Garrison Keillor - "Homegrown Democrat"

While I was on my trip I bought Homegrown Democrat, by Garrison Keillor. He is the rambling personality behind A Prairie Home Companion, a weekly radio variety show detailing the times of the fictional town of Lake Woebegone, along with music, and NPR humor. His writing feels like he dictated the entire book after staying up all night downing capuccinos and arguing over politics. The sentances are long and can be cumbersome, but full of passion.

The wonder of the book, even though it rambles in and out anecdotes about growing up, attending the University of Wisconsin and the death of JFK, is that it mirrors many of the reasons why I also am a Democrat. I am a Mormon from Idaho who works with a popcorn seed company in rural Indiana, which means that my peers at church and work, my family, and most of my friends are dyed in the wool Republicans.

To most of which, my choice to abandon the Republican party is approaching apostacy, because the Democratic party is percieved to consist of socialists, abortionists, supporters of gay marriage, and unreasonable vegetarian environmentalists. The Republicans see themselves as supporters of Christian values of temperance, low taxes, traditional marriage, moral values, the American Dream, and the City on a Hill.

When I look at the Republican party I see whited sepulchres that advertise Christian values, the American Dream, the City on a Hill in bright letters on the outside, but behind the boardroom doors are happy to make deals with tobacco companies, the logging industry, the military industrial complex, the oil industry or who ever else holds the purse strings. I see the war in Iraq. I see Iran-contra. I see Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo bay, illegal detentions and nightime raids on Muslim American homes. I see oil wells in the Alaskan wildlife refuge, the loss of wilderness and public lands, high national debts, tax breaks for the rich, Jack Abramoff, and empty words to pacify the religous conservatists about flag burning, school prayer, and constitutional marriage amendments.

Garrison Keillor argues that the Democratic party, the ideal one he believes in, supports a social contract. This social contract argues that the government exists for our good and should do good. The government should support public works, public transportation, public schools, public welfare, public lands. The constitution and the bill of rights are the framework for this contract. Civil rights spring out of this contract, as well as responsibility to support public schools and services.

Unfortunately, these may not be the pillars of the actual Democratic party, but they should be. That is a moral standard I can grab on to and defend. It expands the morals of the party beyond gay marriage and abortion, as it should because the government does so many things besides marriages and abortions.

Back from Argentina

I spent the last two weeks in Argentina and Brazil, visiting the popcorn production there and walking through the research plots. Argentina had a disturbing resemblance to Illinois or Indiana and so I took very few pictures of the countryside. The towns and cities were not though. They had a vibrant feeling that rural United states has lost somehow. We went through the home town of Evita with her picture painted on the walls bearing only a vague resemblance to Madonna.

This is a park in downtown Buenos Aires. I don't know how many millions live there, but downtown and residential areas are indistinguishable. Apartments rise next to office towers and restaurants for rich and tourists sit next to small grocers and choripan (like a bratwurst) venders. The streets were clean and the food great. We saw one slum that reminded me of Nicaragua as we were entering Buenos Aires. It had house after house built of castoff corrugated tin and uneven wood slabs. It zipped by quickly and it is hard to believe that it existed when walking down the parisian shopping district or the well to do downtown.

Brazil felt tropical in comparison with rolling hills, palm trees, monkeys screeching in the distance and flocks of parrots overhead. The gauchos of Argentina have cousins in Brazil that run cattle there between the trees. Both drink mate out of wooden cups and metal straws. Both groups are contending with increasing cultivation of soybeans and corn. But one thing that was the same was the vibrancy of the agricultural economies. Agriculture was important enough that news about corn prices were on the front pages of the newspapers. People were as excited about the new Case tractors as we might be about new cars and the tractor dealerships had glassed in showrooms with the newest combines on turnstiles. Majoring in agronomy at the university was a sought after major and to be a Inginero Agronomo was highly sought after. Here in the heart of the midwest, the small towns feel empty, and agriculture is almost a four letter word. It is something that our grandparents did, but we are happy to leave behind.

