Yes, I am catching up on the whole blogging thing again... it's kind of like when you tape (or PVR or TiVo depending on your level of technological advancement) a TV show and then don't have time to watch it for, oh, say, two weeks or so. Anyway, all that pent-up blogging is about to be released, buckle up:
1) Thanksgiving only comes twice a year - OK, I promised the Thanksgiving story, teased you even, and then.. silence. So, here it goes. Brett, Courtney, Ashley and I decided to make an American Thanksgiving dinner (seemed like the appropriate thing to do... when in Rome and all) and, as the household with the dishwasher and the kitchen which can comfortably fit more than one person, I volunteered my place as the preparation venue. First the good news (1) I won (with Courtney) in Trivial Pursuit, although it was perilously close (it took us TEN (yes, that's one-zero) attempts to get our arts and entertainment pie... very sad... all I can do in that category is just wait patiently for the inevitable CBC question) (2) The meal was great - I did a roasting chicken and dressing, which I must (as an unbiased observer) say was juicily scrumptious (I rock on poultry - and after dissecting rats, the whole neck removal/cleaning process seemed WAY less gross than previously), with the rest taken care of by the Wilson/van Veller clan. Here is a picture of the teamwork you want to see happening on such an event - Brett and I lifting the bird out of the roasting pan prior to my slice and dice job.
And now, the bad news. I have a garbage disposal (or, as it is known to select persons among us, a "garberator") in my kitchen sink (not the bad news in and of itself, but stay with me here). Having never had access to one of these contraptions before, I am extremely tentative in using it (almost scared in fact) and have thus restricted my use of the garberator to disposing of rice I've soaked off the bottom of my rice cooker pan. Brett and Courtney, on the other hand, grew up with a garberator and thus have no fear in dumping vegetable peels, meal scraps, small appliances, etc. down the chute and letting the grinding begin. However, here's a helpful note to those of you who have garberators at home: never drop a whole uncooked sweet potato down the chute. Why you ask? Well, your sink backs up and, when your dishwasher empties out, you end up having to apply teamwork of a very different kind:
We managed to keep the kitchen from flooding (by about one inch or so in water height... phew) and the apartment fix-it man took care of it the next day, so all is well that ends well I suppose (more pics here, more for the benefit of the Wilsons whom I am told are avid blog readers).
2) I am Premium... for one afternoon - The other nice thing about American Thanksgiving is that virtually everybody goes somewhere else for the weekend... so, if you are sticking around the city, you get your own version of "Thanksgiving leftovers". I lucked into some very nice leftovers this year when the drummer on our worship team was heading home to Texas for the holiday and just happened to have four Premium Club Boston Bruins tickets to spare. Here is, as he told me later, his thought process for offering the tickets to me: 1) Todd is Canadian 2) Therefore, he must like hockey. Stereotypical? Yes. But correct. The seats were amazing - right behind the local cable channel's intermission studio (the side of my head was on TV - I can't tell you how difficult it was to shop the next week with hundreds of people stopping me to say "hey, you're the guy whose side of head was on TV!") behind the Boston goal with tall, padded seats and a bench top table in front of us to support our free (!) food and beverages. Although I realize that it is bad form to comment negatively on free things, I have to give at least a small critique on the very strange mix of free food provided at the Garden - nachos with cheese, waffles, brownies, and - wait for it - fried cream cheese. Yes, that was not a typo - fried cream cheese. Unfortunately, the subsequent required emergency coronary bypass surgery was not provided free to Premium Club members. The game was a bit of a stinker (5-2 Boston loss to Carolina) but you can't quibble with free. I actually ended up spending the rest of the afternoon touring Boston with the lab tech I work with at MIT who came to the game with me - it was kind of neat to get to know somebody you work with in a very different environment. We ended up catching the lighting of the Macy's Christmas tree, which was a bit of a bust really (it really can't hold a candle to New York's tree lighting event) but still a legitimate "Boston experience".
