What a semester! My first semester in grad school has been one of the most all-consuming experiences of my life! Combine that with the joy and stress of buying and moving into a new house, and you've got one gal with a lot on her plate!
The new house is awesome! We've had a lot of fun so far working on our plans for fixing it up and doing some of those things. Before we moved in, we pulled up the carpets to show off the great hardwood floors beneath. Andrew's dream came true, and now we have a nice big pot rack in the kitchen, which is incredibly useful in addition to looking cool. We've really enjoyed the fireplace since it's gotten colder. Best of all, we just got central heat and air for Christmas! The only drawback of this house was its old funky floor furnaces, and the one in our room doesn't work. So now, no shivering away all winter with those! And we get to take out the window units, which will improve the overall look of the house. Many more plans to come…
This semester at school, I took Plant Ecology and Stats I, along with some research hours. Plant Ecology was co-taught by my advisor, Dr. Pezeshki, so there was a lot of pressure on me to do well in the class. Stats should have been a great class, but I got the worst teacher in the business. I'm talking about both of his classes filing complaints and grade appeals B-A-D! So what should have been a fairly easy review of and introduction to statistics was the source of major anxiety throughout the semester. Not to mention it was on Saturdays from 9am -12pm. Ugh. But all that's over now! I got my unofficial grades, and I did great in Plant Ecology and passed Stats. I'm definitely getting in on the mass grade appeal, since I helped instigate it.
Next semester, I'm taking Soil Ecology, also co-taught by Dr. Pezeshki, and Stats II. I got into the Stats II class with the very well-regarded department chair, and I'm really looking forward to learning something this time, not just struggling to put the pieces together for myself. I'll also be taking more research hours and teaching at least 2 labs.
Teaching was quite the experience. Going into it, I was really worried that no one (i.e. my students) would take me seriously. My fear of this was quickly laid to rest on the first day when my mastery of the ideas of homozygous and heterozygous genotypes and phenotypes and dominant and recessive alleles and how all this could easily be represented by yellow and red beads allowed for some credibility among the mostly lost non-majors. One TA (teaching assistant) dropped out due to medical reasons, and I was asked to pick up one for her sections after about a month into classes. So, I wound up teaching 3 sections, which worked out quite nicely.
As a teacher, I had to make many decisions that I hadn't even considered I would be responsible for. For example, when the University of Memphis was closed on a Monday following an on-campus shooting Sunday night, that was the day my extra lab was supposed to meet and get the mid-term exam review and ask questions about the test, etc. I attempted to email everyone in the class a reminder about the exam next week and a review, but since I'm a TA and not the actual "instructor of record", I don't have a master email list for the class. So I was unable to track down email addresses for some folks, and they didn't get the reminders and reviews. Other email attempts bounced back.
At the next class meeting for the regularly scheduled mid-term exam, over half the class cried foul about having no idea that the exam would be that day since the university had been officially closed for an emergency, and some people didn't get the emails with the review. This was the class that I had picked up from the other TA who dropped, so when one student pointed out that they had had 3 teachers and then class canceled due to a school shooting and couldn't I just cut them some slack, I made a snap decision that I hadn't even considered. Instead of handing out the stack of exams in my hand like I had been set on doing, even though I felt rather conflicted over their situation already, I found myself saying, "Well, alright. When can we schedule a make-up?" What? I now was committing myself to coming in on my own time for 2 days at 3 hours each to sit in the undergraduate study lounge and give a mid-term makeup to my misfit section. That wasn't in the script, but that's how it went down. I made Andrew quit calling me a push-over, and we compromised on "Lyndsay: the light touch for fairness." Um, okay. But that's just one extreme example of the kind of decision-making I was responsible for that I never thought I would be handling as a graduate teaching assistant.
A month after classes began, I embarked on a research trip to southern Louisiana with 4 Japanese researchers to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the vegetation, particularly bald cypress trees. Dr. Yamamoto and his protégé, Fumiko, are tree physiologists who specialize in bald cypress. Dr. Nagasawa and his protégé, Yukihiro, are GIS and remote-sensing specialists who were ground-truthing their remote-sensing data, which they used to tell which areas where the vegetation was the most impacted by the hurricane and which areas were recovering slowly after the damage. Sam, a PhD candidate in Dr. Pezeshki's lab, had gone the year before with Dr. Yamamoto and Fumiko, to collect some preliminary data, and he was along for this trip as well.
The lead-up to the trip was really hectic, with Dr. Yamamoto and Fumiko being on a later plane that planned due to some connection delay, but I didn't know that when I was at the airport trying to pick them up. Once they arrived, there were 2 or 3 days of intense entertaining leading up to our departure, including a dinner at Dr. Pezeshki's house, which was cool.
