The Sense Strand

January 22, 2011

2011-01-22T08:30:00.000-08:00

Dear Lucy,

It's been six months since I've sent you a letter! We've talked on the phone, but that's a very different thing.

This letter includes a couple of enclosures that can't be shared by phone. The little water pistols were in my Christmas cracker, and they led to much childish behaviour and hilarity around the dinner table. I filled them and squirted a couple of unsuspecting people, and then passed them to Mom, thinking that she was mature and responsible enough to behave better. But she promptly squirted Dad so I took them away from her and gave them to someone else... Perhaps you could have a water-pistol fight with your visitors or your carers.

The other enclosures are copies of various newspaper and online articles arising from something I wrote last month. (You don't need to read any of these, but you can admire them.) You might have seen on the news at the beginning of December that NASA researchers had found a new form of DNA with arsenic in it. But when I read the scientific paper reporting this finding, I found it to be full of errors in both methods and interpretation. So I wrote a blog post critiquing it, which was widely circulated and admired by other scientists, starting a storm of criticism of the work. This in turn led to some very interesting articles about the role of informal communication in scientific peer review. And a few nice invitations for me - a Q&A (fake interview) in a major journal (enclosed too), two talks at the University of Kentucky, and participation in a prestigious informal meeting called "Science FOO Camp" next summer in San Francisco.

Now I'm up to my eyeballs in teaching a radically new genetics course I've developed. This is the pilot version of the course (only 40 students), but next fall we'll have at least 600. I'm trying to replace the 'classical' genetics syllabus with a 21st Century Genetics course that teaches students what they really need to know. Right now all the components of the course are at the hand-to-mouth stage - everything gets done only hours before it's needed. Sad to say, I get into this state every time I teach - no matter how much I vow to prepare in advance, it all ends up being done at the last minute.

I hope your weather has been bright and not too cold. As you can see from the above recent forecast, ours has been typical Vancouver winter, grey and dreary. I was expecting new snow on the mountains, and regretting that I don't have time to get up there snowshoeing this weekend, but now I look out my window I see only bare trees on the slopes so they must have had rain instead.

The other night I went with Mom and Dad and Michelle and Ron to see the movie The King's Speech, about King George VI's struggle with his very bad stammer. It was excellent, though the previews were mostly for horrible violent stupid movies that none of us would ever be willing to sit through. But one was for a new version of Jane Eyre, which might be good.

I'll send you some cheese with Michelle and Mom next month, but I don't think I'll be able to send any of those wonderful crackers. Apparently the Seattle cracker company's oven broke down a couple of months ago. It's replaced now, but there's a LONG backlog of orders for the crackers so they may not be available for another month or more. I'm making do with stoned wheat thins.

I'll probably come for a visit (bringing Mom and maybe Trishie?) in May, if that would suit you.

Lots of love,

Rosie

Thinking about moving

2010-07-22T08:11:00.000-07:00

Dear Lucy,

I hope you're doing well, and that your weather has finally improved. Ours is at last into the typical Vancouver summer pattern of sunny days and no rain.

This letter has a specific purpose, to find out whether you've taken steps to move to a supported facility, and to offer our help with whatever aspects of the move you'd like.

When Mom and I visited in April, we didn't have time to visit any of the places you knew of. If you haven't had a chance to visit them since then, I think Mom and Dad would probably be happy to do this with you. As I recall, such visits typically needed to be arranged well in advance, so maybe this would be best started soon. I think Mom and Dad might also appreciate seeing these places with you as a way for them to start thinking more seriously about a future move of their own, especially since Michelle and Ron are about to move out.

I've also been thinking about the rather daunting logistics of moving from a house to a small apartment, and about what kinds of support you might like to have with this. One (or maybe even two) of us nieces will be happy to come to Saskatoon for a few days (or more) to help with the move itself, but finding new homes for everything that can't move with you could be a lot of work, as will be selling your house.

