My brother Rich climbing at the Boise State Climbing Gym.  

Corn, its a wierd one mister grinch.

So in Josh's plant breeding web page he has links to two papers that show that corn hybrid vigor may be due to inconsistent sequences. In some cases the genes themselves are hemizygous. In others the retrotransposon insertions are different, affecting gene expression due to changes in upstream promoters. O what we don't know else is going on.

I have too much to do. I will explain later. Right now I have to write it up for Cotton inc. They pay the bills.

Feeling better

I am feeling better. I don't know why, nothing has changed. I still have to plant way too much, but it is coming along.

Links:
Plantbreeding web page

Food blog

Emily painted this for us yesterday. She says she learned Chinese characters from Sagwa, a cartoon about chinese cats that write with their tales. I didn't believe her, but my Chinese math teacher says that they are just about right for the characters for rain. Just like she said 

My daughter Emily and I out in my cotton field. This is the end of my season last year. Theis is a F1 plant, next to us is the F2s. 

No motivation

I am not really depressed. I am not really happy. I am not really sad.

I am just monotone today. It is like a constant F flat in my head. There are moments where it fades and I feel ? ? ?

I don't know quite how now. That F flat is playing today.

Do you listen to Philip Glass? There are a number of his songs that are repetitive to a point where you would think that the performers would throw down their instruments and scream out an aria in C sharp major just to mix it up a little. That is how I feel with my life. I just haven't got up the courage to throw down my fiddle and start screaming.

I went to BYU to resolve things with my professors there. It is like none of it ever happened. It is like a dream that felt like a lifetime and then you wake up to find that it is almost the same time as when you fell asleep. Before I left, I sent an email with a tentative itinerary, outlining what I wanted to do. I asked for comments and for suggestions. In return, nothing. silence. ambivalence. when I got there, I proceded to start doing what I said on my itinerary. Response: "Ok, sounds good." "Where have you been eating for the past three days." "Oh, were you here till midnight working again? " Nothing. silence. ambivalence.

I went through all of the sequences and found all possible ligation points, restriction digestion sites, and vector contamination. Then I annotated them and sorted them by primer design and problem. Then I tested all the primers for ones without problems to see if the size was the same. Results: 95% that amplified were OK. 5% were not. This is error rate in sequencing so might have missed ligation site. Response: OK. Nothing. silence. ambivalence. Then I tested ones designed from other species and a subset of possibly messed up ones. Response OK, give us the good ones.

Then I did GISH. In one day. This is not that short of a protocol. I didn't finish. Response: Oh OK. Did they read my report? No. Did the look over the lab notebook with raw data? NO. Did they look over the sequencing data? NO. Did they have any questions. No. and NO.

Since then,
Nothing. SILENCE. AMBIVALENCE.

When I got back. I asked what they thought about my field plans here. Response: whatever you think is best.

Nothing. Silence. Ambivalence.

What a sweet melody of advice from my advisors on my graduate committees.