3) Sister in the house - Ainsley came down to visit for six days, which was a lot of fun. I think we did a fairly successful job of seeing the entire city of Boston over the one weekend I had off (although she discovered Newbury Street, the fancy shopping district, by herself, which is actually good given that one of my "rules to live by" is "never go shoe shopping with a girl, in particularly Ainsley"). In two days, we managed to visit (1) The Museum of Science (including the BodyWorlds exhibit which was at the Ontario Science Centre last year - real bodies which have been "plastinated" and posed, showing the actual muscles, nerves, and bone structures as they would be oriented while doing specific activities - really interesting, although I got a bit obsessed with finding the sciatic nerve we use to do nerve block experiments on our rats in each specimen) (2) The New England Aquarium (very fun - particularly the Deep Ocean Tank, which featured sharks, three very cute turtles, and (my personal favourite) three yellow-and white speckled fish who just did laps in a group for the entire five hours we were at the aquarium... we dubbed them "the boys" and checked in every so often to make sure they were still going at it... the jellyfish were also pretty amazing) (3) a classical music concert featuring one of my friends from church who is a professional cellist (really good actually) (4) dinner at Ye Olde Oyster House, America's oldest continually operating restaurant and frequent haunt of J.F.K. (amazingly good) (5) desserts at the famous Mike's Pastry Shop in the North End (also amazingly good) (6) a walking tour of downtown Boston and Cambridge (always fantastic, although we didn't make it to my favourite spot, Beacon Hill... next time). I very much enjoy being a tour guide, so it was a lot of fun. We also caught the Bruins game during the week, which (ironically enough given my Premium Club access the previous week) we watched sitting in the VERY LAST ROW of the TD Banknorth Garden (and I mean last - the back of our seats was the concrete wall of the arena). My, my, how the mighty can fall so quickly... but the game was WAY better, decided in a shootout and ending in a Boston victory despite Ainsley's cheering for Tampa Bay "because they were cuter".
4) Animal Wrasslin' - My lab work is still moving along nicely - I am now completely done experiments for my first paper from my post-doc, which I think will be reasonably good (we have a nice story and, even better, understand why things worked as they did). My materials were, last week, used in a rabbit experiment to try to prevent adhesions between the peritoneal wall and the intestines following bowel surgery and was found to be amazingly (and surprisingly) bioadhesive, which is very interesting and potentially very useful (although the actual peritoneal adhesion prevention result was, although hardly disasterous, not a home run). We have also finally figured out how to miniaturize our drug delivery membranes so we can test them in our oscillating magnet, which is very exciting (we already know they work if you heat them up in a water bath instead of using a magnet). If that works, we will implant our device in a rat and see if we can numb and, uh, "un-numb" the leg of a rat by applying an oscillating magnetic field on the rat's leg. I am getting kind of excited about this project as I see it come together - this has a huge potential to make a big difference to people with chronic joint pain, potentially allowing them to trigger the release of anaesthetic locally by just holding a magnet to their joint for a short period of time (great, that is, as long as you aren't wearing a pacemaker). I think there is definitely potential for patents/very good papers for me out of this too, which would be a nice side-benefit. I am getting deeper and deeper into the lab though... I am now working on six projects (yee!), am co-writing two grant applications for February (one as kind of the primary scientific guy), and am about to recruit my first full-time undergraduate slave, er I mean, "research assistant", so things are definitely picking up. On the other hand, doing animal research definitely keeps you humble... over the last week and a half alone, I got in a wrestling match with a 10-pound New Zealand white rabbit while we were trying to fix his bandages (I won, although the decision was closer than you might have expected) and (in our last nerve block experiment) handled three rats which, on average, generated 3-4 poops per test cycle (which takes about three minutes and is repeated 7-8 times over the course of a full experiment). As a chemical engineer, I am seriously tempted to try to work out the mass balance on these rats to figure out how that prodigious waste production is even possible, but the proof is in the pudding (pun not intended) I suppose. I am a little relieved actually that all my animal work is done for the time being (i.e. tested and dissected) and, as of Wednesday (knock on wood), all my cell work should be temporarily finished, which means I can head home for Christmas without having to worry about any babysitting duties. Actually, I think that working with animals is very good preparation for real parenting... feeding, constant attention, and cleaning up the toxic waste (we will certainly leave the dissection part out of the metaphor though).
5) Geek Alert I: A couple weeks ago, I got sucked into purchasing a "lifetime subscription" to live streaming internet satellite television, which advertised access to several Canadian TV stations. Although somewhat skeptical given that the provider would not let me know which 3000 channels you supposedly get access to until you actually sign up, I was sufficiently interested in attempting to get access to Raptors games without paying NBAtv's $179 annual fee (I like the Raptors a lot, but not that much) that I bit. Turns out that among the roughly 20 Canadian channels included in the package, the only one I had even HEARD of before was CPAC, the Canadian Parliamentary Access Channel. Now, normal people would be fairly upset at life at this point... I, on the other hand, was actually kind of pumped that I would get to watch the Liberal leadership convention a couple of weekends ago. I can actually remember watching the convention where Jean Chretien beat Paul Martin for Liberal leader back in 1991, at which point I was (doing the math)... well, 13, and I have been a bit of a convention junkie ever since. Actually, when you subtract the 90% of the time where people are standing around and/or waving banners and chanting for no apparent reason, political conventions are some of the best pure theatre you can get on TV, and this one was also pretty sweet. I am actually pleasantly surprised by the choice of Stephane Dion, who has always struck me as an intelligent and (for a Liberal anyway :) very principled person who is willing to do something risky if he thinks it is right (see: Clarity Act). The next election is shaping up as pretty interesting, with two (and potentially three, if one includes the somewhat intriguing Green Party) relatively decent party choices led by actually intelligent people - a rare confluence of events indeed. This is in sharp contrast to my opinion of the result had Bob Rae won (considering the first time around was such a rousing success, who wouldn't want an encore, only on a larger scale???)
