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.

Uncle Howie

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!

May 22, Back to London!

Back in London (Over a month ago! See, I told you it would take me several days, now it's become several weeks!)!

On this day, we joined another tour group and left London for some sight-seeing. Our first stop was Blenheim Palace, the mansion where Winston Churchill was born. The place was grand, although not quite up to the scale of Hampton Court. There was a exhibit about Churchill that I found fascinating. I'm now inspired to read a good biography about him. My favorite story about him was how much he loved his wife. Someone once asked him what he would like to be if he was reincarnated after his death. He answered, "I would like to be Mrs. Chruchill's second husband."


Blenheim Palace was beautiful! It sat on a spectacular plot of land as far as the eye can see, with gardens! In one of the many gardens was where Churchill proposed to his future wife, Clementine.


One of the cute statutes in the garden was this little guy. His facial expression was priceless.


A little shop in Stow-on-the-Wold... This is a little town in the Cotswolds, about 3 hours west of London. Many rich people buy property out there. For hundreds of years, it's been farm lands, people still raise sheep and cultivate canola for the oil. Canola fields are spans of majestic yellow!


This old home is now a hotel and restaurant in Burton-on-the Water, a small town with a quant river running through it, also known as the Venice of England.

A beautiful home in Burton-on-the Water very near which a monumentous event occurred... to be continued.

London/Paris Slide Show

Thursday May 21 Paris

Day 2 in Paris was Ascension Thursday. Many stores were closed, but not museums and restaurants. Ascension Thursday celebrates 40 days after the resurrection and Jesus and His ascension to heaven.

We hopped back on the tour bus and rode around for another drive through some parts of Paris. Our final destination was Musee du Louvre. This is the art museum that supposedly beats all museums. Di Vinci's Mona Lisa lives here, so does Venus de Milo (artist unknown). These and several other renown paintings and sculptures make this one of the most visited museums in the world. There were galleries and galleries full of naked statues, sculpted by really famous artists. Truthfully, I was more impressed by the art collection at Windsor Castle.

Before we left Paris, we stopped back at Rue Cler, a little street lined with grocers selling various food items, including the aromatic baguettes and formage (bread and cheese). For dinner the first night, we ate at a little bakery shop. For the second day, we ate at a Chinese restaurant (gasp!!). Everything in Paris is expensive! A hamburger would have costed 15 Euros or almost $20 USD. Contrary to what most people say, I found Parians to be very friendly. The lady who waited on us at the bakery treated us to a little scrumptous chocolate cake filled with chocolate mousse. It reminded us of a Hostess big wheel, but 100X better. If you say "Bonjour" and "Merci", people were super nice.


Looking out from the glass pyramid...

The Mona Lisa was actually very small.

One of the museum's gallery




Aphrodite, known as Venus de Milo

Bakery shop in Rue Cler with the really nice store clerk, standing but bent over on the far right

Chinese dinner in Paris with a stow-away, Bunny.

Eiffel Tower, May 20-21 Paris

Of course, everyone who goes to Paris must see and take pictures of the Eiffel Tower, even though Paris is SOOO much more than a tall Erector set structure. Like an ordinary tourist, I took tons of pictures of it. You can purchase tickets, ride up the elevators, and go up to the top for a grand view of the city. We decided to just admire the structure from the ground. Besides, it reminded me of "Superman 2" when Lois Lane went up and was almost killed (were not for Superman who flew there to save her in the nick of time).

Because we only had less than 2 full days in Paris, we decided to get around the city on one of those double decker tour buses. We saw the Tower on the first day and decided to wait for sun set to see it lit up. That did not disappoint. Paris isn't called the city of lights for nothing. By the time it was compeletly dark, the Tower was lit with what looked like sparkling diamonds.