Lou and I have begun to look into people who specialize in helping seniors with moves like this - would you be interested in hiring someone? Do you have a good real estate agent in mind, and a lawyer who can save you most of the legal hassles, or would you like help with that too? (One small business we found will help with everything from coordinating lawyers and real estate agents to planning your new furniture layout and hanging the pictures on your new walls!)

Just let us know what we can do.

Love,

Frog, May 29

2010-04-23T08:47:00.001-07:00

Dear Lucy,

I hear your weather has been lousy. You're in good company; even though it's nearly June, Vancouver has yet to get as warm as Saskatoon was in April! Here's the latest grim forecast*.

And here's the frog photo; you can see he's on the glass railing of our lunch/coffee area, above the long tables where the med students study. (You can faintly see the fishing line that's holding him in place.)

On Thursday I'm going with Dad to his appointment with the Lions Gate Hospital physiotherapists, where he'll get help with his balance problem. He's seen the motion-disorders specialist at the UBC Parkinson's Disease Clinic. They've confirmed that his body's sense of balance doesn't work properly in certain situations (getting up from a chair, turning a corner), but there's no evidence of a specific cause. For years we daughters have been trying to get him to do exercises to improve his balance, but he keeps expecting a medical cure instead. I'm hoping that the LGH physios will finally get him working on the problem himself. He does go to the gym regularly, and a trainer there has recently added some strength training (weight-lifting) to his cardio program. Once he has a formal set of balance exercises to do, I think I'll encourage him to ask the trainer to also check that he's doing his balance exercises.

Later (June 4): Mom has been feeling generally lousy, and her doctor found that she had a urinary tract infection, so she should be better soon. I (belatedly) remember your telling me that your doctor said that, whenever older ladies are feeling poorly, they should be checked for urinary tract infections.

Dad had a full hour with the physiotherapist. She was very thorough, checking how well he could do many different things. She's working out a set of exercises to improve his body's ability to react quickly to changes in position (that seems to be the core problem), and he's to go back next week. But for now his only exercises are to practice walking in a straight line, and to try to balance on one foot for the ~30 seconds it takes his coffee to warm up in the microwave.

Love,

Rosie

*Later that day: The weather forecast was overly optimistic. The temperature briefly made it up to 12 °C at 3 pm and then dropped back to 11 °C.

Visit to Saskatoon

2010-04-07T16:45:00.000-07:00

Hi Lucy,

Mom and I are arriving on April 17, at 2:04 pm on Westjet flight 104 (direct from Vancouver with one stop in Calgary). We leave on April 21 (Mom's birthday!), at 11:05 am on Westjet flight 121, which gets us to Vancouver at 3:25 pm. I've reserved a rental car, so you can expect us at your door shortly after 4:00 pm.

At lunchtime today I went over to the new Biodiversity Museum to watch the arrival of a skeleton. It's from a blue whale that washed up on a PEI beach in 1987. The Canadian Museum of Nature had it buried (for preservation?), and now it's been exhumed and its skeleton prepared for display in the glass-enclosed entrance hall of the museum. The big problem was getting rid of the awful smell; I hear it still pongs a bit, so lets hope the museum has a good ventilation system.

Here's an artist's view of what the skeleton will look line once it's been installed.

I've been promising to take Mom for a pedicure for months now, and I though you might enjoy having one too (brightly painted toenails are a very cheerful addition to the morning ablutions). On consulting with my Saskatoon cousins I discovered that Marcy is an expert in such things - she says 'all things esthetic are my specialty'. She recommended a place at The Centre Mall (Vian's), so I've made us an appointment for 10:30 on Monday morning April 19. It's my treat. Let me know if you'd like a manicure too - I think I'm going to get one. (If you don't feel up to traveling to the mall, we'll give you an amateur pedicure at home so your toenails don't feel left out.)