While I was gone in the tropics, the temperature here at home plummetted and there was a blizzard. The night time temperatures were well below zero and our pumphouse froze again and left Leila and the girls without power. Matt and Todd from work came and thawed it out for them though and my neighbors came with their snowplows and dug Leila out. We had 17 inches of snow, but the drifts are 4 feet deep in places. The schools were closed all week due to the cold and then to the blizzard. Emily has been in heaven since she has been able to shovel snow and play outside in her snow clothes. She has been making snow tunnels for the cats. They run in and out of them trying to catch each other, jumping on top of each other and rolling in the snow and then begging to come inside once they are wet and cold.

It is good to be home.

Procrastination on writing a paper

I have officially graduated now. I got the diploma in the mail this week in a red cardboard tube declaring me the proud recipient of a PhD. But, somehow it doesn't feel done, really. I still have papers to write and now I am in Indiana, far from Texas and far from motivated.

I want to write a paper on quantile analysis of AFIS data, but I just can not seem to make myself write it. Right now I have the time, I have a half hour to go and to the end of the day though and have not written a word. Procrastination always brings out the blogger and internet surfer in me..

Moving, New House, and blogger update

I have not written for too long. Much has happened:

we moved
Gas leak
Pipes froze
Chicago meetings
Decided to grow a beard
Argued with old apartment management and stormed out
Mouse under bathtub
Cats
Bones in Barn
Christmas is coming


we have not reconnected our internet at home and so we feel cut off from the digital world.

Fall Fun

The leaves are just about all down now, but before they were Emily and Aleah pushed them and piled them and ran in them. Winter keeps threatening to come and then it backs off. It gets cold enough to snow and then the winds change and then for a few days it is warm and sunny.

Aleah is sick today and threw up last night every hour on the hour. Today I stayed home with her during church. She was so tired that she actually asked to go to bed and immediately fell asleep when I put her down. Right now she is feeling good and asking for "anya, Oh wawo, me, up, Oh daddy, Fidge?" Which translated means I want some candy(anya). If someone moved a chair(wawo) up next to the fridge(Fidge) I could get some candy down."

Tomorrow I am going to the Crop Science Society meetings in Indianapolis. I hope that they will be useful for my work. I was hoping that Leila and they kids will go with me, but now Aleah is sick so they will stay home. 

Our new house

As they say in Zaboomafoo, "We are going on an a big adventure and we don't know what's in store!" We are going to buy this farmhouse and a chunk of the farm. It is out in the middle of nowhere, but only 5 minutes from my work. We decided that we might want to try the farm life after we spent all of our Saturdays at Prophetstown state park, a living history farm north of Lafayette. So we are going to try it out for ourselves. The girls have been making a list of animals to get:

cat, to catch the mice, rats, moles, etc.

dog, to chase the cat, etc,

horse - actually may be a possibility, the Nefs, from church, have 11 horses and need somewhere to board a few,

chickens, of course,

goats, we are not so sure,

giraffes, elephants, hippos, all possible zoo animals.

Any suggestions? 

Sand Dunes in China

I was playing with google earth and found the sand dunes in the desert between China and Mongolia, somewhere north of India. I just couldn't get the picture out of my head. 

Aleah trying to play the violin

Aleah is fascinated by the violin, she is just too little right now. That doesn't seem to stop her too much. 

Emily harvesting corn at Prophetstown

 

New House

We made an offer on a house last week. It is a farmhouse ~ 5 miles from my work. We have agonized about where we wanted to live and what kind of house we were looking for. This was worsened by the huge housing market here. There was a big building boom in the 90's and housing prices have been stagnant since then. That means that there are lots of houses for sale, especially older homes that Leila and I liked for reasonable prices. We debated whether we want to be as Leila says "city mice" or "country mice." My work is about 10 miles south of town, so moving closer to work means further from town.

There are some nice little towns in the area. The closest is Romney at ~ 1 mile from work, but four houses were for sale (out of maybe 50 total). Three were on the highway, and one was two bedroom and like 300 sq feet. Linden, Attica, and Crawfordsville are further south, also quite nice. New Richmond is to the west; it is where Hoosiers was filmed. I was dissappointed to find out that the gym in the movie has since been torn down. It is quite picturesque. To the east are Clarks Hill and Stockton. Lots of the houses for sale in these areas were built in the early 1900s. These little towns are quite small with less than 500 people in most. Crawfordsville is larger.

