Established in Seattle

Quickly coming up on week two in Seattle now. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot that happened since the last post. We're both looking for work, and when my fiancé and I aren't searching the internet for employment, we're combing through thrift stores for things to replace what we left in Wisconsin. Our apartment now has most of the furniture we want, excepting a couple chairs and things that will have to wait until I have a job so that I can pay for materials to build them. Our neighbors are going to think we're building a doomsday device with all the crap I'm planning on doing. It's mostly just shelves, but they might secretly be DOOM SHELVES!

I'm particularly proud of our new sleeper sofa. It's not really interesting or even good looking, there are even a couple of light stains here and there, so it's not the thing itself I'm proud of. My pride resides in how all it's bajillion pounds got into the apartment from 4 miles away and up three flights of stairs. We found it cheap on craigslist, and we also found a guy that hires truck drivers in major U.S. cities to do furniture delivery for cheap as well. Cheap-cheap. It's called Craig's truck and is actually based in Seattle, so I got to meet the owner when he picked me up so I could help him lift the sofa into his truck. He's a bit of mixed bag, and I'm not sure who was more foolish: me for getting into a stranger's van or the stranger who let me get into it. After a conversation that included everything from Christian rap music to the Seattle couch-trade, I determined that we both had definitely made better decisions in our lives, but were both safe acquaintances.

And now we have a couch.

Otherwise...we celebrated pi day a few days ago by making pie. Next year, I think we'll have to only eat food that is circular or has pi in it. Double points for foods like pizza and tillapia (that's been cut into a circle).

Next up: Things to do with the upcoming trip to NCUR.

Post about moving in I meant to do roughly forever ago.

I'm in Seattle now.

The preparation for the trip out here and the trip itself were great ways to wrap in tarp/bury in concrete whatever time my Fiance and I had. Even though we spread the trip out over five days (it was only supposed to be four, more on that later), the stress from it was enough to shrink my appetite and the number of hours I normally sleep in half. It probably would have been easier if we had more than a month prior to get everything packed and shipped out, and it definitely would have been easier if both of us hadn't participated in the River Falls Community Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing. My soon to be wife was cast as Lenora, a female equivalent to Leonato. I'm engaged, by the way. Been that way for a little more than a year now. She did great, despite the gender-bending and other circumstances of the show. As if moving half-way across the country weren't bad enough, the play was more than a bit of a circus. I won't linger on it, but just to give you an idea, the initial actor playing Verges showed up to all of three rehearsals and was generally useless while he was there. I ended up being re-cast for the part a week before the first show. With the exception of a few high school theatre classes, it was my first time really acting on stage. Hopefully I broke a few legs.

Along with the shortage of time, the weather was very problematic. Wisconsin, in addition to surprisingly large political unrest, was recently hit by some nasty blizzards. This made visiting friends and family before we left difficult. We really weren't keen on crashing into a snowdrift immediately before driving it to Seattle. We did manage to see the majority of people we wanted to see, although not all of them. We'll soon be back in Wisconsin for the wedding and a few other things, so hopefully we'll catch up with them then. Thankfully, we'll get to take the train back. While it won't be as bad in the summer, driving through the mountains is a real challenge during the winter, particularly through Idaho. On the outside, it just looks like funky shaped state full of potatoes. Do not be fooled, as it's primary export is actually death. Idaho is like the Ninja of the United States. It's deceivingly small section of I-90 is dangerously graded and normally racing with semis and secretly-aspiring nascar drivers. We decided that it was bad enough without being covered in snow and ice and so spent another night in our hotel waiting for I-90 to become less terrifying.

P.S.

For some reason, I was also unable or forgot to return almost any of our friends' and family members' possessions that we've borrowed. The right thing to do would be to mail it to them, but that seems counterproductive. I'm sorely tempted to create just one more incentive for people to come visit us.

Presenting-Time.

In roughly an hour and a half, I will present my experiences with study abroad and research to roughly 60 students in Dr. Tim Lyden's Anatomy and Physiology class. I'm a little terrified. It's mostly just excitement that's getting lost somewhere in my throat I think, but I'm nervous either way. Of all the presentations I've done in the past few years, this is the least....research-y.  My normally effervescent nerd-soul will have to be kept on a tight leash, as I'm talking about something besides zebrafish for once. I'll have to whip out all the fancy colloquial words like "ain't" and "nifty".

