The Final Frontier is Outsourced

Headline news brought me out of my thesis-induced retirement today....

I was down in class when it happened and I'm sure the video doesn't do it justice. But the idea of it can make emotion rise deep in your gut. Imagine for a minute, growing up with a model spaceship. Your parents and grandparents talk about the great moments when astronauts landed in space. The last and greatest frontier, where all mankind raced to be - Americans landed on the moon. It was a symbol of American accomplishment, an inspiration as a child that anything could be done.

The toy spaceship was the integral part of my imagination. Together we soared over the confines of the house, landing for exploration on faraway places. I later got a LEGO space shuttle with an arm for launching satellites and run training flights from a 747. My brother had the fall away launch pad with detachable rockets. Our obsession with the space shuttle was entwined with our ability to dream about the future. Nobody could tell me it didn't exist in space because nobody I knew had been there before. We lined up on the couch upside down and pretended to launch off into the great unknown. My parents drove us by the big launch site as kids and while I don't remember much, I remember excitement. The space shuttles were exciting, inspiring, powerful and unique.

The pictures and video are awesome. There is no more epic way to go out than to be flown around the mall before retirement at Dulles. While I'm excited to see what's next, the passing of this era leaves me nostalgic. When I help teach my kids history and we reach the space shuttles, I don't know what words will do it justice. My kids will never understand.

JawSaw

I saw this on TV the other day, and I know you want one. You can get it discounted through the TV price, so order now! Frankly, it's probably a waste of your money, but it would be cheaper than some peoples' nights out at the bar - and safer too. Why not order it, then break it trying to cut stuff that's too big and whip yourself in the face with the leaves when it all gets tangled up? Why not?

Or you could always just buy the rodenator with a month's worth of bar savings...

In other news, it's the end of another long week. Amanda has a new job at a place which will hopefully make her very happy. Finding your first real job out of college is a challenge, especially after a Masters too, and she toughed it out. Let it be known, I'm really proud of her.

Work is going well, and there may be rumors in my life for a Ph.D. around the corner. My adviser told me he thinks I'll be done with my Masters in June. Goes without saying that I love research, but I can't wait to be done.

Beginning of classes

Well, just like that the Delaware County Fair is in the books again. We'll have the carcass show tonight for the few animals which were purchased and slaughtered and that will be the official end for one more year. There's a lot of pictures from the fair showing up on the website, so check them out. Not only are there great photographers entering in the show (including my wife, who won 3rd place!), but it seems there were a lot of good pictures shot by fairgoers and submitted to the site throughout the week.

As we sort through all of Amanda's pictures, mine have been posted to the Picasa album. Suprisingly, Picasa has not been cooperating well with her Google-brother Blogger, so I'll include the link to the album so you can go there straightaway. In the end, only 25 pictures made my cut onto the site, but as I fill up that site I'm trying to weed out some of my less good shots, including a cut yesterday on some pictures which lacked clarity or subject focus and were just on there for sentimental reasons.

I also began a new photo website which I like less, but they tricked me into joining with a contest for the best geocached photos. I'm a sucker for contests like this so hopefully I'll win something, and if not I've at least put in a little ad online for the Delaware County Fair. Yahoo's Flickr is just a little bit too glitchy and gimmicky for me to use it much yet.

Class is started here on campus and so now i have to adjust to a new schedule once again. I have yet to remember that I TA a class in the morning, so luckily it's for my forgiving mother-in-law because I haven't showed up to it on time yet. Coffee gets me through the long days of adjustment and by November my pigs should start coming off trial. Looking through the fog of chaos to the future of lab work and predictable schedules. Well, here's to hoping anyways...

Loving Lab Help

I married a saint. Don’t get me wrong, nobody’s perfect, but this woman brings light into the hell that was last week. She stuck with me through the worst I could drag her down into and she helped to get me back up out of it. For that I am grateful. Who knew that pipetting could stir such emotions in my cold, automated heart?

