Ruth and I went down to North Carolina to visit Malc, Clarissa, Willow, and Oona for Thanksgiving. That was great fun! They live in a wonderful area and the climate is very nice (escpecially compared to Cleveland in November!). To be fair, we haven't had much bad weather until just this last weekend in Cleveland. We ate a lot and played video games and played with the kids. I'm glad that Malc is doing well there.
Work has been fine, just very busy. We're still waiting to hear about the grant I submitted in October but we probably won't hear anything until February or March is my guess. We have lots of projects going on and it will be nice to have some of these things out the door and (hopefully) published soon.
I've come to the realization that I have to have a winter hobby in addition to my warm weather hobby (motorcycling) so I'm thinking of getting back into music (guitar mostly) to while away the really cold months. So I'm growing my fingernails long again and trying to figure out what to learn to play. My brother-in-law and sister are taking up guitar and that's probably what has spurred me to take that back up again. I already have a guitar and all the gizmos already so why not? I just wish I had my acoustic here. Ah well, maybe next trip home I'll bring it back. :-)
We're going to drive to DC for a couple of days to spend the Chris'mas holiday with Ruth's brother's family. We can't really afford to fly anywhere this year and Ruth doesn't have much time off so we'll do the best we can with what we have. Ruth's brother's familly is great and they've been very kind to me over the years so it will be great to see them. Particularly the nephews and our niece. I guess that's about it for now!
I've known these friends since high school (well actually I've known Aaron since junior high!) and they're the best friends anyone could ever hope for. They've helped me out in all sorts of tough situations and have been incredibly supportive. None of us has ever had any bad habits that might get us in trouble with the law, and they're all incredibly kind and caring people. I mean come on! Anyone who takes the time to read this site knows what a terror I can be to deal with and Aaron, Malc, Yvonne, Mary, Jeanette, and Clarissa have stuck by me and been so kind to me all of these years. It gets me all teary-eyed just thinking about it. Luckily, they like Ruth too! :-)
So we're really looking forward to seeing those guys and we'll probably call Jeanette while we're there. I've managed to get back to California a couple of times in the last few years and seen them for a day or two here and there but Ruth has not been able to get back to see them due to her very limited vacation time so she's really looking forward to the trip. It's just a shame that we can only go for the weekend.
I have been feeling pretty burned out lately. As I alluded to in my last entry, our weekends have been very busy over the last year and neither Ruth nor I have taken any real vacation time since our wedding (and for obvious reasons THAT wasn't much of a vacation!). Ruth managed to go spend time with her family last year for a sort of mini-reunion but I was stuck here for something (can't remember what now) so I didn't get to go. Besides, we need to take a vacation that's just for the two of us. No offense to family but visiting family can still be stressful in some ways while relaxing in others. Anyway, I need a little time away from the lab. I'll take some work with me but I'm looking forward to just kicking back with the gang and taking it easy.
It can be strange for Ruth and me to hang out with those guys though because they have kids so their lives are very different from the time that we were closest (our late teens through our mid-twenties). Ruth and I are, essentially, a decade behind them in terms of life paths due to the protracted training involved in my career so we often feel a little disjointed from them. Not to say that they make us feel out of place, it's just a simple fact that they've had more time to develop their careers, buy homes, raise their children, etc. So Ruth and I are in our thirties (late thirties in my case) and just getting to the point that most people get to in their late twenties. In fact, our immediate social circle of people here in Cleveland are folks in their mid-to-late twenties with no children, school loans to pay off, and just starting what could be considered their long-term careers.
I've been aware of sort of putting my life on hold and, in fact, it has been easy for me to step outside of my life and live vicariously through my friends in a completely unblinded sociology experiment. I've noted the changes in the way they live their lives and the shift in values that some have had. In many ways I feel sort of like a stone creature - my values and goals were formed in my late teens and have remained pretty much the same for a long time now. So my life was completely static while I was in graduate school and it's only over the last couple of years that we've dealt with FINALLY making a liveable wage (I survived on a salary that was essentially poverty level for over a decade) and paying off our bills. We aren't at the point of comfortably buying a house or taking vacations to Europe yet but that path is immediately before us if things continue to go well. I can't escape the feeling that something bad will happen soon and we'll be back to square one again but that's just my paranoia from having grown up in a chaotic financial environment. Ruth and I are comparatively comfortable when we reflect on our childhood and college years. Luckily Ruth has far more interest in managing our money than I do and she's good at it. Frankly money is highly overrated and just another source of stress for me. So watching the lives of our friends change over the last decade has been a spectator sport for me.
