Tequila and Diesel Rivers

Tequila in the morning, Tequila in the evening, Tequila at suppertime, when you are in Mexico you can have tequila anytime. We really got tired of this concept while we were in Mexico. I seriously think that Mexicans think that this is the only thing US Citizens do when they come to Cancun. Which is probably true.
Sarah and I just got back from a wonderful six days in Mexico where we spent our honeymoon. It was all in all a very enjoyable trip and very relaxing which is what we truly desired it to be. We arrived in Cancun last Saturday afternoon. The faint smell of ocean was in the air as we made our way off of the plane. And we hopped aboard a shuttle to our hotel. Upon arrival at the Royal Solaris we were quickly seperated from our bags and escorted to meet Omar who would get us oriented with the hotel. Omar was enamored with Sarah when he found out she was an English teacher because we was an aspiring writer of pop fiction and the english language in general. I was left out in the cold because no one wants to talk to a lowly research assistant. We we coerced into signing up for a tour the next day where they would of course offer us the amazing opportunity of becoming a member of the Solaris family. We were offered an oceanview room if we took to tour so we quickly consented. Most of the time we spent on the beach just relaxing. For most of the trip the weather was so amazing. It was the absolute perfect temperature due to the clouds that provide constant shade from the scorching sun. We didn't need to go very many places because our hotel had quite a bit to offer us. Several things stood out on this trip that I will always remember. The turquiose color of the ocean mixed with the bright white color of the sand on the beach was such a wonderful sight to wake up to every morning as well as listen to all night long. The sight of hovering seagulls eating bread from a an elderly gentleman's hand was pretty cool to watch. I really wanted to try this feat for my self which suprised Sarah because of my slight fear of birds (I have had a lot of encounters with small rodents and birds whizzing by my head and I just can't seem to get over them). And the most unforgettable event that occured on our honeymoon was the trip to Chitzen Itza. The most memorable experience about this whole trip is that we didn't even occur at those old ruins. We had scheduled our tour for the day before we came home. So we board the double decker bus that morning and Sarah wanted to sit on the bottom level. It looked very crowded to me so I pointed out that we should just find somewhere up stairs so we made our way up and found a quite cozy place upstairs that would provide me with the much needed leg room and provide Sarah and I with a little bit more privacy. So the bus starts and we are very excited to get going. The bus gets about a mile away from our hotel and the bus driver comes up with the fun idea of his own. He was turning the bus around and decided to pull out in front of a dump truck. He then instead of gunning it to see if he can get out of the way he decides to stop. Sarah and me had the absolute perfect spot to witness the entire accident take place. Time stood still. The dump truck full of cement and rebar is doing everything he could to just stop. Adn then it happened, the dump truck hit us. The bus lurched to its side in protest and everything in the overhead compartment spued out of it and fell onto the floor. and the people under it. I happened to have a stroller hit me in my arm and I think Sarah ran into my elbow. And then a very pungent gasoline smell filled the air and all we heard was shrieks and wails of "Gasoline" and "explode" filled the compartment. So both Sarah and I proceeded for the closest exit along. We were shocked at the scene that appeared as me made it down that narrow stairway. There was the dump truck halfway inside the bus and a woman that had been sitting in the seats that we would have been taking had we not moved to the upper level was pinned between the bus and the undercarraige of the dump truck. The exit door was half blocked by the truck as well. Sarah got through first but accidently got caught for a minute and I let a mother and child go before me. I had never seen so much gasoline in my life. It literally was a river of it that we had to wade through to freedom. Both Sarah and I came away from the experience unscathed physically. And no one on the bus including the pinned women were killed in the whole ordeal. I am glad for several things taht occured that day that prevented us from sitting in those seats. One of those being my long legs that couldn't endure a three houre trip to Chitzen Itza. But the most eerie thing about the whole accident is that for the rest of our trip we couldn't really enjoy ourselves. We had felt that we had somehow cheated death. Kind of like a "final destination" kind of a thing. In fact the next day we decided that we would just go to the airport early. We had had it with Mexico. The beach was amazing but we just couldn't bring ourselves to enjoy its wonderful view anymore. So it was a wonderful trip where both Sarah and I got to really relax and unwind. Which was much needed. I also learned that life is so fleeting and any little decision that we make on it can change our lives for the good or the bad. I am just glad that Sarah and I are back in the U.S.A.. Mexico is great don't get me wrong but after a long trip it is nice to be able to lie down in your own bed and relax on your own couch. After a long trip you just get the yearning to come home.