Flowers and other sights

2010-01-27T09:36:00.001-08:00

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Dec. 10 2009

2009-12-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

Hi Lucy,

This is just a quick note to accompany these biscotti (and a tiny token Christmas present). If the biscotti don't fill a niche in your diet, just pass them on to Ivan or feed them to visitors along with a cup of tea.

Mom and Dad and I went to the aquarium the other day. I remember it as a bunch of tanks with solitary fish, but now each tank is a whole ecosystem, very beautiful and dramatic. We didn't make it to the show in the "4-D theater"; apparently it has not just the usual two dimensions of screen but other sensory 'dimensions' of smells and spray (there are tiny nozzles behind each seat!). And we didn't stick around for the beluga show either - instead we went off to the Prospect Point Cafe, high above the Lions Gate Bridge, for lunch.

The weather's been beautiful all week, but below freezing. I've been still riding my bike, because the roads are clear and dry (not icy), but they're forecasting a week of snow flurries and snow-mixed-with-rain, so I think I'll be back on the bus for a while.

Teresa called to complain that she'd spent $65 on new bulbs for her garden, but before she got around to planting them a rat found them in her garage and ate them all! It's quite unfair, as she had nagged me into finally buying new bulbs a couple of weeks ago (because mine are exposed in pots on my balcony they almost all died in last winter's long cold spell) and I planted them right away.

Mom doesn't have a date for her knee replacement yet, but she's getting into shape for it with her weekly physiotherapist visits. Mom refers to the physio as 'your friend Julie' even though I've never met her, and says she keeps giving her more exercises to do. I'm going to take her (Mom, not the physio) for a pedicure soon, on the premise that you want your feet to look their best when you're having knee surgery.

Lots of love,

Rosie

p.s. After 25 years of safely mixing food and computers, the other day I finally spilled some tea (with milk and sugar) into my computer keyboard. And now I know it's true - keyboards are washable! I took its batteries out (it's a wireless one) and rinsed it under the tap for ages, to get out not just the tea but the tiny cracker crumbs that the tea had congealed into invisible goo, and massaged the keys up and down for a while to dislodge the goo, and then dried it overnight in the 37°C incubator, and now it's as good as new.

November 13

2009-11-13T07:08:00.001-08:00

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

2009-10-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-16T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-14T16:18:00.000-07:00

Sent from my iPhone (please ignore typos).

Waitting

2009-08-26T11:02:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

Dear Aunt Lucy,

Happy Canada Day! (Though Canada Day will be long gone before Canada Post gets this letter to you.) Last night Michelle and I replaced the spring-flowers banner on Mom and Dad's house with a Canadian flag. She's going to watch the North Vancouver parade this morning, and Fran says that Jesse will be in the Coombs parade.

I was over at Mom and Dad's because they were both feeling lousy. Mom's ribs are still very sore, and Dad spent the morning with an attack of some intestinal virus. But Dad is OK now, and Ron came by and used his massage therapist training to figure out why Mom's ribs are so sore. Basically, he thinks it's because, when she fell (now almost two weeks ago), the right side of her ribcage hit the arm of a wooden chair in the dining room. This bruised and twisted the lower ribs, and the pain she felt all around her ribcage was referred from the stress this put on her vertebrae. He said it's not uncommon for the pain to not arise for some days after the fall, and that the ribs will take a couple of weeks to recover. Mom is still waiting to hear the results of her X-ray, but it's reassuring to have this reasonable explanation.

Our family has benefited a lot from the partner choices of my sisters. All the present and past ones are great resources for the family (a computer expert!, a renovator! a financial expert!), and all so nice that they remain welcome parts of the family even if the marriage splits up.

I emailed my Dean on Monday, asking about the status of my promotion file now that the Senior Appointments Committee had had its last meeting of the academic year. He was cagey, first saying only that the file was in the President's office, and then explaining (when I asked) that the committee hadn't made its decision yet. This means no decision until at least September, so I've asked my Department Head to try to pry more information out of him.