My grad research project officially started the beginning of August. It feels like I’ve been waiting for this forever, but now that It’s here I just can’t wait until it’s over. The way the past three weeks have flown by, I imagine this project will be a blur in my life so I’m going to need to find things like Pelotonia to brighten and accent this high speed pursuit of a couple of letters after my last name. Since I’m doing most of the work by myself without any employees to help me, I would be remiss to not mention those who have volunteered to help me out of a few pickles so far: Lucien, Dare, Dan, Frank and Mike.

Lab work has never been my specialty and I seem to have forgotten that when I wrote the protocol for this experiment. I’ve suddenly been submersed into the dark world of basement labs, working in four different labs and gaining access to BSL2 over at the vet school for culturing of pathogens. The amount I’ve learned in the past week has rivaled all of last year’s classwork, making me question why I ever took classes in the first place because I’m such a hands-on learner. But last week was an extreme baptism into the hellfires of bloodwork.

When Amanda called, I told her to go to her exercise class because I wouldn’t be home for a long time that night. Everything I’d tried to do that day kept dragging out. I’d been at work since 7 am and it was already 6 pm. I still had to do all the hematocrit, plasma and serum spinning and storage, and didn’t even know how long it would take me since I hadn’t done 200 blood samples at once before in my life. I’d memorized protocol and gathered supplies, just starting when the phone rang. Amanda immediately asked if I wanted her help. Her company was more what I wanted, but her help was great too. But I didn’t want to ruin her evening, insisting that she didn’t come down.

She came down anyways, bringing pizza and a hug for the hapless, absent-minded genius who had forgotten to lock down some hematocrit tubes before spinning and was cleaning up broken glass glitter. It’d been over an hour and I’d gone nowhere. We ate and she learned how I wanted samples labeled and pipette and she got straight to work. And we worked, and we worked. This was a bloodwork marathon I don’t intend to duplicate any time soon. Thursday is looming up on me already. Last week we didn’t leave the lab until midnight but it was long before that when I realized I married a saint. Such self-sacrifice doesn’t come easy or often and I really appreciated it. I love you, Amanda.

Bi-weekly Update

The past couple of weeks have once again been an absolute whirlwind. Starting my thesis has turned out to be the single greatest writing endeavour of my life and I think I started it none too soon. Besides trying to write about 1,000 words per day, I’ve also been trying to get amendments in for my protocol and other items around. Combine this with the state fair coming into play and there has been a lot of busy rushing going on.

The vegetables are growing well, with the best cantaloupe plants I’ve ever had. We trained the pumpkins to climb this year and the strength in their trailers is amazing! I’ve included a picture of the trainer a few weeks ago which has not totally filled out with leaves and blooms. I’m not sure how well the vines will hold the pumpkins on, but it’s a fun thing to try anyways. Those little wispies that come out from the vine have been reaching out and pulling the vine along every day, strengthening its position on the cage and providing a lot of entertainment for me.

4-H camp was this past week and over all, I think we’re pretty lucky. With all the heat and enough rain to canoe without damming up the creek, it’s really amazing that we were able to run all of our sessions without being cancelled out by rain except by night. Each day was blazingly hot with stifling humidity (heat indexes well over 100), but we made it through and only lost 1 dehydration patient over the week who had to go home to recover from losing too much fluid. On a funny note, we created a video to instruct campers about the 2 biggest problems we had at camp this year and I will plan on getting that posted as soon as I can get ahold of a copy of it.

I’ve got a bunch of different articles open on my browser, so hang tight and I’ll get them all out this week, but with the state fair and my position as a judge, a volunteer, an employee, a researcher, a sibling and a husband – it’s going to be a fast-paced next couple of weeks. Hang in there with me and stay cool and shady from all the hot weather.

