Spoiled dog

 

Chapter 1. Awake

 He awoke to alarms and bright lights that made no sense. For a moment the astronaut remembered the edges of a dream where the stars were so bright and cold. He felt the warmth of a woman's hand brush his face and felt sad to leave her behind for the claustrophobic and overwhelming present. A memory of music threatened to pull him back into the dark, but he swam towards the discordant and insistent call of the alarms that started to make some sense. He was awake and something was very wrong.

The computer was supposed to wake him slowly feeding him the drugs to wake his mind, nutrients and stimulants for his body, and then information he needed to get out of his sleepcoffin ready to take over his mission. He had trained half his life for this planned moment when he would climb out and see a hopefully habitable, but alien planet with his own eyes.  The computer would have seen it for years as he travelled and built an approach and mission plan.  The astronaut would then review the plan, adjust as needed, report back to earth and get to work.  That was the plan. That is what he had rehearsed till it was second nature. 

The alarms were wrong.  The dreams were wrong.  He was confused and weak.  Blinking was hard. Staying awake was a fight. The lights . . faded . . . and came back like a nightmare.  

He had trained for this kind of contingency plan of course.  Days of simulations for what to do if he had to wake suddenly and make quick decisions or repairs.  Many simulations had no winning solution, no way that he could fix the problem, but they all required him to start by deciding to fight through the fogginess of artificial sleep, disconnect himself from the machines, and choose to act, to do what he could, even if it was impossible and all he could do was try to send a message home.  Communication was a success, even if death was inevitable. 

So he decided to act. Step one in his emergency checklist complete.  Next figure out what kind of mess he was in so he could build the next steps to check off.

Finally writing the book I wish I could find

How do you find a book that isn’t lost, but half forgotten? I remember reading it. I swear I found it in the Boise Library where they had a shelf of popular books on the first floor near the check out desks. I can see the cover in my mind. It had an old computer terminal with letters in green and an old computer terminal font. In my memory, it said “Press enter. . .” But that can’t be the title, or else I could have found it. I don’t remember the author’s name. I don’t remember the character’s names.

My memory is not trustworthy though. I recently retold a story from that time to a friend that I remembered about his father losing his job and not telling anyone in the family. In my memory he went to the park or the library while he was looking for work, while spending down his savings and pretending that all was well. He was caught in the lie in my retelling of the story and the loss of their savings precipitated their move to Denver. My friend laughed and said that sounds like something his father would do, but that didn’t remember anything like that happening to them. Which of us is remembering wrong? I am assuming me. My own memory is full of holes and stories that have taken on a life independent of the truth.

The internet seems to have all of the information you could ever want. Wikipedia is a better encyclopedia than the World Book Encyclopedia that my mom bought from a travelling salesman. With Google I can find which restaurant has banh mi near Pikes Place Market and Amazon will send me the cord I have lost to charge my headphones in a day. But, I can’t find the book. I wrote about it once on my blog. I asked Reddit and Twitter and Facebook. No one seems to remember it like I do. Maybe in some forgotten database there is my library history from 1992 with the true title and author hidden in the list of sci fi books that I checked out. Maybe I just read it while I procrastinated doing my homework or waited for the bus? I don’t remember having the book at home or other places. Just there in the library.

I think of the book and its story at the most random times. There are moments that seem as real as my own memories, embedded in the times I have tried to find the book or debated making up my own. I remember the book being good enough that I would think other people would have read and remembered it.

The story is a fantastical one, not a profound book or a great one. If one day this finds its way to the original author, don’t take my description as criticism, only that it wasn’t something inspirational or intending to be the great American novel. It was just a fun story. It assumes the reader accepts the sci fi and fantastical elements of the story without too much of a skeptical eye.

It had an astronaut that comes back from a long and lonely trip to find Earth empty and abandoned. The people appear to have disappeared in an instance but without obvious violence. There are no bodies, just a mystery. He walks through the empty cities to find a broadcasted radio signal. The source of the signal is a library or an office. Inside the power is on, the transmitter on repeat with a simple message - Press Enter. The computer screen is waiting for someone to push the button.

Nothing happens when he pushes the button, except the story within the book. It is a flashback to the beginnings of the story to the protagonist - a young boy that has bad dreams. He dreams of a beautiful woman floating in space outside a broken colony ship. The stars are bright and too close to be real. Space feels cold and she talks to him in his dreams. He writes about his dreams on a 1990’s imagined version of an internet message board and obsesses about her being cold and alone in space. His obsession starts to interfere with his life and all he talks about is his beautiful girl floating alive in vacuum of space.

