That most glorious and gluttinous day in honor of our Almost-National Bird

Yilin and I went to my parents' house for the long Thanksgiving weekend. It was great: I got to sit around and just do nothing. We got to see my brother and his girlfriend, my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandma, etc. Oh yeah, we ate turkey. ;)

But the whole Thanksgiving-and-Pilgrims thing got me to thinking: they brought seeds and potatoes and other foodstuffs over with them. It seems like an obvious thing, to take what you need to plant crops and not just what you need to eat on the transatlantic journey. But would I have done the same? Even though I consider myself reasonably intelligent, somehow the answer is "no".

I think I would take enough for the journey with a little extra, but I wouldn't have thought about planting crops when I got to shore. I probably just would've assumed that there were edible plants somewhere, but plenty of fish, fowl, and game for me to hunt and kill and eat. Bread? I can live without that. Meat? Absurd! Live without meat?! Preposterous.

I guess that would've been my role in the New World: a hunter. Maybe a hunter/gatherer. Certainly not a farmer, unless it were necessary. Perhaps I would be more of a livestock kinda farmer, domesticating wild animals or something. Sure, the pilgrims needed farmers, but who really wanted to live without meat?

Lost

I spent a good part of yesterday cataloguing what was lost when our -80C freezer thawed. At least, I catalogued what I specifically lost: the embryos/experiments resulting from the use of 354 eggs, 24 litters of mice, and 29.4 days of manwork.

The good news is that half of the stuff was from my old project and therefore unlikely to ever be put to use; i.e., it was lost anyway. The bad news, so to speak, is that this is a gross underestimate of time and animal life lost. The lost time estimate assumes that everything was done as efficiently as possible by a theoretical human performing experiments nonstop for 7.5 hours per day, and that experiments have no incubation periods.

In reality, there are very few days in which I can perform 7.5 full hours of experimental work. Those are usually 12+ hour days that feel twice as long as they actually are. You see, when you leave something incubating in the cold room for one hour you are not working for that hour, therefore that time does not count as lost. The only time counted as lost is the 5 minutes every hour that you change a solution. So while the experiment/processing takes 3-4 days to perform, it is only actually 5 hours (+/-) of work lost. Or so the insurance company says.

So you see, I probably lost 4-6 months of experiments rather than the 1 month estimate. But again, about half of it was stuff that I would never use.

Ed figures that the total loss, translated into a dollar amount, comes to a laughable $76,000. This does not include stuff generated by people who left the lab and aren't here to catalogue it. (But again, this stuff wouldn't likely be used, so it technically doesn't matter too much.)

This dollar estimate is laughable for two reasons: 1) it is, again, a gross underestimate of the value of lost material; 2) you can't put a dollar amount on anything that an 8th year grad student does. Even if I saw one cent of this insurance payment (which I won't), it could never replace the fact that my time in grad school has been extended due to the need to replicate these experiments. In fact, I would pay $76,000 for this never to have happened.

Anyway, I am beyond caring about it at this point; I am too focused on getting done whatever it is I need to get done to graduate.

What the...?

I saw a link this morning. A little snippet of "news" (or, more accurately, an "item of interest") on the front of Yahoo!'s website. Apparently, a lot of people are searching Yahoo! for recipes or instruction on how to cook turducken. My first response was "WTF is turducken?". I clicked on the link.

For those of you, like me, who have never heard of a turducken, allow me to describe it to you. A turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck stuffed with a chicken. It sounds excessive, gluttonous, and on the verge of morally wrong in so many ways. I can't wait to try it! Last year the big craze was deep-fried turkey (which I have yet to try), and this year it's turducken. I wonder if anyone tried to deep fry one of those yet...

One of the people who posted a comment on Yahoo!'s turducken page said that the turducken inspired his favorite creation: the pheaparquail! The pheaparquail is a pheasant stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a quail. (Five bucks says this person snubs their nose at ordinary chicken.) I don't even know where to buy a pheasant or a partridge, so this culinary delight will have to wait.

The mere idea of creating a culinary matryoshka doll is intriguing. (Matryoshka dolls are those wooden Russian dolls where you find one inside another inside another...) My first thought was the pilamacon: a pig stuffed with a lamb stuffed with bacon. That seems a bit large, though, and beyond my capacity to prepare in my NYC apartment. Besides, bacon isn't really an animal. *Obligatory Simpsons quote:

Homer: Lisa honey, are you saying you're never going to eat any animal again? What about bacon?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Ham?
Lisa: No.
Homer: Pork chops?
Lisa: Dad! Those all come from the same animal!
Homer: [Chuckles] Yeah, right Lisa. A wonderful, magical animal.

So let's hear your best culinary matryoshka delight, and see who's cuisine reigns supreme!

Birthday Surprise the Third

Well, my third and final birthday surprise from Yilin was that my brother and his girlfriend came to NYC to visit for the weekend. I was not expecting this. We had a really good time that weekend, alternately eating a lot and relaxing.

Then the following weekend Nick and Marianne visited from Montreal and took me (us, really) to dinner at the crazy Japanese drinking-place-that-has-no-name-in-English (it's true; if I could read Japanese I would tranliterate the name of the establishment, but since every sign that looks like it might be the name of the place is written in Japanese, and I can't read Japanese, we'll never know...). We had a great time.

The weekend following that, Yilin's parents were in town. We did a lot of shopping, and ate a lot of Asian food. It was fun.

So, with the past three weekends shot, workwise, I am going to make an effort to get a lot done this weekend. I have been working late this past week, and will probably continue to do so for a long while. (I have some more counting to do: 120 photos x 15 minutes/photo = 30 hours of staring at a monitor counting cells.)