Pumpkin Carving Part 2

 
Ethan really liked the color-changing electric candle in his pumpkin, and I sorta have to agree. Green is my favorite, obvously.


 
And here is the whole line-up from the kids. I think the quidditch pumpkin really looks great - proud daddy moment for Cain's fancy design realization. The vampire bunny is just too cute. I wish you could set the color on those little changing candles, because the bunny is amazing in magenta/violet, but it flashes through too quick for me to catch it.


Audrey STILL hasn't finished hers yet, the crazy. She has a blondie yellow-orange pumpkin with a swirly stem, who is now pouting on the counter, on the verge of a complete emotional breakdown after having to watch all the other pumpkins get all the attention for two days in a row. Because pumpkins love to be beheaded, gutted, mutilated, and set afire for our enjoyment.

I am totally happy with my pumpkin this year. I showed you the bottom half in the previous post, but the fun part is that I got a second pumpkin, a white one, to make a brain sticking up  out of the head. here's how it turned out:


I used power tools when carving for the first time this year. I don't have a dremel, which is apparently the tool of choice, but I found that a variety of drill/screwdriver bits gave me the effect I needed. I still had to skin it with a potato peeler, though, which was a bit time-consuming. It has to be skinned, though, to let some light through for the lit effect:



 

Cornucopia, or Pumpkin Carving part 1

I'm neutral about 'Cornucopia' as a WoTD ... Its a good word, but not spectacular. It reminds me of Hunger Games now - I actually read all three books recently. but thats not the point.

The point is pumpkin carving!

The kids and I started pumpkin carving last night. Raechel (9) had a little struggle figuring out how to carve a vampire bunny, but found a good (not undead) bunny carved pumpkin image online that got her thinking in the right direction (the classic put a circle around it solution). She got a little ambitious carving her circle and almost detached the bunny from the middle, but that's easy to fix with a few toothpicks, so our vampire bunny is is good shape.

Ethan, who turned 5 a few weeks ago, gutted his pumpkin with minimal assistance after I cut out the top, drew on a face with marker, poked holes along the lines so he had a chance to use the hole-poking tool, then cut the eyes and nose out all by himself. I did the mouth for him, though. He was going for scary: 

Cain (10), is still on his Harry Potter kick, and gave himself a very ambitious pumpkin - he wanted to carve a quidditch match. He knew I used skinning/sculpture methods, and thought he might do the same, but ended up simplifying it to cutouts, not that its particularly simple. The entire design and execution is his. 

  

I think his speed lines are going to look awesome. He's a little disappointed that he didn't get more detail into the players, but I'm pretty impressed, myself. 

Audrey hasn't worked on her pumpkin yet - I think she's doing it today or tomorrow during the day. I started mine last night, but I have a lot more work yet to do. Here's the finished part: 

I'll post more pics when they're all done and lit up! 

I love carving pumpkins. I think tonight's going to be a lot of work, and next year I may have to get a dremel to make it go faster if I do another complicated one. 

Asseverate

: to affirm or declare positively or earnestly

• EXAMPLES

"I will myself asseverate and bind it by an oath, that the muff thou bearest in thy hand belongeth unto Madam Sophia; for I have frequently observed her, of later days, to bear it about her." — From Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel Tom Jones

Actually, that's all. This made me crack up.

ensky

This morning I started to read Ocean at the End of the Lane while riding the bus. I was losing myself, just about to fall madly in love with the little book, when the bus ride ended and I had to get our for work. In closing the book, something fell out, but it wasn't my bookmark, which was still there. I got down and searched the floor, and saw a brightly colored green and blue card sporting an exotic and eldritch-looking symbol. It wasn't rectangular like a playing card or index card, but square.

This is a point of departure. At this point, I could tell you what really happened next, or I could make some shit up that I find more interesting. I'm not telling you which way I will go.

There was more writing on the back of the card, but I didn't actually register any words, as I was also trying to get my book back in my bag, and exit the bus, and already my work-brain was informing me that there were e-mails to compose and cells to feed and DNA to mutate. So I just slipped the card back into the book. Then a pipe fell from the construction guys working on the side of the building, and there was significant pain, and blood, and then not much until I woke up beeping in a hospital bed at St. Mary's feeling very nauseated and with a strong sense that my head ought to be hurting, but wasn't. Or maybe more like my head was hurting, but I wasn't feeling the pain. Then I vomited, and as I blacked out again I clearly remember being very embarrassed, because some nurse was going to have to clean it up.

