November 13

Dear Aunt Lucy,

Thanks for your Halloween letter. Surely your little tomatoes aren't still ripening in the snowy weather (maybe they're now on the windowsill). Big beets are just as tender as little ones - I once fed a whole Gagne family dinner on one giant beet from the Farmers Market!

I'm attaching a family email I sent out on Tuesday, reporting on Mom's meeting with a surgeon at the Joint Replacement Access Clinic at Lions Gate Hospital. Mom is in good spirits now this is finally settled, but Dad is still complaining about the delays (it took three months for her to get to the surgeon), so he and I are going to write a tactful letter to the Director of the OASIS program, suggesting that they look into ways to improve their communication with physicians and JRAC.

On Wednesday night Graeme brought three of the boys and his partner Pat to dinner at Mom and Dad's. He also brought a ton of delicious Chinese food, so nobody needed to do any cooking, which was very nice. Here's a photo snapped with my phone camera. That's Ira on the left sitting in Mom's wheelchair - the boys were fooling around in it. and Monroe and Wes on the right.

This will be a quick letter - I'm off this morning to Simon Fraser University across town, where a physics graduate student will begin teaching me how to use their "optical tweezers" apparatus to control the movement of a tiny bead under a microscope. I'm going to be using this apparatus as part of my sabbatical-year research project, measuring the forces that single bacterial cells exert on DNA molecules when they're pulling them in across their membranes (the DNA molecules will be attached to the beads).

I'm on the search committee for a new faculty position, so I spent yesterday doing a quick read-through of 194 cover letters and CVs from the applicants. One result was the attached blog post on what not to say in a cover letter - my favourite is the CV page where some unfortunate computer misbehaviour had replaced every 's' with a 'p'!

Love,

Rosie

Dear Aunt Lucy,

I haven't sent a proper letter for quite a while, and this one will be a bit rushed. I have to get my car to the shop for a long-overdue checkup and then bike to the gym at UBC for a long-overdue workout with my sometime exercise partner.

Yesterday was the memorial service for Aunt Betty. The minister, who I guess had never known her, began by referring to her as "Amanda" (her real first name), but soon switched to "Amanda/Betty" and finally to just "Betty". Alex gave a very nice summary of her life, and how especially he valued their time together when he was to only son not yet in school. Teresa and I used a couple of the handkerchiefs you sent to wipe our eyes during a very moving talk by Elaine (Ted's wife) about how much Betty had meant to her. She also reminded us of Betty's intellectual and ecological ideas - I remember as a child being startled to see that they had some classical music records (!), and feeling sorry for the boys because instead of a proper lawn they just had what I thought of as messy trees and bushes (what we'd now call 'eco-scaping').

I was also reminded that a Christmas gift from Betty was what got me started making fancy desserts. She gave me a little apron, a mixing bowl, a package of red jello and a bag of marshmallows with a recipe on the side for a foamy pink concoction. Here's a picture of where that ultimately led - a raspberry Bavarian cake for Monday's thanksgiving dinner. (The mint leaves I garnished it with went very nicely with the tablecloth you embroidered.)

The trashy novel you sent ("Filthy Rich"?) appealed to the very lowest part of my taste in reading - I read it straight through and then passed it on to my sisters.

Mom is being quite a bit more active lately - up and down out of her wheelchair, and doing her knee exercises. They haven't heard yet from the Joint-Replacement Clinic at Lions Gate Hospital about an assessment appointment, so I'm going to call them today to check that they know she's waiting for one.

I'm off Sunday for a week in California. Mainly a conference at Asilomar - have you ever been there? It's a State Park in Monterey that's also a wonderful rustic conference center. The conference I'm going to is one of a series that began as a birthday celebration for a colleague (he's now 70 and still an active researcher). it's particularly great because the organizers have never allowed anyone to show slides. In the past we've been given 20 minutes with a whiteboard and some pens (the modern equivalent of a 'chalk talk', but this time we're only getting 15 minutes and some big paper pads.

