Hannah & Jon’s Excellent Adventure

This spring, I will begin my field work with common mullein.  I thought I might write a little about it.  I’m going to be setting up an experiment in the field to test whether or not the invasive plant I am studying, mullein, is being eaten by native insects.  The question ends up being something along the lines of: are native insects limiting the growth of this invasive plant.  If the answer is yes, that could be good, as it would mean that the population of mullein might naturally be controlled. But, if the insects are eating mullein, what are they not eating.

I will have three sites, and will be identifying three hundred plants at each site for my project.  I will exclude insects from half of the plants, and then at the end of the growing season, I will dig up all the plants, dry them, and then figure out if there is a difference between the plants with insects and the plants without insects.

So it is going to be a lot of fun, and also quite a bit of work.  I am looking forward to getting started!

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So after a very nice trip home to Mass and Maine, and then a couple of weeks sweating over my mullein, which REFUSED to grow, it is time to start classes again.

I am looking forward to starting up - I hear the stats class this semester is supposed to be helpful for research analysis.  I will also be assisting my advisor with the the ecology class she is teaching - I may even lead a lecture, although maybe not :).

Jon is enjoying his job - I think that he likes the change in roles to system administrator and has had fun learning new tasks and a new system.

This month marks my ten year anniversary of being vegetarian.  It’s pretty exciting, as it seems like vegetarianism is lifestyle choice for me at this point, and something that I am going to be able to sustain.  At this point, learning about ecology and the effects of global warming as it is going to effect all biological study, I am glad that I made the effort 10 years ago to stop eating meat.  I’m not sure that at this point in my life I am flexible enough to make that choice.  Also, very recently I discovered the amazingness that is fake bacon.  It is AMAZING!  Even Jon will eat it (although I know that he would prefer the real stuff).

Here are some of my favorite veggie websites:

http://vegkitchen.com/

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/

http://101cookbooks.com/

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Over the last weekend in September, Jon and I took the journey back to Boston for our friends’ Andy and Sharon’s wedding.  We loved being able to see all of our friends, and the wedding ceremony was absolutely beautiful.

Saturday I got together with a few of the girls plus Dustin and Marc for brunch at Firefly’s in the Back Bay.  I had a great time catching up with people: Hearing about D and A’s wedding, A’s time at grad school and teaching, and M’s job.  Afterwards, Amanda and I went shopping, then it was time to head to the wedding with Nate and Trevor.  The ride down to the Cape was fun.  We decided to stop for a snack on our way down at a local pizza place.  For some inexplicable reason, Nate, Trevor and Jon were drawn to the prizes in the quarter machines, and each decided to waste their money on crappy toys.  Nate got a voice recorder that he immediately used to say awesome stuff into, only to play it back to us, over and over.  Trevor got a tiny plastic dog on a pedestal with the words “Boys are dumb and kind of smell.”  Jon got a wheel which did not roll.

As I mentioned earlier, the ceremony was beautiful.  We had a great time, and I think that it could not have come off any better.

The next morning we had brunch with Jon’s mom at Tremont 647.  This is one of my favorite places to go, and some might remember my going away brunch there.  Amanda and I also went to yoga at South Boston Yoga Studio, which I have missed tremendously since leaving the city.  I still go to yoga in Fort Collins, but I have not found anything that compares to the atmosphere and skill of the studio in Southie.

On Monday, my uncle Jerry drove Jon and I up to Portsmouth to meet my parents and Andy, Kristin, and Kendra for breakfast.  Of course it was excellent to see them, and it was so exciting to see Kendra running, speaking with sentences, and having hair.  Kristin brought Kendra’s halloween costume for me to see, as we will not be there for the big night.

We caught the plane back to Denver, and had we taken the boat taxi in Boston, would have used every type of transportation during the day.  We had a great time- it was nice to be back in the city and to see all of our friends and family.  It was also nice to return to our new home, and to look forward to visits from everyone in the future!