Time Flies... (duplicate post)

...when you're having fun. It looks like my blog has mostly died in the past 2 weeks, but in reality, that's because of all the good things that have been happening around here. I've been super busy and while my busyness encompasses a broad range of stuff, I'll try to lay them out in a series of blogs. Since most of my life has been defined recently by grad school, this first blog will focus there.

I was originally supposed to start my pigs on project the beginning of July, but the project start has been a little delayed by the age of the pigs and their growth. It all is based on when they reach a certain age and so as the pigs were born a bit late, my research was once again inevitably delayed. We're planning now to start the beginning of August, but that is good because it gives me a lot of time to catch up on the other progressions with the project around here.

One of these includes the final formulation of the diets to be used in the project. After balancing out the potential diets, we determined that there was a need for another treatment for comparison and the deletion of a previous diet. Since my focus is still on the impact of organic production, we will be using a commercially available, organic supplement which is intended to benefit the pigs in a similar way to which antibiotics could be used without the actual use of antibiotics. This is a fun little bit of science, but please stay posted and I will either blog my class paper on the issue or I will create a page to upload it. It's too long for this blog already.

We also got a shipment in of pig feeders for use in the indoor housing with outdoor access treatment. Because these pigs were traditionally fed on clean ground we needed to buy and build new feeders. I need to be able to weigh back all of the feed to determine weekly feed intakes and weight change. This will help us get a numerical value for what we call feed conversion which is simply the amount of feed it takes for a pig to gain a pound in body weight. Because we're going to look at economic factors to consider in organic production, the amount of pig feed it takes to grow the pigs will be an integral value in this.


Assembling pig feeders turned into a 2 day process where I ratcheted, un-ratcheted and re-ratcheted all day. The feeder material was sheet metal folded and drilled and it didn't quite all line up. To further complicate the matter, the instructions were not written in the correct order for everything to line up. It took 3 times to finally get an order of assembly which worked. At the end of the second day, covered in dirt and grease, I was finally confident that the pig feeders would work and hold up to the abuse that pigs put on everything in their pens. Hopefully the straw bedding will distract them from demolishing the feeders.

I also got to do my first pig weaning last week. I know it seems odd but I never took a swine class in undergrad and so my trip out to the farm last week turned into another great educational experience. The pig industry is very numbers oriented with records on everything. So as we weaned piglets from their mothers, we weighed them. They were doing pretty well, since some were weaning out at upper 20s. After recording weights, we sorted them into groups of similar weights so that they could grow with other pigs of similar size. This helps to prevent bigger pigs bossing the little ones around and "hogging" all of the feed.

As I mentioned before, we're also using straw in the outdoor access pigs. So while we were out there we helped put straw up in the mow. Stacking straw in the mow (pronounced like "ow" with an 'm' on the front) is hot, dusty, sticky work. We used to do a bit of it when were younger, but I haven't stacked much since high school when I stopped volunteering for sub-minimum wage work. It capped off a super long week last week and gave me sore hands which will once again harden into callouses that I lost in college. Hard work is good for the body.

We've also been doing a lot of training and sponsor recruiting for the Pelotonia. Luckily this is going to start wrapping itself up so we can just focus on the training. People have been very generous; Amanda and I are grateful for all of their support and proud to be riding on behalf of agriculture this year.

Credit to D. Sturtevant for the photo.

Approval!

Great news came in today! My project has been approved by the IACUC review committee. I was getting pretty skeptical since we hadn’t heard anything recently and I was starting to get worried about how long we would have to wait to hear back. Then this morning we got a query about correcting a typo and I was even more worried. Were we going to have to go through correcting every typo before the protocol was finally approved? But thankfully it finally came in this afternoon. And none too early.

Logistical issues have already caused us to need to readjust the plan a few times. Nothing ever can work out quite as planned and there is a plethora of research projects out there. Each one says something just a little bit different with slight changes in methods and results. In an effort to streamline the project and eliminate animal stress (including the humans working on this project), and to make sure that this project has real benefit and applicability to society and animals, we keep reevaluating the project details. And while the animal care protocol is approved, this is only the beginning.

