Halloween

I haven't posted in quite a while. I'd like to say it's because I was so traumatized by Galya's untimely passing and have been in mourning for the last month. The truth is I've been so busy with school and midterms and life that when I have a free moment I prefer to lounge, chat and otherwise veg rather than exert myself mentally. While blogging is therapeutic most of the time, it can sometimes be downright draining. And a lot of things I would've liked to write were better left private. All right, I'm done apologizing.

I love Halloween. It's not because I have any attachment to pagan festivals of the dead, but because it is a holiday and is an excuse to celebrate.

On Friday night we went over to Byron's place for his annual lab Halloween party. I was amazed that we found his place since we didn't bring directions and Quinn's GPS wasn't working. Ashton was dressed as a fairy and Samuel was a jack-o-lantern. I was Richie Tenenbaum, but no one recognized me or appreciated my amazing costume. We participated in some non-traditional party games, including archery and splitting wood. There was also bobbing for apples, but I abstained to protect myself from the swine flu. Snowball fights periodically erupted as well, and we thoroughly enjoyed Byron's chili and wassail.

Last night we invited some couples over for a Halloween party at our place. We got back from a stake conference meeting just in time to set up our porch for trick-or-treaters. We had little bag lanterns, big piles of leaves and a strobe light going for spooky effect. We got way more trick-or-treaters than last year, and actually gave away all our goodies. Our friends started rolling in around 8. The Platers brought some incredibly ornate Halloween cupcakes, the Drapers brought enough snacks for a super bowl game, and the Martins brought Costco-size load of sugar cookies. We provided some "home-made" root beer with dry ice and juice slushies. It was quite the spread, and I think everyone was afraid to dig in. Around 8:30 a wave of freeloaders rolled in and took care of a lot of the treats, and then they left as abruptly as they had dropped by, presumably to haunt another venue with free food. Don't get me wrong, I love those guys, but we were trying to scale down the chaos a little bit last night. At 9 we watched Silence of the Lambs, which is a pretty fantastic movie, although not very Halloween oriented. Our clearplay machine chopped out of a lot of the interesting parts and sometimes we were left a little confused. No one was scared, but I guess that just shows how numb we are to the dangers of transvestite serial killers who sew clothing out their victims' skins.

Murder

This morning I started to open the front door to leave for school, and through the opaque glass I saw a brown form on the porch. I smiled, realizing that Galya was probably standing out there leaving her characteristic droppings on the green astroturf. I opened the door to a startling and horrific scene of murder. There lay Galya in a mangled heap, surrounded by scattered feathers. Her neck was bloodied and her face disfigured. Her shoulders were skinned of their feathers, revealing pink muscle tissue and bone. I stared at her for a straight minute, shocked and outraged and devastated. I walked away from the door and back to the bedroom, where Ashton was still sleeping.

"Ashton."

"Are you leaving for school?"

"Galya's dead."

We walked back to the living room and I opened the front door to survey the scene. Over by the porch swing was a puddle and smear of blood which extended to the astroturf. Ashton got a garbage bag and I grabbed a shovel. The tears I'd been choking back began to flow pretty steadily when I picked up her corpse and placed it in the bag.

There's a dog wandering this neighborhood who better watch its back.

Crayfish

Yesterday I fulfilled a lifelong dream of mine. We drove up to Strawberry Reservoir and caught crawdads. It was a riot. We brought a rotisserie chicken and a bag of rolls along for a little beachside picnic. Craig, Meg and Greg (sounds like a Dr. Seuss book, right?) and Yo Hey (that's a phonetic spelling of our new friend's name) accompanied us on our outing.

After devouring the savory greasy chicken, we took chunks of the carcass and tied them to the ends of string. Greg went out into the water first and launched his line. He didn't catch anything for a while, but we didn't get discouraged. Yo Hey took a dip in the frigid water while I continued preparing lines with bait. We moved over a ways to a rockier area and continued tossing out lines and waiting. Nothing. Then Yo Hey, crayfish ninja master, spotted a crawdad right where we were standing. We had no idea they'd be so close. We started luring it with the chicken, and it slowly emerged from its rocky lair. The crawdad circled the chicken and then decided he wasn't interested, but Greg had already positioned himself to lunge for the unlucky crustacean. Greg snatched it out of the water with his bare hand and tossed it in a five gallon bucket.

