Episode X: Going Home

This is just a quick post to let everyone know that I am currently safe and sound in sunny Southern California. I arrived Thursday, December 14, at around 8:00 pm. Here are a few scenes from the road:


Miles and miles of flat land....

Followed by more miles and miles of flat land...

And more flat land...

Interrupted by an occasional mound, slope, hill or mountain.

The journey lasted a total of fifty-two and one-half hours, including a one day stop in Albuquerque (with a tram ride to the top of Sandia Peak) and a half-day stop at Petrified Forest National Park.

























"Sunny Brae"

Prior to my trip I went to the local AAA office in Lawrence and had them print out a deluxe, detailed map of the exact route I was planning to take. I told the lady that my destination was sunny Brea, California (as it was snowing at the time in Lawrence), and she asked me if the name of the city was "Brea" or "Sunny Brea". I told her that it was Brea, and spelled it out for her. So I get my map and find that it has me traveling from Lawrence, Kansas, to Sunny Brae, California. As it turns out, Sunny Brae is a small town near Eureka in Humboldt County (see map below). Needless to say, I did not get much use out of the AAA map.

Episode IX: Giving Thanks

Kansas City, MO

For those of you who like Adam Norris Trivia, you may be interested to know that this is the second consecutive Thanksgiving that I have spent in the Midwest. This time, however, I did celebrate with family, albeit extended family. Very extended...

It was actually a very nice day, spent with second cousins, and the cousins of my second cousins. You may notice a number of familiar faces, including Mr. Boom Bennett. One of the nicest parts was homemade donuts, which held the guests over until mealtime (although it is hard to beat Aunt Sheila's dip).

Oklahoma! City

After the football games were over, Emery Wright and I were planning a road-trip to Oklahoma City (OKC) and Tulsa, but at the last minute he cancelled, then I cancelled, then I re-signed; so I began my solo trip at around 9 pm Thanksgiving day.

At around 2 am I reached my first major destination: the Oklahoma City National Memorial, which commemorates the 1995 OKC bombing. Now I rarely use the words "stunning" or "incredible" to describe things, but indeed I found the monument to be both stunning and incredible.

It is built on the site where the building once stood. The area where the building collapsed is now the "Field of Empty Chairs", each chair corresponding to a worker in the building who died that day. On the other side is a giant elm tree, which survived the blast and the burning cars all around it. In the middle is a very large, shallow reflecting pool. It is bounded by a gate on the east, bearing the time 9:01, and an identical gate on the west, bearing the time 9:03. The building collapsed at 9:02.

The memorial looks magnificent both night and day, but it looks much more stunning at night. Also, an entire museum dedicated to the bombing, right next door, is the most emotionally powerful museum I have ever been to.

The rest of the day, though enjoyable, was somewhat of an anticlimax. I went to the state capitol, which was nice, I walked around town, and I spent about an hour searching for my cell phone (I found it in the middle of an intersection, completely unharmed- guess I left it on the top of the truck).

As evening approached, I went to Myriad Botanical Gardens, which are some very nice formal gardens in the middle of downtown. It featured the Crystal Bridge, which was a giant glass tube filled with a fully functioning rain forest, full of exotic species, waterfalls and butterflies. When the sky turned dark, nearly every plant in the whole place- including the ferns and palms- lit up with Christmas lights.

Finally, downtown OKC: a very nice place, with skyways connecting many of the large business buildings, and the dining/shopping area accessible by car, foot, horse-drawn-carriage, or water taxi, taking advantage of the artificial canals that go through the heart of downtown (photo above).

Tulsa

The following day I spent in Tulsa, beginning with Oral Roberts University, a private university founded by evangelist Oral Roberts. The campus is very nice, and boasts numerous interesting (and expensive) buildings, including a prayer tower, which houses telephone operators willing to pray with/for you, 24 hours a day. This is also the site (according to the plaque) of the largest bronze statue in the world. Whether or not that still holds true, I can confidently assert that it is the largest pair of bronze praying hands I have ever seen.

The other main attraction of the day was the Philbrook Museum. It had some very nice artwork, but my favorite part was the fabulous building (built for an insanely rich family) and exquisite gardens surrounding it, including a fountain that begins on the balcony and ends at the pond seen below.


And a Few Days Later...

Back in Lawrence, I gave thanks for our first snow of the season! I was surprised, I seemed to be one of the few that was really excited about it. I was excited until I heard the announcement that a special guest scientist/author/celebrity had to cancel his lecture due to "inclement weather".