His worried mother seeks treatment for his obsession as it becomes a mental illness. The treatment is an experimental drug that was used to help soldiers with PTSD forget and recover. He seems to forget and goes back to his normal life, but he is wounded and sad.

This starts him on a path that ends with him becoming the reason why the Earth is empty and the astronaut is reading this story with us. The astronaut has a choice and a job to do that requires him to believe and act on the fantastical story to bring everyone back. It is a New Agey magic mixed with sci fi elements.

I remember moments from this story with great detail, but large chunks are missing. I would love to read this book again. Maybe I would be disappointed, that it required too much suspension of disbelief or that the characters weren’t likable. Maybe the story has leaps of logic or tedious bits that I skimmed over. But, since I can’t find it and I have the framework of the plot in my mind still after 30 years, I plan to write what I remember of the book instead of randomly searching Google for it.

Is this fan fiction? Kind of, but a fan fiction for a story that only I remember. A book for a fan base of one - me. It is more of a retelling I guess.

Is this plagiarism? I hope not. I doubt it could be proven to be since I don’t have the book in front of me and if I did I wouldn’t be trying to write it myself. The names and details are all my own. The arc of the story might not even match the book, if it exists. It is the best that I can do to write the book that I think I might have read on a day at the library when my friend’s father probably wasn’t there pretending to go to work at a job that he didn’t have because that memory doesn’t check out. It didn’t happen and since I can’t trust my life to be real, I guess that means that maybe this book is one that I invented all by myself.

If as I write or if this is published and you are reading this thinking - this sounds awfully familiar and you know the book - please send me the actual author and title. If you are the author, my apologies for butchering your book as I remember it. I hope you see this as the praise I mean it to be.

2025 in Five Hot Takes

The algorithms that drive traffic on the internet love a hot take so here are five hot takes to sum up 2025. 

1. Maybe veterinarians should be in charge of our healthcare system. 

In February, our dog pulled out of her collar when I was taking her for a quick walk at night and ran directly in front of a car.  I heard two thumps and loud yelp.  When I ran to find her, she was bleeding profusely from her mouth, head, and her front leg hung at a bad angle.  She wasn't moving at all.  The poor woman that hit her was frantically trying to convince me the dog was going to be fine.  Spoiler alert, she was.  I feel bad but I was rude and told her that I couldn't deal with her and the dog and that I needed her to go away so I could get the dog off the road and to the vet. 

I called Leila, while my neighbor comforted the woman, and we loaded the dog onto a sled and took her to the emergency vet clinic.  I crouched in the back and tried to keep Holly - that's the dog's name, still while we drove in case she had a back injury.  I was really scared that this was the end of the puppy.  At end of the summer we took in this dog from Emily and Celia. They found her abandoned as a very small puppy in a Hy-Vee parking lot.  She was an adorable puppy with a ton of energy - but full of worms.  She was way too much dog for their already crowded apartment and busy lives.  This dog quickly decided that I was her person and we have spent hours every day walking off some of that puppy energy.  

The emergency vet clinic for the very reasonable price of $5000 performed two surgeries - one minor one to drain blood from her lungs and abdomen and another to reattach soft tissue of the side of her face back to her skull, multiple x-rays, three overnights in the clinic, anesthesia for setting her broken collar bone and the surgeries,  follow up visits, all of her prescription pain meds, antibiotics, and tranquilizers to keep her calm while she healed, and some free dog food. 

What would the cost have been if a human being in the US had gone to the emergency room for two surgeries, four days in the hospital, medicine, and follow up visits?  If you didn't have insurance? Don't even think about how much that would be.  

The dog has made a full recovery and drags me around the neighborhood multiple times a day. She loves chasing squirrels, deer, and leaves blowing in the wind.  She hasn't learned her lesson though and still wants to chase cars - especially my neighbor's purple pick-up truck, landscaping trucks and trailers, the mailman, and all delivery vans.  

2. Open office plans are a mistake

I had this rather posh corner office on the fourth floor since I moved to St Louis in 2016.  It had a white board, a small table for meetings, and large windows.  I used to write ideas and plans on all of the windows and the white board.  I had shelves of books and a place for my stuff.  

Because my office was assigned to a lab it escaped the open office master plan.  The rest of the offices were remade into huddle rooms and cubicles with no assigned seating.  They put in open areas with couches, long tables, foosball, and ping pong tables. During covid most people were required to work from home, but I didn't love that so I got permission to keep coming to the office.  I started drinking coffee that year and would hang out with the lab workers during my coffee breaks and ate lunch in the cafeteria with money from the Moderna vaccine trials.  I rode my bike to work almost every day and kept my bike in my office.  All the security and building management people knew me by name. It really felt like my home away from home. 

