when I called him, the call didn’t go through. So I thought he must be in the parking garage. He immediately called me back laughing because he was at home. He forgot me. He searched all over our 800 square foot house for me and it was on the tip of his tongue to ask me where I was when he realized that we had ridden into work together.

I don’t think I’ve been forgotten since kindergarten.

That’s right. I thought it was high time to bring back the weekly installments of Friday Science. Today’s science tale is a gruesome one and will make you see Thomas Edison in a whole new light.

We all know Thomas Edison as the inventor of many things like the light bulb, phonograph, and electric power distribution. But what many may not know is that Edison was a shrewd business man. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company was the most evil Wal-Mart company of the time and Edison would stop at nothing to maintain his monopoly of electric power distribution.

Edison invented a power distribution system that relied on direct current (DC) and opposed all technological advancements that went against his business model, advancements like alternating current (AC) distribution invented by Nikola Tesla. AC distribution is more efficient then DC because power is sent in very high voltages to transformers and then sent over thinner, less expensive wires to the users.

Well, people started talking about AC and how much better it seemed to be then DC. So Edison started a propaganda campaign in 1887 to convince people that AC was too dangerous to use. To prove his point, he electrocuted small animals like stray dogs and cats, even some cows and horses. Then, on Jan 4th 1903, Edison electrocuted Topsy the elephant. All this was filmed and released as Electrocuting an Elephant. I don’t recommend watching the video. It’s bad enough just knowing that thing exists.

I’d like to think that heads of big corporations would never be able to get away with doing this today, but somehow I’m not so sure. I mean, in the end electrocuting Topsy didn’t help Edison save his precious DC. AC of course proved its superiority in less lethal ways to become our standard form of electric distribution. But it still makes you wonder. Remember the electric car? I didn’t think so.

The foot was feeling much better until I went back to the doctor today. He finds a new way to inflict pain on my foot every time. Yesterday I was feeling so good, that I walked the mile and a half to my car instead of riding the shuttle. Today, I’m back to being gimpy. The good news is the doctor says that I don’t have to come back unless it really starts hurting. No more follow ups! That means this was the last time for him to scrape and dig around inside the wounds on the bottom of my foot (yes, it’s as painful as it sounds).

I have big plans for when this gimpy foot of mine heals (besides the yoga teacher training thing). My friend Craig is running in a half marathon in September (I know, long way off) and since we’ve always talked about training for marathons and actually running in one, I thought I’d train for it too. A half marathon is a good start.

Best of all, I plan on riding my new bicycle. Chris paid our friend Brian to rebuild an old Schwinn for me. I’m in love with my new bike. Its perfection right down to the Om symbol on the side. I just need a bell and a basket and maybe a helmet and I’m off! You know what would be great? It would be great if we had bike lanes or even decent sidewalks. I want to ride my bicycle. I want to ride my bike.

Everyone is blogging about their plans for the New Year and it got me thinking about my own plans. I try not to make any resolutions because that automatically sets me up for failure. Instead, I usually list out a few things that I will try to accomplish. I looked back to see what I’d try to accomplish in 2007 and apparently I didn’t think I should attempt to accomplish anything because I didn’t blog about anything goals related.

This year I plan to get rid of a lot of things. This will probably be the easiest goal since we are in the process of moving. Plus we have got to pair down if we are going to fit in our new space. That means pairing down on everything, even the stuff we are storing away until we really move. I’ve already added some more elephants to the Goodwill pile and I’ve got them down to four Rubbermaid containers. Mom’s going to hang on to these until we move into a place where I can set them all out again.

Probably the most difficult thing I plan to do this year is to be kinder to myself. I tend to beat myself up for lots of silly reasons like skipping out on the Y or not cleaning the house or getting the laundry done by a certain time. I need to let things go. Having a gimpy foot has really wrecked havoc on my ability to get things done around the house. At first I felt really guilty about it, but then I thought “hey…I can’t walk�. That stuff can wait until I can move around better. I need to learn to take care of myself first or that other stuff will never get done because the doctors will have to amputate my foot because I didn’t take care of it.

I guess that’s about it. Oh, of course I want to lose 10 lbs and get super organized and yada, yada, yada. Those aren’t really resolutions as much as things I’m always trying to do. I hope that everyone has a great wonderful New Year.