The house we put an offer on is a farmhouse, built around 1920. It has a large pole barn and walnut trees around it. It has an attic bedroom with sloped ceilings and a gabled roof. The kitchen is smallish and needs a new stove and refrigerator. There are wood floors in the bedrooms and under the carpet in the living room. It only has one bath, but it has a nice cellar. The washer dryer hookups are down there as well as a root cellar and the furnace. This is the house that we saw, liked and wanted to see again after we had pre approval from the bank, but then someone else made an offer by then. We thought it was out of the picture till last week when our realtor told us it was available, the financing fell through for the other buyers, but we had to move fast. We made an offer, but we haven't been back to tour the inside. There are many details that we don't have because of that, but we feel good about it. There is room for an orchard and for us to get some animals for Emily to take care of.

The dissertation is finished

I have finally finished all of the details with my dissertation!!!

After my defense, there were a bunch of comments from my professors that I had to incorporate into the final draft. Some were minor, like whether upland cotton was capitalized (But, we spent 20 minutes in my defense arguing about it and then it came up again and again in the last month), but others were major and required new analysis, new figures or tables, and inclusion of a summary chapter. I turned in a pdf copy to the thesis department 3 weeks ago and then they reviewed it and sent me 58 corrections to make. Most were technical details like placement of page numbers on landscape pages or wording of the abstract. But some involved changing the way I referenced tables and figures throughout the entire text. Minor, but tedious since I have 48 tables. I made those changes and then sent it back and they sent back 10 more requested changes. I have made those and now it is done.

I just have to pay my diploma fee and my dissertation review fee and I will be Dr. Gardunia.

Texas A&M is fee crazy. I had to register for one credit this semester that cost 470 dollars. The fees for that one credit upped the bill to over a 1000 dollars. Then, I have to pay a diploma fee, a graduation processing fee, and a dissertation processing fee. And there are no options, unless I didn't want to graduate, but there is probably a fee for that too.

Einstein

I have been reading Essays in Science by Albert Einstein. That he is a genius is already established, and so I won't go on too much about it. He does a good job explaining his cutting edge physics in ways that at least I think I understand. That is the worst of it. It feels like being blind and listening to an art lover lecture on the brush techniques of the masters. The words he uses are mostly familiar, and the math he mentions seems to call up names I heard in my calculus classes years ago: LaPlace, Fourier, Etc. But, I can't see what he sees. It must be like having another sense to have intuition and perception of the world tied in to mathematics.

It is a joy to read and I recommend it. I read his other essays on Zionism and politics in highschool and he is a persuasive writer, even when he does not talk about his world of physics.

We are doing well here in Indiana. We have not yet decided on a house. We found a place that we wanted, a little farmhouse with a few acres, near my work, but someone else bought it before we put an offer. Then we found another farmhouse with a few acres far from my work, but it is apparently gutted with no electrical or mechanical or drywall? We will see today to see how badly gutted it is. There are a lot of houses for sale and that is part of our problem. There are nice houses in town and there are houses in the country. There are some right near my work, but there hasn't been one that is just right I guess. I will try to put links up to some that we are looking at or some pictures this weekend.

Battleground, Indiana

We went to Prophetstown state park this last weekend. It is the site where Tecumseh had his city and ultimately his defeat by the US army. On the site is a working farm with 1920 equipment, varieties, house, etc. Leila and I love this kind of stuff, but Emily says that "it was a disappointment." I can't see how since the farmer let Emily pet the newborn calves, all of the cats, the sheep, and shell corn. We are going back this weekend for the 1920's county fair.

Bolivian jail

The BBC has a photo tour of a large Bolivian jail where the inmates can buy good cells or rent them out. They have food venders and a futbol field. Children live there with their fathers and attend local schools. Such an odd arrangement. It is like a country unto itself. The inmates are expected to manage local affairs and there is apparently an internal government that deals out justice for violence, etc. It used to allow tourists, but apparently the cocaine there is the best in the country and so many visitors came to buy drugs.

It is a surreal story that is hard to believe, except there was a smaller version of this jail in Viacha where we lived. It was small, but venders and people came and went. Prisoners, we were told, were expected to have their own food and medicine. It certainly cuts costs, but it just seems unreal.