I've started doing experiments in the lab again. The results of the first one just strengthened my adage that "Most scientists spend most of their time trying to figure out why their experiments aren't working." Rather than spending more time on this particular experiment right now, I should probably stop and rethink which experiments deserve the highest priority. In intellectual terms this one does, as it will confirm (or disprove) a result from about 25 years ago on which I've been building my ideas about how bacteria take up DNA. But strategically, it may be more important right now to do other experiments, ones that will provide 'preliminary data' for the grant proposals I'm going to submit in September.

The photos below show the decoration I just painted on one of the doorways of our lab area. The other doorways are painted bright colours (Lou's decorating suggestion), but this one has only recently come under our domain so I just decorated it with some water-soluble paint I had bought a few years ago to paint Merry Christmas on our lab window. By the green doorway in the bottom picture you can see the "No eating or drinking" sampler you made for the lab. partly obscured by the yellow fish mobile.

Love, Rosie

Photos

2009-07-01T06:35:00.001-07:00

June 23

2009-06-23T06:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Aunt Lucy,

I hope you've received my first letter by now (Canada Post definitely qualifies as 'snail mail'). Here's another update on my life.

I took all the gorgeous handkerchiefs over to Mom and Dad's on Sunday and showed them to my sisters (everyone but Claire and Frannie was there). Mom brought out some handkerchiefs she had too. I think each of us took some, Teresa and I choosing ones that weren't too fancy for nose-blowing. Teresa set aside five that she had assembled into a nice arrangement, and left them with Dad so he could take them to the framing shop and choose a mat and frame (his artistic judgement is probably best). But after I left I realized that, if I want to have the framed ones I'd better take some responsibility for the framing, so next time I'm over there I'll go with Dad to the framing shop and pay for the framing.

Tonight my faculty-women bookclub gets together. We read a novel and then meet for dinner at one of our houses. We rarely spend more than a few minutes talking about the book we've just read, and a few more choosing the next one. Instead we mainly talk about our lives and families and work (we're all biologists of some sort - botanists, zoologists, a forest geneticist, a human-pregnancy researcher), and admire each others' cooking. Tonight Wendy says she's making squash ravioli and just needs to figure out how to get the filling inside - I think that may be a similar problem to getting the caramel into the caramilk bar.

I'm (finally) up for promotion to full Professor; it took me a long time to feel I had enough publications and support from my department head to make success likely. The promotion has already been approved at the Department and Faculty levels, and now I'm waiting to hear the decision of the president-level Senior Appointments Committee. They've had my file for a couple of months now. They had sent back a query about graduate students, asking why I don't have any at present and why two of my former students had left without finishing their degrees. I think they're worrying that I might be a poor supervisor, so I sent the dean contact information for former students who could contradict that. I'm not worried about my publication record any more, as I've published four journal articles and two book chapters (way more than my usual output) since the file was submitted, and I've sent an update to the Dean. So the only other hurdle is my teaching evaluations. Despite being one of the most committed and thoughtful teachers in the department (lots of evidence for that), my student-evaluation scores are the lowest in the department, apparently because many of the students in my first-year biology classes think I'm mean. I don't care deeply about the promotion, but I'll be very annoyed if I miss out because of these evaluations (annoyed at the Senior Appointments Committee, not the students). I should find out soon, because the committee needs to make its decision by the end of the month.

Next week I'll write about running my lab,

Love,

Rosie

p.s. My apartment is STILL a pigsty, but the cleaning ladies come on Friday so I'll need to pick everything up before then.

June 16

2009-06-16T04:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Aunt Lucy,

Your long letter reminded me that I'd like to be writing to you often, so I'm trying a new strategy to make that happen - writing the letters as blog posts and then printing them out and mailing them to you. I'm sure you know what a blog is - a diary written on the internet, usually open to anyone who cares to read it. I already write regularly (more-or-less daily) in my 'research' blog RRResearch (rrresearch.blogspot.com), and I value this writing because it helps me think clearly about my research as I do it. I find blog writing comes much more easily than other forms of writing, so now I'm going to write to you in another blog I set up for more personal writing but rarely use - I've just renamed it Letters to Aunt Lucy (sensestrand.blogspot.com).