In April, the "back to the office" committee decided that I needed to move out to a different, smaller office, with no windows since they had given up on the open office plan and my team was assigned space in a different building. My new office had no desk, no shelves, or space for my things.  It did have a broken flat-screen TV on the wall next to a large table, six green chairs, and a white board since it had been converted from an office to a huddle room and now was being converted back to an office.  I moved my boxes of books and personal items along the back wall, stashed some of the green chairs in an empty office, and perched my computer on the table. 

The open office experiment has been a complete failure. The office buildings are still mostly empty.  Majority of employees liked working from home and spend most of their days in meetings on Teams/Zoom/etc. anyway and so driving to the office to work in a bland cubicle and shared huddle rooms seemed like a waste of time.  My work was mostly with teams around the world so I didn't need to come in either, but I used to like to.  Work spent significant money remodeling to the open office plan and now doing it all back again. 

Moral of the story - if you want people to come to the office you have to make it a place actual humans want to work.  Open office plans mostly aren't designed for that.  They are ugly and inconvenient and people like/need to have their own space.  

3. Money spent on my daughter's wedding was worth every penny

In July, my oldest daughter Lee and Celia got married.  I had saved money from one of my bonuses in an investment account to pay for the wedding venue, food, and Celia's mom paid for drinks and some other expenses.  Our neighbor was the wedding photographer.  The location was the Stone House - a dedicated wedding venue in St. Charles near us.  It was such an ideal set up - with beautiful facilities for getting ready, an outdoor ceremony, dinner, and dancing.  The owners of the location did so much work to make it a great experience helping with planning, coordination of the ceremony, decoration, set up, clean-up, music, and more.  

My liver doctor in Iowa had deadly pancreatic cancer.  He was a bit like the character from House - caustic wit and and abrasive personality. Most of my appointments he pulled along with him an IV bag connected to a port in his stomach. He told me that he was treating himself with an experimental cancer treatment so that he could make it to his daughter's wedding.  He proudly shared pictures of himself walking her down the aisle and dancing with her at the wedding at our last appointment.  

I didn't understand at the time why this was such a important milestone for him until I walked Lee down the aisle for her to marry Celia and danced with them after the wedding.  What a proud moment.  Leila and I had a very humble wedding and we didn't spend an exorbitant amount on the wedding for Lee and Celia but I get why that was so important for him now.  These moments need to be celebrated.  I may not be Mormon any longer, but there is a holiness that comes from such happy beginnings and I am proud we were able to make it a beautiful and fun time for everyone that could come. 

4. European's have the right idea about summer vacation 

The last few years I have been taking my vacation all at once in the summer.  One year we all went to Europe.  After the wedding I took a couple of weeks off of work and Leila and I went on a sailing cruise in Maine on the windjammer - "Angelique".  The boat is a large sailing boat that sails from Camden, Maine.  Leila found them online after watching some videos on Youtube.  

We flew into Boston, stayed overnight near the airport, and then caught a bus to Camden.  The first day we checked in and dropped our stuff in our small but comfortable cabin, met the crew, and then wandered the town and ate dinner at a restaurant near the water. There are rooms for around 30 passengers.  Our cruise wasn't full.  Many of the other passengers had been before on the same boat. We slept on the boat and helped set sail in the morning.  

Each day we had coffee and breakfast early and then helped put up the sails.  The route changed depending on the tides and weather.  We stopped each night at a protected bay and usually had some time to hike or sightsee at each location.  One night the crew purchased a pile of lobsters from a lobster boat and steamed them in seaweed over a fire on the beach.  I have so many beautiful photographs of the coast of Maine. It was quiet and restful. The captain and crew were great fun.  Food was amazing.  At night we would play music together in the small cabin and then sit on the deck looking at the stars and talking. 

 I highly recommend booking a vacation with them. 

When I got back to work after almost 4 weeks of vacation, everyone commented on how rested and relaxed I was.  I felt so much better.  I had been stressed and frustrated with work. I am not sure it matters where to go or what you do, but the luxury of taking a big block of time is something we should all get.  In EU and in NZ/Australia this is expected.  In the US, such vacation time is rare.  I think it has made me a better employee and a happier person than slogging through the year with no breaks. 