Things are good here in Indiana. I will put up some pictures when I get home and write more.

Indiana, Defense, and Popcorn

There is so much to write. These last few weeks have not given me that much time and I have neglected writing here.

1. Monday, July 24th I practiced my defense presentation
2. Wednesday, July 26th we closed on the house.
   
3. Thursday, July 27 I defended my dissertation.
   
4. Friday, July 28th we left Bryan, TX for Aunt Sandra's.
   
5. Sunday, July 30th we started driving North and made it as far as Anna, Illinois.
6. Monday, July 31st, we arrived here in Indiana.
7. Tuesday, August 1st. I started work

So things have been a bit hectic. I worked on my presentation all weekend and then on Monday I gave it to the lab. Tuesday the movers were supposed to come at 8:00 AM, but did not come until after 11:00. I had promised Stelly and the lab that I would go to lunch with them as a farewell that day and the two movers took forever to finish loading everying, not that I mind that; they seemed to be careful. Leila let me go about 1:00 to go to the end, but noone had ordered, they were waiting for me. I worked on getting everything in order with my seed and office that day and also Monday. I had four boxes of stuff from my offices as well as one box that I wanted to take in the car with lab notebooks, etc. It just felt so unreal that the end was coming.

Wednesday I worked on my presentation and then we went to the title company for closing, which took quite a while since there are 10-20 lbs of paperwork. There are so many fees. We paid 8-9000 dollars in fees and so did the buyers. We were starving. Tuesday night we stayed in the La Salle Hotel in downtown Bryan. It was very nice, but the girls had a horrible time falling asleep.

I wasn't there because I had went home to finish working on the bathroom sinks. We had committed to stopping the drips in the sinks, thinking it would be a simple job. Unfortunately, the inside of the faucets were all rusted out and taking the handles off to replace washers was impossible. The only thing to do was to replace the faucets. I tried replacing pipes and shutoff valves first because the faucets were fused by rust and crustiness to the sink. The plastic deals that held it in place were stuck and even with the tool that the Smiths loaned me I could not get them off. The only thing left to try was drilling holes in the plastic thingamagigs and the faucets with AJ's, our neighbor who had us over to dinner that night, drill. I fixed them both, but as the son of a plumber it was not as easy as it should have been.

Wednesday and Thursday I spent preparing for my presentation. I didn't finish until lunch time on thursday. I prepared three presentations: one overview, one on methods, and one on stuff I didn't have time to talk about in the other. I only used the overview . I will try to atleast get a screenshot of the title page up. The slides looked pretty good, I will toot my own horn about them. My presentation was at 2:00 so I went to lunch with Kelly and then walked to the HEEP center to set up.

Things started out badly when we realized that I had not arranged for a substitute for Dr. Monica Menz, nor had I taken her off of my committee. She and her husband, Dr. Javier Betran, who is also on my committee, moved to France. Dr. Betran was there finishing up his corn harvest, she was not. Dr. Stelly scoured the halls for unoccupied professors. Dr. Dirk Hayes came by to get coffee so he became my new committee member. I started at about 20 after two and finished about 3:15.

Stelly made the audience ask questions. Leila asked about what my results says about the utility of random mating for breeding. That was a tough question that carried over into the next part where the audience leaves and I am left with the committee. Dr. Smith asked about whether upland should be capitalized or not. He also asked about which generations should be used for making assertions about random mating. I had to admit that my choice of generations was not right. The best would be to compare the F2 derived rm families. I think that there should be intensive study of that generation anyway to look at interspecific barriers. My BC1F2 etc were not well suited for that either. Too many other things going on. He also asked about my use of the term hybrid breakdown. This comes from good F1 yields, but disasterously low F2 yields. This to me is breakdown of the hybrid in later generations. To him, hybrid breakdown would be low fertility of the F1 generation. Dr. Betran pointed out that I had analyzed heritability wrongly since I had used the combined set of populations which are genetically different and so confounds heritability calculations. The Parent-Offspring regression also is wrong, since the slope needs to be adjusted by the covariance of the BC1F1 to the BC1F2 and BC1rm1 generation. I was a bit taken back by this since he had helped me set up the analysis, but they are things I can fix. Stelly asked me about day length sensitivity and breeding questions. There were more questions that I don't remember clearly, but at 5:45 it was over and they all shook my hand and gave me hugs. I had passed. It was over.