Mom says you don't think you'll be coming out here for Christmas. We'll miss you - maybe we should organize a flying visit from some of us to you instead.

XXX

Rosie

Back from Chicago

Dear Aunt Lucy and Mom and Dad,

I hope you're having a good visit and, Mom, that your knee is settling down again. Did any of the Saskatoon cousins get in touch? And were you going to Regina to see Mike and Lucille and Alice, or were they coming to Saskatoon?

I got back from my quick Chicago trip late last night. It was a great trip. I tried taking the new SkyTrain line to the airport - that worked very well, fast and convenient and much cheaper than taking a taxi or paying for parking.

I got there on Monday afternoon, with just enough time to visit the famous Field Museum of Natural History to see their wonderful collection of dinosaur skeletons. (I wanted to send you a postcard but the shop was already closed when I left.) While I was trying to figure out how to use my credit card to buy a ticket for the subway into town (having decided to use public transit for the whole trip), a woman offered me her still-valid three-day pass (she was heading out of town). And when I got to the Museum (long walk across nice parks because I'd misjudged the distance), I discovered that it was the once-a month 'free' day for museum entrance. And when I got inside I found myself following behind (and listening to ) a museum official who was giving a couple of visitors a personal tour!)

I got back to my hotel with just enough time for a quick shower before being taken out to dinner. The hotel was very posh (just a block from Northwestern Medical School), but the kind of place that tempts you with lots of overpriced amenities - a tray of snacks laid out, each priced at triple what you'd pay on the street, a big bottle of water by the bed with a $5 price tag on it, there were even prices on the tea and coffee for the in-room coffeemaker.

Dinner was at a pricey 'pub-style' restaurant. The three of us shared a series of dishes: We started with fried pork rinds (light as air), then had a "chef's sampler" plate of three kinds of gourmet ham (with pickled wax beans), and then a 'mixed charcouterie' (spelling?) plate with headcheese and lamb tongue and oxtail terrine and a little pork pie, and assorted garnishes (raspberry mustard!). And finally, a big slice of a pork tenderloin that had been wrapped in a pork belly (the cut bacon is made from) before being roasted, accompanied by the house "pickles of the week" and little dishes of beets and of corn (with garlic mayonnaise and lime juice). We were in hog heaven!

Then I sat in my hotel room and tried to pull together the talk I would have to give at noon the next day. I hadn't given a talk like this for a long time (a couple of years) so I was redoing all my slides and it was a bit of a mess. But I got up early (when my brain works better), and it came together nicely.

I spent the day of my talk being taken from office to office, talking for 45 minutes with different researchers about their work and mine - very interesting and lots of fun. I'm going to use the honorarium they pay me (usually about $200 US) to pay for two years of a $10/month 'data roaming plan' for my iPhone, which will let me use it in the USA.

Before I left Vancouver I had to get my big grant proposal submitted. That went pretty well - having two smart people in my lab was a very big help. If it doesn't get funded it will be because we don't have enough preliminary data to prove the feasibility of the experiments we're proposing. I'd be able to resubmit it in March, by which time we will have a lot more preliminary data.

Got to go - I promised my friend Jolie that I'd make it to the gym this morning (I haven't been for weeks).

Love,

Rosie

Testing

Sent from my iPhone (please ignore typos).

Waitting

Dear Aunt Lucy,

I'm writing this on my phone, from the (very long) lineup at the US
border. I'm going down to talk with a friend/colleague in Bellingham about a research grant I'm planning to submit at the beginning of October. (Update, we ended up deciding to delay this submission to the next deadline, in February, which will give me lots of time to get everything polished. But I still have another proposal that's due Sept. 14.)

I offered to make the cake for Lou and Rob's wedding, so last night I
made 3 square feet of spongecake and 4 batches of buttercream
frosting, going through 3 pounds of butter and 30 eggs. Two more
pounds of butter went into the puff pastry, and I need to buy at least
a quart of rum tidouse the spongecake layers with.