The other sort of oddness that seems to make them a bit uncomfortable on occasion is our lack of children. Sometimes I think our friends (both here and our friends from Cali) think that we don't like kids or don't want to be inconvenienced by them when that's not the case at all. I love kids - as long as they belong to someone else! Inevitably, when parents see me with their kids they say things like, "You'd be such a wonderful father, why don't you have kids of your own?" Why, you ask? Well I'll tell you - I grew up around a constantly swirling, shifting backdrop of children - cousins, nieces, nephews, neighborhood kids, church kids, etc. My Mom LOVES kids and we had kids around all of the time when I was growing up. I know from first hand experience the kind of sleep deprivation that parents suffer, the noise, the constant cleaning, the overwhelming financial responsibility, etc. Ruth doesn't want to deal with that and neither do I. Come on! I haven't even grown up yet, why would I want kids to cut into my toy budget? LOL. Anyway, my friends are good parents and their children are exceptionally well behaved compared to the average curtain crawlers you see in the world so I've always enjoyed being around them.
So, after a command appearance at lab early tomorrow morning, we head out to NC for a weekend of fun with our friends. It's supposed to be a nine hour drive (which means 7-8 for Ruth and me with our fast - but safe! - driving habits). Wish us luck!
Let's see, what has happened of late. Ruth and I bought new cell phones which doesn't sound like a big deal but, in fact, has turned into a big deal. I had noticed that my trusty old analog/digital StarTac was showing low signal strength all over Cleveland. Now that was a bit odd because it had been showing very good signal strength everywhere I went up until a month ago or so. I thought something must have changed in the local network so I decided to pay attention to the signal strength in DC when I went for FASEB.
Same problem in DC! Now this was odd. One of the reasons I had kept the dinosaur StarTac was that it would almost always pick up a signal - even in the dreaded ANALOG zones! Oo! Scary! Anyway, the thing was incredibly reliable and I thought it was very odd that I was having trouble with it so I called our good friends at Verizon Wireless. Well, they suggested that I just update the software through their trick little dial-in procedure so I grudgingly admitted that, yes, maybe a software update would help out. Nope - no change. So I thought, "Well I'll just ask them when they're going to get those cool Treo handsets and I could just dump my Sony Clie and only have to futz with one device for my cell-phone and PDA needs." Naturally, the customer service rep had no idea what a Treo was, much less why I was upset that they hadn't tested and deployed the device yet. That pretty much did it for me. I've been loyal to Verizon for a long time but their customer service people seem to be truly uninformed and uncaring about the tech world.
Ruth had picked up a new phone not too long ago but the charger had dropped into a puddle of salty, muddy brine on the front floorboard of her car and the little metal fingers had corroded so it wouldn't charge her phone any more. I had cleaned the contacts off once before but the same thing had happened again (hey it's Cleveland! They put salt on any bit of snow they see during the winter and you end up tramping it all over the place) and the charger was essentially useless (it turned out later that the connector on the phone had been messed up too and it wouldn't charge even when we got a brand new charger for it). So Ruth was a bit frustrated with her phone situation also. Ruth was also intrigued by text messaging and mobile web access (neither of our phones supported that stuff) so she was ready for a change. We have a couple of friends who work for Cingular so we thought, "what the heck, let's see what kind of deals they have!" and looked up their current deals on the web.
I'm a HUGE fan of Motorola phones so we were pretty stoked to find that they had a special deal on the Motorola V400 phone. Now I like these little clamshell/flip phones because I find it comical to watch people talk into their little Nokias and Sony/Ericcson phones by putting it to their ear then moving it to their mouth and then putting it back to their ear, etc. It's just bloody silly and looks like they're using a walkie-talkie. The flip phones open up and have a reasonable distance between the speaker for one's ear and the microphone so they work well for me. And their little screens tend not to get as scratched up as the tiny little soapbar phones (in my experience). So we were walking in the mall, looked at the V400 and decided to get two of them so we could share chargers/batteries/accesories.
Ruth and I have NEVER had the same kind of phone so we figured this would save us a little money on accesories and we could troubleshoot problems more easily. And the phones came with $100 dollar rebates so we weren't paying that much for them and we found a plan that matched our nationwide one-rate plan pretty closely AND we could accumulate minutes. Neither Ruth nor I are phone people - we don't like to talk that much on the phone (in fact we find it amazing that so many people can't seem to be without a phone!) and we rarely use our allocated minutes on a monthly basis except when one or both of us is travelling - sometimes that can get expensive.