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So despite being Colorado, far, far away from Red Sox Nation, and some might believe, in the midst of Enemy Territory, Jon and I have found our fair share of Sox fans to watch the playoffs with.  Last week, we were introduced to the Steak Out in Old Town by some grad school friends of mine.  We had a good time - good beer, huge amount of Red Sox fans, and aside from the occasional flat-baseball-hat tight-ribbed-sweater-wearing bro, a nice crowd.  We had an even better time there last night, when the place seemed to be flooded with Red Sox fans, much to the dismay of about two of the other people in the bar.

Before the game Jon joined me and one of my labmates for the CSU homecoming parade.  We enjoyed seeing oldies in older cars, dance routines, the marching band, and the democratic party float.  There was also candy galore, to the point that the three girls next to us were forced to leave quite a bit of their spoils behind.  Their dad tried to pawn some of it off on us, but we were not going to take candy from children so to speak :).

Tonight for the game, we went to Woody’s; a pizza buffet and bar next to campus.  When Jon and I came out to visit CSU in February, I had an interview on campus on Monday morning, so we headed up to Fort Collins on Sunday and caught the super bowl at Woody’s.  We had a great time there despite the loss, and had a nice time talking with the other patrons of the bar.  We had a similar experience tonight with a great bartender, and really nice people, including 3 of my students, much to my embarrassment.

So here we are at hour 5 and a half, and we have arrived home to see the rest of the game, fingers crossed!  Also, I am wearing my new Ellsbury t-shirt that I got in Boston a few weeks ago.  What did you do for the game tonight?

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Just wanted to write a quick note about our Labor Day Weekend. First of all, by popular demand, we finally have some photos of our apartment! We’re very happy with it, and it’s shaping up nicely.

As far as this weekend, it was a lot of fun. On Sunday, we went for a hike into the mountains of nearby Lory State Park. The photos we put up don’t really do it justice; the view from up in the hills was phenomenal, looking out over the Horsetooth Reservoir and down into the city below. It was a fairly strenuous hike, but also a lot of fun. It’s great being half an hour from so many sweet parks!

Today, we drove down to Denver to meet up with Hannah’s high school friend Bexx (which I am told is short for Rebecca). She just moved to the Denver area about the same time we did, but we hadn’t been able to get in touch til today. Bexx’s boyfriend Ron was in town visiting, as well as another friend of hers named Kelly who lives in the mountains to the west. After meeting up at Bexx’s apartment, we took a bus downtown to the “Taste of Colorado” food and music festival.

Astute readers may recall that we were less than thrilled with the Taste of Chicago as we passed through there on our way to Colorado. The Denver version was fairly similar, but thankfully involved a few billion less people. I think we are just not cut out for food festivals; between the crowds, the high prices and the mediocre food (since they have to cook enormous batches) it seems to always wind up being a letdown.

I don’t mean to say the day was a waste, though. We had a lot of fun getting to know Bexx and company, and another friend of theirs showed up later on to take us to a local British-style pub. We don’t have too many friends out here yet, so it was really good to meet some fun folks and just enjoy the beautiful weather.

All in all, it was a great weekend, and as always it’s over too soon. Hope your Labor Day was a good one, too!

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This is a highly overdue post, but I found a job in Colorado! As of last week, I am officially a System Administrator for Skybeam Internet (currently named LP Broadband…they’re going through a merger and rebranding phase).

I am still in training with my bosses and the job is not 100% defined yet, but basically I am going to be in charge of taking care of their servers. I’ll be doing doing things like developing and implementing a backup plan, making sure their systems are secure from hackers and automating a lot of work that up til now had been done by hand.

The company itself is small but growing, not unlike BzzAgent. Their business is “wireless broadband”, with a focus on rural customers. Basically you can get high speed internet to your home or business, even if cable or DSL isn’t available in your area, via LP’s wireless technology. I’ve thrown in my lot with an “interesting” cast of characters it seems, but I think it is going to work out very well.

In other news, we’ve uploaded some more albums to our photo site! Amanda made a special guest appearance…I’ll leave it to Hannah to write about her time here.

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It’s been hotter than hell the last couple weeks here in the Front Range, but supposedly the end of the heat wave is in sight. Temps of 95+ have been the norm, but on the bright side it’s super dry so it’s not as bad as it sounds.

