7 June 2020

0212 sequence editing
0431 watching house hunters renovation
0717 sleeping
0904 sleeping

Food: omelette, ham, fruit for lunch, maple salmon and baked potato for dinner

Fact: The Vasa was a navel warship commissioned by the Swedish royal family in 1625, and included over 700 carved sculptures and other ordainments to go with her 64 cannons.  Without any real way to calculate how much ballast the ship would need (since it was larger than anything previously constructed) the builders guessed and drastically underestimated it.  The boat sank less than a mile from shore after a gust of wind capsized her.  The ship's cannons were removed about 40 years after she sank but from that point on was undisturbed (other than anchors or dredging/blasting waste being dumped on her) and lost to history until the 1960s when she was rediscovered (in pretty good shape since conditions aren't right for a lot of the things that destroy ship wrecks, other than the parts destroyed by things being dropped) and eventually refloated, then towed back into the harbor for restoration work.  Since drying out before conservation work was finished could result in cracking all work was done under a mist of polyethylene glycol mixed with water (25 min of spraying, 20 min stopped 24 hours a day, for 17 years, followed by 10 years of gradually drying out). 

Right as i was getting ready for bed I heard Dumas wandering around aimlessly and apparently when he got up to get some water grey kitty mat snipped him.  Being a good puppy he wouldn't disturb the kitty.  So i moved the kitty for him and then went to bed.  Once I woke up we had lunch and then I did a little bit of stuff on my computer until it was time for dinner.  After diner we got everything ready for churching, then churched and talked to the others on skype before and after.  I found out mother made an angelfood cake for dessert and we had that with fruit.  We are still trying to figure out what is growing out of our geranium plant since it really doesn't look like a germanium.  According to mothers app it is some sort of sunflower.  Guess we will know when it starts blooming.  Then mother and I watched House Hunters for the rest of the evening while I did some computer work.  My favorite episode was 2 guys in Palm Springs.  One was all into crystals and wanted to buy the house they looked at that had a crystal sound room.  The other guy was like yeah your crazy.  I also liked that they didn't like lawns in the desert but were also concerned about killing something that was already planted. 

6 June 2020

0413 reading
0937 sleeping
1458 sequence editing
2338 talking to Brendan

Food: ham, fruit, and veggies for lunch, lamb, rice and cauliflower for dinner

Fact:  When the Jesuits came to China they called God "lord of heaven" or Tiānzhŭ .  This was also the name of a traditional chinese god.  This spelling was recognized by Pope Clement XI during the Chinese Rites controversy (which mostly a battle between the Jesuits and the Franciscans/Dominicans about if Chinese rituals regarding honoring ancestors and Confucianism/Chinese imperial rites were secular and allowed (what the Jesuits said) or conflicted with Christianity.  The Jesuits lost in the 1700's but eventually in the 1900s the issue was reevaluated and determined not to be in conflict.  This decision also lead to greater diplomatic relationship between the Vatican and China.

Yankees game 1 in London.  Suzyn was sad she didn't get to meet the royal family.  Father and I grilled lamb and it was basically and inferno.  So much easier to do a whole rack than individual pieces since you could flip the whole thing at once (and we only did 1 minute per side).  Father's new gloves worked well.  We also decided when flipping we won't spin now that we are using this super intense heat, its too dangerous.  We ate dinner outside which was lovely. 

5 June 2020

1116 sleeping
1440 working on sequences
1558 working on sequences
1854 eating dinner and listening to the Yankees game

Food: PB&J for lunch, burgers for dinner with fruit and veggies

Fact: Hart Island, in Long Island Sound, is where the City of New York buries unclaimed bodies, people unable to pay for burial, people whose families sign the burial over to the city (knowingly or unknowingly), and body parts from amputations.  There are somewhere around a million people buried there, although its impossible to know how many since records are not digitizes and a number of the hand written log books were destroyed in a fire.  It's run by the Department of Corrections (workers come from Rikers Island prison each day).  There used to be a prison, Union POW camp, sanitarium, and a reform school on the island but its all been abandoned now.

Woke up for my lunch gathering with the louse group (although Julie couldn't make it).  Everything is going well with everyone, although Tic and Fanny are thinking about getting covid tested since they were at the protests over the weekend.  I also talked some to Lizzie and its looking less and less promising that we will be able to go backpacking.  Basically the new rules didn't change much other than you can now be free to travel as you want after 7 days (really longer since the 2nd test can only be taken after 7 days in state and it takes 48 hours to process the tests) if you have 2 negative tests.  Since we don't have time to go up for that long before the hike its a no go.  They may even postpone the trip in general since things are a bit crazy in Anchorage right now.  After work I put on the Yankees game (although it was actually Wednesday's game since Thursday/Friday were travel days for London).   We managed to eek out another win although the didn't make it easy. 