We did have some trouble with Ruth's new phone dropping calls the instant she tried to answer them so we took the phone back and got a new one for her and have had no problems since. She's happy because she can now text message her friend Matt (and me) and I'm happy because I have a new toy to try to hack about with. I never bothered to hack the StarTac much. I knew it could be done and I knew some maintenance codes and things like that for it but it was just a very utilitarian, reliable tool for me. The V400 has possibilities. It has a built-in camera (which is just icing as I'd never buy a phone for that reason alone) and, while I was tinkering with it on the first day, I discovered that it uses Java (well more specifically a subset of Java for mobile devices) as its base development environment! Now THAT is cool and hack inspiring! So I promptly signed up for Motorola's developer service and downloaded the tools they had available. I was peripherally aware that the mobile phone world had taken a shine to Java but hadn't realized they were already building devices that used Java so extensively. It's cool.
So, lately, in what little spare time I have, I've been reading up on Java and starting to learn a little bit of Java code craft. I'm no Rob Butera so it will take me a while to get comfortable with the language - it ain't the line numbered basic that I first learned to code in - but I'm pretty excited about a new programming project and the phone has inspired me to think about software development stuff again. I go through phases in which I'm into computer programming or ancient history or airplanes, etc. I'm a dilettante and I end up getting interested in WAY too many things for my own good. But I have fun.
In other news, the weather here today was fantastic so we took a nice long bike (bicycle NOT motorcycle unfortunately!) ride through the Cleveland Metropark closest to us and wore ourselves out in a good way!
We managed to see many of our old friends and I even made it to NIH on my last day in town. So it was a good mix of business and pleasure. Since we've been back, I've been working on a grant application and that's going ok. I've had to put off submission until October 1st for many reasons but I think it will be a better grant as a result of the delay.
The weather here in Cleveland is still very annoying. It rains more days of the week than it doesn't so I haven't had much time on the Ninja so far this riding season. It's making me a little crazy but saving us gas money since I'm riding the train to and from work when I can't ride. Even on the bike, my average mpg is around 40-42 miles per gallon so it's a very efficient way to get around. And it's so much fun that I'd rather ride it! Ruth decided to ride pillion the other day and very quickly decided that she's not cut out for the back until I get a more comfortable bike. In general, she prefers to be the one in control on the bike so the whole experiment was over quickly. So I'll be riding solo it looks like. Hopefully we'll get more sunny, rain-free days soon. I'll try to keep you posted.
Work is much the same, we're trying hard to stay on top of experiments and data analysis. We have a few projects that are finally becoming productive so it's good to be able to send out some papers. We're going to D.C. later in April for the FASEB meeting so it will be good to see our old friends there. Right now I'm just waiting for the alternating freezing cold, passable warm days to settle into a "mostly warm" routine so I can get the motorcycle out of winter storage and start riding!
January passed relatively uneventfully. I gave two talks so that kept me quite busy. We've almost finished revising one paper and are almost ready to send another for the first go 'round. So I feel a little bit better about my productivity. I still have much to do and we're working on getting all of the preliminary data we need for a grant submission this summer.
I'll be in Florida again next week for a grant progress report. Ruth can't go unfortunately. I'm going to enjoy the time in the sun though. I just wish I had a motorcycle to ride while I was down there! This winter has been tough in that regard for me. Yesterday I loaded up an old video of a riding test of my motorcycle and played it over and over again just to hear that roar! My coworkers thought I was just pitiful. Ah well, they don't understand... I hope you all can get just a glimmer of how much fun riding my motorcycle is for me. I certainly miss it just now.
What else is going on? Hmm, nothing of particular note comes to mind. We're keeping very busy as usual. It's rare for us to get home before 9pm from work. We often have social responsibilities to attend to and our weekends are always busy. Whether we plan them to be or not. We did go to the annual motorcycle show last week to check out the new models and that was a lot of fun. Maybe I'll post some pics for you all. I found the next motorcycle I want to buy but it will be a long, long time before I can afford to do that. Oh, I also still need to post the iBook review and I now have a G5 (very, very nice!). I'll try to get myself organized this coming weekend. Have a good one!
