It's All Dry Now

So, it turns out it was a total of about 5 inches of rain in less than 90 minutes. I think this is a picture of Regent Street, about 6 blocks from the lab, but downhill. A couple of apartment complex basements and underground parking garages ended up with 7 and 8 feet of water in them, so it looks like we were doing OK, despite the water spurting through cracks in the walls. No serious damage done to the Escalante Lab or to our house, which is mostly just cleaner.

Still, a little unsettling. Must be the monsoon season coming on.

Rain, Hey Rain

The great deluge! (20% chance of precipitation, my ass.) The skies opened up, the thunder rolled, and it poured for a good 40 minutes just now. The radar shows the storm moving off to the south, but man, that was the most amazing rainstorm I think I've ever seen.

Apparently there was waist deep water on some of the roads in town, and certainly our building was popping leaks here and there. Rocco in the courtyard here isn't an especially short guy...

It seems to have mostly stopped now, but it'll be interesting to see the papers tomorrow. The isthmus is probably a disaster. I'm glad the landlord cleaned out the gutters last week.

Amazing, This Modern Technology

In the interests of expanding our little corner of the blogosphere, I've added a link to Amanda's blog over on the right side there. Go forth and comment upon it! There's a picture of a little poofy bird, which is a sure sign of quality!

Holy Flying Crud On a Stick!

Man, YouTube is great.

Lab Morning

Ah, yes, another delightful Sunday morning in the laboratory...

I think I'm starting to get a handle on how to make my experiments turn out pretty enough to publish. It's a little frustrating - I know what the gene does, which is the cool and interesting part, but to actually publish it I need to make pretty pictures, which has been a real technical hassle. Ah, well. It'll work eventually. With a bit of luck, I'll have all the data I need for this paper done by the end of the week, when my parents are arriving for an extended weekend of fun and excitement.

Anyhow, I'd better go check on the HPLC. I think I've managed to clog another column, but it's possible I'll be able to unstick whatever's in there. It involves acetonitrile, of course (all the fun properties of methanol and cyanide in one convenient package!), but it could be worse.

Mneh. I should make tea, too.

And She Said Yes!

Exciting news! Anita and I have gotten engaged!

I've been living with the most wonderful, amazing woman for over three years now, and I finally realized that it would be really dumb to let her get away. It's a really strange and scary and wonderful feeling. We feel very grown-up. We even went to the jewelry store and picked out an engagement ring, so it's official.

So, life is good, and things are happy here in Madison this week. Hope things are good for you all, too!

Tap that thing!

For those who don't read BoingBoing obsessively, here's something I think you'll enjoy. It's Roy Smeck! Something to aspire to...

Update of Recent Developments

1) The art fair is nice.
2) Sunstroke is less nice.
3) It's really very difficult to adequately sunscreen on the top of your head.
4) Smoothies are easy to make, as long as you remember to add more liquid than you think you should.
5) The independent video store on Willy St. has the new Battlestar Galactica.
6) Billy is totally a Cylon.
7) Kaiyo and I are both meant for cooler climes. We're also sleepy.

4th of July Vacation

Jorge went to the Bahamas for summer vacation, but our resources are a bit more limited, so it was off to sunny Mineral Point for us! We spent a lovely weekend (well, Monday and Tuesday) in the 3rd oldest city in Wisconsin, about an hour from Madison. We stayed in this charming bungalow, which was part of a little artist's collective.It was fun, actually. The place was nestled into this little wooded nook near the downtown, with lots of old buildings from the 1830s - 1850s. That's when the Cornish lead miners came over and settled the place, building a lot of quite nice limestone cottages and things which are still around. We took a tour of one of them (called Pendarvis), which was interesting. Remind me not to get into lead mining.
Here's Anita out back of the bungalow, posing in front of the flowers. One of the buildings back there is the oldest one in the town, and dates from about 1825. They use it as a classroom for teaching art to kids now, and are hoping to refurbish the old blacksmith equipment to start smithing.

The rest of the town was nice, although I must say I'm glad we didn't stay at this "Guest House". It looked like the sort of place you lock your insane cousin Freddy.

The big excitement of the day was sampling the Cornish cuisine. We had pastys and saffron cake and figgyhobbin, which together seem to constitute the whole of the Cornish diet. Pastys are potatoes and rutabagas and meat and onions wrapped in dense pastry dough suitable for schlepping into the mine, figgyhobbin is the same dough, but filled with honey and nuts and raisins (tasted a lot like baklava, actually), and saffron cake is a sweet quick bread flavored with saffron. I thought this was a weird thing, considering how poor the Cornish were, but apparently they had a habit of luring ships to wreck on the rocks so they could "salvage" the cargo, and they managed to score enough saffron that it snuck into the cuisine.

Finally, of course, there was the Fourth of July parade! Here's a picture of the cutest little baby horses, but the whole experience was great. They had the high school band, the junior high band, and the talented children's band, they had American Legion guys with guns, they had scary clowns, and they had the sorriest looking bunch of Civil War reenactors you've ever seen in your life. These boys had it down. They looked exactly like the lowest dregs of cannon fodder scraped out of the gutter and on their way to the front.

It was a good vacation. Not the Bahamas, but hey, it was cheaper! And had more lead mines in it!

P.S. Turns out Wisconsin is the "Badger State" not because of the animal, but because the early lead miners (not the Cornish, the other, inferior class of lead miners) were so transient that they didn't build houses, they just dug out little "badger holes" in the sides of the hills to live in. Who knew?