The animal care protocol is only for assuring the least harm to the animal and appropriate care and contingency planning for the whole project. Although it is very important to make sure that research projects responsibly minimize impact on the lives of animals, it is also very important to make sure the project has important meaning to the furthering of science. So what still remains are all of the little details. Details that include the exact percentages of feed ingredients, the exact measurements to the inches of the pens, the exact times and camera positions for observations. And again, all of this is based on the literature and findings of all the people before me. As things go on, I will try to keep you updated on the different parts that go into a simple research project.

No more videos! (duplicate post)

This past week marked a great milestone in my time as a graduate student. Since I arrived last summer, I’ve been assigned to video evaluation of pigs we recorded on farm visits. The main gist of the project was to evaluate a training program’s success in helping farmers learn to limit their pigs’ stress and thus to ultimately benefit the pig by lowering their stress level and improving the interactions with humans. There’s a lot of evidence that points to increased production value of animals which have more positive interactions with humans as opposed to negative interactions with humans and sometimes people just don’t quite understand what can make up a positive or negative interaction. Some things as simple as shouting across the pens to someone else can stress out an animal whereas moving through pens at a moderate volume level and occasionally gently patting animals that are in your way, etc., can help improve their interactions with the livestock caretaker.

So a part of this project consisted of us coming on farm, walking through the pens with a video recorder, and then me going back through later and counting the number of pigs visible in the frame every five seconds. Let’s review: We visit LOTS of farms and record pigs; then I watch the video, stopping every five seconds to count pigs. Yeah, I started last summer and have never caught up. Until now.

This week I finished video number ~130, each one of which took excess of an hour if it went right the first time. The whole time the camera view is being knocked back and forth by pigs on screen that ran into the videographer (not a fun job) so it’s a short matter of time before I got motion sick. There were weeks in the fall where I spent the whole week in a state of motion sickness and headache from so much video analysis. All of this was fit in between classes and other work, and on a time crunch because we’re trying to analyze the project data now. As much fun as that was, I’m very glad to have it done and the time freed up to help on something new. Projects need to be changed up every so often and that one’s been on my plate for over a year now.

Labels

Some labels come easy, some come a little harder. For example, I struggled with what to call this post because everything that sorted through my mind seemed either inappropriate or a bad conglomeration like our trip to the German buffet on Sunday. Truth be told, this post is about Marijuana and Salvia, the old and the new, the legal and illegal, and how a class discussion about omega 3 fatty acids earned me a label by accident - one that you hope not to get during your time in grad school - as the pot kid.

So I'm taking this nutrition class and as we reach the end of the quarter and all the main topics have been discussed, we've had the opportunity to talk to the boom in omega enhanced food products which even extends to the pet industry. As we ran down a list of sources of omega 3 fatty acids, I was shocked to see salvia pop up on the list. For those of you who've forgotten about salvia's "recent" publicity appearance, I've included the link.

Coming from Michigan, I'm pretty sure there's not a drug or substance that goes undiscussed, so I was pretty familiar with this one to the point that I knew people who wouldn't touch this stuff no matter what, even though it's legal, because it supposedly really messes you up like a bad trip. Of course, not all herbs are bad for you, but this is one really potent herbal supplement with some polar opposite effects on the body.

Of course, I raised my hand without stopping to consider the social consequences and asked the professor if that was the stuff that you could get high off of, "like pot"? His response to a shocked and silent class, "Well, it wasn't around in the 60's". He then went on a diversion into a guy named Jim Stafford, recommending we need to watch his song "Wildwood Weed". So I Googled it and include the embed here for you. Based on the clip, I'm pretty sure there was one person in class who appreciated the reality of my comment.