See, that's not very believable. Because why would I be blogging about that if it happened just this morning? I certainly wouldn't be in any condition to write, if i was on a bunch of painkillers, and I don't even have a laptop to write from a hospital room, and I am certainly not going to write that much on my phone. Take 2:

There was more writing on the back of the card, but I didn't actually register any words, as I was also trying to get my book back in my bag, and exit the bus, and already my work-brain was informing me that there were e-mails to compose and cells to feed and DNA to mutate. So I just slipped the card back into the book. I went upstairs to my desk, and had just about sat down when Dan asked if I could mutate some DNA for him, because his first attempt didn't work, and blah blah blah excuses could I do it for him? Sure, Dan. And there was a call from the vet upstairs about one of the cats - please call him back.

hmmm. still unsatisfying. Ensky means to exalt, pronounced like enthrone, not like Penske.

Fimbriated

Fimbriated - basically means fringed, but I love the definition: having the edge or extremity bordered by slender processes : fringed

Recommended ChaoticShiny writing exercise generator to my brother, and decided I would try it: 

Write for at least 300 words about a trigger, a newspaper, and a rodent.

The air was crisp and clear and dry outside the burrow. Most of the leaves had relocated to the ground for the winter. Normally, I'd grab tons of the crunching dry leaves, before they rotted, and drag them inside for nesting, but this year I had something even better. I was keeping an eye on the neighborhood raccoon (its the sort of thing my mom would repeat - don't keep tabs on the raccoon and you'll usually be in for a nasty surprise) and saw it hanging out in these big plastic bins that showed up with the big loud pink creatures. One of them is chock full of newspaper. The pinkies are surely the worst hoarders ever - keeping all their valuable nesting material open to the elements when they have an enormous nest that none of us have figured out how to infiltrate yet. Anyway, I grabbed as much as I could and dragged it home. So I don't have to bother with leaves, since newspaper is better in pretty much every way. 

When mom wasn't home, I loaded the BB gun I'd just gotten for my birthday and put on my halloween costume. The Lone Ranger is on patrol! Watch out bad guys! I get on my bike to survey the neighborhood for evildoers, which turns out to be awesome because if I get going fast enough my cape billows, just like the real lone ranger riding his big white horse. I can always go fastest on the downhill driveway of the church, so I go there and practice billowing. I don't see any evildoers, but they're probably just scared off by how badass I look.  If my brother is finished with his homework maybe he can put on his ninja costume and I can ride him down and bring him to jail. The doghouse would be a perfect jail. I head back home and see a rabbit poking its head out of a burrow in our front yard. I don't think it saw me. I quietly stop my bike, get off, and creep behind a bush. The rabbit is crawling out, nibbling on some of mom's flowers. Mom hates seeing those flowers eaten. Not exactly a scary villain, but it'll do. I creep a little closer behind the landscaping and take out my pistol. That rabbit will be so scared it'll never eat another flower! I get on my elbows like a little green plastic army guy and take aim. 

There's a loud clap and my left shoulder explodes in pain. The shock sends me about three feet in the air, which is totally stupid. get down, hide, freeze, get in the bushes, get down, hide .... front left leg won't work at all, but I get under cover of a bush. Freeze. Listen, freeze. There is a big pinkie coming around from behind a bush - its definitely looking for me. I can make it to the burrow. I dart, and tumble because my leg won't work. My fur is wet. I dart again, and stumble. Its running at me now and the clap keeps going off. I barely make it into the burrow and there are more claps, even louder inside, and dirt near the entry is bursting in little puffs with every clap. Freeze, hide, listen, freeze. Listen. The claps stop, and I hear him moving away. My fur is wet all down my left front leg. I try to clean it, and it hurts. Its blood from a small hole near my shoulder. Its hard to groom there, but grooming is soothing, as long as I don't move the leg too much. 