We flew into New Orleans and met Dr. Nagasawa and Yukihiro, who were flying direct from Tokyo. We rented a suburban at the airport and then headed out to the LSU Forestry field station in Bogalusa. This place was the epitome of cool, with all the amenities we could hope for, including a full kitchen, a ping –pong table, and free laundry. This was our base of operations for 3 days while we drove all around taking in the particular culture of rural southern Louisiana by day and drinking lots of Abita beer by night. All this was fine by Sam and I since it was out in the woods, which is nice, and the price was certainly right, which was free for visiting researchers. But on the third evening, the Japanese abruptly decided that they would like to move accommodations the next day to the French Quarter to experience some of New Orleans' charms.
We moved to the Hotel St. Marie on Toulouse and Bourbon the next day. Work was put on hold for the day for the transition. We spent that afternoon and evening drinking beer on the balcony, until Sam enticed the Japanese to check out some of the town's exotic entertainment at the topless clubs. I stayed at the hotel to work on Stats homework, but the Japanese were most impressed from what I heard.
We spent the next 4 nights in the Quarter. We made multiple visits to Café Du Monde for beignets and frozen lattes. We ate at a bunch of cool places and saw jazz bands at Preservation Hall and the Maison Bourbon. On our last night, Sam and I went running around the Quarter with Sam's local friend, Brandy, who was an excellent and entertaining hostess. We played pool at locals bar Fey-Hey's and then went to 80's dance night at One-Eyed Jack's. Who knew research could be so fun?
It was impressive to see the resilience of the city's residents, and it was clear that, in the Quarter, things were back on track after the hurricane. In the suburbs around the city, things were a different story. We saw amazing amounts of devastation in both scope and magnitude. It was incredible to think about what folks' lives must be like out there in those subdivisions, among boarded-up, abandoned houses, which comprised the majority of the buildings, with FEMA trailer interspersed in front of some of the houses undergoing renovation. While there were some signs of life out there, mostly it was a sea of decay. It was truly painfully heart-wrenching to take in at times.
Data collection for this gig was an interesting experience. The remote-sensing guys had the backseat of the suburban all wired with laptops, inverters, GPS sensors, and they collected data as we drove around by taking photographs with a GIS camera out of the window of the moving vehicle. If a spot was of particular interest or not easy to see from the car, we'd get out and walk around. During the last two days, we finally got to do some mucking around with Dr. Yamamoto and Fumiko. I got mired for awhile in the swamp muck, got covered in duckweed (i.e. pond scum) both in and out of my clothes, and I crawled through nutria excrement. But I did get to take a couple of the core samples from bald cypress trees, which was really cool. You use a small auger to drill through the center of the tree trunk at breast height. Then you pull the long thin strip of trunk out of a hollow part in the auger. This strip then gets covered with a plastic drinking straw, until it's examined later for variation among the rings. Neato.
On our last day there, we all went on a guided swamp tour. Now that was cool. Our guide showed us some very lovely sections of swamp and delivered up wild alligators, to my utter delight. We saw turtles and snakes, majestic cypress with Spanish moss drifting from their branches, a huge great blue heron, and a house that had floated miles from its foundation when it got carried off by the post-hurricane storm surge. The swamp was absolutely captivating, and I could see why people trade in their 9 to 5 to become a permanent part of the life there.
So that was a great way to kick off the first month of grad school. On my return, I had to give a lot of attention to my Plant Ecology class project, for which I was required to do an experiment, a 10-minute presentation about it, and write it all up as a scientific manuscript. Great, I thought. This would be the perfect time to do a pilot study of a smaller version of the main experiment I'm planning on doing for my thesis. And maybe this would have be the perfect time to do that pilot study, but it was not meant to be so.
I intended to use a species of grass that we had growing at the greenhouse as the plant I would experiment on. When I tried dividing this otherwise hardy plant into sections to be experimented on, they all died. Next, I went to collect another grass species being studied in our lab from some wild populations we had identified in the summer, but, when we went to dig them up in late August, they'd all died back or were well on their way to doing so. I checked around a couple more places locally for the second species, rice cutgrass, but no one had any. I called about 15 regional nurseries, and not one had either of the grasses. Finally, I found a nursery in Pennsylvania that sold the rice cutgrass, but it was going to cost $85 for the plants and shipping. I tried more local places, but I finally wound up ordering from the PA nursery.
After about a week, my plants arrived. Dead. Okay, completely brown and not dead, but in absolutely no condition for doing an experiment on. I thought that perhaps I could put them in the light room and restore them to green state for doing the experiment.
I'm getting nervous at this point and having this cartoon-like sensation of the pages of a calendar flying off into my face.
After a week in the light room, the rice cutgrass was infested with fungus and struggling more than ever. I needed a new experiment if I was going to have anything by the end of the semester. How about a germination experiment? Plant some seeds, and count how many that sprout after doing things to them. Perfect, and Sam had some seeds of a grass species that was an official release from a USDA Plant Materials Center that I could use. So, I design an experiment, do some treatments to the seeds, plant them, and set them up in the light room. Then I started reading about this species more in-depth, only to discover that these seeds require 4 to 6 weeks of soaking before they will germinate. It was far too late to expect that anything could possibly happen with these seeds by the time I needed them, so again I was casting about for another idea.