Then the frenzy began. Yo Hey and Greg continued spotting them all over, and one after another we baited the crawdads and scooped them up. Yo Hey found a badminton racket on the shore which he and Greg used to capture them. In the end we only caught eight crayfish, but that was more than enough for a sampling. We left a little early to get Samuel back, and Greg and Yo Hey met us at our place to cook them up, along with Luke. Greg and Yo Hey pulled them out of the cooler and stabbed them all in the head (Greg read that this is the quickest, most painless death, although they continued to move around long after the lobotomy was inflicted). Then we threw them in a big pot of boiling water until they turned bright red. We savagely ripped off their tails and cracked them open. Armed with butter, garlic and salt we carefully extracted the meat and scarfed it down. Yo Hey figured out you could get meat out of the claws too, and we pretty much dissected every part of the animal to get every morsel. It's a good thing we hadn't planned on them for dinner, because we would've needed about thirty times as much. But it was a glorious experience, and definitely something I'll want to try again.

Berries

We decided we wanted to hit up one of those "pick-your-own-berry-farms." We didn't have any buckets to put our loot in, so we bought a gallon of cookies and cream ice cream and had an impromptu party on Monday night. Fifteen people responded to the free ice cream text message and showed up for some sweet sweet mooching. It was a really good time and a nice way to start the week.

On Tuesday night we went out with Alpha to the McBride Briar Patch in Mapleton. It was impressive. They had row after row of blackberry and raspberry bushes, with ripe fruit just dangling, waiting for us. We ate and picked simultaneously until our buckets were satisfactorily filled.

As I made my way down one row of bushes and approached the end of the farm, I saw a bunch of deer in the neighboring field. As I got closer to the fence I noticed that they weren't your ordinary mule deer. Some had speckles and the bucks had huge reindeer-like racks. It turned out the place was an exotic deer farm, and they had some cool animals. There were some miniature caribou, white deer, curly horned rams and little antelope dik dik looking things bouncing around. The speckled caribou came up to the fence for some berries. They had geese and ducks and chickens running around in there too. The place had me pretty jealous. I can't wait till I can get my own farm!






We liked berry picking so much we decided to go back with our friends on Friday night. Greg, Luke, Ryan, Stephen, Amelia, Quinn and Violet joined us for round two. This time we got a chance to talk to the owners of the farm and they gave us free corn.



Later that night we had a Dune party. A few weeks ago we borrowed Dune from Brinton and thought it was amazing. We invited a bunch of friends over to watch it and had some great laughs. That movie doesn't even need Mystery Science Theater dialogue; every line is amazing on its own. Here are some favorites:

What do you call the mouse shadow on the second moon? Muad'Dib!
Not in the mood? Mood is a thing for cattle and love play, not fighting!
Fear is the mind-killer.
My name is a killing word.
And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach!
Bring in that floating fat man!
We have wormsign the likes of which God has never seen!

And it doesn't hurt that Sting dons a winged speedo for a complete non sequitur scene.

Spring City

Yesterday I went down to Spring City with Ashton, Samuel, Maryn and my parents. Spring City is a little Podunk city down by Moroni, a little over an hour away from Provo. It's a colony for artists, potters, sculptors and photographers, sort of like the art Mecca of small towns. They were having an art festival down there where all the artists opened up their shops, studios and galleries for the public to walk through and check out.

Highlights included a woman who makes violins AND stain glass windows. Her little shop is called the Crystal Fiddle. There was also a hippie out in front of the potter's shop who was carving sandstone by "subtraction." Some of his designs were pretty incredible, and it made me want to pick up a hammer and nail and give it a go. I really enjoyed walking through the main art gallery where a Plein Air contest was displayed. There were some very beautiful scenic pictures in all different styles. My favorites were Doug Braithwaite and Steve Pugh.