On a brighter note, my fiance and I have a hotel all set for NCUR. Now we just need plane tickets and the name of a good show on Broadway to go see. AAaaaand a money-tree.

Can I plant this?

More pictures!

Check it out, I finally got some more of these things up.

Where's my reset button?

I've been home for over a week now, and it's a little weird.

A lot of it has less to do with being back and more with getting ready to leave. The last week largely consisted of sending out more job applications and looking for a place to safely pass out in for a week after driving the 28 hours to Seattle. Some might see it as apartment searching, but after the amount of walking, driving, and flying I've done in the past few weeks, as long as the mice don't mind another snuggle-buddy I'll be happy where ever.

Our goal is to get everything squared away by the beginning of March. Between the planning and the worrying and the arguing and the nerve-racking, I'm about one more bout of food poisoning away from ecstasy. At least I think we've got our new apartment nailed down. We sent them money and called dibs. DIBS I SAY.

There's other things that are weird about being back. Even though Taiwan has a lot in common with the States, I've had to readjust to the things I was used to a month ago. Some things, like the floor toilets and the possibility of becoming road pizza whenever I was near a street, have been left behind fairly easily. The floor toilets provided a Great Fun in trying to not fall into them. Other things have taken longer. For instance, now that I'm diligently job searching, I pretty much need a crowbar every time I want some separation from my chair. Being in my apartment for long stretches of the day is very different from my time in Taiwan and being almost constantly on the move. While it was exhausting to travel and do so much, it was by no means boring.  Even when I am successful in rending my behind away from in front of my computer, River Falls provides only so much diversity in locale. It's a far cry from the kaleidoscope of Taiwan's scooter-filled metropolises, murmuring seashores, and wide variety of architecture and local business. 

It sounds strange to me, as I'm more of the "hide in my cave while everyone else has enjoyable interactions" type, but I also miss having a lot of people around. Part of me misses all the people-watching, but I wasn't exclusively a wallflower over there. It's a good thing too. Almost everyone in Taiwan - and there were a lot of them - was nothing but kind and willing to put up with me masticating the Chinese language into a pulp. Even though it was difficult to get our points across, I really enjoyed being around so many people that were as nerdy as I am. I've worked in a lab with other people before, but not with as many people or with as large a set-up as in Taiwan. Adding to the awesome, most of the people we were working with were brilliant. It was a little intimidating at first, as I am neither tri-lingual, bi-lingual, and I don't even have a master's degree, but everyone there was just too generous for my embarrassment to last for long. 

Now, I'm back to my friends who have no qualms with telling me, "I love you, but you need to actually open your mouth when you talk or quit attempting speech with a mouth full of peanut butter" and other sweet nothings regarding how much of a socially-stunted over-achieving dork I am.

Not having a state-wide snow emergency was pretty nice as well. The heaven's picked the exact worst time to dump it's contents on me. I'm having enough trouble accomplishing everything I need to and squeezing in last minute visits with friends before we go due to my job/apartment/figuring out how to move/packing up things. The last thing I need is being blinded by plumes of snow on a frozen highway.

Until the Midwest road system becomes largely dependent on tunnels, I'll have to make do. There's a small mountain of things on my to-do list, including:

• Find a Job.
• Figure out how to ship things to our apartment.
• Finish my research with Dr. Huang.
• Meet with some bio/chem/tech clubs and a few teachers on campus to give presentations of my experiences
• Prepare said presentations
• Prepare a poster for NCUR that combines my last year of work, including the trip to Taiwan.
• Meet up with friends one last time before going out to Seattle (and convince them to come visit)
• Help out in the play my fiancé is currently struggling to keep afloat.

Fun side note: I can make soy milk now, thanks to the tutelage of Dr. Huang's wife.

Also, I totally typed in "globspot" instead of blogspot and think the former is Much better.

Day two back in the States.

Don't go looking for day 1 or anything about leaving. This is it. I was way too jet-lagged and busy to be productive yesterday. Who knows how bad everyone else on the trip was doing on their first day of class. I know Dr. Huang had something like 4 or 5 hours of classes. As for myself, I slept in until noon and have been struggling with sleeping more than 4 hours at a time since. The trip over there wasn't nearly as bad. No wonder we can't travel back in time, it's a real pain.