6) Geek Alert II: Saw this on a shirt at MIT - if you can figure out what it means, you really belong down here. Feel free to share your guesses (and rationale for the guesses) in the comments - I won't explain it unless somebody at least tries :)
7) Church Stuff - I am definitely feeling more at home in my church here. I led my first small group this past week (it was like old home week after doing the Philpott group for 2 1/2 years) and have been to a Christmas party and a games night over the past two weekends, both of which were quite fun. It's not quite the level of connectedness I had at Philpott just yet, but I definitely feel like I am "in the loop" now, which is definitely a nice feeling. They are now trying to recruit me to lead a small group in the winter, which I am not sure I have time to actually pull off in addition to my other MIT and church commitments with worship team etc., but I have definitely noticed a pattern in that jumping into doing things really has a huge payoff in more ways than one, so we'll see what happens.
8) A Cultural Experience - Periodically, I miss the last bus out of MIT back to my place and end up walking home through Cambridge's Central Square, which has been termed by one of my co-workers as "slightly scuzzy". This is, of course, "scuzzy" only by Cambridge standards, which is really not that scuzzy at all (car break and enters are considered "major crime" here). As a result, I am totally comfortable walking through at virtually any hour of the day. However, this past week, I had an interesting encounter which backed up the "slightly scuzzy" label. I was stopped by a black man trying to collect money for a "racism prevention" centre in the Downtown Crossing area of Boston to "fight" the philosophies of Louis Farrakhan, a Malcolm X contemporary who (according to the guy trying to convince me to donate) "pledged to destroy the white race in a pool of blood" (a quote which I cannot find any credible evidence for, although Farrakhan is on record as stating "white people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet" and "murder and lying comes easy for white people"). He handed me a well-worn laminated photocopied sheet "describing" the organization and claimed this was "the last night" for such donations to be received. Now I would not give any money on the street to any organization I had never heard of, let alone the $50 he was trolling for to an organization whose goals I was sensing as somewhat questionable, so I tried to extract myself from the conversation by playing my "starving student" card (mostly true) despite sympathizing with his stated goal to "end racism". As a walked away, the guy heckled me and told me to enjoy the bloodbath to come in which I would presumably be dismembered by the Farrakhan nation along with all the other white people in America. I think I would ultimately view the experience as equal parts scary and oddly amusing, but it does point to something I have most certainly noticed since arriving even in this supposedly "enlightened" corner of the United States: racial tensions are very, very real (even here in Boston, the cradle of the anti-slavery movement) to an extent I have never even begun to experience in Canada. Two examples (1) after approximately 30 trips to the local Shaw's grocery store (roughly equivalent to Loblaw's/Fortino's), I have NEVER been served by a non-black or Hispanic worker (to put that into perspective, Boston is demographically a more predominantly white city than Toronto or even Hamilton); (2) in our lab of 70 people total, we have 7 Canadians as well as Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Israeli, and (insert country here); however we have ZERO black or Hispanic scientists. There is a real economic divide and, particularly with the black population, what seems to be a very deep-seeded, historical bitterness which provides a very different vibe from the Canadian experience. I think this is one instance where, even given our obvious historical advantages in terms of slavery, Canada has clearly done a more proficient job at erasing many of the boundaries between the races, particularly among the younger generation.
9) Rant: At the risk of repeating myself, I was out Christmas shopping north of Boston last weekend and am more convinced than ever that Bostonians are the worst drivers on the face of the planet. During the thirty minute drive (covering an uninspiring total distance of approximately... three miles), I was nearly in ~18 accidents, none of which were remotely my fault. Based on this experience, I now present a (not) actual transcript from a typical driving examination in Boston:
EXAMINER: "OK, let's get started. Turn on the car"
EXAMINEE: "OK dude" <examinee proceeds to try to insert the blunt end of their house key into the cigarette lighter>
EXAMINER: "Congratulations, here's your license. Drive safe!"
Never again will I complain about Toronto drivers... until, of course, I do, but at least then I will appreciate their relative average sanity.
OK, here's my new year's resolution: same volume of blogging, better distribution of blogging. If you survived up to here, congratulations, you have way too much time on your hands :)