What I enjoyed most was walking around the small town and seeing all the historic homes. In a way it was reminiscent of old Nauvoo, although on a much smaller scale. I think it would be really cool to live in a community like that, but there would definitely be drawbacks. Like no cell phone reception. And no nearby shopping. And girls with braided mullets.




Samuel was a gentleman and gave us no trouble all day. He just sat in his stroller or car seat and slept, except when I teased him for a smile.



Other trip highlights included an alpaca farm right before Moroni. I've never seen so many alpacas in my life! It was like the entire credited cast for Monty Python and the Holy Grail!



On Friday night we had Quinn and Violet over to make bread. They brought Kurt with them because his wife is in Canada (something about her being pregnant and the mounties offering free health care.) We made a special recipe Violet learned at enrichment, a fool proof wheat bread. It only had 5 ingredients, and it turned out incredible! It was just as good as the 4 dollar loaves you can buy in the store. One day I want to get a wheat grinder and go totally free of store-bought bread. Samuel was a good helper in the kitchen.

Silver Lake

So I survived the first week of fall semester. It's going to be brutal, but I also think it will be the most enjoyable semester. I'm finally done with all the lame-o general ed classes, so I can immerse myself in some upper level biology classes. I'm especially excited about my evolutionary biology class (I'm sure I'll post something separately for that) which is taught by my lab boss Byron, and I'm stoked out of my mind for my conservation biology class, which is taught by Rick Gill, the man who persuaded me that climate change is fo real. Con bio is a capstone class and we have to do a conservation assessment for our grade. No exams! My classmates and I decided to get a leg up on the assignment and go camping this weekend. We chose the picturesque and surprisingly accessible Silver Lake for our "geographically bounded region."

Cooper, Quinn and I headed up American Fork Canyon in the late afternoon. We passed Tibble Fork Reservoir, which gave me a heavy dose of deja vu (I went camping there when I was eight with my dad and little brother), and we continued up to a sign that read Silver Flat Lake, 3 miles. We then cruised up a dirt road, which was filled with holes and big rocks. Good thing we had Coop's truck. We got to Silver Flat Lake, which looked like a huge puddle, and parked at the Silver Lake trailhead. The scenery was beautiful, with mostly scrub oak, aspen and pine.

We headed up the trail and made it to the lake no problem in about an hour. The panorama was breathtaking, and I was stunned at how beautiful and untouched the lake looked for being so close to civilization. The lake is surrounded by high mountainous cliffs, formed by a glacier, and the granite crags make for an incredible picture. Fish were leaping out of the lake like mad, and we sent Cooper to catch some while Quinn and I hiked up a little higher to set up camp.


I busted out the sweet tent I bought at a garage sale earlier this summer for the first time. Quinn got to work setting up his hammock, and when we'd put on warmer clothes we ran down to the lake to see what we'd be eating for dinner. Coop had caught a couple brook trout, but he had let one go because it was so tiny. So we set about making a fire away from our campsite (to avoid bear problems) to cook our manly meal, which also included some instant Betty Crocker mashed potatoes, made with water boiled by Quinn's Jet Boil. In lieu of s'mores we had mate, an Argentine tea which got me fairly wired. We saw flashlights near our campsite and hurriedly killed our fire (we technically weren't supposed to light one) and Quinn went down to inspect our company. Cooper and I watched with terror, fearing the rangers had come up to slap a big fine on us. Finally Quinn came back up the mountain and let us know we just had some neighbors camping nearby. We cleaned up our dinner mess and hung in the bags on a tree, then headed back to our campsite.

Cooper set up his hammock around eleven thirty, and we decided to head out under the full moon to see if we could find some wildlife. We took a spotlight with us, and we walked around the lake and perched on a few rocky protuberances to sit and wait. We got pretty spooked talking about cougar attacks, and around 12:30 we decided to head back to camp. As we were walking above the lake, however, we heard a loud splashing noise and we ran to the edge of the trail to check it out. We could just barely make out a silhouette out in the water, and guessed that it was probably a moose. As our eyes adjusted and we continued watching, we became positive that it was a female moose. We decided to get a little closer to try to get a photo. We perched on a big rock and shined the flashlight on her. We could see her eyes glowing and confirmed that it was a moose, but we weren't close enough to take a photo.