The border wait makes me really angry. They have to eventually process
everyone by the end of the day, so having long wait times doesn't save
them any money. But it wastes thousands of person-hours every day, not
to mention all the gas we burn while creeping forward.

On Sunday I went with Teresa and Denis on a 'Slow Food Bike Ride'
around Chilliwack. We saw a goat farmm and a modern dairy farm (the
cows stay safely in the barn and the grass is brought to them as
silage). Also bees, Herefords, wine.

Mom is doing very well. But after she has the knee surgery she won't
be able to do stairs for several months. It's nice to have long
advance notice of this so they can make plans for it. If they stay in their house Mom will be stuck inside for the whole time - one option would be for them to rent a convenient apartment for those months, then move back as soon as Mom can manage the stairs.

Better stop writing this as we're finally getting close to the border.

Later - Aug. 31: I'm back from Lou's wedding. It was lovely, very informal, with food brought by all the guests. My cake was promising to be a big mess (weather too warm for the buttercream frosting), but it all came together well at the end. Mom is getting around very well with her walker for short distances and the push wheelchair for long ones.

Love

Rosie

July 29

Dear Aunt Lucy,

The plumber is here! I was in no hurry to get things fixed until the garberator became so rusted that its drain started dumping water into the cupboard, forcing me to use the second less-convenient sink (my kitchen sink is two sinks, one tiny and one small, and I normally use the tiny one for washing up). This morning I was doing the final dishes in the second sink before the plumber arrived and heard a loud 'clunk' and then splashing from under the sink. The garberator had completely detached itself from its drain, and the weight of it had pulled the drain off of the second sink too. Much urgent rearranging of towel and dishpan under the sink. The people who live below me haven't complained about water leaking into their kitchen ceiling (yet), so I think I caught most of the water.

The weather is what the Australians call 'stinking hot' - very unusual for Vancouver. Yesterday I took 4 showers, and still felt grubby and sticky most of the time. But it's great weather or tomatoes (I hope yours appreciates all your care). My two tomato plants are on the roofdeck - well, they're only 'mine' in that I'm the one who planted them. They have a modest number of cherry tomatoes (modest given that the plants have names like 'sweet million'). I also planted some scarlet runner beans; they're climbing all over the dead branches of a Japanese maple that didn't make it through our unusually severe winter. They look pretty and the beans are much tastier than the supermarket ones, though they always look like they're going to be nasty and tough. I'll be going over to Mom and Dad's later this week for dinner, and I'm hoping to have enough beans for them. Dad and I will be going to the do-it-yourself framing store and framing some of the handkerchiefs you sent - I'll include a picture in my next post.

Trishie is trying to get fit (I forget what her motivation is), and she and I had planned to hike up Mt. Hollyburn tonight. She ended up canceling because she's going to Coombs tonight to house-sit for Fran and James, but in the meantime I'd invited two members of my lab and their partners to come along. They're all much younger than me, but my daily bike commuting exercise should save me from being left too far behind. It's not a hard hike (maybe 3 hours), and I'm hoping it will be nice and cool up there.

I didn't see anything of Boston except the Mass Turnpike (leaving) and the back route to the airport (returning). My friend and I spent a day in Vermont - our planned visits to cheesemakers turned into visits to farmers' markets, because that's where most artisanal cheesemakers are on Saturdays. One 'cheesemaker' we visited turned out to be a big flashy store selling cheese and books and gimmicks, and the other turned out to be an empty old house on a back road. But the oddest thing was that we never saw a cow (or a sheep or a goat), in a full day of driving all over southern Vermont. Lots of lush pastures and meadows, old barns, one horse, six alpacas and one llama, but nary a cow. We started theorizing that all the Vermont cheesemakers import their milk from Wisconsin or China, or that they keep their cows safely in germ-free warehouses... We didn't see any proper farmers either - the people selling produce at the farmers' markets were all running very small-scale organic operations, lots of beards and sandals.