Nostalgia

I know that life is an onward progression and there is never any way to go back re-experience or re-create the past; there's no point in trying either because it just puts a taint on the good memories you have. But listening to Pandora today, Keith Urban's "You'll think of me" came on and all I ever think about when I hear that song is Dave in the lab, singing away on his guitar.

I'm glad to be in a new place with new co-workers, but I really miss the lab environment that we had up there (even the leaking biohazards and broken oven fiasco). It was fun to feel the combined energy circulating the labs and to come in during lunchtime and hear the guitar strumming away or picking out bluegrass. So in honor of MSU today, I embed the more bitter version of Keith Urban - live.

One week, already?

I realize that we're not actually quite a full week into the new year, but this first business week has come to a close and I'm frankly shocked by how fast it blew by. I know there's lots of people out there to talk about how much time flies, but I'm not here to tell you about that.

Instead, I just wanted to hypothesize that this week passed by even faster than normal because my life was so strictly scheduled. With my struggles in school last quarter and the need to get a project online for grad school, I've been busy nearly every minute of the day. And when I get home, all I want is some free time to spend with Amanda. But with both of us diving into school again, our time together has been scarce.

It just seems such a shame to have time pass so fast just because I put forth the effort to be more efficient. Frankly, it's unbelievable that there's already only 51 weeks left to 2011, and that a week blew by just like that. I have a lot to show for it, sure, but I'd rather have that week back to relax and enjoy life instead of rushing around trying to make life enjoyable.

Finals Week Fun (duplicate post)

There's nothing quite like the life you get when you've been freed of the books and studying chaining you all quarter. Even getting up EARLY this week hasn't been able to put a damper on my mood although a severe cold is doing its best. So let me tell you about a couple of my days back in the research loop so you can understand what I do, and maybe also give you an idea of the efforts we put in to protect the food chain.

Yesterday I was up before dawn thought about the day. We met on campus and left in the truck around 5.30 to head North to a pig farm where we would be collecting samples starting at 7.00. This research is specifically for finding ways to better handle and treat pigs so that they are less stressed on a daily basis. Not only is stress reduction important to the consumer, but it is important to the farmers because they want to keep their animals as healthy as possible.

After sample collection, helping to save a pig from the abuse of its pen-mates and saying goodbye to the farmer, we were headed back to campus. I grabbed a quick shower and then hung out until I had a meeting in the afternoon. After the meeting I went downstairs to learn how to make the plug-ins for the thermometer we use in some experiments. This was frustrating work, but thankfully all I was doing was learning so in the time I made 1 successfully, Katie had made 5. At the end of a 12 hour day, I went home to Amanda and finally got to relax for the rest of the evening before an early bedtime in preparation for this morning.

This morning was pig slaughter/harvest. Because it's the end of the quarter, there were less students on the floor, but their vacancy was taken up by some researchers and their visiting colleagues from my alma mater who were collecting liver, jejunum and duodenum samples for a variety of research purposes. This just goes to further emphasize the critical value of animal by-products in the world around us.

My job this morning was to singe the hair and scrape any remaining hair from the skin of the pig. Hair can harbor bacteria which can later infect people, and even though we don't eat the skin, the skin comes into the meat lab where food products will be fabricated, so it's crucial to make sure we keep the area as sterile as possible. The removal of hair is so important and time-consuming that half of the crew today was dedicated solely to this purpose, with me at the end of the line, singing what hadn't already been spun off the skin or shaved by 4 people with knives. Following the end of harvest, we then proceeded to scrub down every inch of the facility, sterilizing and sanitizing the living daylights out of it to prevent any bacterial growth before the next time we use it.

For the rest of today, I'll be reading journal articles on subjects that potentially could be in my field of research next summer. All just a couple of days in my life... And yet, somewhere in the mix I also found time to find all of the gifts I needed for Christmas for Amanda, too. She's been so good about not spying or prying to find out what she's getting, I just hope she's pleasantly surprised in the end.