In an attempt to escape the heat last weekend, we cruised down to Boyd Lake State Park over in Loveland. Maybe we are just jaded by our previously taken-for-granted Atlantic beaches, but man, the BLSP (as the kids don’t call it) sure was a letdown. I believe Hannah described it as “hippo water” and I can’t really disagree. The water was an delightful mix of silt, sunscreen, motorboat fuel and a certain…je ne sais quoi (that’s French for “kids peed in it”). On the bright side, afterwards we went to the amazing “Inca” Mexican restaurant in Fort Collins and ate tons of delicious food. Score!

This weekend, we embarked on a different mission: Couch Or Death. Predictably, it nearly wound up being Couch AND Death. An ancient Indian tradition, dating back to 2004 AD, is the CSU Couch Roundup. This time-honored ritual involves people hauling their dumpy couches to a Colorado State University parking lot for freeloading cheapskates (a.k.a myself and Hannah) to claim. Now, you may recall me lamenting my poor luck at catching busses in a previous post. As it turns out, I was the Donald Trump of bus-catching compared to my ability to win a freaking couch.

Here’s how the couch roundup works: Dude rolls up on the parking lot with a couch. Usually, it has certain…qualities…such as hideous patterns, flat cushions, and/or a family of wild turkeys in the frame. Unsurprisingly, most of the couch-seekers were college students, to whom these relics were still an impressive upgrade. BUT, every ten-thousand years, the stars would align, the clouds would open, the blinding sun would shine through the Northernmost point of Stonehenge, and a couch that a normal human would find acceptable would grace us poor wastrels with its presence. At this juncture, the entire crowd would descend on the staff to enter the raffle for the luxurious, only kind of soiled, sofa in question. The first few raffles we lost, and except for a hot neon yellow floral number Hannah loved, we weren’t too broken up. But after losing our sixth couch or so, we got serious. We snuck in multiple bids, tried telling people they were uncomfortable, I think Hannah even moved one closer to a pile of dog poop to make it seem stinky. Nothing worked; we lost every time. It was a black day. Except for our faces, which were very, very red after spending hours in the sun.

Thankfully, after leaving the cheating bastards at the Couch Roundup in frustration, our day improved significantly. One of Hannah’s lab mates lent us his van (a van which hasn’t seen a tuneup or vacuum since Operation Desert Storm) and we found a nice matching sofa and two chair set at a thrift store. In fact, I am sitting on the aforementioned couch as I write this, and our apartment finally feels complete. Long-overdue pictures coming soon.

We wrapped up the evening at a “lab party” at Hannah’s professor Ruth’s home here in Fort Collins. It was a great time, grilling some food, talking and generally being entertained by Ruth’s three year old daugther, Arabelle. Despite our dismal failure to wrangle anything at the Couch Roundup, we found what we were after and had a great evening to boot. All in all, a solid weekend.

Also, thanks for everything, Manny Ramirez. Hope to see you at a Dodgers-Rockies game in Denver soon!

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So Jon and I are closing in on the end of our third full week here in Fort Collins, so I thought it might be a good time to talk about how things are going here so far.

We are working on furnishing the apartment, which is quite large compared to what we were used to.  Last week we picked up three stools for the breakfast bar from a family living north of town.  It was a bit of a feat fitting them into the civic but we have gotten quite good at fitting way more in that car than it should ever hold.  Today we had a delivery from the furniture fairy!  One of the other students in my lab had a desk and a bureau that he no longer needed.  He brought both over to the apartment, and carried them up the stairs by himself, as we were out at the time.  Thanks Steve!

Last night Jon and I went out on the town to listen to some music.  For those of you who remember the going away party we had at the Squealing Pig, you may remember the preformer from that night, Mike Barret.  Jon found a guy playing downtown who seemed to fit the description of Mike exactly; Irish folk, bawdy, and with whom everyone could sing along.  In reality he seemed to be just a huge Buffet fan, and not Irish in the least.  Oh well!  we had a good time and some good beer, so it was not a complete washout by any means.