I just found out this week that months and months of work that I had been doing on the Stipeae would now have to come to an end due to the fact that there is not enough money to pursue it any further. I have been working on this particular group since June and have really enjoyed my time working with them even though it has been somewhat of a challenge throughout the entire process. I thought because I am sad and frustrated right now that I would do a recap of the past several months of my life as pretaining to the lab. I began in June doing work on the Stipeae which is a tribe of grasses. Mary (who is my boss) had spent the from November to March in Australia working on this group and others and obtained samples of the Australasian Stipeae to come up with a phylogeny of the australasian samples. Phylogeny deals with the evolutionary background of a plant species. So these samples would help in establishing a (ancestral) tree for this particular group. I was asked by Mary when she got back if I would be interested in helping her on this project as well as others. So in June I started beginning to extract the DNA from the plant specimens that were brought back. These samples were packed in silica gel which helped to dry them out completely and keep them dry so the DNA doesn't degrade any more. The extraction process started offf really good. This didn't last long due to the fact that a change in plastic tubes halfway during it caused some extra stress. There are several things that happen during the extraction process. I obtained this simplified process from Wikipedia.
1-Breaking the cells open, commonly referred to as cell disruption, to expose the DNA within, such as by grinding or sonicating the sample.
2-Removing membrane lipids by adding a detergent.
3-Precipitating the DNA with an alcohol — usually ethanol or isopropanol. Since DNA is insoluble in these alcohols, it will aggregate together, giving a pellet upon centrifugation. This step also removes alcohol-soluble salt.

Or in other words, the samples are weighed and then placed in a small tube. A nickle bee bee is also placed in the tube. Then the samples that we are going to extract go through the disruptor which in simple terms it shakes the samples at very high speeds to break up the material.

The next parts of the extraction process has a lot of little technical steps that may come across as boring so I won't tell you everything. The main steps are we use chemicals to lyse or break open the cell and another set of chemicals to seperate all the extra stuff in the cell from the DNA. These chemicals are called buffers which is a substance that help facilitate a reaction but at the same time resists changes that occur during the reaction so it doesn't combine with the stuff in the reaction. So by the end of the process we have a vial of DNA. We then put it through a spectrophotometer and run a gel to test for the quality of the DNA. The polymerase chain reaction is the next process that we underwent. In this process which has several steps we amplify or enhance the DNA and then send it to the CIB for Fragment analysis. After we get if back from them we have the sequence of DNA which we then have to align so that the sequences line up. In order to do this we look at graphs called chromatographs to see what is actually happening in the sequence. The highest peak in the graph represents usually what is found in the sequence of DNA. This is just a simplified view of what I do at the lab. I know it is probably boring to most but I find it a very fascinating process. I will just have to deal with the fact that disappointment is a part of my job now. That is the nature of science. To try to find answers to questions but never really obtain those answers. The answers we receive will just lead to move questions. It's a fascinating process. I have to give up for now and not receive an answer.

Half Blood Half Betrayed

A couple of months ago I received some horrific news. This news took me completely off guard and I was irate for days afterwords. In fact the mere mention of this topic escalated into hour long conversations on the topic. This subject is the topic of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince's release date not being in November but switching to July of next year. This just floored me and i didn't know how to take it. I felt betrayed and let down. I had already started to formulated plans for the party was going to be like and even was going to center my whole Halloween yard decorations completely on Harry Potter. I read the book again to get decoration ideas for the yard. I was so excited and was even going to go see movies that contained the trailer merely on the fact that they contained the trailer. Then Warner Brothers just up and pulled it from it's slot with some bogus idea that they will make more money by switching the movies release date in November to July. It's just ridiculous. They then replaced Harry Potter with the Twilight movie. I have never read the Twilight books so I can't really judge what there target audience is but I'm pretty sure it is geared towards young teenage girls or at least girls in general. So to switch from a show that is geared towards an audience that contains not only adults and children but both girls and boys to a show that is geared towards a girl based audience doesn't seem to me to be a way to stuff your pocketbooks. You are switching from a family movie and switching to a teen romance. The numbers don't add up in my head.

