New Year - a little late!

2012!?  The years just keep rolling by, don't they?  This is my much-delayed new year's eve reminiscing.  Actually I'm only half a month late so I suppose it could be a lot worse.  This will be a short post though because I'm not really in the mood to be deeply philosophical.  Still I've looked back every year, so I'll look back at least briefly today. 

Let's see.  Overall I'd have to say 2011 was pretty good to me.  I'm actively involved in work and everything is going well there. I'm actively involved in my national professional organization and everything is going well there.  I got my promotion to professor, with a raise, and in December we got a good bonus which paid for Christmas and then some.  My life and work seem to be on a pretty nice even-keel for a change. 

So personally, things are going well, but there are also a LOT of changes going on at my work.  The department has a new Chair, and with a new Chair come changes, so that's one aspect of it.  Add to that, our interim Division head has decided she doesn't want the position and is leaving, so we'll have a new Division Head in another month.  And add to that our lab administrative director left in December.  Whenever there is this much change, people are nervous and unsettled.  I've ridden so many changes at this place that I'm sure I can ride these too, but it is a pretty excessive amount of change in a fairly short period of time this time.  It'll be interesting to see how the department grows.    

Family-wise things are going well, too.  I have a new niece-in-law, with my oldest nephew getting married in November.  My nieces and nephews all make me so proud.  What a great group of kids.  Plus I have four grand-nieces now.  Maybe my newly married nephew and his wife will add a boy to that mix along the way.  So far I'd have to say that my nephews have excellent taste in women.  All my nieces-in-law are good-looking girls.  So of course my grand-nieces are perfect.  *laughing*  Which is not to say that my nieces and nephews aren't good-looking.  As I mentioned, I have nephews ands nieces to be proud of.

So what about the new year?  I think this year I may buy a new house.  I like my little house, but the commute is getting really old.  I'm seriously considering moving to somewhere close to the rail lines.  That will be my big project for the year, probably.  At work I have lots of projects to work on to keep me busy.  Maybe I'll consider losing some weight and getting back into better shape.  And of course I always have lots of around-the-house projects that I never seem to get to. The cat-kids and I are fat and happy.  It should be a good year, I think. 

New York, New Year

Wow!  Three months since I posted.  I always let the back end of the year get away from me and this year was no exception.  I didn't even do my usual end of year/new year musings.   I'll have to try to fit that in sooner or later.  Or I guess I could just skip it this year.

Let's see.  I have so much to talk about.  Guess I'll do this blog about my trip to the Big Apple and catch up on other things in another blog.

I have a good friend in medical school in New York, so I went to visit her for five days the week before Christmas and we had a blast!   I can totally see why people love New York.  Everything is there.  And I mean EVERYTHING.  Things we can only get online in Dallas, you can actually stop and pick up in a relatively accessible store.  Authentic food from probably every known culture.  Yum!   And of course, Times Square, Broadway, Rockefeller Center, etc.  It was impossible to do everything in five days, so we were selective of course, but everything we did was fun.

First of all, all transportation was public, which was really different for me with my independence defined by my car.  You can't live without a car in Dallas.  In New York it's not only possible, it's often preferable.  Traffic isn't pretty.  Also, I've never been on a subway in the US before so it was a learning experience. I've been on the London Underground, the Paris Metro and several systems in Japan, but nothing here in the US.  I'm VERY glad to have had my friend to act as guide.   She was in charge of getting us from point A to point B and did a great job at it.  

My friend lives in Jersey City, so we went into New York every day for food, shopping and entertainment.  We ate Greek food, we ate Falafels, we ate the best greasy cheeseburgers I've ever had, we ate authentic Japanese at a place where we were the only non-Asians inside.  Basically we ate our way through 5 days. 

We went to see Wicked!  AWESOME!  I had never been to a Broadway show, so likely I would have considered anything we saw awesome, but Wicked really was amazing.  I want to see it again.  And I now have the soundtrack for it.   

We went to see the big tree at Rockefeller Center at night, which is the first picture in this blog, and also wandered around looking at all the Christmas decorations, which are the other pictures.  As you can see, all the decorations were amazing, although of course the pictures never do them justice and I can't possibly post all the pictures I took. 