We continued watching her for about fifteen minutes, when suddenly she bolted from the lake and started making circles on the muddy shore. She bucked and snorted and grunted and scared the crap out of us. It was super erratic behavior, and we could tell she was really agitated. At one point she started galloping toward us at a surprisingly fast gait. Moose look like such awkward gangly animals, but that she-moose could move! We stood up on the rock yelling and Cooper started clapping at her. She broke left about 25 paces from us and ran out into the lake. She did a few laps and then came back to the shore to repeat the ritual. She must've been just as spooked as we were. We moved to a bigger rock and gathered ammunition to hurl at her should she charge us again. We waited until she swam back across the lake and we couldn't see her anymore, and we made a mad dash for our campsite.

We were all wired on adrenaline and a pretty jumpy. As I laid down in my sleeping bag and closed my eyes, a chorus of coyotes started howling. They sounded really close, like they were down on the lake shore. The cacophony continued for several minutes, and my heart was racing like a hummingbird. I tried to convince myself that coyotes were harmless, but images of a pack of thirty coyotes ravaging our campsite kept flashing through my mind. Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep that night.

We woke up the next morning around 7:00 and went down to the lake to inspect the panoply of tracks left behind by all the nocturnal wildlife. We saw a lot of tracks from our crazed moose friend, as well the pack of coyotes. We also saw a lot of deer tracks and something that looked like Sasquatch.


We spent the morning fishing on the other side of the lake from a rocky outcropping. Each of us took turns with the fishing rod while the others worked on breakfast. Thanks to Quinn's Jet Boil we had some fantastic mashed potatoes, instant oatmeal and hot chocolate. It was perfect for the light drizzle of rain that persisted most of the morning.

I've never been much for fishing, but I had a blast throwing that line out there and reeling in those brook trout. I caught four total (Cooper cast the line on one of those, but I still brought him in). Quinn and Cooper caught some more too, but we only brought three home with us.

Around noon we decided to head home. On our way out we saw our moose friend again, this time munching on some willows down in a gulley. We watched her from a much safer distance on the trail and snapped some half decent photos of her. The whole experience made me want to get out and camp a lot more often. It was a blast. And it didn't hurt that we were doing it for a class assignment.

Feculent

Wednesday marked my last day at the nursing home. I went out in burning glory too. I was scheduled to work on west, which is the coveted unit, but when I arrived at six a.m. my coworker cheerfully informed me that I'd been bumped on the schedule to the north unit, because she needed hours but couldn't work on north because "it drives [her] crazy." I responded that north drives everyone crazy and walked away. North was nuts, but not anymore nuts than normal. I had section 3, which was 10 people and two showers, but I was magically able to get everything done, and at a fairly high level of quality (just getting stuff done quickly doesn't mean you're doing a good job).

I don't think I've really written that much about the nursing home, which is probably a good thing as far as HIPAA goes, but it really has been an influential job in my life. It has opened my eyes to the unpleasant crevices of healthcare (no pun intended) and made me have a lot more respect for the infantry of aides and nurses that keep so many sick people alive. I learned a lot about compassion and kindness and back-breaking work (rolling a 400 pound person on their side really can break your back, especially if you're tall like me). I definitely will miss some of the residents there, like Marilyn from south, whose Elvis Presley and "Give Said the Little Stream" serenades will always make me chuckle, or the time she stuck a cup of blue jello down her pants. "Can I have a banana? Banana pudding? Dr. Pepper?" I'll miss Ellis, who passed away a while ago. He sung to me in the shower and cracked dirty sailor jokes. I'll miss my more recent friend Bernice, a loving grandmother with an addiction to Rush Limbaugh.