The truth is this. They jerked us around. They set a release date and made trailers and sent out the information in all the magazines and then when we Potter maniacs thought all was well they came in like a heartless mistress and ripped our hearts out of chest. But they didn't stop there. Instead of coming up with some amazing lie that we could actually believe they told us the truth. And that hurts. Because it was the most unexpected thing we could ever get from Hollywood. For years they have been telling us stories and feeding us lines and for the first time they show us how green there truly are. We all new this secretly. Another things is I afraid that when I finally sit down in the seat on opening night of Harry Potter. I will be disappointed. I was disappointed once when it came to Harry Potter movies and have since that time never really trusted again. This was in the case of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban which is by far my favorite of all the books. I really had a hard time with the movie due to the fact that they left a lot unexplained and that troubled me. I have a feeling that this might happen with this movie because some of the vital Tom Riddle memories will not be making an appearance in the movie. They have also added a Death Eater attack on the Burrow scene which doesn't happen until the last book. I just didn't want to wait anymore. There really hasn't been many choices when it comes to movies as of late. And I am saddened by the fact that if all had stayed as planned last Friday I would have been in a theatre watching the next installment of the Harry Potter movie. I may not go the first night or even the first week when the Half Blood Prince comes out and that is a big deal to me. Warner Brother's let me down and they'll have a hard time regaining my trust.

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55 days of Christmas

I turned on the television tonight and was not at all surprised to find that ABC Family was playing a Christmas show. Apparently they have a countdown to 25 days of Christmas. Why is there a countdown any way? I mean if there going to show Christmas shows then it would mean to me that it's Christmas time. so instead of a countdown why not make it 55 days of Christmas? You can never have to much of a good thing and there isn't anything special about November so why not just extend the most magical, joyous, wonderful, and yuletidey time of the year. Oh wait there is something and it's called Thanksgiving. You know that holiday that is supposed to venerate the harvest festival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Plantation. That wonderful spread of delectable grub all centered around a beautiful roasted turkey.

I find it very hard to find decorations for this special time of year called Thanksgiving. Where are the cardboard cutouts of pilgrims and cornucopias to plaster upon your windows and walls as well as grace your table? What happened to the Thanksgiving specials and movies? I for one would love to see Garfield's Thanksgiving Dinner or Charlie Brown Thanksgiving. ABC Family won't be showing A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving but will be showing A Boy Named Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Come Home. Why not Charlie Brown Thanksgiving? There is also some great movies like Plains Trains and Automobiles and Home for the Holidays that deal with Thanksgiving. And many more that have Thanksgiving scenes. I'm sure they will show these on the day of Thanksgiving but when did it become Thanksgiving Day and not Thanksgiving time. What happened to the elementary schools plays with kids dressed up in shopping bag Indian vests and construction paper pilgrim hats singing songs like five little turkeys and the Mayflower song.
I just would like to be able to enjoy Thanksgiving which is a pretty cool holiday if you think about it. It's a time to be thankful for the bounty that we have and be grateful for all the blessings and freedoms that we are granted. Yes, it could be considered just an excuse to shovel and gorge us on tasty treats until we spue. But Christmas could be considered just a commericalized holiday or an excuse for the retailers to finally get their profits back into the black. It all comes down to the our own personal feelings about the purpose of holidays and the spirit of these events. Thanksgiving isn't only about the food. It's about being content with the fact that we truly do have so much to be grateful for. We live ina country that yes has flaws and our leaders do make mistakes but we have liberties and rights that few people have and many think aren't avaliable to them. It's not that I am opposed to Christmas movies or the Christmas season. I love them. Bring them on when the appointed hour has arrived and I will chow down on some peppermints and homemade cookie cutouts. It's more about let's not be so caught up with Christmas that we overlook one great celebration that occur in the month of November. Why is that we need to be so worried about Christmas that it extends into other holidays other than December? Why do we have to make it so complicated that in order to get everything done we have to start in November or for some even in October? Let's just enjoy the things that are in the present and not worry so much about the future that we fail to see what's staring us in the face is a pretty good time. My friends, Let's watch Thanksgiving specials and make it so that November is about Thanksgiving and Fall activities and not about getting ready for the December.