We went shopping pretty much every day.  On one side of Macy's the windows are all done with fancy Christmas scenes and puppets.  Those window scenes I absolutely could not do justice to with a picture, but this will maybe give you a little flavor of what they were like.  "Magical" is probably a good word.   In fact I'd have to say the New York is fairly magical at this time of year.

We got home pretty exhausted every evening after walking and wandering around Manhattan all day, but it was sooooooo worth it.  One minor downside - temperature.  One day in Manhattan the high temp was 27 degrees, which as you know is WAY too cold for this Texas girl.  Hats, gloves, thick scarves, heavy coat ... these are absolute 'musts' for December in New York.  And add an umbrella for those wet days.  Still the weather didn't slow us down much.  We still had a blast. 

Oh, one other minor downside, I picked up a Yankee virus, which I was coming down with the day I flew back home, and then I kindly took with me to east Texas for Christmas.  Hopefully my whole family didn't end up with it. 

So that was the NY trip.  More on the rest of my life in the next blog.

October temps

It's an incredibly lovely Sunday morning.  The weather has settled into it's Texas Fall mode with mornings in the low 60s and high temps in the mid-80s.  Perfect temperatures.  Now if we would just get a little more frequent rain, it would be ideal.  The rain last weekend wasn't enough to break the drought of course, but much of Dallas looks green again.  That's a nice plus.  My sister in the high country in Colorado got about 10 inches of snow last weekend when I was getting rain.  I'm glad I'm not there, although the Fall colors are gorgeous, from the pictures she's sent me.

Today is a beautiful day here.  It's still cool right now, totally blue sky, bright sun.  I'm taking advantage of not having to be anywhere today to do a bunch of puttering.  Plus Sunday's my watering day, so I've been out watering the lawn and starting to cut back some of the dead shrubbery.  Amazingly, a bunch of green is showing in the interiors of those shrubs.  Looks like most of them will make it. 

My car is fixed.  It spent 3 days in the shop and is all back together now.  I'm happy about that.  The rental I had was a BRIGHT red Chevy Cobalt.  Not a bad car, but it doesn't handle like my Subaru.  I was glad to have my car back. 

Friday at work I might as well not have gone in.  Computer issues made the day less than productive, although I did attend three meetings I really needed to be at.  Given I had three meetings I suppose my day would have been fairly disrupted anyway.  The computer issues revolved around missing files.  I've spent this last week working on several PowerPoint presentations that I have coming up, and like a good girl, I saved and closed them before I left Thursday evening.  Friday morning they were gone.  Along with two excel files I had saved and four file folders full of files I had created recently.   After a minor panic attack and major ranting, an Information Systems guy came to my office to tell me that they were migrating things to a new server.  My stuff wasn't gone, I just couldn't access it.   They predicted I'd be able to access it again in, oh, eight hours or so.  *laughing*  Talk about your mixed emotions.  Vast relief that I wouldn't be required to recreate files from scratch, relief that I didn't need any of those PowerPoints on Friday, vast irritation that I couldn't work on anything current.    Life on a computer network, ne?

Anyway, not much going on.  Just thought I'd put in a picture of my pretty red roses.  The yellows are blooming too right now, but aren't as big and full as the reds.  This may be my shortest blog post ever, but that's it for today.

Amateur Auto Mechanic

My poor car.  It takes a fair amount of abuse from me.  Not that I purposely abuse it, but I drive long distances and I like to drive fast.  Almost two weeks ago now I had an unexpected meeting with some road debris.

I was commuting to work at 5:30 am and in fairly heavy traffic for that hour.  I was traveling "above posted speeds" in a group of cars three lanes across and several deep and I was moving along next to an 18-wheeler.  All of a sudden he threw up a large piece of road debris of some sort.  It came at me too fast to really tell what it was and I had nowhere to go.  Just the luck of the draw that it happened to come at me.  So I hit it on the right front (passenger side) bumper and ran over it, and my car started making 'unusual' noises.  Damn!  Was my thought.  (okay, it was more colorful than "damn", but you get the idea).

