Nesting time

I am sitting at my computer procrastinating writing my dissertation. The birds outside the window seem to hold my attention better then analyzing my cotton plant heights and yields for genetic effects.

There is an annual vine that seems to attract chickadees, sparrows, cardinals, grackles and mockingbirds. It has no fruit yet or flowers, but plenty of dead twigs from last years growth. They all take turns hopping up and down the main stems and tugging at the last year's growth until they can pull a branch free. Then triumphantly they take off. I assume that they are making nests.

It is that time of year. Even here, for me. We are getting the house ready to sell. Leila has cleaned out the flower beds. We've washed the cabinets in the kitchen, painted the living room, painted Emily's room and the office, put up crown molding, repaired the damaged drywall in the closet, and still there is a growing list of things to do.

The worst of them is replacing 4 tiles in the kitchen. They had bubbled up and in a feverish fit I tore them up, fearing water damage or an invasion of tile eating ants. Instead we found nothing. This was supposed to be easily fixed with matching tiles saved in the attic, but now I can't find them. Apparently we have unique tile. It is almond colored, smooth, and THIRTEEN inches x THIRTEEN inches. Who ever heard of 13 x 13" tile? We found matching 12" tile, but no luck on 13" tile. So if anyone has 13" uniformly almond color, no texture, no pattern, just smooth, tile please have pity on me. Send them to me!! I beg you.

The crew and I. That sounds like the title of a musical.  

Measuring the plants and taking notes. The biggest difference between the experiments here and there is that in Mexico there were no day length issues. The F1 yielded well. The BC1F1 did very well, but the G. mustelinum parent did not have any bolls yet. Apparently it has not only day length sensitivity but also a juvenile period. Not to mention that it grows slow. But, some of the random mated material did great. 

Dawn in Mexico with my plants and I.  

Don't tell my children

I have to confess something. As I lay awake listening to my youngest cry at 12:30 AM a few nights ago, I realized something. Crying works. It gets you what you want. I don't think that it would work for me, but for my children certainly. I have little to no resistance to it. It tugs at me. When I here that cry there is a compulsion to do whatever possible to make it better, to make it stop.

Aleah has not been sleeping through the night. She wakes up two or even three times, cries, gets fed, and then goes back to sleep. We have tried inconsistently to grit our teeth and try to get her to fall back to sleep by herself, but by 2:00 AM I am too tired to be tough. I just want to go back to sleep.

We have continually told Emily that tempertantrums are not the way to get what she wants, but that is not true. Of course it is the way. It isn't a good way, but sometimes the desired result is acheived. Crying and tempertantrums, most of the time work. The other thing she does that works is go boneless. She just collapses into an amoebal state. It helps to get out of practicing her violin.

One last picture from Emily. There are about 8 closeups of plastic cows.  

Another of Emily's photos. Actually pretty good pictures.  

Emily has found where the camera was hidden away and took a series of pictures of her toys and my shoes. 

Job decision and skin disease

I am going to be a popcorn breeder after graduation! Leila and I really agonized over the decision, well I have at least. Leila has felt good about this from the beginning. I have been unsure, mostly because the potentiality of the Bayer position was so good, but it just didn't look like it was coming to pass.

So last Thursday I called Ag Alumni and accepted the offer. Within the hour, my face and neck were burning and red. My eyes had been itching earlier, but now I looked like I had a sunburn across my face. Then in a few hours it had spread to my chest, arms, legs, feet, hands, etc with a burning itch like poison ivy complete with tiny blisters. I went home early and went to bed. The next day it was worse and I went to the doctor. He told me it was an allergy and probably not rubella, unless I had been exposed in the last 72 hours, and gave me antihistimines which made me very tired and ferociously grumpy.

My logical conclusion to this was that I was allergic to my new job and I had made the wrong choice. I stewed and worried, while trying not to scratch, for three days. Then, I decided, while lying in bed that I would turn back down the job, but I still needed to hurry and start to write. Deadlines are here and I have been anxious about writing my dissertation for a long time and it has been building like pressure inside of a geyser. At that moment, as I lay in bed thinking about what I needed to finish my proposal and get started on my first chapter, The rash spread like fire ants across my body and I could feel the blisters swell. The itching was tremendous.