I like that show. It's neat.

With all the chaos that comes along with getting everything ready for the upcoming wedding in December, I have been looking for an swift way to deal with the stress that comes along with everything that needs to get done. I have turned to television shows like most other Americans do. I've never been the kind of person that is very faithful when it comes to television shows. I just have a hard time confining or allocating time towards any particular show. Nothing seems all that important that I need to watch it. If I want to do something else that night I want to do it without worrying about what some character is going to do this week to solve some problem. My feelings have changed due to some shows like the Office and Pushing Daisies. I am also very grateful for the fact that Andrew and Elisha have Tivo to alleviate this dilemma that I face when it comes to doing something else or watch the telly. I have also turned to the internet to find snippets of favorite shows from yesteryears.

I have loved cartoons for so long. I am saddened by the fact that in recent years saturday mornings are filled with a plethora of Japanese anime with crappy story arcs that all seem to have the same storyline week after week and Disney sitcoms reruns that if you tune to the Disney Channel you can see the same episodes from your favorite shows every night of the week twelve times. It's fantastic. This is not what my blog is about so I leave this issue here for now. Dexter's Laboratory was one of my all time favorites and I never tired of it. I wished i could find my favorite episode which is the Muffin King episode but alas I could not.

British television is great. They just seem to go to far sometimes which I have a tendancy to do sometimes as well. This is one of my favorite shows called the Vicar of Dibley. Alcie is by far my favorite character in this show. He comedy is spot on all the time.







This is part one of the finale of Vicar of Dibley and thought it wedding appropriate.

I have mentioned the office which I was worried about last season becuase of the sporadic good episodes that were occuring but am pleased with the recent return to the strange things that happen in an everyday office instead of branching out. Pushing Daisies is good as well. I hope that it is able to draw in the crowds it needs in order to avoid cancellation. The way it treats death is very original and weird in a way. The characters are well established as well and I like the chemistry that is between them. I make it a point to turn it on this show on wednesday nights even if I am not going to be watching just so it doesn't get cancelled. It is a littel bit strange I know to turn on the tv and not watch it.

My Blooming Bride

I have some very exciting news to report. I finally worked up the nerve to ask my girlfriend Sarah to marry me. The wedding date will be on December 12th and will be here in Logan. I am really excited and nervous and a lot of other emotions right now. It's just really surreal to think that I am actually going to be married in a little more than a month. I trully love Sarah and am extremely grateful for her patience with me. And also the fact that she still want's to marry me despite my short comings. She is truly a special woman. Well, you might ask how we first met? She moved in as I was becoming a freshman in high school into the same ward or church congregation. She became friends with my friends and hence became my friend. I had feelings for at the time but never really let on. Then at the end of my sophmore year in high school my family decided to move to central Utah to a little town called Spring City. I still came up to visit my friends in Logan occasionally so I never really lost touch with Sarah. When I went on my mission to Atlanta, Georgia for two years she wrote to me a few times but I think I only wrote her like once or sent amessage through our friend Elisha. I'm sorry Sarah for this. I am a horrible when it comes to sitting down and writting letters. I went to Snow College for two years after my mission again keeping in touch with my friends up here in Logan. Then when I graduated from Snow I decided to move on to Utah State University and finish my degree here. I started hanging out with sarah quite a bit and then in that December of me moving up to Logan I decided to make the first move to ask her out. She had her GRE exams so I got up early and made her a quiche breakfast and took it over for her. It was recieved very well but at that time Sarah hadn't made up her mind about me yet so she wasn't ready. It took until that next July for her to get back with me and we started the next two years of our dating period. It seems like a lot when in comes to the traditional mormon dating scene. But we had our kinks to get out. I 's don't know why she still with me but I am eternally grateful for this fact. We had been talking about marriage since last June but I was still waiting for my answer to whether it was right. Again Sarah thanks for your patience. She was getting very inpatient and made it very ifficult for me to suprise her. I finally came up with the idea that I would have to go down later on at night in order to suprise her. She left me no other option. We talked earlier on that day and she asked me questions that would get me to reveal when I was going to do it so I led her to believe that it was going to happen on the weekend. This was on Thursday, October 23rd. I got everything together and made the trek down to Springville to ask her the question. I got there and was so nervous. I had carved in pumpkins that asked will you marry me in them and placed them along the walkway up to her parents house. I had to get her to come out so I made up two stories. The first was that a new satelite had been lauched that day and you were suppose to be able to see it. This one didn't get her to come out so I made up another one in which the moon was a deep orange and she should go out and see it. I will not forget the look on her face when she opened that door to her parents house. She ran out and hugged me as I was kneeling and said yes. I gave her my adoptive grandma Ann's wedding ring which meant a lot to me to give it to her. I had gone ring shopping with her to get and idea of what she wanted and i don't recommend that anyone do this if you already have a ring. It made the process so much harder on me.