What am I reading? A couple of novels (Infinite Jest, and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit), a book on the history of curry, one about C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, and one I haven't started yet (just picked it up from the public library) called Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Sex and Science. This last one is by Mary Roach, who wrote a wonderful book called Stiff, about all the interesting things you could arrange for your body to do after you're dead. Not just be dissected by medical students, but be plastinated for public display, or composted, or used for forensic research, or, my favourite, be put through simulated car crashes to help improve the realism of crash-test dummies. She manages to combine being informative, sensitive, and very funny, so I have high hopes for her sex book.

Lots of love,

Rosie

July 15-16 2009

Dear Aunt Lucy,

Thanks for your red-letter-day letter - I do like your notepaper.

I'm between trips. I spent last weekend in Penticton, and tomorrow night I leave for New England. Penticton was family. Mom and Dad decided to spend a few days there and the motel offered them a group rate if we took 5 rooms. So Trish drove the up to Penticton on Thursday, with Michelle following on Thursday night. Lou, Rob and I drove up on Friday afternoon (I couldn't leave earlier as I had to chair a PhD oral exam that morning). Michelle left early Sunday morning (she had a Sunday meeting in Vancouver) and on Monday Lou and Rob drove Mom and Dad back and I drove Trish back.

While we were there Mom and I went for pedicures, and I got a manicure too. This was a new experience for me. I quit biting my nails about 20 years ago but never managed to stop chewing on the skin around them until last week, and I thought getting a manicure would help motivate me. I also wanted to see how a professional does it. Quite interesting - I now know to use a clear base coat to help the polish stick, and to use cuticle oil to stop my cuticles from cracking, and I'm looking for a buffing pad to smooth away the worst of the ridges in my nails.

Lou, Rob, Trish and I went for a walk in the hills on Sunday and picked a quart of Saskatoon berries. I was hoping to make some jelly from them, but that didn't work at all. I first boiled them with a little water, thinking that would release the juice, but they just sat there. So I mashed them, but instead of releasing juice they absorbed the water in the pot. I added more water - they absorbed that too. Finally I added enough water that I could spoon out a bit of 'juice', but when I mixed that with sugar it tasted like thin purple Kool-ade. So I dumped the whole mess in the garbage! I don't know what went wrong - people sell Saskatoon berry jelly on-line, and post recipes, so it must be possible to make a tasty version. I'm sure these were real Saskatoon berries, but maybe the Penticton ones are a different species than the Saskatoon ones.

Tonight I'm having the people in my lab over for dinner, and I had planned to serve the jelly with the duck I'm roasting, but I guess we'll just have gravy. My lab is small right now, so dinner will be just a research associate and her husband, a post-doctoral fellow and his partner, and our undergraduate lab assistant. In Penticton I managed to find a big box of sour pie cherries at the farmers' market, so I'm going to make a cherry pie. (Pie cherries have become very scarce - nobody makes their own pies any more.)

Tomorrow night I fly to Boston, taking the 'red-eye' so I'll arrive on Friday morning to meet up with an old friend. We both attend the same conference in New Hampshire, and we usually try to get together for a day or two before it. We're both cheese junkies, so this time we're going to spend a couple of days visiting the cheese-makers of Vermont.

Later... Dinner done, I realized that I can't just put the dishes in the dishwasher as I usually do after a big dinner, because the garburetor is full of rusty holes and I still haven't had the plumber in. Now, next morning, the clean dishes are sitting in the dishwasher, which is acting as a large-capacity dish-rack (brilliant suggestion from one of my guests). All the pot-scrubbing has destroyed my new manicure (perhaps I should have worn rubber gloves...), but I now have all the little bottles (base coat, top coat, etc.) and the special spray that claims to make the polish dry faster, so tonight I'll try to replicate it for myself.

Oh, almost forgot the good news - my promotion came through after all! And the Dean wants to meet with me to discuss why UBC's student teaching evaluation system works so badly for an excellent teacher like me!

Lots of love,

Rosie