4 June 2020

0935 sleeping
1223 getting ready for meeting with the hawk group
1411 eating lunch
2012 trivial persuit

Food: hotdog for lunch, chicken with spices and mashed potatoes for dinner

Fact: Siberia is over 5million square miles (6 if you listen to the trivial persuit card; 4.6 if you listen to zac's estimates based on knowing the size of a series of other random states/countries and also 4.6 if you listen to eddies amazing math that included estimating the degrees of lat/long covered by sibera and doing a surface integral in mathmatica (or was it matlab) shown in the picture below).  Since they rounded up to 5 and thats what the internet says, we gave it to them.  

Woke up a little before the zoom meeting with Jason, Shanta, and Keith about raptors.  The meeting went pretty good although we basically decided that Shanta and I could decide how to best proceed when we met separately in a couple weeks.  I also decided to go ahead and get my plane ticket to Alaska on the off chance things work out to go backpacking with Lizzie and John still.  Other than that spent the day working on Catharus sequences.  We ended up trivial persuting today rather than tomorrow since Maria and Kevin have their prewedding retreat thing this weekend.  Since Eddie has a grant proposal due Friday we played by quick rules, which meant once you landed on a pie piece you didn't have to leave until you got the question right.  The west coasters still won, but we had all the pie pieces and were making our way to the center, and maria/kevin only needed 1 more so it was a close game all around.  The highlight though was the Siberia question, especially when Eddie and Zac came up with the same answer using two totally different methods.  Ironically, the only random state/country measurement that Zac got wrong was Texas. 

3 June 2020

1407 picking up schubie food and puppy meds
1421 on my way back from the vet
1546 working on sequences

2212 trivia with Kansans

Food: lunch meat for lunch, chuck roast, asparagus, and potatoes for dinner

Fact: Benjamin Lay was a Quaker who was known for being anti-slavery, a vegetarian, and into animal rights before any of these things were cool.  He was born in England in 1682, ran away from home to became a sailor, after a while ended up in Barbados where he and his wife would feed slaves and spoke out against slavery.  This didn't go over well and eventually they were forced to go back to England.  Eventually they ended up settling near Philadelphia and kept up the antislavery fight.  Benjamin also began making all his old clothing by spinning flax he grew inorder to be sure not to be benefiting from slavery or animal pain.  He was also had some form of dwarfism.   Overtime he was disowned from 4 quaker meetings due to his radical views (2 in the UK and 2 around Philadelphia) and he wasn't undisowned from the last one until 2018.  Lastly, he wrote an antislavery book that was published by Ben Franklin, but it was too radical for Franklin so his name wasn't actually on it as publisher. 

Woke up for the ANSP lunch.  There was apparently a pretty strong storm and people kept losing power/internet.  Jason was the original host then he handed it to Nate and then i ended up with it since none of them were sure they were going to be able to stay on (and many of the people would appear and disappear at random).  What was funny was the storm didn't look particularly crazy on the radar.  While I was on the call I got an email from Drexel saying they were ready to submit the NSF if we were, and so the button was pushed and the waiting begins.   Once i was off the call then I had a quick bite to eat and drove over to the vet to pick up food/meds for the pups and drop off the box of sleeping bags for Maria and Kevin.  Silvy texted me a bunch so I gave him a call when I got home.  Not much going on there other than people not taking things seriously and a bunch of new cases.  Afterwards I did some work on my sequences and then we had dinner before doing trivia.  Jimmy was running a few minutes late, so we talked to Ron for a while before it began.  Father was telling him about the salt treatment he put on the poison ivy to try and kill it, and that if that didnt work he was going to try some thing with gin.  Ron said just drink the gin and then you wont worry about the poison ivy.  We ended up coming in 4th (or 3rd from last) after a tie for 2nd to last.  We were closer with the tiebreaker question (how many miles above the eary does the space shuttle orbit) even though we were way off.  The bonus round was college team nicknames.  Maria put it together and we did pretty well, although Ron missed the The Washburn Ichabods, a D-II team in Kansas.  As usaul, without Ron though the game would not have gone nearly as well. 