I worked my way across traffic, took the next exit and looked for a street light (not much out there where this happened).  I got my trusty flashlight and went to look and originally thought I was dragging the debris.  A big chunk of stuff was dragging and rubbing on the front tire.  I tried to pull it loose and discovered it was attached!  It was part of the undercarriage of my car.  So I twisted it around and stuffed it back up in there and drove the rest of the way to work.  The car didn't overheat or lose gas or make any more unusual noises except it was (and is) very loud when I accelerate.  When I left work, there were no drips or fluids under the car, so since I had to fly to DC the next day, I put off taking it to the shop until I got back.

Turns out that piece of debris ripped my engine shield off the bottom of my car and loosened or damaged other pieces.  The good news is that it missed my fog light and headlight on that side, and it looks like the front bumper (which wraps the whole front of the car) can be salvaged.  Tomorrow I'm taking it to the shop to be repaired and renting a car for the three days they will have it (hopefully only three days). 

So where does the amateur auto mechanic come in?  Friday as I was leaving work I approached the car and thought "what the hell?"  A large piece of the undercarriage on the driver's side was hanging down to within about 2 inches of the pavement.  I got down on my knees (thankfully I wasn't wearing a dress) and determined that it was fairly solidly attached and then drove the car home that way, carefully skirting any road conditions that would cause the car to bounce.  When I got home, I waited for the car to cool down and then laid down on the ground and got under it to see what was going on.   I even got under the car on the passenger side to see how the same piece on that side was attached.  Scarily, it's not attached.  That's apparently the broken piece that I stuffed back up in there and it's just sitting in there!  Anyway, when I pushed the hanging piece back up into place and looked at it by looking in the wheel well over the tire, I found a place where the hanging piece has a hole that matches up with a hole on another piece of the car.  So I found a nut and bolt (almost too small so I put a washer on it to make sure it doesn't come through), and bolted the hanging piece back up in place.  I have no idea if it's intended to be bolted there, but it's working fine, and I have my car to get around in until it goes to the shop tomorrow.

You can see in this slightly fuzzy picture, the shiny new nut and bolt holding the piece in place behind the edge of the tire (lower left corner of picture).  I have a tendency to try to fix things myself, although I admit I usually leave car things to real mechanics.  I needed to be able to use the car this weekend though.  Desperation is the mother of invention.  I know it's "necessity", but in my case it was desperation.  I had to be desperate to try to tackle car stuff.

So that's my car saga.

On a bright note, it's raining!!!!!!!  And the sunshine girl is dancing for joy.  It's amazing how good a mood I'm in without the sun being out.  We need it so badly.  My roses are loving the nice temperatures and with a little help from me watering and now the rain, they're blooming like crazy.  Pretty.

October and Cooler Temps

How about that?  My weather fixation continues.  Actually, I just like sunny Sunday mornings.  It was 56 this morning when I went out to set my sprinklers.  Brrrrrrrrr!  I haven't felt 56 in a long time.  It's supposed to stay like this for a little while.  High 50s to low 60s at night, mid-80s during the day.  Beautiful weather, but no rain in sight.

I have seen rain though.  Both times I went to Washington DC in September it was raining there.  I wish I could have brought it back with me.  Still, even with water restrictions my lawn is looking pretty good.  The break in the heat will probably save it, although the same can't be said for many of the trees in the area.  Flying into Dallas last Friday, everything looks brown, and maybe half the trees are brown rather than green.  You can tell there's a serious drought here.  It looks like mid-winter rather than early Fall.  I'll have to cut back all my dead shrubbery out front and hope to find some green in the center.  That shrubbery is usually green all year.
The cat kids are fat and happy.  I found a pet sitter for them this year while I was on the long vacation and had her come in every other day.  She worked out perfectly.  Only Addy came out for her, but at least Addy got wet food every other day.  Addy didn't lose weight while I was away like she has been for the last couple of long trips.  You can see from this picture that neither of them is in danger of starving, but I didn't see the usual, Addy-dropping-weight-and-Zoe-gaining that I often see when I'm gone long periods of time.  Here they're taking an early morning drink at the patio birdbath/cat watering hole.