Speaking of Thanksgiving, we had a great time in St. Louis. It's sad to see the older generation of my Mom's side of the family declining but they hold up well and keep going. We also had a great time with the cousins. Ruth even went bowling! Amazing! She needs practice and she wasn't too happy with me because, even though I haven't bowled in about 8 years, I still managed to get a few strikes and score around 140-150. Not bad for an old man! As an added bonus, it was reasonably warm while we were there and we even had a day in the mid 60's. We went to the art museum in Forest Park that day and had to shed our coats because of the warmth.
In other news, Sparky the Wonder Volvo has finally all but given up the ghost. He's been a faithful companion since 1997 and has taken us from Maine to Miami and from Maryland to Missouri without dying on us. However, the last two years here in Cleveland have been hard on ol' Sparky and he's paid the price in rust and oil. His transmission is now limited to two of four gears. That's not too much of a problem for me since I just drive Sparky to the train station (I can't really afford to park on campus!) and leave him there but he doesn't really go faster than 30mph anymore and I worry that there may be some situation in which I will HAVE to go over 30. I have no idea what we'll get to replace him. I'd love a Honda Insight for the fuel efficiency and cool factor but they're way too expensive for us right now. I'll probably end up getting a little Civic or Toyota Corolla - anything under $10K is more like our price range. Even that sounds expensive when I think about what I paid for my motorcycle which is far more performance oriented than any car (cage!).
Work has been going a bit better. It always seems like I'm running to stand still but things are getting finished and we're trying to get some papers out. I've had one paper held up in review for, get this, FOUR MONTHS!! How unprofessional is that? I just can't believe it. I mean I know how papers can get held up in writing but once they've been submitted for review there is NO excuse for holding it up by more than a few weeks. If I find out who is holding me up I may be temped to use some of my kung fu. ;-)
Anyway, Happy Holidays to those of you out there to whom the sentiment gives a warm fuzzy feeling!
The weather has changed for the worse and it looks like it's going to stay bad for a while so I'll probably ride my bad motorscooter in to work tomorrow and drop it off for wintering at my favorite bike shop. I'll miss it. I've managed to put over 2000 miles on the bike this year and that has increased my confidence. I've been diligent in improving my riding skills and have been lucky to avoid close calls with all the cage drivers out there. As I become more focused and aware of the traffic around me it becomes much easier to see the problem children on the road and avoid them.
I've had a nasty cold over the last seven days and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. This is a problem because if I can't breathe I can't do kung fu and otherwise stay in shape. I was going to call the doc today and get an appointment but I didn't get around to it and the office is now closed. I like my gp but everytime I go in she pokes me somewhere sensitive! And NO it is NOT enjoyable!
We'll be going to St. Louis for Turkey Day this year instead of our normal trip to Pennsylvania to visit with Brock and Christine. We're going back to my hometown to visit my Aunt Lil and the remaining relatives there. I think it will be nice. I haven't been back to St. Louis in the fall since I was a little kid. I'll try to post a little summary of the trip after we return.
At home things are going well. The apartment is shaping up nicely, most of the boxes are now unpacked but we're still trying to optimize the layout of everything. We still have too many boxes in the living room that we need to rummage through though. I also have a lot of data CDs and Zip disks that I need to go through and find data for the hypoglossal project with Rob. I had a bit of time to go out on the motorcycle this weekend. It was fun but I became pretty badly lost since I don't get out much! Once I found a cross-street that I recognized I managed to make it back home ok.
Ruth had a chance to ride a Ducati Monster 600 last week, the bike that she's been interested in for herself. Unfortunately, the guy selling the bike had put aftermarket pipes on the bike and the noise just put Ruth off. Neither of us is keen on pissing off the neighbors by having a loud bike. Most of my sportbike friends and the magazines seem to think that the first thing you should do when you buy a new bike is replace the exhaust or end can. I don't really see the need. I'm not out racing around at 100 mph with the my elbows touching the ground when I take a corner so I don't need the weight reduction or the ground clearance. If anything, I'm going to get one of those double bubble windscreens to cut down on the amount of wind that hits me right at the front of my helmet when I'm going over 60 mph. Other than that, the bike works pretty well as is.
We went to see The Ring over the weekend. It was ok - not great, just ok. It had Ruth jumping in her seat though. We paid matinee prices so I didn't feel like we got ripped off. I probably wouldn't pay full price to see it, but that's me!
In other news, I had to take the motorcycle in to the shop for a bit of work. Ever since I first got the bike, it ran a bit rough and didn't want to move off in first gear well without really revving it. I called the local bike gurus and they told me to bring it on down as it was probably a carburetion problem - which it was! Anyway, to make a long story short, the bike was running on three of four cylinders and not running well. Now, post the fix, it's very smooth and has much more power than it did before. Way, way too much fun.