I won't miss the poop. Or the showers. I won't miss the frantic running around, the chaotic stress of answering call lights while trying to remember the growing mental list of tasks and requests. Did I mention I won't miss the poop? Being a nursing aide is hands down the most feculent job I can imagine. I look forward to only changing my baby's diapers from now on.

Nematodes

A lot of crazy crap happened this last week, and I'm just now getting a second to write about it.

Early Monday morning (like 5:45 a.m.) I took off to Park City for the Society of Invertebrate Pathology annual conference. Last year it was in England, next year it's in Turkey. Lucky me, I got the year it was in Utah. Actually, that's probably the main reason I got to go.

We arrived at the Canyons Grand Summit resort in time for breakfast, a wonderful buffet. The week would be filled with such buffets. I was a basketcase because my presentation wasn't done and I had to present my research at 3:30.

My research. Last September I started working in Dr. Byron Adam's lab. The Nematode Evolution Lab. We study worms. It sounds really lame put that way, but it turns out nematodes are one of the most important and abundant lifeforms on the planet. Back in October I started on an RNAi resistance project. We ordered a bunch of mutant C. elegans strains that are deficient in the RNAi pathway, and therefore immune to the effects of RNA interference. I've been culturing these strains since then and trying to determine how fit the mutants are compared to the wildtype. I've been able to show that there seems to be a fitness cost to the mutants, more or less. This is good because it will keep the mutant alleles very rare in the natural populations . . . ya da ya da ya da. What a snooze, right? This might all be over your heads, but it was pretty elementary at this research conference. I sat through countless lectures of bigwig professors, doctoral students and postdocs with super impressive powerpoints and years of extensive research (and hundreds of incomprehensible bar graphs). When it finally came time to give my presentation I felt like I was giving a science fair project.

I was the only undergrad to present that day, and one of two total undergrads at the conference. So even if my research wasn't earth-shattering, it was still a feather in my cap. I can now put "presented original research at an international conference" on my resume. So that's pretty cool.

Tuesday was a bunch of lectures and a 5k in the afternoon. Byron was in charge of the 5k so we got the privilege of setting up the trail and directing traffic so people didn't get lost on the mountain. After a brief barbecue Ashton picked me up and we headed to Bountiful to participate in Seth's setting apart as a missionary. That was neat.

Wednesday morning we went out to eat at Mimi's cafe for breakfast before shipping off Seth. That place is good! Even though he was in his suit and tie and all packed up, it still didn't hit me that he was really leaving until he stood at the door of our house and we both started tearing up. I just wanted to keep giving him hugs, to talk a little bit more about his novel, to go for another run on the river together. Two years is a long time. I've managed to get married and have a kid in two years. The next two years will be really exciting for us, I'm sure, as we head off to medical school. But for the most part it's business as usual, only now there's a void that Seth left behind. At least he gets the benefit a completely different life for the next two years. That definitely makes it exciting. I'll be chronicling his mission on a blog for him: eldersethjenkins.blogspot.com

I felt guilty leaving the research conference early, since Byron had paid so much money for me to be up there, so I left early Thursday morning to head back up. I got there just as breakfast was ending, and my fellow labsters were surprised to see me there. They informed me that they weren't going to the morning lectures because they were boring and about fungi. Instead they were going to take the morning off and go mountain biking. This made me feel even more guilty, since I had left Ashton with Samuel, who had been pretty colicky lately, with the intention of getting more out of the conference. Byron rented me a really nice Trek mountain bike and we got gondola passes and spent the morning on the mountain. This was my first time mountain biking, and it was pretty intense on some of the trails, but after a couple hours I got the hang of it and was cruising down the mountain pretty confidently. It's definitely something I would like to do again.