It's been nearly a year since I officially started working at the Intermountain Herbarium at Utah state University. The job has been very beneficail for me. I've learned more from this experience then I have in my entire college career. Many people wonder what an herbarium is. In fact we get quite a few people that come in through our doors expecting to find an exhibit of live plants or something else of that sort and find to thier dismay that the herbarium consists of nothing more than rows of metal cabinents. Not very exciting as compared to maybe a greenhouse but stored within the metal cabinents is the next best thing. And the things contained in the cabinents is a collection of preserved plant specimens. And in that sentence is your simple definition of what a herbarium is.
You may have even started your own herbarium and not even have know it. Have you ever pick flowers and put them in a book to be pressed flat? Well this process is a vital part of the herbarium. The specimens are pressed flat and dried in a a plant press (in your case a book) and then later mounted on paper which is a standard size. Probably one of the things you failed to include with these specimens is a label containing information of where you got it from, who collected it, the date it was collected, and other information on habitat, associated species, lat and long, or other information. This label is a vital part because it tells the viewer all the information they need to know about that particular plant at the particular time it was collected (this is not always true because some labels have more imformation than others).
Herbariums have many purposes. These purposes are:
--- if you were to set up a collection of living plant species ( just one of each) for just the Intermountain Region (Utah, Nevada, and parts of Idaho and Wyoming) and place them in a greenhouse you would soon run out of room. You would probably fill it up just by collecting trees. Herbariums alleviate this problem because the specimens are dead so you don't have upkeep on trying to keep the specimens alive (because sometimes plants just die) and you don't have as much of a problem with space because the plants don't keep growing and you can mount a specimen so it contains all the vital parts of a plant but still fit on a piece of paper.
---one important part of scientific research is the fact that is you or others can't reproduce your results for a particular claim then your claim isn't valid. Say you do research and find out that this plant is related to another plant which previously it wasn't even considered to be related and you want to publish a paper. Herbarium specimens can help with others being able to reproduce your results because they have the same plants that you work with in your study(you have to have preserved the specimens that you work with).
---What about winter? A scientist that works with plants has a year-long job. He can't just stop when winter comes and all the plants go dormant.
---What about extinct plants? Herbariums have these plants on file to be looked at and studied. They contain a rich heritage of material and information.

Well, I think I have bored you enough with what an herbarium is. I think I will talk to you now about what I am doing at work. When I started this job I mainly did three simple tasks.
1- mounting of specimens (arts and crafts time as I like to call it)
2- Data entry in the database
3- filing of the specimens
These three tasks have evolved into numerous tasks since Mary got back from her trip to Australia in last March. At this time she recruited me as a research aid. It has been an enjoyable yet overwhelming experience at times. I have had to learn basically a whole new language of plant terms in order to understand what I was suppose to do. I now work not only in the herbarium but also at the USDA Forage and Range Research Lab on campus as well. At this lab I am working with the Australasian Stipeae and other grasses that Mary collected on her trip in Australia. What we are doing is trying to establish a phylogeny or plant ancestry for the Australasian Stipeae. This part of the job is where I have learned the most and has also been the most challenging. I just run extraction for the specimens and then run the PCR or polymerase chain reactions for samples we have. I am currently working on finding the right primer pairs for my given samples using primers found to work in Romaschenko's paper (link is here http://www.brit.org/fileadmin/Publications/JBotResInstTexas_2_1/14_Romaschenko_at_al-Phylogeny_of_American_Stipeae.pdf). I have had a few challenges with a couple of things but everything seems to be coming together. I have to opportunity of getting my information published in this next year four times and if all goes well I may be going to Japan this next summer to present my results.