Grad Life

I thought I'd talk a bit about my life in the grad office. I know it's probably not my best choice to blog out my frustrations where the people I'm frustrated with can read them, unless of course what I say in print I would be willing to say to their face.

Basically, there a few people I think are really great people, and I like them a lot. Then there are definitely 2 people I can't stand at this point. Kill this morning was a combination of those as well. It's frustrating to be treated like a child and yelled at by a professional peer when I didn't do anything wrong. This is beyond a simple misunderstanding because it was treated as more than that. Approach a person with animosity and don't expect them to be your friend long. Approach someone who bailed your project out all summer long and you're not likely to get a smile out of me again unless you trip and fall on your face. And to top that one out, I was doing exactly what every other better-trained worker than myself had been doing and continued doing after you tried to be an ass and make and example of me.

This frustration also goes toward the person who thought they needed to call and interrogate me last night about their assumption that turned out to be falsely based on greed and poor life choices. It was cool when you were trying to be adult and address your concerns and rectify your misunderstandings. But when you turned it into a session of asking the same question multiple times and trash-talking other people who used to appear important to you, it was way out of hand. Move on, get over yourself and try to find meaningful relationships among the ones who still treat you with respect, such as what I've tried to show you.

On that happy note. I've gotta head out to work and study for Biochem. If you want a happier blog entry, go to the one immediately chronologically prior to this.

Just sitting

This morning we had harvest for 30 pigs here on campus. While this overlapped with my 11 am class that I would've been occupied by otherwise, it also took up a lot of my morning considering that we started at 6.00 am this morning. I like getting up early in the morning and my time working odd hours with Marcus was amazing. But what you have to do in that case is find a time for a warm afternoon catnap. What I don't like is the long day without any kind of rest. My new plan for this afternoon was to take a nap, but my position as a TA in a 2.30 recitation won out and I will be headed to the class shortly. If any of you expect to find me this evening, you will find me back here at Animal Sciences helping host the Fayette County 4-H group as they come in for a carcass show regarding the animals they had us harvest on Tuesday.

Speaking of 2 harvests in the same week I am sharply reminded of something my dad said a couple of years ago. I often have these sudden and short-lived urges to work out and build up my muscles. Exercise in the form of walking, running, basketball and biking are things that I have no trouble picking up at any time or getting into the habit of doing. However, in the case of actual muscle building, I usually don't last a week. Well, a couple of years ago Dad made the comment that some of the strongest people arre those that work in a slaughter facility or as butchers. He claimed this was because of the workload and how it was also built around a week so that different muscle exercise was performed each day.

Now that I am aching all over from the second harvest in a week, I am realizing just how right he was. The work that we do, even when I'm only moving carcasses down the rail (pushing or pulling weight) is very taxing and I am not in the kind of shape that I should be in to do this twice in a week. Tuesday was difficult, but the repeat on Thursday has pushed my muscles to a point where they complain to me when I try to drink a bottle of water. This is hard work, and good work. When I was asked today by one of the grad students today if this was what I thought I'd be doing in my Masters program, I said "Yes." I am learning new things every day and starting to fit into the work so that I don't feel uncomfortably out of place every day now. It's good to be challenged again, both physically and mentally.

Although my commentary on the following links will be limited, they are totally worth the viewing. Check them out and have a great day!

First off, if you know anything about Google maps, you've probably tried creeping on your house and seeing what you were doing when they took the image for their website. If you haven't, just take my word for it that they are real photos and I can even tell when they update them because the model or position of cars will change at our house. Well, apparently in Brazil, the images were banned after this happened.


Hungary continues to pollute the earth, even as we're still trying to sort out who we really are going to get away with scapegoating for the BP spill.

Finally, in case you haven't heard it often enough in recent news, here's the Daily Show's take on the non-witch GOP candidate.

I love Pandora radio and my ACDC channel has been one of the best choices I've made regarding my homework and project productivity.