Okay, due to popular demand I'm putting up pictures of my motorcycle. Here's another from the front - that's not me on the bike, by the way. Let me know what you think!
In other news... I heard from my brother-in-law and he tells me that all of those restrictive rules I was complaining about are becoming common in California as well! That's a disappointing shocker and I hope that trend reverses soon.
I had some ideas for rants but frankly I'm too busy to put any of that stuff into an organized and readable state so I'll just do a bit of mental meandering for a while...
The question that I hear most often from my beloved friends and family of late is, "So Chris, how do you like Cleveland?". Hmmm, now that's an interesting question. I've lived in California (the Left Coast), the greater D.C. area (the Right Coast - truer words were never spoken!), and now the Middle. Since I spent the first ten years of my life in Missouri I thought I knew what was in store. That wasn't quite true.
First, people here in Cleveland are, in general, incredibly nice. Cleveland as a city is suffering from the typical Rust Belt decay and much-talked about revival. Parts of the city suck! It's as if the locals just don't care about the liveability of the area. That sort of freaks me out. It was very much like that in the depressed parts of D.C. as well. Bombed out houses, broken windows, lots of muck on the streets and sidewalks, etc. But other parts of the city aren't bad at all. The architecture in the better parts is interesting at the least (sometimes way too ostentatious for Ruth's and my taste but hey, that's what you have to deal with from the industrial barons of the last century) and bland at the other extreme. In fact, we're having a hard time finding a place that has a reasonable yard (the folks east of the Mississippi seem to like being able to see into their neighbors' bathrooms!) for some privacy and the hoped-for hottub but is not so HUGE that we won't be able to clean it up in a single weekend. We've seen lots of too big and lots of too small cramped - not much else yet!
Another peeve of mine - no matter where I live - is slow traffic. In Cleveland the speed limits come in two varieties: 25 mph and 35 mph. That's it. Now, since everyone reading this knows that I tend to, how shall we say it, enjoy the very visceral sensation that high speeds provide for me - and Ruth seems to like that particular buzz as well - you can well imagine how these speed limits make me feel. If the local men in blue weren't assiduous about ticketing then all would be cool, however, they take their jobs very seriously. So I'm not too thrilled with the stifling speed limits we have here. I mean come on, it's bad enough that half of the people on the road don't have any clue as to what they're doing but to punish those of us who know why we're in the car and have somewhere to get to in a timely fashion is just ludicrous!
The worst thing about Cleveland for me is surely the winter weather. I imagine everyone that lives here says that (if you don't dislike the winter weather here then you are way more wacked than anyone else I know and that's saying something!). I'm not a SAD person, at least I didn't think I was until I came here! When I was younger I foolishly believed that I could live anywhere and be happy. That, as it turns out, is not quite true. Most of you know that I really didn't care for the Right Coast much. Cleveland is better, particularly during the summer, but the winters here SUCK!. It's grey and rainy for the better part of five months. I didn't fully comprehend how this would affect Ruth and me until we went through it this last winter. Not pleasant. I'm really dreading next winter. The folks here keep telling us that this last winter was very mild. Oh boy. If it was just grey maybe I could tolerate it but the wind here rivals Chicago - it is bitter, swift, and cutting. I think I spent almost every evening of the winter chasing garbage cans down the street (our lame landlord wouldn't let us fence them in).
Politically Cleveland feels pretty religiously conservative to me. That really gets the backs up of people I tell that to here. They always say, "But Chris, Cleveland is the most liberal city in Ohio!" I have no doubt that this is true. I'm not complaining about it I'm just making the point that it's very different from the Left Coast for me. We also suffer from something that I consider so unconstitutional it makes me quiver with indignation. We happen to live in Shaker Heights where they think it's ok to tell you which colors you can paint your house! This is on property that you have purchased and pay exorbitant taxes on! Now Bethesda suffered from this same nonsense as do a great many communities on the Right Coast. People just put up with it here. I mean they won't even let you put your garbage cans at the front of the house on collection day, instead the garbage men must have access to your backyard so they can go get the garbage and take it out to the truck! The city politicos seem to be in denial of much of the human condition. This is a very real and very big difference to most of the western parts of the country. Jefferson must be spinning in his grave. If I want a junker car in my front yard and it's on my bought-and-paid-for property then you better believe I should be able to do that in the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave. Anyway, I guess this turned into a rant after all.