Caveat, or "With the eventual goal of immortalizing shark rectal gland epithelial cells"

It has been a while, but still less than a month, since the last post, so I'm pretending to still be posting regularly.

We were shipped shark cells (which were dead on arrival) and a shark rectal gland. We are now growing rectal gland epithelium, or trying to, with the eventual goal of immortalizing shark rectal gland epithelial cells. And here is the big discovery, for me: even in a cell culture dish, dissected away from the rest of the body, alive and (relatively) kicking, shark cells smell strongly like dead fish. Yay science.

We got through the opening weekend of Les Miserables at the theatre, and it was impressive. Tech week and opening weekend is always some stress and a long haul, and that is doubly or triply so with a 3 hour show with 36 cast members and a similarly sized orchestra. Personally, this is the first big chunk of cello playing i've done since I broke my left index finger last holiday season. I had some serious callous-building to do and my hands are way out of practice, so my fingers would HURT after playing for 3 hours straight (which is not much of an exageration - the cello plays in every one of the 31 songs in Les Mis, and never has more than about 30 seconds of resting). I am still making some errors here and there, but for the most part I am ridiculously proud of the way it sounds. end brag.

The best news of late, though, is from Cain - he was going to read some Harry Potter, but couldn't remember which book he left off on. So he made the decision to restart the series from the beginning, and went on a Harry Potter kick. He will be Harry for Halloween, and he NEEDED to have the official HP wand that he saw at barnes and noble for $30. Saving the money from his allowances was going to take too long for am impatient 10 year old, so he decided to make the money himself, by selling his self-folded origami creations. His repertoire includes ninja stars (multiple subspecies), balloons, cranes, dragons, and boomerangs. Since mom and dad have been at the theatre every night, the babysitter, our friend Terri, took him all over town to likely spots to sell Origami. He got kicked out of the mall by security on his first day, but was not dissuaded, and made a killing the next day at a busy bus stop. Then Terri helped him make an order form and collected orders from all the rest of my colleagues at work, and he was over the top. The whole thing was so fun to watch ... he now has the wand, and brings it into the closet under the stairs to read the books. My kid wins at Harry Potter. Love my kids.

proximate

The incubator nonsense continues. I also just re-read the last post, and maybe I should proofread things. I probably won't though.

We are performing a test-run with a CO2 tank hooked up to the incubator (instead of waiting for a line to be run to the room) and a handheld O2 sensor set in the room.

Well, we are doing that NOW, but earlier this week, we wanted to do that and couldn't because it turns out plastics designed to work at room temp or higher can get brittle and break when you want them to work in a cold room, which can make your CO2 leak out into the room instead of fill the incubator. So that needed a fix.

And today's shark-cell-incubator-mad-science-emergency is that the CO2 sensor on the incubator, which tells it when to shove more CO2 in or not, is carefully calibrated to be a really good sensor when operated at 37 and high humidity. It is complete shit when operating with basically no humidity at 18 degrees.

My boss is super optimistic that this will all get worked out. In fact, he's having some mad-science-shark-cells cent here on Friday, and they'll need that 18 degree CO2 controlled environment ready to go as soon as they get here. I think maybe part of his optimism is because he's out of town and doesn't have any idea that most of this epic has been happening. I may tell him shark week is over and he can handle this on his own from here on out.

In other news, I get to be assistant coach for Cain's soccer team, and our first practice is this evening!

I haven't commented on the word of the day because I am completely unimpressed. My mind is near-constantly sorting through proximate and less proximate and more ultimate causes for things, and I sometimes actually think about it in those terms, and the word is just played out. For example: Ethan could be screaming and crying downstairs, and through brief interrogatory investigation ("use your words, honey") it is discovered that the proximate cause of the screaming and crying state is that Raechel won't let him wear the BLUE necklace. But dig a little deeper, and Rae is withholding necklace rights because Ethan was kicking her in the elbow, which was because Ethan was .... and so on, until it is revealed that the ultimate cause of the problem is that its too damn hot outside for the kids to go out and run off excess energy, so they're stuck inside tormenting each other.

