More SNOW!

Another big snow storm this weekend. We got about 2 feet all together!

Winter!

One week into winter! The weekend right before, we got about 10 inches of snow. (The picture above is from 3 years ago... but they all look about the same anyway.) This past weekend, we got tons of rain which melted everything.

We're on Christmas break right now. I'm on a condensed break this time. The new spring semester will start on Jan 18th. I may have just enough time to get prepare for it.

68 days until the big day!

Whirlwind

This has been a whirlwind of a semester. Lackluster students and very apathetic under-achievers are very discouraging. I am looking forward to the end of the semester, now just 3 weeks and 2 days until the week of final exams. We get 3 days off next week for Thanksgiving. I'm preparing a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.

I am in the slow process of cleaning, down-sizing, and decluttering. I found the old floppy disks from my college days that still had readable documents. Some were lab reports I had written. I must say, I did a pretty good job with them.

Here's the abstract to one of them:

ABSTRACT
In this experiment, respiration patterns during and after various activities were investigated. As the subject remained at rest, after open hyperventilation, after closed hyperventilation, after rebreathing, during speech, after breath holding, during obstruction of respiratory passageways, and after exercise, inspiration and expiration cycles were recorded and analyzed. The rates of respiration increased significantly after open hyperventilation, closed hyperventilation, rebreathing, breath holding, and exercise. Slight increases were observed during reading aloud and obstruction of the nasal pathways. Chemoreceptors detecting changes in gas concentrations and baroreceptors detecting changes in gas pressures, among other factors, could have stimulatory effects on the rates of respiration. Respiratory volumes and capacities were determined along with forced expiratory volume within the first second (FEV1.0) in two subjects. There were clear differences in these volumes and capacities between the male subject who exercised regularly and the female subject who did not. Since FEV was measured incorrectly, the extremely low FEV1.0 could have no significance in clinical diagnosis of diseases of the pulmonary system.

Unfortunately, I didn't keep the title of the report. But, it was for Animal Physiology that I had taken in the spring semester of 1994.

House O'Dreams

Pears, Chicken Little, & Fox urine pellets

We're getting a good crop of pears this year. This summer has been very wet and a bit colder than usual. Even this August, there hasn't been too many sweltering hot and humid days. The squirrels have stayed away from the pears for the most part. We've been sprinkling fox urine pellets to make them think that there's predator near by.

We've also acquired a chirpy Chicken Little. He's kind of cute, but very noisy.

About a month ago, I spent a week at a workshop to learn a new technique to teach students. I was in Ashburn, VA and at the Janelia Farms Research Center of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. If you've seen "The Aviator" with Leo DiCaprio, you'd know who Howard Hughes was. This is a biomedical research facility build with the money he left behind. It is a state-of-the art, no expense too large, glass-walled structure that costed about $500 million! To receive a research grant from the HHMI means you are or well on your way to induction into the Academy of Science or winning the Nobel Prize.

Even though we were there to learn, we were pampered by stays in rooms that were beyond luxurious and food that was glorious. I gained 5 pounds in one week!


There are labs in there!

Beautiful sunset over the building and a small pond

A great blue heron lives by the pond in front of the research building.

May 25 London (Last day)

The British Museum is the home to perhaps the world's most extensive collection of artifacts from all corners of the world. In its height (around 1920), the sun never set on the British empire that covered a quarter of the world.
Many pieces were probably taken (stolen or robbed) unjustly. This is one chamber that housed many Chinese bronze urns dating back to 3000 BC, jade carvings, and various ivory items.
Jade horse

Mummified kitty cats (Sorry it's blurry)

Kitty replicas were also encased with the dead.


This is probably the most valuable artifact in the museum, the Rosetta Stone. Its discovery allowed archeologists to translate hieroglyphs. Top left corner shows 2 or 3 lines of hieroglyphs followed by large section of Egptian Demotic then Greek (bottom of picture).

Westminster Abbey

Houses of Parlament

Big Ben

You can bearly see the London Eye on the left, a ginormous ferris wheel. The view of London is suppose to be spectacular, but ticket to ride it was too expensive to tempt us.

Our stow-away makes another appearance.

Gate to Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace looks a lot bigger on TV. We missed the changing of the guards.

Picadilly Circus, London version of NYC's Time Square

May 24 London

Peter Pan, memorial to his creator J. M. Barrie

Swans in Hyde Park

The famous Harrods department store where everything is over-priced

Near the end of the afternoon, we ended up back at the Victoria and Albert Museum. This was an interesting display in the main rotunda. The blue and yellow glass piece hung in the middle.

May 23 London

Today's tour included Tower of London! It's one of the main attractions in London.

This is St. Olave's Church. The gate had some morbid sculls on it I found interesting. We couldn't enter it to explore, just sat in its courtyard and ate some lunch. Lunch included French baguette from a couple of days ago. Even stale French bread tasted good!

The White Tower inside the Tower of London. The Tower of London was built in the 10th or 11th century by conquering Normans. It was more of a fortress and later used as a castle. Parts of the castle was used to imprison traitors. One most famous prisoner was Anne Boelyn, second wife of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth's mother. Anne was imprisoned and later beheaded. She's buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula within the Tower.

Traitor's gate was where prisoners were brought into the Tower from the River Thames. Two excellent movies with scenes at The Tower are "Elizabeth" with Kate Blanchett and "A Man for All Seasons" about Sir Thomas More.

Front entrance to the Tower. The grassy area would be where the moat was. Inside the Tower also houses the Crown Jewels. I didn't find them nearly as fascinating. The little gem on my ring is worth more to me than all the diamonds, rubies, saphires, and gold, and silver in that collection of coronation regalia.

London bridge... intact... not falling down

Engaged! May 22nd

By this little gate, I got engaged!

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." -Jane Austen

This entire day was specially crafted by my betrothed to be a Jane Austen/"Pride and Prejudice" kind of day. First, Blenheim Palace that served as Mr. Darcy's Pemberley; then the Cotswolds that served as Lizzy Bennett. "P&P" is one of my favorite novels.

At Burton-on-the-Water, we strolled along this little foot trail (on the right and along a shallow creek) with sheep gates. Sheep gates are meant to allow only pedestrians through and nothing else, including bikes and sheep.


From the trail, we saw sheep frollicking in the distance, if sheep can frollick that is. OK, maybe they were just busy snacking on the fresh grass.

Yes, this was a very special day!