Here's the condensed form of the last few days of the trip in Taipei. Friday (the day after my last post) we went to what Dr. Huang called a cultural park. Basically, it was an entire mountain side that was half composed of wax models and replica indigenous Taiwanese villages while the other half was an amusement.park. I liked the almost every aspect of the first half except for the really awful gift shops. They were everywhere and were pretty much limited to selling (at best) useless or (at worst) offensive. I'll have to find somewhere to post more pictures from the day, as I'd like to describe some of the more ugly knick knacks for sale. However, there's some contention over how bad the stuff really was, and I'm curious what people think.

Aside from the gift shops, the replica villages were really educational. Once I got over how unnerving the wax models were - they weren't life-like enough to look completely real, but it was enough that I was worried that they'd start to move - it became a really good way to see the cultures of the different tribes indigenous to Taiwan. There were also a few mock ceremonies performed as well, but for the most part they were only interesting in seeing the similarities the had to Native American rituals. Many of the Taiwanese tribes made something very similar to totem poles. The group actually had a pretty decent conversation about this and settled on similarity possibly being based on the similar resources available to both tribes in Taiwan and those in the Pacific Northwest. We're probably wrong, but it's also a question that's nearly impossible to answer anyways.

The amusement park section was less educational, but a lot more entertaining with its rollercoasters and tower-rides. Kathryn and I made good work of them all. Unfortunately, Kenna was feeling sick again and wasn't able to join us. By far, my favorite ride was the rollercoaster in the Mayan-themed section of the park. Unlike most rollercoasters, there wasn't a sharp drop at the end of the initial ascent, it was more like a gradual plunge. While thrill junkies may criticize me, I enjoyed the more subtle transition. It also helped that once the cars got up to speed, we were in for roughly two minutes of twisting track, hairpin turns, and several loops. When everyone got off, it didn't matter what language you spoke, as we all might as well have been speaking in tongues. Rides that temporarily damage your ability to make a complete sentence should be the future of diplomacy, I think.

The next day, Kenna, Kathryn, and I got to present what we learned and did on our trip to Dr. Huang's old lab technicians. It was admittedly rushed and not a very good presentation, but for putting it together in basically a single night, I think we did okay. If it hadn't just been Dr. Huang's old lab techs it probably would have been disastrous for use.

Okay. My tired face is starting to get the jump on me, so I'll have to finish this one later. Keep and eye out for new posts and pictures soon.

Taiwan - The end is nigh pt. 1

2012 or some crap, right?

Soon to be back in the States blog.

There's a couple of things on my mind right now. I'll spare you my worries about getting hired anywhere anytime soon, as well as all the other weird and wonderful rites of leaving never-never land.

Right now, the group is Taipei again after spending the first portion of the week in Taizhong. We're in the process of scrambling to squeeze in as many last minute research projects, touring, and pictures as possible. This may or may not be because of the -20 degree weather that we get to look forward to if our flight somehow lands on the ice rink that is the MSP airstrip.

Our time in Taizhong was a bit of a mixed bag. We arrived on Sunday and mostly rested the rest of that day. Monday and Tuesday were spent doing more surveys of the TCM compounds we received from Drs. Cheng and the coral extracts from the NMMBA. It's a four day protocol, and because we had to leave for Taipei today, I got to try and carry three 96-well plates wrapped in tin foil and whatever else I could find to keep them from spilling in taxis, buses, and subways. It was worth it though, as the extra time allowed the embryos to be perfectly treated by most of the chemicals and we found a few new effective compounds to look at. Considering that Dr. Huang's model has been used to survey several hundreds of chemicals and only found two or three really promising drugs, this is pretty exciting.

We also took another stab at using the anti-AA antibodies we got from Dr. Yu at the Zhongshan Medical University. Unlike the survey, this has yet to really come to fruition. We've got a few kinks to work out still, some of which are quite interesting. One example of this is our use of the optical equipment at Tunghai University. In order to get better resolution and clarity, we've been using something called a confocal microscope. Basically, it builds a topographical map of a sample. By taking away layers and isolating certain areas, a confocal microscope allows us to see things that would be hidden when using a normal light microscope. In layman's terms, it's like looking through batman's microscope. I really like seeing all that those things can do, although it's good to keep in mind that we still have a small laundry list of other experiments to do with the anti-AA antibodies. Once we're back at our own lab, I plan to take full advantage of the very generous supply of antibodies from Dr. Yu.