I just finished book three of Daniel Abraham's Dagger and Coin series, which is quite good. I really like having a bunch of anatomically divergent races of humanity as an alternative to having humans/dwarves/elves/hobbits/etc like a classical fantasy world. Then I started reading Jared Diamond's The World Until Yesterday, which is non-fiction, but (ironically?) comparing cultures of divergent races of humanity. Is that irony?

Vapor

Oh crap - it happened. Somebody noticed I was blogging again. Now I'm going to feel obligated to write them. Well, maybe a little.

I thought about maybe starting to write a story and seeing how that works out.

Also thought about writing about various experiences here at work, but there are always questions about what I can and can't share, information-wise ... plus then I'll start speaking lab language and no-one will be able to read it.

I did nto know that vapor can be a verb meaning to indulge in bragging, blustering, or idle talk
Read more at http://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/#BiSCuwzQbSLEod5s.99 

also didn't know that link would pop up with the copied text of the definition... 

now my font shrank!! Help me!!! I'm meltinnnnnggg!!

grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

overcompensating. 

Ahhh. what was I saying? forget it. this is potentially better (and maybe potentially vaporing):

There is an epic to be told. And I use the word epic loosely. Bossman was away on a remote desert island laboratory (I think it was a mad scientist convention) and an old mentor (possibly his mad scientist idol) who is losing funding (not going to turn this into a rant about government not funding the NIH) and needs a place to grow cells for his research. Now, most EVERYONE in biomedical research grows cells. Skin cells, cancer cells, kidney cells, blood cells, blood cancer cells, Henrietta Lax's illegally obtained cancer cells, mouse cells, cat cells, monkey cells. Cells are great for when you want to try something in a living system that's not actually a living organism (get that distinction? alive but less likely to upset PETA). Mammalian cells, as a rule, grow at body temperature, which is fairly constant among mammals at about 37 celsius, or 98-100 farenheit. So you have incubators set to 37 degrees with humidification and controlled gas (5% carbon dioxide, because it works). We have a room full of incubators full of cells, and freezers full of frozen cells that we can thaw out and grow again later. Again, this is normal if you work in a lab. 

What is not normal are the cells that mad scientist mentor/idol needs us to grow. They aren't from a mammal, they are from a shark. I'm not even going to try and go into why bossman wants to grow his mad scientist mentor/idol's shark cells, because the reason involves ion channels, and I am totally over ion channels (actually I just thought that sentence sounded good). 

For the centigrade-impaired, room temperature is 23-25 celsius, freezing is 0, boiling is 100, and as mentioned above, mammalian body temp is 37. Shark cells want to grow at 18, which makes all sorts of sense when you consider their environment, but do you sense the major problem yet? We use incubators to keep cells warm, and shark cells are below room temperature. Suddenly we don't need an incubator with humidity and controlled CO2 levels, we need a refrigerator. I look into this problem and the friendly folks who want to sell me incubators for thousands of dollars have a solution - an incubator that can be cooled by a separate unit that is also ridiculously expensive. But this would contradict Mad Science Law #2: don't buy new equipment. Dr. Frankenstein didn't buy a monster, he MADE one. He didn't even pay an electric bill - he harnessed lightning instead. So how do you make a heating unit keep something cooler than room temp? Seriously, I'll wait - see if you can work it out. It's going to seem so obvious once I tell you. 

You put the incubator in a walk-in cooler. 

I know, right? 

The cooler is set to 4 degrees - its basically a refrigerated room. If we were a restaurant, we'd keep food there. We're a lab, so we keep - well, that's not important - the point is its at 4 degrees. The incubator is heating itself to 18, 14 degrees above ambient temp. In a normal room at 24, the incubator heats itself to 37, 13 degrees above ambient. The incubator shouldn't be doing any more work than normal. Full of win. Just set the incubator to 18, attach the CO2 line, and  .... shit, there is no CO2 line piped into the coldroom. Why would there be? Who would need a CO2 line in a cold room?

Mad scientists, that's who. 