I have no trips in October, but a lot of small projects to complete.   I'm participating in a Webinar this week.  Then I have an e-learning project due, a talk for the lab techs, a presentation at journal club,  a set of chromatograms to tidy up and submit for a book chapter, a science project to help a local student with and a GC/MS assay to bring up in-house to make our ICU docs happy.  That's my list I'm hoping to either complete or get well into this month.  The GC/MS assay will probably take more than a month to validate, and the science project I just need to grow up some cells and figure out some basic stuff before helping the kid set up the project herself.  The talks and presentations should be pretty straight-forward, so they'll get done this month.  I've become pretty good at throwing presentations together.

My promotion went into effect on September 1st and all is good at work for the most part.    I had to qualify that because of 2 things:  We have a new Chairman of Pathology, and a new Chairman means lots of changes coming along.  It will be interesting to see how things work out.  The second thing is that the County Hospital is struggling right now and going through lost of changes.   I sign out test results over there, and they are working on getting credentialing up to date.  I haven't been credentialed over there previously despite signing out for the last 10+ years.  So I'm getting credentialed, and in the meantime, someone else is covering my signout duties.  At my primary job though things are going very well.  New instruments are being installed, and I'm staying nicely busy.

And that's the news for this lovely Sunday morning, October 2nd, 2011.  Or something like that.   

Weather fixation

Yup.  I'm totally fixated on the weather these days.  It's not as hot as it had been, although we did break a record by having 70 days of 100 degrees or more this year . . . so far.  I'm not totally convinced that the weather is through with its super-heat yet, but the last few days have been nice, comfortable mid-80s to mid-90s.  Which tells you how hot it's been . . . that I think mid-90s is comfortable.  I mowed my back yard and didn't even break a sweat hardly.

Thought I'd throw in a picture of my twin peach trees.  You'd never know they were once the same size. 

So the temperature has been 'decent', but we're still severely dry.  It actually rained Friday evening.  I was standing in my doorway, literally trying to will it to rain before it started.  Me, the sun-lover, trying to will rain.  It's just not normal.  It did rain though.  It was only a few hours of a pretty soft rain at my place, but I was just so happy to see moisture.  Of course, I'm still watering today since Sunday is one of my watering days.  It'll take more than that little bit of moisture to counter the effects of our long drought.

So see?  Fixated on the weather.

I survived my first work week back from vacation.  It wasn't too bad since I had cleaned out all those emails.  I'm actually mostly caught up, which is kind of amazing.  Of course, I partly owe that to the fact that the new instruments didn't get installed while people argued over who pays to run the water and power for them.  So they're still sitting waiting on installation, and I have only a few validation studies waiting for me to reveiw and sign.  Those came from the new tabletop instrument that didn't require any rerouting of systems.  Other things seem to be moving along nicely.

I interviewed medical school applicants yesterday.  This is about the fourth year I've volunteered to interview the applicants.  I enjoy it, but I only volunteered for four weekends this year since I'm fairly busy with other stuff.  I have another meeting in Washington DC at the end of the month . . . coming up fast come to think of it.  I just had a meeting in DC just over a week ago, so DC twice this month.  Keeps me out of trouble I guess.

I've been sorting through vacation trips and pictures and trying to figure out what I did what years.  I know the first long vacation trip I took was in 1993, and that was a 17 day, 7100 mile jaunt around the western US by myself with my camping gear in my car.  Then I went back to the Utah parks  (Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Capital Reef, Arches) for the next five years (1994 through 1998), although I didn't do all four parks every year.  In 1999, my sister Monica and I went and we went to all four parks.  In 2000 and 2001 I didn't take the long vacation, as far as I can remeber.  In 2002 I went by myself.  In 2003 and 2004 Yasmeen started going with me.  2005 was by myself.  2006 was with Yasmeen.  2007 was Monica, Yasmeen and I and that was a fun trip!  They were all pretty fun, but that one especially was.  Yasmeen went with me in 2008, and Monica has gone now in 2009, 2010 and 2011.  So although I used to go alone all the time, after Monica went with me in 1999, I've only gone alone twice.   They've all been pretty great trips, each memorable for different things.  One of these days I'll have to transcribe all my hand-written journals from those various trips into the computer, and maybe intersperse them with the pictures from the trips.  Someday when I'm bored for something to do.