I have finished my second week at work at CSU and am really enjoying it.  My advisor Ruth and I are working on the design for my research project, and I have been assisting Chrissy, one of the PhD students in the lab with her work.  So in between stuffing my brain with as much information as possible about invasive plants and the bugs that love them, I’ve been helping Chrissy mix soils, measure leaf lengths and transplant 600 Verbascum plants.  So far so good!

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When I left off, we had just returned to Indiana after a long day in Chicago. Our next stop? Omaha, Nebraska!

If you’re thinking that the drive from Chicago to Omaha might not be the most exciting one you could take, you’re right. Indiana, Illinois and Iowa are all pretty monotonous (they start with the same damn letter!), and even the Mighty Missisippi is not so impressive this far north. We did have a good moment stopping in scenic West Branch, Iowa, however.

We were starting to get pretty hungry, so we randomly chose a restaurant off the GPS and headed into town. Apparently West Branch is the birthplace of former President Herbert Hoover (first president born west of the Mississippi), although we didn’t stop to see the sights. We did stop downtown, which consisted of about 3 storefronts and a gas station. The restaurant we had been looking for was nowhere to be seen, but we did find “The Comeback Bar & Grill”. This turned out to be quite the classy establishment.

As it turns out, West Branch is not exactly bumping at 2pm on a Sunday. The Comeback hosted three guys sitting at the bar, watching NASCAR and drinking some cans of beer (the bar’s taps were all broken). Our waiter was a 13 year old kid with blonde hair covering his whole face Cousin Itt style (ok not really, but he had a ton of hair) who mumbled so much we had no idea what he was saying. Our food was actually pretty tasty and cheap, and the woman managing the place was friendly. All in all it was quite the experience

We were pretty exausted when we finally rolled into Omaha, but we still decided to cruise around and see the sights. There’s actually a pretty nice downtown area, with a bunch of shops and restaurants. We happened upon a really good Mexican joint and sat down to relax and eat. Strangely, about halfway through dinner, we noticed that the previously desolate streets were suddenly alive with people at 8:30pm on a Sunday. Turned out that the Olympic Swimming Trials were being held that weekend in Omaha, and had just let out for the night. So that was sort of an odd coincidence that made Omaha much livlier than I think it otherwise would have been.

The next morning, we spent a few hours at the world-renowned Omaha Zoo. That’s not a joke; Omaha actually has one of the best zoos in North America! Among the exhibits are a sweet geodesic dome containing an entire desert environment, an aquarium with a long underwater tunnel surrounded by sharks, and of course Gorilla Valley! It was insanely hot out and we needed to get moving, so we didn’t fully explore the zoo. We were certainly impressed by it on our short visit, though.

The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable. We drove about 3/4 of the way across Nebraska, stopping in a smallish town for the night. There was another surprisingly good Mexican restaurant here, located in what had obviously at one point been some kind of fast food joint (the layout was a dead ringer for the Wendy’s in Ayer, MA). We walked around down by a stream behind the hotel for a while, getting assaulted by about 100 birds swarming out of their mud nests in the process, before calling it a night.

Tuesday morning came bright and early, and the end of the trip was in sight. We grabbed a quick breakfast, then hit the road for Cheyanne, Wyoming, where we’d turn south for the last leg. There didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot going on in Cheyanne, but we did stop in at the Sierra Trading Post outlet. It’s sort of the L.L. Bean of the West, selling a bunch of camping supplies and other outdoorsy goodies. Nothing really tickled our fancy that day, though, so we kept on trucking. And about an hour later, we were cruising the streets of Fort Collins!

It was a long, long trip for sure. Six days in the car will get to anyone, and to our credit neither Hannah nor I flipped out and tried to strangle the other. So I guess that’s a good sign We saw a number of places we might haver have thought to explore, especially Omaha and the Indiana coastline, and I’m really glad we did it.

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Google finally got its act together tonight and I was able to upload the last month’s worth of photos to our online album. You can find it at http://www.hjadventure.com/photos!

I also went back and edited the first post to include some of the pics. Part 2 of the road trip to come tomorrow.

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