Thanks so much for the handkerchiefs. Not only are they more lovely then I expected, but knowing that they were hand-made by particular people makes me think I should frame them as family mementos instead of putting them to the sordid use I had planned. I already have some embroideries and other handicrafts hanging on my bedroom wall, including the sheaf of wheat and poppies you gave me and a hand-painted dainty apron that I think came from Grandma. I'll definitely share them with Teresa, as I know she likes to use real handkerchiefs. Lou is coming over on Sunday and we're going to have a Fathers Day brunch with Mom and Dad, so I'll bring them with me.

I'm glad you have some plants to look after and use for food; the ones I grow bring a lot of pleasure into my life. Last weekend I bought a little banana plant at Home Depot (only $12). Right now it's on my balcony but I might move it up onto the roof deck where it will get more sun. I'll have to move it indoors over the winter. I don't think it will produce bananas (at least not edible ones), but it's a bit of a thrill to grow something so tropical.

What am I up to? Domestically, I think I told you on the phone that I have a new bicycle. It's a pleasure to ride, and has newfangled disk brakes which, I'm told, work as well when wet as when dry. I'm expecting that to be a big safety improvement for most of the year here, but I haven't had a chance to test them because it hasn't rained here once since I got back to town two weeks ago! We seem to already be into our summer-sunshine weather.

My garburator (did you know that word is a Canadianism, like 'parkade'?) jammed last week, and when I looked inside I discovered that its walls have rusted clean through (it's more than 20 years old). So I'll need to get a plumber in to install a new one. That's actually a good thing, because I have lots of other problems that need a plumber: my hot water tank is long overdue for replacement, there's a copper pipe under my bathroom sink that's had a slow pinhole leak for about 15 years (!), and none of my faucets work properly (they're all the kind with one rotatable control rather than two taps, and the balance between too hot and too cold has gotten almost impossible to find).

Last night I made peanut butter soup, using a West African recipe from the New York Times. Chicken, onions, ginger, garlic, hot pepper, big chunks of yams and tomatoes, and lots of greens. The recipe called for collards, but this being Vancouver and not Atlanta I had to substitute bok choi. And about 3/4 cup of peanut butter. The recipe said it would serve four, but it made an enormous potful so I'll try freezing some.

I'd better stop writing - it's after 8 am and I really must clean up my pigsty of a kitchen before I leave for UBC. I unthinkingly put the remains of the garlic down the drain, forgetting that it would just get stuck in the useless garburator, so now my sink reeks of garlic.

Love,

Rosie

Parking at UBC

2009-04-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

As is the case at just about every university in the world, the students, staff and faculty at the University of British Columbia loathe and detest the people who control parking. Unlike most other places, somebody got so fed up that he took them to court, hitting the university with a class-action suit claiming that they had no legal right to impose fines or to tow or impound parked vehicles. (UBC Parking had impounded his legally parked car because they claimed he owed $200 in parking fines.)

Four years later, a judge has ruled that UBC is 'ultra vires' with respect to parking fines, meaning that imposing fines is outside the limits of their legal authority. However they still have the right to regulate parking, to tow and impound illegally parked cars, and to charge the costs of towing and storage to the owners of the cars. UBC responded with a carefully worded press release, intended to convince us that we still must pay for parking.

At present UBC only tows cars that are blocking emergency access or in a disabled-parking spot, that someone has complained about, or that have at least 4 unpaid fines. That's only 1 or 2 cars per day.

