penn

Westward Bound

Matt and I are headed out west for an excellent summer. I will post pics once we make it to Portland, and I have some fun stories to tell. So far, we've gone through Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. We're currently in Lander and will spend tomorrow hiking. We spent the last two nights camping, and after we leave Lander we will be tenting again all the way into Portland. It's a good time to be outdoors. We've managed to avoid all the floods, and any rainstorms hit while we were safely in a car or tent.

Just wanted to check in and say hi to everyone.

Fungi

From my friend Will on Facebook:

"Fungi breathe oxygen, eat other things, digest, and respire CO2, just like us. Many live in partnership with plants and animals, mediating the breakdown and direction of nutrient flow in natural ecosystems. Some even produce chemicals very similar to mammalian neurochemistry. Mushrooms are amorphous, spore-producing, animal-like networks that may or may not ponder their own existence."

And a retort from his friend: "If soil is the heaven trees root their dreams in, then think of it; fungi must be angels."

The other side

Just wanted to share a lovely excerpt from a NYTimes article entitled "Doctors and the 'D' Word." The article brings to mind a former supervisor who complained mightily about euphemisms; she preferred to call a spade a spade, and that extended to death.

At the beginning of the article the author, Danielle Ofri, writes about the different euphemisms she learned for death when first in medical school and interning.

My intern’s use of the term “passed” also brought to mind a wonderful poem called “Gaudeamus Igitur,” by John Stone, a cardiologist from Atlanta. This poem — the title translates to “Therefore Let Us Rejoice” — was delivered as a commencement address to a class of Emory medical students who probably didn’t realize how lucky they were. I read this poem to all of my students and interns because it speaks to the emotions of moving on in medical training and in life. It includes this passage:

For this is the end of examinations
For this is the beginning of testing
For Death will give the final examination
and everyone will pass.

When Dr. Stone died in 2008, I thought of this line. I know he would have been relieved that he didn’t fail.

A little look

Outside of our apartment/house, there are a number of lovely old trees. Our house was built sometime in the late 1890s, and many of the trees around are just as old. We have massive oaks, maples, and cottonwoods providing delicious summer shade.

My favorite tree, however, is much younger. It's a curious tree, and before I had looked closely I thought it was perhaps more than one tree.

It certainly looks curious, doesn't it? The dark parts, the light parts. I must have edited the photo, right?

Nope, that's just the way that tree looks. I don't know if the tree has always looked that way, but it has definitely had this phenotype since it leafed out this spring. Once I took a closer look, some wheels started turning in my head.

Those white and green leaves have quite a distinctive pattern. And they remind me of an activity I did in genetics this past semester. We raised up plants with both mutant and normal chloroplasts. Chloroplasts are an organelle within the cell of a plant (a little piece that does something but can't live on its own). Normally, chloroplasts have a lot of green chlorophyll inside, and that green chlorophyll performs photosynthesis for the plant. This is how the plant gets its energy.

However, in some plants, there are mutant white chloroplasts instead. They don't work as well, so the plant doesn't get as much energy. If there are just white chloroplasts in the plant, the plant stays white because there's not much the plant can do. But if there are both green and white chloroplasts, the plant might stay variegated, or the green only leaves might out-compete the variegated leaves.

I don't know what will happen here to my variegated maple. There certainly are variegated and green-only leaves on the same branch.

Only observation and time will tell. Amazing what you can see when you open your eyes, look around, and truly watch the world.

If Only

Silly

I saw a silly "street art" type of thing during finals week that I never got around to sharing. Someone decided to do a little rogue advertising.

Lucy update

I've posted a few other things, so I hope none of you think I'm turning into the crazy cat lady. Wait, what am I kidding? I've always been a bit crazy and in love with cats. I can't even fully enumerate how much joy little Lucy brings into our lives.

For example, she loves to help out when we're on the computer. The other day, she also helped me by dialing a friend of mine on the cell phone (still unclear quite how she managed that).

And she exercises her maternal instincts (or her playful instincts?) by pulling our plastic bags out from under the sink and distributing them around the house.

And she absolutely, positively lives to chase bugs (when she isn't bird watching). Who knew that we adopted such a budding naturalist?

Teacher dress

Something I wore to teach many times in the last few weeks of subbing. I usually wear it with leggings and much nicer shoes, but the day when we took the pic was too hot to have anything on my legs.

This is nothing I would ever have thought to purchase, but I absolutely love it. It was a Christmas gift from my mom, and it is comfortable yet still quite appropriate. I usually wear a brown zip-up sweater so I can adjust to different classroom temperatures.

Note: there is a lace applique on one side of the shirt. I think that's my favorite part, after the high comfort. I'm enjoying being a little dressier for a change.