Nevertheless, I enjoyed my first Kansas snow. This was also the first time my truck has been snowed on (at least while in my possession). Finally, it was also the first time that I forgot to roll up my window during a snow storm, and consequently, when I got in to drive a few days later, it was the first time that I ever saw the entire driver's side of the floor covered with a thick layer of solid ice.

Episode VIII: Eating at E's

(And Elsewhere)

Of course it was only a matter of time until I had to write about food, and as it turns out, that matter of time was three months.

So I signed up for a KU meal-plan, which gives you a discount when you purchase on-campus meals in bulk. I purchased the cheapest meal-plan, which amounts to about three all-you-care-to-eat meals per week plus a bunch of credits accepted at on-campus food courts.

Mrs. E’s is my all-you-care-to-eat location of choice, because (a) it is by far the best one, and (b) it is the most convenient (as demonstrated in Episode II, it takes only five minutes to walk there). Technically the name of the place is Ekdahl Dining Commons, but I suppose the marketing directors decided that name does not sound particularly appetizing. And they are right. Thus it is called Mrs. E’s, which, although no one has actually seen Mrs. E, we figure the name must stand for “Mrs. Enormous”.

The online advertisement for Mrs. E’s boasts a “stunning” view, and in this case I found the ad to have been right on. The whole dining area features windows from floor to ceiling, and since the building is located at the top of a hill, one can see for miles (particularly beautiful when fall foliage is on display). The above photo is a panoramic picture that I constructed, showing about 270 degrees worth of the dining hall. The additional 90 degrees consists of the actual buffet area. While this picture may give you an idea of what eating there is like, I am afraid it does not do the scenery justice. But please do click on it to get a higher-resolution picture.

I notice that I eat quite a bit at Mrs. E’s, and one day I attempted to quantify exactly how much I ate, so I took photos of all the nutritional information displays, and created the montage seen below, with dots representing items that I ate.

As it turned out, that meal was worth 3,999 calories, consisting of 167g protein, 194g fat, and 484.7g carbohydrates. To give you a frame of reference, the FDA decided that a “normal” diet was either 2,000 or 2,500 calories a day. However, if you were to adjust the FDA’s Daily Value scale to my 3,999 calories, that meal would have given me 149% of my DV of fat and 81% of my DV of carbohydrates. Clearly, then, Mrs. E is putting me on a low-carb diet.

A final note: the most that I have ever gained in one sitting at Mrs. E's (on record, anyway) is 6 pounds.

Elswhere

Like I say, I only eat there around three times a week. Other times I eat at various food courts on campus, and some days I eat very little. One place on campus that you can always count on for excellent food is in the Kansas Union food court, where there is a special-order pasta service, in which you tell the chef exactly how to make your pasta, including the veggies, meats, noodles, sauces, cheeses, spices, etc. It is exquisite. However, it is a treat for me, since the Kansas Union is about a fifteen minute walk, and fifteen minutes of walking in the cold cold cold is not pleasant.

And…

Speaking of eating, our million-dollar-salary football coach weighs like 500 pounds, and the first time I saw him walking on campus, I wondered if he was even able clasp his hands together, due to his prodigious belly. Anyway, the point is, here is my favorite KU football shirt, hanging in a store window.

Finally...

Speaking of football, KU just beat their rivals (Kansas State) in their final home game of the year, and here is a video of their celebration. It is about 1 MB, so if you have a dial-up connection, it may take a while. Please tell me whether or not it works. Thanks.





They proceeded to take the posts out of the stadium and dump them in the lake.

Episode VII: The Lab

I suppose it is just about time that I post about something “important” and “career-related”, so here we go: The biggest part of a biology PhD program is research, and as of a few weeks ago, I am officially enrolled in laboratory rotations. Basically, lab rotations consist of the student working in three different labs, with a period of about two months spent in each lab. At the end of the last rotation, you decide which lab you want to continue in. For your edification, I have provided a brief description of each of the labs that I will be rotating through.

Chris Gamblin runs the lab that I am currently working in. He studies a protein called tau that is thought to be important in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. He has lots of spending money (so I hear) and employs a rather large staff, with a post-doc, two technicians, a graduate student and an undergraduate student. He also listens to completely random music in lab.

Erik Lundquist heads up the lab for my second rotation, in which he studies C. elegans, a little tiny see-through worm. The goal of the lab is to better understand neuron development.