Luckily, I work at a big institution with a whole department full of engineers. I call them, and someone comes to look at the issue. There is a CO2 line in the larger room that contains the coldroom, good. It actually runs right next to the coldroom -- even better. Just put a hole through the wall and seal it well, and  ... hold on, that codl room doesn't have ventilation. It just recirculates the same air to keep itself cold effectively. It doesn't vent air out, and it only gets fresh air when the door opens. Regulations state that any area with closed ventilation cannot have any gas line run into it unless we also install an O2 sensor, to make sure we don't accidentally create a deathtrap. They didn't get the memo - we're mad scientists, deathtraps are sort of our thing. That argument doesn't convince her. So maybe ...

this post is enormous. to be continued. I need to actually go DO some mad science. 

Inscrutable

Turns out merriam-webster has a word of the day , and it's inscrutable. Cannot be scruted. 'Scrutable' is actually a real word as its antonym, they say. I guess they don't feel its a verb. I feel they didn't scrute hard enough.

I'm freakin sick of management crap in the lab. I really want to do science, not do all the 500 little things that keep the lab running and compliant and blah blah blah. Whine whine whine.

Have been trying to research amplification options for cello in the event that such will be needed for the Les Mis pit orchestra. I think it will be, but I have no idea how it will be paid for, because even the cheap options that are ok but not fantastic sounding run $200. The nicer systems run twice that and more.... I rediscover yet again that I could spend pretty much my whole salary on cello toys and accessories ... Just like I could on the RPG hobby ... why should hobbies be expensive? its not fair!

Started listening to a D&D AP (actual play) podcast, which is listening to another group sit around their table and play. Sometimes its really boring, and their sound recording quality isn't awesome (I have been spoiled by Fear the Boot (an amazing gaming podcast that is not AP)), but I do kinda like the story they are telling so far. Time is an issue. Maybe if I didn't sleep at all, I would have enough time to do all the stuff I want to do. Reading, playing, parenting (playing with kids), cello (playing), watching TV (playing video) ... but all the stuff I have to do steals time.

This post is BORING! I think I am a little depressed by my life. Which is dumb, I think - objectively, I do fairly interesting things. But I write down anything about it, and I feel like 'how dumb is that!' Maybe its a confidence thing. I probably still need more confidence. I wonder if that is also too expensive.

Stuff that is happening

Following in the footsteps of an old friend, I think its time to revisit my blog.

Admission: since breaking my finger last Thanksgiving, and then it taking all winter to heal to the point I could take the splint off (I am now wise in the ways of battling splint-stink), I finally got my cello out again to play. Unsurprising in retrospect, I have absolutely no callous on that finger anymore, but aside from that I think it went pretty well. I still remembered which hand to hold the bow with, and which end of the cello goes down, and my fingers had an impressive repertoire of muscle memory.

The reason for such an admission, or rather the reason that I got out the cello, was because I'm going to be playing in the pit orchestra for a production of Les Miserables right here in Rochester! I'm quite excited about this development, even more so because Audrey is singing in the ensemble and I am actually, for the first time since ... well, since ... um ... some show in Florida - Beauty and the Beast maybe - Audrey and I are working on the same show! Maybe I'm celebrating a small victory here, or maybe you, dear reader, are underestimating the difficulty of working out how both parents of three children can work on the same show without the children living at the theatre.


Also I'm now running two D&D games, which I'm quite enjoying. Currently, I should be designing clever defenses for the gnoll (except the gnolls look like trollocs) fortification that my players hope to assault next week. So far it has a front door, which is guarded by a spiked dry moat and a wooden stake wall with a single small (wooden) tower; and a back door, which is concealed, watched by hidden snipers, and both entrances lead to the underground portion of the fort ... and I can't really write any more than that because what if one of my players reads this? Dead giveaway is what it would be. Maybe next time I write about D&D I'll seed it with a bunch of details that are wrong, and see if anyone was paying attention. See, you don't HAVE to be devious to run a D&D game, but it doesn't hurt either. Maybe all those bits I already wrote are wrong, even! Devious! This was posted by one of my players in that game:




You know you're a geek when you are very proud of yourself for custom-making two lego pegataurs (yes, winged centaur) - but you're even more of a geek when you find that brickforge already makes centaur bodies that fit minifig torsos, and you deflate a little cause they look better than yours.


The other game already has its own blog - X-Crawl - and it hasn't been updated in forever either. I am not making any promises.