2 June 2020

0457 sleeping

0550 sleeping
1622 sequence editing

1734 sequence editing

Food: ham, fruit, and veggies for lunch, tacos (with the korean style beef)

Fact:  Willa Cather wrote part of Death Comes for the Archbishop while staying with with Mary Austin, a writer who focused on the healing aspects of nature, especially the deserts.  Austin was also involved with the California Water Wars (on the loosing side).  After loosing that battle water from the Owens River was diverted to Los Angeles and Owen's Lake dried up.  The Lower Owen's valley began receiving water again in 2006 after missing earlier deadlines to restart the flow. 

Woke up spent most of the day working on the Catharus sequences or checking COEUS to see if all the approvals to submit the NSF were finally in.  Still waiting on the 4th level of approval.  Otherwise it was a pretty uneventful day.  I did message with Larry a bit about my post highlighting the differences between when Is and I got pulled over and when Brendan and I got pulled over.  After dinner the parentals and I went for a walk, and then I took the pups out for walks as well.  The Yankees beat the Jays, but the highlight was YES spending much of the later game showing a Red-tailed Hawk (Homer) that was watching the game.  John and Suzyn had a long talk about hawks, which was mostly Suzyn correcting John's mistakes.  But they both agreed it would be a pretty nice life to snag some food on the way to the stadium and then watch the game from the foul pole. I wish I had my Homer the Hawk shirt (the was the reason they made the shirts), but its not here (Illinois maybe?).

1 June 2020

0905 sleeping
1128 sleeping
1802  getting some work done
2025 watching Yankees/Jays

Food: pb&j sandwich for lunch, chicken and rice stuff (with some Italian sausage spaghetti sauce stuff) for dinner with fruit/veggies

Fact: Sesame Street was briefly banned in Mississippi because it included an integrated neighborhood and the adult that did most of the teaching was black.  Some of the board claimed they were doing it to make sure the Educational TV network wasn't defunded for being too progressive for the Mississippi legislature to handle.  Luckily there was such an uproar when the decision was leaked to the press it was quickly overturned.

Today was fathers birthday.  Mother made him a Key Lime pie that was pretty amazing and we sung happy birthday with Alexa.  Mother also hung up a happy birthday father sign over his chair.  Other than that I got the lit cited finished with the NSF proposal and then went to walmart to pick up groceries.  Otherwise it was a pretty uneventful day mostly of noone talking to eachother.  We did enjoy the yankees victory even though they made it way more interesting than they should have with a large lead late in the game.  Also spent a while working on a fb post about the differences I've encountered at traffic stops when Is and I were together and driving a nice truck (first question was what are people like you doing driving a truck like this) vs gtting pulled over with Brendan.  I really feel like in order to truly end police brutality and racism we need to get at the root causes and why cops feel like they can treat people differently based on ethnicity. 

31 may 2020

0051 working on the grant
0851 sleeping
1956 trying to get the screen capture box working to record churching
2316 working on the grant

Food: buffalo burger and a little bit of steak

Fact: Bitter almonds are grown primarily in the Middle East and Asia.  Since they have a stronger flavor than sweet almonds they are mainly used in baking or for flavor.  Since they contain hydrocyanic acid they must be processed (by baking or boiling) before being sold to remove the cyanide.  Even just 7 unprocessed almonds is enough to kill someone.  It made me think of Eddie as a kid eating fruit seeds that contained cyanide to build up a tolerance.  Such a weird kid.

Woke up and spent much of the first part of the day working on the NSF proposal.  Its just about done so I should be able to get everything uploaded to fastlane tonight or tomorrow.  Also got an email confirming ANSP is still standing, although some of the nearby stores on 19th and JFK were looted.  There are curfews everywhere, apparently even Champaign had some looting.  The whole situation is just depressing- the police brutality continues even while people are peacefully protesting, no wonder people feel like the only way to be heard is through property damage because clearly what we've been doing to this point hasn't made a differnce.  Next, father and I grilled some steaks and buffalo burgers.  Father used some old almonds (we had to look up if the cyanide was potentially an issue).  The fire burned super hot and I couldn't get the steaks off because of the flames so father ended up having to put gloves on and do it.  Mother then cooked the mushrooms because we thought it was too hot for the burgers.  But then the fire died out and it was challenge to get the last batch of burgers finished.  It all turned out amazingly though.  Then we had a quick dinner and i worked on my grant while the parentals got everything ready for churching.  We tried recording the service but the box kept falling asleep, possibly because it wasn't plugged into a monior.  Have to try it again next week.  Then I worked on getting the final touches on some stuff I needed Jason to look at.  Eventually the parentals and I had a discussion about the risks associated continued churching at church which wasn't exactly pleasant but it had to be done because cases here are spiking and it isnt a testing thing since the percentage of positive tests is actually increasing with greater testing. Spent the rest of the evening getting stuff uploaded to fastlane.  What a day.