So from that fun experiment, I decided that I had better get up and start writing. So I got out of bed, plastered myself with calamine lotion and headed for the computer. The closer I got to the computer, the worse the itching. By the time I sat down at the computer my hands and fingers were so swollen that I could barely type and couldn't concentrate. I gave up and went back to bed.

So either I am allergic to my new job or to writing my dissertation. It could also be the Cashew fruit I ate for dinner the previous night. I use to eat it in Nicaragua, mostly in Villa Venezuela, where I did break out in a nasty skin rash also come to think of it. OK, so I am either allergic to cashew fruit, popcorn breeding, or finishing my PhD. Let's hope it is cashew fruit since I can cut that out of my life with little pain or sacrifice.

I guess it all could be a psychosomatic anxiety attack. Some people hyperventilate, some people get dizzy, I break out in leparous rashes.

Emily with her violin. We don't have a clear practice program yet. Needless to say we need to work on it.  

So you have a Ph.D now what?

I am approaching the end of my Ph. D. and am looking for jobs. The good news is there are jobs. The bad news is I am not sure which I want. The sad thing is that I have been in school for almost 10 years and I am not sure what I want to be when I grow up.

There are really four kinds of positions available to someone with a Ph.D.:

1. Work for the government. For me that means USDA, usually in a plant geneticist or plant breeding position. Once and a while there is a germplasm curator position. More and more of these positions are molecular biologist positions. I think the reasoning is that molecular markers allow dissection of traits, etc. etc. but the long and short of it is that they publish more.

I don't think that I want to be a molecular geneticist, otherwise I think USDA positions are great because of steady research funds, job security, and good pay. I want to be actively involved in research, and I am not sure that I can sustainably work with markers. Currently, there is a Sudden Oak Death position in California and probably some postdoc positions.

2. Be a Professor. Teaching 1-3 classes a semester, advising graduate students, being on committees, writing grant proposals, publishing papers, trying to get tenure. Will the fun never end?

Life after tenure seems pretty good and pay ranges from 60,000 - 90,000 . Working with students is rewarding and there is a lot of lattitude for research and time. I have applied for three or four positions, including one here at A&M in cotton breeding. Too many professors seem to find better things to do than work at the bench or in the field.

3. Private industry. Make good money, see the world, sell your soul. Trade secrets and the bottom line make publishing in journals and presenting at conferences a very low priority. The good thing is that they also focus research into economically viable, and I guess that could mean important areas.

Seed companies are the main source of employment options for me such as in cotton: Bayer, DeltaPine, Phytogen, Monsanto, and a number of small companies. Outside cotton, the big players are Dupont which owns Pioneer, Seminis, DeRuiter, and many more depending on crop.
I have a job offer from Ag alumni seed, a small seed company in Indiana. They are looking for a popcorn breeder. There is also a possibility of a job with Bayer Crop Sciences as an experimental breeder. It is an interesting position because they seem to want someone that can pull together molecular as well as field data and start to integrate information that is coming out of genomics and mapping. They want to start interviewing candidates next couple of weeks and I would find out in the next month. I think that I would have a decent chance at it, but the popcorn company would like an answer before I would hear from Bayer.

The beauty of a private company is that there are no grants to apply for, no tenure to earn, no classes to teach and no graduate students to advise. The negative is that profitability drives promotion and retention. I have not worked in that environment and it is intimidating to jump in.

What to do? What would you choose? Is McDonalds hiring?

Timeline to graduation

There is so much to do between now and graduation. I feel like I have procrastinated so much. I am running markers right now in Dr. Menz's lab along with Stella and Nilesh. Things are working I just am frustrated with the politics of it all. That is all I dare say here, but if you want all the juicy details email me and I will give them all to you. I just wish we could all get along.