Rebecca Hays’ lab studies flies and looks at the molecular mechanisms that induce apoptosis (“programmed cell death”). This topic relates to human diseases such as cancer and Parkinson’s disease.

In looking at the pictures of my professors, you might be led to believe that all KU biology professors are white and in their thirties to early-forties. Of course, you would be badly mistaken: there are plenty of fifty or sixty-year-old professors at KU.

I figure you might enjoy a photo from everyday life in the lab, so here is a picture from Dr. Gamblin’s lab: it consists of my E. coli bacteria growing right next to leftover Halloween candy (which is free for the taking).

And for something completely different…

There was some kind of drawing put on by the various food courts here on campus, where if you ate at every one of them in a certain amount of time, and got a stamp for each one, you would get a free drink and be entered into some kind of drawing. Needless to say, I had little difficulty eating at all the different places, and I enjoyed my free drink, and what do you know, I also managed to win…

A pink scooter!

It is battery powered, and recharges via a normal wall plug.

I have named the scooter “The Thugmobile” (for obvious reasons), and it has been quite a hit already. Just last night (Friday) Emery Wright and I took took it from one end of campus to the other, and had a total of about eight comments (mostly favorable), including two pretty young women who wanted to ride it, a guy who quoted Napoleon Dynamite (“You ever take it off any sweet jumps?”) and a police officer who thought surely we must have stolen it.

Episode VI: The Little Things

Here are some of the small, day-to-day kinds of things that have caught my attention recently.

Sports

Around here, college sports are indeed a day-to-day kind of thing. Friday the 13^th was KU basketball’s opening night kind of celebration, featuring skits, mascots, Harlem Globetrotter imitators, and somewhere in there some basketball as well. The funniest part was both men’s and women’s teams doing exquisite choreographed dance routines. So sports fans, if you will, please imagine former KU players, such as Paul Pierce or Raef LaFrentz, dancing the waltz (or the Macarena) on the basketball court. I think you will agree, it is a pretty funny thought.

(These pictures were not taken by me. I forgot my camera.)

Pithy Sayings

A few words of wisdom that I have picked up while out here:

First and foremost:

“Knowledge is the understanding that tomatoes are fruits,

Wisdom is not using them in a fruit salad.”

And a couple on location:

Note that the city of Lawrence, but not the state of Kansas, has rules against smoking in indoor public places.

Around Town

A couple of structural curiosities that I have found here in Lawrence:

First, in some of the older parts of town, the sidewalks are made out of bricks which are fairly uneven and not particularly well-taken-care-of. The interesting thing is that many of the bricks have “Lawrence, Kansas” engraved into them. I have two hypotheses on why this would be: first, the city may want to discourage other cities from stealing the bricks from Lawrence’s sidewalks to use in their construction. After all, it would be embarrassing to have a public building in Kansas City built out of bricks that said “Lawrence, Kansas” on them. My second hypothesis is that it serves as a sort of station identification so that, if you were abducted, blindfolded and taken to Lawrence, then left on the sidewalk to fend for yourself, you would immediately be able to get your bearings and recognize that you were in fact in Lawrence, KS.

Another useful public sign is this, typical of the stairwells on campus, letting you know that you are on the fourth floor, and if you go up one level, you will be on the fifth floor, and if you go down one level, you will be on the third floor.

And Finally…

Even though I have not been driving much (since nearly everything is within easy walking distance), it is nice to know that gas has been hovering just below $2 here.

Episode V: The Roommates

And now... the other moment that you all (read: Mom) have been waiting for... My Roommates!

The following is a short description of my two suitemates and one roommate, arranged in age order.

Christopher Flynn

Preferring to use his last name, Flynn (19) is the youngin' of the group. He comes from Boston, and I mean BAW-stuhn

This picture is fairly representative of his life. In a sense, he fulfills Kyle’s role, in that if the TV is on, it is probably Flynn watching sports or playing videogames.

I have compiled a list of things that I have seen Flynn doing here at the Towers, and ordered them by frequency with which he does them:

1) Watch TV

2) Play videogames

3) Sleep

4) Eat

Note that "study", "read", and "have pleasant conversations with his roommates" are items not included on the list. He goes for days it seems without speaking a single word to a single one of us. However, if I should ever want to have an animated discussion with him, all I have to do is mention something sports related. For instance: "Hey man, it's a shame to hear the Red Sox didn't make it to the playoffs. Did you see Garciapara's grand slam the other day for the Dodgers?" Etc.