I haven't yet found a clear explanation of the real implications of this decision for people who park at UBC. (I park here only occasionally, when cycling isn't appropriate, but I always grudge the $5.) So here's my interpretation:

UBC can tell us where to park, and it can do its best to charge us for access to that parking. In the parkades this will work fine most of the time, because you usually can't get out until you pay. But in the open lots you pay at a machine and leave the payslip on your dashboard. Until now the lots were checked at random times every day and if your car was caught without a payslip it was ticketed and you were fined; if you accumulated four fines your car might be impounded. Now UBC has no authority to collect fines, so if they give you a ticket you can ignore it. In principle I think they could legally impound every car that didn't pay, but in practice they won't do that (if only because their impound lot is far too small).

The class-action suit asked that UBC pay back the ~$4 million in fines that it collected between 1990 and 2005. (That's only about half of the fines it has issued - who knew that half of all fines remain unpaid?) Whether UBC has to do this hasn't been decided yet.

The obvious next step is for UBC to install pay-gates at the entrances/exits to the parking lots, but until they do I'm not paying for parking.

Review of 'The Collapse of Darwinism'

2009-03-27T12:03:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I was at our Biomedical Library looking through the evolution books (preparing for my Cafe Scientifique presentation on Should Darwin be an 'ism'). One of the newish books (2003) caught my eye because it was titled "The Collapse of Darwinism" in bold yellow letters.

The author, Graeme Donald Snooks, is an economics professor at the Australian National University (Australia's top university). He has lots of initials after his name, and is the Director of the Global Dynamics Centre in their Research School of Social Sciences.

I did't bother reading the book, but the Preface is a fine example of the arrogance of academic non-biologists towards biology. He claims that

"a great chasm is opening up between the appearances and the reality of the Darwinian tradition in evolutionary biology. It is the purpose of this book not only to explain the inevitable collapse of Darwinism but to provide an alternative theory of life that, unlike Darwinism, emerges from a systematic analysis of reality. This new realist theory of life is called the dynamic-strategy theory.
What are my credentials for this daunting task? While I am not a geneticist, neither was Charles Darwin.

He then goes on to explain that Darwin was wrong about the mechanism of inheritance ('"Lamarckism, heresy, blah blah") and to claim that what needs to be understood is not organismal replication but how dynamic systems operate.

And then, two paragraphs down

"The most critical test for any theory of life -- a test that Darwinists of all descriptions consistently fail -- is whether it can explain the dynamics of human society."

I think I should write an economics book. I'll claim that modern economics theory is rubbish because it's all about money and goods, whereas what's really neeeded is an understanding of microbiology.

What worries me is finding this book in the biomedical library of a major research university. I wonder if I should talk to whoever is responsible for book-buying.

No CO2 from burning cooking oil?

2009-02-22T20:08:00.001-08:00

An article in the Feb. 22 New York Times about cars burning used cooking oil as fuel states

"Vegetable oil is cleaner than either gas or diesel, producing virtually no carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas linked to climate change..."

But cooking oil is a tri-acyl glycerol. It consists of three fatty acid chains, each linked to one of the three carbons of a glycerol. Each fatty acid chain is a hydrocarbon chain with about 16-20 carbons and 30-40 hydrogens,with a carboxylic acid on the end linked to the glycerol.

So it's mostly carbon and hydrogen. Burning this to completion with oxygen is going to give CO2 and H2O. There may be a few more complex products, if the combustion doesn't go to completion, but I can't imagine how it could be burned without producing a lot of CO2.

The only difference from fossil fuels is that the carbon in cooking oil was recently removed from the atmosphere by crop plants, whereas the carbon in fossil fuels has been in the ground for many millions of years. So if we include the agricultural carbon fixation that produced the cooking oil, there is no net increase in atmospheric CO2.

Gravity

2008-12-02T17:42:00.000-08:00

CNN's tips to reduce jet lag include the following:

Try to sleep at take-off when gravitational forces and a shortage of fresh oxygen make ideal conditions for dozing off.

First post

2008-11-28T07:35:00.000-08:00

I started this blog because I wanted to grab this great title before anyone else did. I'll use it as a place for posts that don't belong on RRResearch or RRTeaching (i.e. general stuff that's not specifically about either research or teaching).