Anyway I guess that's about it for now. 

Almost time to work

Yes, the summer has totally gotten away from me. And vacation has totally gotten away from me. Today is my last day of vacation, and tomorrow I return to work after three weeks off. It's going to be hard to go back, but at least this week I remoted in and cleaned out 700+ emails. Tomorrow shouldn't be too horrific.

Vacation has been wonderful. Monica and I did the Utah parks again, and even though it was a shorter trip than we usually take out there, for various reasons, it was great. We hiked Angel's Landing again, of course. The picture here is the trail near the top of the hike. We also did a hike in Bryce. Those were our only two hikes though. We skipped Capital Reef completely this year, and opted to shop in Moab rather than hike in Arches. Easier on the body; harder of the credit cards.

We did things a little differently this year in a couple of ways. Usually we take the roads up through the panhandle after Amarillo, and then take roads across northern New Mexico. It's an incredibly scenic drive . . . once you get past Raton. Nothing "incredibly scenic" about most of the Texas panhandle nor eastern New Mexico. Instead of taking that route though, this year we took I-40 straight west from Amarillo to Albuquerque and then headed northwest to Farmington. It wasn't an especially scenic drive but it was 2 to 3 hours shorter!! I really liked that! Yes, I know that interstate is going to get you places faster than back roads, but I've almost always opted for back roads to see the scenery. However, given that I've made that drive almost every year since 1993, I figured I could skip seeing it this year. And I did really like hitting Farmington in daylight and not exhausted from 15-ish hours of driving.

Another different thing we did was after leaving Moab we drove straight to Denver to visit with my nephew, niece and great-nieces. That drive was only about 5 1/2-ish hours, less than it usually takes us to get to my sister's place. Interstate again.

The weather was fairly warm this year out there. That's probably not surprising, given the national weather, and it was cooler than Dallas, which wouldn't have been difficult. But Zion hit 103 the second day we were there. Bryce was nice though. Not too cool for me, for a change. We got thunderstorms both nights we were in Bryce, which didn't make Monica very happy, as she has a pretty good lightning phobia. The days were picture perfect though, so I have to say I'm glad the rain and storms came at night.

Both hikes were great. We saw the peregrines and condors both at Angel's, but didn't get near enough either of them for pictures this year. This little guy hanging onto my boot and his friends were about all we got close enough to take pictures of. In Bryce, we did the loop section of the trail in the opposite direction that we usually hike it, and I think I like it better that way. We missed sharing the trail with the horses that way. Picture below is from the Bryce hike.

Another different thing we noticed was that there seemed to be less people this year, in many of the places we went and on the roads. We wondered if it was because we started a week later than usual. Perhaps more kids were back in school and we were past the peak season.

In general I would say that it was another wonderful Utah vacation, with a finishing touch of getting to spend time with my Denver grand-nieces.

Today I'm doing stuff around the house in preparation for going back to work tomorrow. Plus I'm watering my lawn. The county has restricted water usage because of the continuing drought. The temps finally broke and have been lovely (80s), although we're supposed to get three days of 100s again this week. But we've had no rain. Not a drop since we had a brief morning rain on Aug 14th. And I think that was the only rain in the metroplex for the last 60+ days. So I can currently water my lawn on Thursdays and Sundays before 10:00 am and after 6:00 pm. That will help my water bill, but my lawn is going to look worse than it does. Can't be helped. I may not be able to keep it alive if we don't get rain, let along looking good.

The dogwoods succumbed to the heat and drought this year, and the holly might have also during the time I was away. I'll give it some time to come back since it's managed a previous comeback. The peach tree-lets look good still. Well, the big one looks good, the tiny one is surviving still.

That's it for now.