Flynn's greatest observable talent is his cooking skill. He does quite a bit of cooking, and makes one killer BBQ burger. I suppose this works to cancel out the fact that he drinks all my sodas.

Zachary Roland

Zach is an undergrad, but is older than me (23).

He is a pretty nice guy, very much into music (able to identify almost anything I listen to, barring Jazz and Classical) and movies, and plans to be a senior for, say, 3-4 more years.

One particularly convenient thing about Zach is that he lived in his own house last year, and therefore has a good deal of furniture and housing supplies that he has contributed to the place (i.e. couch, TV, vacuum, Playstation, cleaning supplies, etc.)

And amazingly enough, he is only the second person I have met who is really into Ben Folds- and consequently, we are going to see him in concert next month.

Paul O’Sullivan

Paul is a gem, and I am quite glad that he is my roommate. He comes straight from Ireland, and I mean AYE-ur-land. He is the old man of the bunch (25) and spends way too much time working in ‘the studio’ on his architectural models.

We hang out from time to time (when he’s not working)- eating at Mrs. E’s, or using the free indoor pools here on campus. He is/was an avid surfer (go figure- a surfer from Ireland) who wishes he lived in San Diego. Note that he consented to me using the corniest picture I could possibly find of him

Not only does he have a wicked Irish accent, but he is also the second-fastest talker I have ever met. And on top of all that, he has a certain speech impediment in which he says things like ‘flat’ when he means to say ‘apartment’, or ‘lift’ when he means to say ‘elevator’ (note that he also says ‘a lift’ when he means ‘a ride’, and if you ask him for a ride he thinks you are saying something naughty). He also pronounces things oddly, for instance, ‘pecan’ rhymes with ‘vegan’.

Finally, rather than saying ‘eight thirty’, he says ‘half eight’, which is difficult to decipher: does he mean eight + half (8:30), eight - half (7:30), or eight * half (4:00). One of the funniest things he has said thus far was when I asked him what time his classes started, and all he said was “half”.

And for something completely different…

Here is hard evidence of, believe it or not, the FIRST turkey I have ever bowled. It just so happened that it was in the 10^th frame, during cosmic bowling, while I was suffering from a moderately severe case of food poisoning.

Episode IV: The Towers

And now... the moment you have all been waiting for... (0r at least the moment Mom has been waiting for...) Pictures of THE JAYHAWKER TOWERS! That is, pictures of the place where I'm living.

There are four towers, with six or seven stories each, and maybe ten units per floor. Each unit consists of four rooms, including two bedrooms. Floorplans can be found here.

A guy I know who comes from Costa Rica calls them the “yay-hawk towers,” and my roommate once had a letter sent to him with the address “Jay Hock tower”. The official name is The Jayhawker Towers, although people in the know just call them The Towers.

I don’t really consider them to be dorms, since they have two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and a kitchen; but I don’t consider them to be apartments either, since they are owned by the university and rent out by the school year. A friend insists that they are “townhouses.” I should note that while I requested the all-graduate tower, I was given the everybody-except-freshmen-allowed tower, with a graduate student as a roommate. Thus far things have worked just fine.

Here are a couple pictures of the bedroom, which I share with a guy from Ireland. The one thing you don't really see in the pictures is my bed.



The kitchen, which is a good thing to have, is at least in one way a step up from the Norris family kitchen: the broiler actually works.



Below is a picture of my tower (Tower D) with Tower C in the background. If you enlarge the picure by clicking on it you will see that I have circled the windows that belong to our rooms. Likewise on the picture at the top of this page, my room is the one on the top left (with the light on.) An interesting sidenote: my wireless headphones work all the way out to where I took these pictures, which means I can continue listening to the radio or TV or whatnot all the way across the street.
















One interesting thing about living in the everyone-allowed dorms is that a number of athletes live in them. Particularly, it seems that football players like our tower. Here are side to side pictures of an athlete's living room (posted in the athletic museum) and our living room for you to compare and contrast. Note that the only everything in our living room (except the sound system) was brought by my suitemates and was already here before I even arrived.

My favorite interior design element of the place can be seen below. For some strange reason, every time you walk in the door you get this uncanny feeling that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are pointing guns right at your mid-section.

Well that's all for now. I will update this after I get a couple more pictures, but for now, I leave you with a nice little view from our living room window.