Sam suggested that I use some extra willow cuttings that he had, since nothing with the grasses had worked for me so far. And that did work. Well, actually the experiment was a failure in the sense that I didn't see a treatment effect for the parameters I measured. But I was able to carry it out and report my findings in the way that was expected of me. I even did well on the presentation and earned some praise from the generally tight-lipped Dr. Pezeshki.
All that equated to an incredibly consuming and frustrating experience that I guess is the sort I'm supposed to be having, developing my character or something like that. Supposedly all this "experience" will make my future attempts more fruitful, and I can only pray it's so or else I'm in the wrong line of work.
I did have an excellent semester, music-wise. I finally got to see the Disco Biscuits at the New Daisy and got to hang with many great friends I ran into there (what's up Dan and Kim, Andria, D.D., and Sam!). Then I scored a free ticket to the Black Crowes show at Mud Island. That was my first Mud Island show, and it's hard to imagine anything that could beat it. It was a beautiful fall night on the Mississippi River, fifth row center, with the Crowes on their hottest night I've gotten to see them on. I was there with friends Jason, Sean, and Anne, and instead of Andrew, who had to work instead of take advantage of the ridiculously awesome and free chance to see one of his favorite bands. Serendipitiously, I wound up hanging out with other friends Sam, Katie, Lewis, and Jennifer before and after the show, even though we didn't know we were all going to the show until I ran into them in the parking garage on my way in.
Since he had missed the Crowes show, I had to understand when Andrew bought tickets somewhat impulsively to the Neil Young show in St. Louis. It was right before Thanksgiving, and we would have to be apart for the holiday because I was going to Kentucky, and he had to work. So we made a little escape out of it. We scored big-time on Priceline and got a 4-star hotel for $65 that turned out to be in the renovated historic and resplendent Union Station, which was rather close to the equally historic and resplendent Fox Theatre. Thank you, William Shatner, we had a great time.
The show was ridiculous. Our seats were great, and the venue was breath-taking. We had seen Neil at Bonnaroo the year he was there (Andrew's seen him bunches), so I had some idea what I was in for, but, then again, really I didn't. His wife, Pegi Young, opened, playing some nice acoustic songs from her new album, her first solo in a long career of singing back-up for Neil. Then Neil came on, by himself, with an acoustic set of songs on guitar, harmonica, and piano. Tears started streaming down my cheeks at the first chord of the song he opened with, "From Hank to Hendrix." The whole set was so intense. I just grinned, and my eyes leaked the whole time. After that set, he came out with the band and played a great electric set. He's quite the hard-rocking old fella.
Andrew also couldn't resist the mystery of the new Blind Melon lineup, and so we went to see them last week at the Gibson Lounge. I'm not fanatical about their music, like, say, Andrew. But I wasn't too sure how to interpret the idea that the band was soldiering on without deceased lead singer, Shannon Hoon. Was it just a commercial motive to sell the name while some people still remembered them? Maybe, but they did a great job anyway. The new singer wasn't trying to reinvent their sound and did an excellent job delivering the lyrics in a very long shadow, and the show rocked. I don't know when I last saw Andrew have so much fun at a show, and that made it even better.
The most heart-warming musical experience of late, by far, had to be Madison's strings recital a couple of weeks ago. Students in the fifth grade strings program performed several holiday classics in the "pizzicato" style of plucking the strings. It was too cool to see Maddie plucking on her violin, making music with the rest of the group. I was incredibly proud.
In there somewhere, I threw my best friend, Emily, a baby shower in Louisville. It was a bit of a challenge to pull that off from Memphis during the semester I had, but it all worked out with my mom's help. It was really fun to get to return the favor from when Emily threw my bridal shower. Her daughter, Eva, was born a couple of weeks ago and is stunningly cute (from what I could tell when I visited, but she was sleeping the whole time, so she's probably even cuter when awake).
Currently, we are all working on Christmas preparations. Andrew is a cookie baking machine, and I'm on baking support services. We put up the Christmas tree, and I got to decorate our mantel with garland, pinecones, and lights. We are the plain-janes on our street and haven't done up our house exterior as most folks have. We're doing well to do the tree thing, thank you. Anyway, we're not done shopping yet, so I've got to muster up a bit more of that commercial spirit, I mean, Christmas spirit before the last present is wrapped.
Madison gets out of school on Thursday. Andrew has to work Christmas morning, which is a bummer. Then, on the day after Christmas, Maddie and I are heading to Kentucky for a few days. We've visiting Mom, Carter, and Grandma for a day, and the Madison is off to visit her dad and stepmom (who are expecting a new addition to their family in May) and her half-brother, Connor. We're driving back on New Year's Eve, so I don't have any plans for then just yet, although something is likely to turn up.
Have a Safe and Happy Holiday Season!
Originally posted at www.myspace.com/wannabedutch on 12/18/07.