Seth

Yesterday Seth gave his farewell address before he takes off to New Zealand. It was really bizarre to see my little brother talking from the pulpit like some experienced evangelist. I pictured him when he was a lot shorter, and cuter, and blonder, and we went fishing for my birthday. I thought about my awkward early pre-teen years when he and I would spend hours setting up armies of action figures or lego fortresses, only to never start a battle. I remembered sharing a room and laying in bed at night listening to scripture stories on tape, because he insisted we do it, but secretly I wanted it too. That's how we became such accomplished scriptorians. I saw us playing basketball on the driveway, when I could still drive past him and make a decent layup. I remember before my mission getting him started on the guitar, and playing beautiful Shins duets for my grandparents. I came home from my mission to a punk kid who was better on the guitar and better at basketball and a raving success with the ladies. He didn't need his big brother to show him what was cool anymore (although I can still teach him a thing or two about quality music), and he had become his own man. I wonder if he realizes how much more manliness he's going to acquire over the next two years. And how much hair he's going to lose.

Moving

I'm not sure what to title this photo. I thought "Summer Reading List" would be funny. I wish. "Bibliophile?" How about "Moving Day?"

Today Lauren and Jesse came down to swap spaces. They are being very gracious and letting us take the upstairs, so we can have a separate bedroom for Samuel. We personally think they're insane, but we're not about to talk them out of it! We'll have triple the space and a lot more windows, so we're pretty stoked.

A lot of other things of note happened this last week. Ashton got her gall bladder out. Yuck. She went under the knife early Tuesday morning, and she was out of the clinic three hours later, walking around and ready to take on the world, or at least the growing mess our house has become since Samuel joined us. Everyone kept telling her to sit down and take it easy, but she can't stand a dirty house. The Percocet definitely helped, but she went off that the next day, no problem. The doctor sent home some sweet pictures of her gall bladder, before and after the cholecystectomy. They cut it open to see how many stones were inside. It was pretty packed! Ashton thought it was beautiful enough to hang on the fridge.

On Thursday I floated the Provo River with the boy I mentor. It was pretty hysterical. Pretty much every great activity I come up with blows up in my face, but I barely scraped by on this one. Right off the bat we hit trouble when we got to a point where the river narrows between some concrete slabs. The increased velocity of the river sucked us right into some low hanging branches (and these weren't twigs, mind you) and although I tried to push off them with an oar, the impact flipped our raft over. I frantically grabbed for Marc before the river washed him downstream and held on to his flailing body by his wrist. I finally got him to stop panicking and stand up (the water was only about 3 feet). He continued screaming and sobbing with tears and snot pouring down his face, while I righted the raft and tried to calm him down. I finally got him to climb back in the raft and we continued down the river. We hit some pretty fun little rapids, and ticked off just about every fisherman we passed. Marc kept calling out to them, "Isn't the water too cold?" "I wish I had caught all those fish!" "We don't want to run into you!" He has the social graces of a walnut. I had my cell phone on me in a ziplock bag so I could call Ashton when I was done. Unfortunately some moisture still managed to leak inside, and my phone stopped working. Curses.

Friday was Fisher's wedding. I got to go up to the sealing, which was performed by Vaughn J. Featherstone. He's a friend of Drew's grandmother, apparently. The sealing was lovely, and afterward I headed across the street to visit my dad at work. I picked a good day, Bagel Friday. We had a nice chat over Dr. Pepper and then I headed back to the temple to see if they were done with photos. I got there just as they were taking the last group shot, and they yelled at me to hop up the stairs. Following the photos was a wonderful luncheon at the Lion House. I sat at the "friends" table, which had seats for six people. Three of them were friends of the bride, a bunch of giggly airhead barbie dolls, and one of them had her husband with her. The other seat was occupied by Mike Polkington, an old friend of Drew's. He's a super nice guy, very fun to talk to, but he acts like a five year old most of the time. Drew's other friends Kelly, Branson and Branson's girlfriend J-Shawn showed up later, and to the dismay of the plastics, we insisted that they sit at our table. The Lion House staff wasn't thrilled, but they relented under Mike's authoritative demands. Our nine person table became a little rowdy, and we missed most of the program, including an epic poem read by Drew's brother about the Andee/Drew saga. Ashton came up later that night with Samuel for the reception, which was in a very nice backyard. There were peacocks caged up near the wedding line, and peacock feathers everywhere.

And Saturday we moved. We're still moving. It might take a while.