Easter

Sorry, I am going to skip past the remainder of my time in Denver and jump straight to Easter. It is much more fun, (i.e. comes with pictures).

Last Saturday Hubii and I went to Iowa to visit his sister and her family. On Saturday we went to the Great Plains Dough Company (a yummy pizza place, but Hubii does not seem to be fan).

Here's a picture of James I took from the loft of the restaurant.

I was also able to get a great picture of our niece who recently learned how to walk. She is a very impressive walker, as you will see later in this blog.

We played Settlers of Catan with the Great River Expansion. I mention it, because it is the first time in my life that I have ever won at Settlers. So it was a big deal for me. I think that the river changed the game mechanics and people were not playing in the usual way. Anyway... I am sure you are very interested.

We went to church the next day and enjoyed a great Easter Service and baptism. I don't have a picture of the whole family, but I do have a picture of the cutest member.

I was really impressed that she could walk and handle that ball at the same time. When I was playing basketball I had a lot of issues with that skill.

And here she is giving the ball to Hubii. Thanks for the fun time in Iowa!

Denver

Happy Easter everyone! Christ is risen!
So sorry that I was not able to keep up with my pledge to update weekly but I am sure that my hilarious recount of all the fun I had last weekend will help you forgive me. So last weekend my labgroup went to Denver. It was for a conference with the research group we are part of. We work with a couple of universities (like Denver University) and with a medical device company and share the data that we collect with them. So we were going to present our current research to them and they were going to show us what they had been working on and what we had to learn from them. I had a decent bit of data on my specimen but still did not have my slides put together. I thought that this would be the biggest obstacle to a low stress weekend.
The plan was to leave on Thursday at noon and arrive in Denver between 10 and 11pm. Then present our group research on Friday morning. I had leftovers in the freezer plus I bought a few frozen dinners for Hubii to make while I was away. Further, Hubii had plans for Thursday and Friday evening (a piano recital and a play: Julius Caesar). So all was set at home. I just had to work on my slides on the way there or early Friday morning.
Well, as the guys in the lab were in charge of getting the rental cars we didn't end up leaving until 1pm. No problem, just an hour, not too bad a set back. The trip across Kansas was mostly uneventful. Long, boring, tedious, about 6 hours of flat highway. Well, it is Kansas after all. It starts to rain and possibly hail (it sounded like hail but I couldn't see anything on the road). After we stop for dinner I take over driving one of the cars. After about 20 minutes it starts to snow and then it starts to be ridiculously hard to see and then the wind starts pushing my car around. I comment that if I were making this trip with Hubii this would be the point at which I make him do the driving. But we keep going, 45 mph or slower on a 75 mph interstate. eventually we make it into Colorado and I think, great only 3 more hours and I will be in nice, clean, safe, hotel room. Then I see that the gates on the interstate are closed and we need get off at the coming exit.
We drive into a town that is completely dark, even the McDonald's is dark. We realize that the power is out in this town and the McDonald's workers are leaving for the night. Thankfully about 15 minutes later the power comes back to the town and we drive to the nearby gas station and hang out in their food mart. We were hoping that as the storm was heading east and we were heading west that the gates would be up soon. It was about 9pm and we stood around the food mart (which was quite large) and drank gas station coffee. I called Hubii to update him on our situation. We call the DOT hotline to get updates on road closures. At about 10 we start to pull chairs from the attached restaurant and sit around. Then the power goes off again. The gas station is actually quite full of people. Lots of people who were heading towards Denver or Kansas City were stuck there. There was even an Army unit hanging out in the restaurant area. We start to play price is right with the items in the gas station. Then we start to fall asleep. At about 11pm my advisor decides that we won't be travelling anymore that night and would have to find a place to stay in this town. We try to call the nearby hotels but the only hotel that is picking up is completely occupied. At midnight the power finally comes back. We are able to call a hotel and find enough rooms for the group. Great! Well, we learn to be thankful for small blessings. Like the fact that the room does not have any dead insects in it. Supposedly the rooms we got had been closed all winter and they hadn't cleaned it (they weren't expecting to be inundated with stuck travelers). No insects, but a fair number of mouse droppings :S . Well it was just one night, and I could have slept anywhere after staying up till midnight in a gas station.
The next day we found out that the gates finally opened at 4am that morning. We left at about 7am and drove straight to Denver. Thankfully I finished my presentation in the car on the way there. I gave a short (very short) powerpoint presentation and as I was the last presenter people were more interested in moving on than in asking too many questions. Which was good, I hadn't really practiced my presentation a lot.
Phew, what a crazy trip! There are more, not so exciting details, about the rest of our time in Denver but I need to get to bed. Also, look forward to a posting on our Easter trip to Iowa.

Best Weather Ever!

So the weather outside is great! I wore open toed shoes to church AND capri pants AND we both left our coats at home. It makes me very happy when the weather is warm. Plus there are so many trees whose flowers are in bloom or beginning to bud. Overall very optimistic weather, which is nice after weeks of freezing rain and 'wintry mixes'.

As usual, school is keeping us both very busy. This week was better for Hubii than the last but I spent a lot of time at school trying to do testing for my research. If you want to see some of the things my lab is researching you can watch this video, but be warned there are a lot of closeups of cadaver knees. Anyways, the lab mostly works with the knee joint and how it interacts with the attached ligaments. I am doing a small research project on how the arteries around the knee behave as the knee moves. There is no testing protocol for this, so I am trying to figure that out right now. All that figuring out means that things take longer than expected. What I thought would be done by Friday night was only at the beginning stages when I left on Friday. I had to quit on Friday because I needed someone to run the x-ray machine for me and the only person authorized to take X-rays in our lab had been running his own tests all day and was too tired to be of any help to me. So I will have to continue testing on this coming week.

But last week was not a total let down because after I left work we went to Hubii's coworker's (Mike's) place for game night. They were playing Arkham Horror, a co-operative game that can be played by upto 8 people! Well, I only missed one round so I joined when I got there. Plus I got fed with delicious grilled burgers on home made buns! But wait that wasn't all! Mike's wife, Kirsten, has had some maternity clothes sitting in her closet since she had her son. She had tried to take them to a large charity consignment sale. Fortunately for me, they were no longer accepting maternity clothes (which seems strange to me, because all the maternity clothes I own are second hand). Here I am modeling one of my outfits and showing off my 24 week belly.

Like I said earlier, I have to continue my research this week but need help from lots of other grad students. To help lubricate the wheels of graduate student generosity I baked up some goodies. Hopefully they are persuasive.

Cinnamon raisin bread

Banana nut bread

I will be going to Denver with my research group this week. We will leave on Thursday and return on Sunday. Hopefully Hubii will survive the weekend without me. Also, please pray that I can get all my testing done by Wednesday as well as all the HW I have due this week. Oh, and that babii doesn't get too affected by the stress I feel this week.

Papaya

This will be a short post, it's almost bedtime. We just got back from a dinner we got invited to last minute (well almost, invitation this morning at church). It was delicious and fun. The hosts have chickens and bunnies!!! Flemish giant rabbits, but we only saw the kittens (I just found out that's what baby bunnies are called).
Supposedly babii is now the size of a papaya. That is scary because there were papaya's on sale at the Price Chopper and those guys were HUUUGE.
Last week was rough for Hubii because in addition to his regular duties he had to advise students and interview another candidate for the CS faculty position. The college made an offer this week, hopefully things work out for the best.
In other news, my inner ankles have almost disappeared and my feet look extra chubby.