We went to dinner with Kelly and Bonita at Oxford square and had steak dinner. We spent that night with Bonita and then that afternoon set off for Sandra's. I had some things to take care of at work. I had forgotten to fix the gin and the seed room needed to be cleaned and organized one last time. I also went through the DNA lists, etc. After that I said goodbye and we were on the road.

Emily's Birthday

Emily went for pictures today. She is turning 6 tomorrow. It is dumbfounding that I could be her parent. She is growing so fast.

She has started reading on her own more and more. We were in the car the other day and Leila and I were discussing what to get her for her birthday with important words spelled out loud. Emily in the back seat started spelling things back to us. From now on we are going to have to speak in Spanish or French to discuss things around her since she is learning to read.

She is having a party tomorrow with her friends from school. Since we cook together often, Emily has started making up her own recipes. Often they have sprinkles as a major ingredient. She asked to make one of her recipes instead of a birthday cake for her party. We figured, why not? So Emily is making Jello with marshmellows and whip cream. I think it has sprinkles on the top and they are going to have pink cookies that Emily picked out from the store.

Happy Birthday!!!

Emily 

Brian's Brain

I had another "seizure-like episode" two weeks ago and so my doctor ordered a bunch of tests. The prognosis is not in, but I did get a copy of the MRI results to look through. I wish I knew what I was looking for. I can tell which is my brain, but what is normal? The ones on the right have a dye that they injected in my arm, the ones on the left do not. 

Gypsies by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a little known science fiction book from the 1980's, that I bought when I was in highschool at my favorite store, Redux - Used Junk. It was wedged between a comic book-sci fi store and someplace that bought used jeans on Broadway, near Garfield school, in Boise, ID. I used to stop in there and talk to the owners on my way home from school and if I had any money I bought a paperback for a dollar or two. I was was drawn in by the eclectic shop and its bohemian owners that made their living as waiters to pay the bills while running the store in between trips to South America in their VW bus.

Whenever I read Gypsies, I think of their store. When I see the characters in my head, I see the owners: the beautiful, but aging hippies. It is the tale of a family that has the ability to step between alternate realities. The spectrum of possibilities being infinite they are limited by their imaginations to the worlds they can find and explore. But, they have not really explored or even used their talents. The family consists of three children Karen the oldest and the responsible one, Laura the ex hippy, and Tim the rebellious angry youngest brother, now grownup. Their parents were killed gruesomely and they were raised by adoptive parents. Their adoptive father, Willis, saw their skills as evil and beat them violently whenever he caught them "making doors" or "windows." This because inevitably afterwards they would be pursued by "the grey man" that had murdered their parents. Willis wordlessly would move them to a new location, beat them all soundly, and it would all begin again.

The story begins with Karen's divorce and realization that her son Michael has their talent, and is pursued by the Grey Man. She runs to her sister, Laura, and together the three attempt to find out the truth about their family and their talents. In the process they have to confront Willis, their brother, Tim, the Gray Man, and even travel to Novus Ordu, an alternative America where magic is real, and their parents were created as part of a mystical military industrial complex.

What makes this one of my favorite books, is that the bulk of the story is about the family, about the consequences of what happened before they want to remember. The need to understand feelings and memories suppressed since childhood because of unravelling adult life is also very real, and grounds the fantastical premise of the book. The characters are mundane, normal, but that is a great strength in a genre where too often all the men are ruggedly handsome, miraculously resourceful, and the women beautiful, busty, but shallow and unimportant. It makes the incredible situations believable.

I also love the descriptions of the worlds, that feel real enough that they could be out there, if only we knew how to get there.

Leila

 

New job in Indiana

Pictures of Ag Alumni, my new job. I am trying to get the video shots from my camera to load. I don't think that they did here, but it is worth the try. We went to visit this last week and are excited to go. Leila liked the area; the schools seem good and the neighborhoods are nice.