I got a JOB OFFER from Ag Alumni Seed!!!! They are a small popcorn breeding company owned by the alumni association of Purdue. They licence all of the wheat, soybean, and corn lines released by the Purdue breeders as well as their own popcorn lines. Their biggest competitors are ConAgra, a behemoth of a company, and Weaver, a local company. They are in Indiana, just outside of Lafayette, about an hour from Indianapolis. They are offering not bad pay with pretty good benefits. The town is nice, the company is small with good people working there. I feel like I could learn a lot from Max Robbins, the breeder. I think I could feel at home there. The negatives are that it is far from a temple about two and a half hours to Chicago, IL. It also doesn't involve teaching or will pay as much as some jobs, ie Bayer.

Well, back to work.

Emily wants to be a veterinarian, because it is an important job because she is helping animals. She informs me that my job, in cotton breeding and genetics, is a GOOD job, but not IMPORTANT, because I don't help animals or people.  

Christmas lights from the Christmas tree. Looks like electric fire 

Leila helped her sister with her senior project of sewing bags for the breast cancer center. 

Disaster for gingerbread land. Leila made a gingerbread house for Christmas. The Royal icing was stronger than cement though and we had to use a sledgehammer to break in.  

Leila's Mom got us a digital camera for Christmas and so we have lot's of pictures. They may not be good, but we have a lot of them. Here is Aleah up close and personal. 

Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

Leila and I went to go to a movie yesterday, since we are in Seattle and we have free babysitting from Nana, Grandad, Anna, or Blake at any time. It has been nice. It is almost like dating again, except I am not sleeping out on the couch by myself. Now all four of us are sharing twin beds along the back of the pit. We can touch heads at night and all talk.

When I saw the opening credits and saw the distributor, Disney, I felt nervous and worried that somehow this would be so disneyfied like Pocahontas or something. For once, they left the beauty of the original story alone. The few modifications do not detract, nor do they change the spirit of the tale. In one case, with Edmund in prison meeting Mr. Tumnus as the witch informs Mr. Tumnus of Edmunds betrayal, it adds to the weight of his actions. Aslan and the rest are magical, but the special effects do not come at the cost of the story or meaning. The makers of this movie loved the books.

I think this is the best movie of the year. I hope everyone goes to see it so that they will make Prince Caspian, The Dawn Treader, and The Silver Chair while Edmund and Lucy are still young. The Horse and His Boy could be made later as well as The Magician's Aprentice.

C. S. Lewis had an insight into Christianity as well as children. That period in England after World War II was a magical time for literature. It is hard to believe that J.R.R. Tolkein and him worked and wrote together in England. Maybe the combination of the trials and horror of the war along with the depression and the hope of the recovery was necessary. I really would like to study some more to see the effect on other writers. I wonder if our tragedies are enough to inspire such art.

Cover of the Life of Pi.  

The life of Pi

I just finished this book.

The plot is odd in itself. The main character is travelling across the ocean with his family and the animals from their zoo, when the boat sinks. The boy, Pi Patel, is thrown into a life boat along with a hyena, a zebra, an orangatang, and a bengal tiger. The boat quickly sinks and they are left the only survivors. The zebra's leg was broken in the fall and is already injured. As the only prey in a boat full of predators he is quickly attacked by the hyena. The hyena kills the zebra slowly and then tries to attack the orangatang. The orangatang holds its own for a while, but as the days go on and on without rescue, the hyena overcomes it and consumes it. The hyena is then eaten by the tiger. Leaving Pi alone in the boat with a full grown tiger.

He manages to establish himself as dominant by providing food and blowing fiercely on his whistle while rocking the boat enough to induce sea sickness in the tiger. Like a lion tamer in the ring, he tames the tiger enough to survive 227 days on the raft until he runs into Mexico. Meanwhile they run into a blind frenchman in a similar life raft, both blinded by the sun and poor nutritien. They also find a carnivorous island inhabited by thousands of meerkats and a very complex algae.

The problem is that I don't believe it. I don't believe any of it, and I don't think that the character does either. There is another version of events told in the end, but how true is that account. What does it all mean? What is the island? What symbology is he pulling from and why include it? The story at the end explains everything, almost, except the island. Which makes me think that it is as fabricated. But why? Why start the book by explaining that this is a story to make you believe in God? If anything it shows how in the face of necessity even the most civilized, Pi Patel is an ideal vegetarian religious example, will become as feral as a tiger. But I think I am missing something. Any ideas?