5. The future is Africa

I shared this photo over Instagram and internally at Bayer to leadership and HR when I decided to change jobs in November. It shows the contradiction, optimism and opportunity that I felt when I was in Africa. I have been to Africa three or four times over the last few years visiting Nigeria, Kenya, and Botswana.  I took this photo of a small pride of lions after they caught a zebra just off the road in the wildlife reserve close to Nairobi, Kenya.  Our guide parked the truck just feet from them while they ate and the sun set on the city behind them. Nairobi was so different than I had imagined. The city feels vibrant and growing. The tourism business helps to keep some space for the wild parts of Africa so close to the huge and modern city.  

In June there was an opening at Gates foundation to be a program officer on the Ag development team and I decided to apply.  It took a few months for interviews and a month or two to get an offer, but I decided to leave my job at Bayer and move to the Gates Foundation in late November.  I had worked with them - reviewing grants and as a consultant for some of their plant breeding projects that they funded over the last 5 years and have been fascinated with the projects they have funded since I started in plant breeding.  

The inception of my career started when I was a Mormon missionary in Nicaragua.  I have always liked plants and biology but wasn't sure what to do with that.  I was on a bus one day near the end of my mission and talking to the man next to me about rice farming.  He was lamenting that the rice he wanted to eat was not profitable for him to grow in Nicaragua.  Instead they imported long grain rice from the United States or Columbia and exported a short grain rice that yielded well in Nicaragua to the US.  He wondered how you could make the grain he wanted grow well where he farmed. When I returned home and took a genetics class I realized that this was actually possible and was excited to find out this was an actual job - plant breeding and genetics became my major and set me on the career path I am still on. 

When I was in graduate school, Norman Borlaug was still faculty at Texas A&M University.  He gave these rambling seminars where he told stories about his life - in Mexico developing green revolution varieties of wheat and rice, in Africa about farm to market roads and the importance of fertilizer and soil health, in India developing mechanization and tractors for small farms and global policy and agriculture development.  They say you shouldn't meet your heroes, but Norman Borlaug lived up to the myth that has grown around him.  I wanted to be like him and be part of the next green revolution.   

I graduated and took a job with Ag Alumni - a small non-profit foundation and hybrid seed company that was part of Purdue University, breeding popcorn mostly for South America and then joined Monsanto.  At Monsanto I worked on improvements to plant breeding methods in the discovery teams for the last 16 years.  As part of that job I was able to work on external collaborations including the institutes where Norman Borlaug worked - CIMMYT, IITA, IRRI, etc.  I have always wanted to go back to the kind of projects that idealistic graduate student me dreamed of working on.  

On paper I had stepped away from the type of job I imagined at the beginning of my career.  Monsanto and Bayer let me reinvent myself multiple times and write my own job description as I changed roles and projects, but it was a large corporate seed company. I haven't been back to develop the rice hybrids that the farmer in Nicaragua wanted. 

This is a slide that Bayer HR used to explain their new paradigm for career development.  Bayer has continued to evolve the structure and teams with "Dynamic Shared Ownership." There are a bunch of interviews from the Bayer CEO and leadership touting this as the future org innovation that will make it great again.  Ask me off-line and I will tell you my full opinion about this org change. It makes the traditional career path increasingly difficult with fewer leadership roles and layers.  It reinforced to me that maybe I needed to make a change in my career. It was a hard decision because I loved the projects I worked on at Bayer, the people on my teams, and the collaborations I was able to set up, but it felt like time to step away from my more linear traditional career to a Non-linear "squiggly" career. My mentors and leadership at Bayer were supportive of the change. I decided to take the offer. 

So in late November I packed up my office and flew to Seattle for onboarding in my new role as a program officer at Gates Foundation.  My job there will be to set up projects to help deploy gene editing as a breeding and improvement tool and to enable development of improved hybrids for Africa and Asia. So far it looks like it will be a great job.  More travel than I really would like, but will work from home most of the time.  

This I hope is a chance to build on both the optimism and inspiration of the beginning of my career and the technical, leadership and project management skills that I developed at Monsanto/Bayer to make a big impact on the world.  It also is a chance to help build the future that I think shows in the picture of those lions at sunset.  Africa is huge with so many diverse countries, people, languages, environments - big problems and potential.  I have felt each time that I have been there that it is up to that challenge.  It is where the future growth will be if it is given a fair chance. 

Stay tuned for more details in 2026.  

Moments that changed my career path

Recently at Bayer there has been a lot of discussion about a "squiggly" career path vs a career ladder. When I graduated from high school - now 30 years ago in 1995, my original plan wasn't plant breeding. I didn't even know this was a job. I imagined becoming a violinist or maybe teaching biology or chemistry. What opened doors and made my career possible has been a mix of luck and coincidence, failure, change, hard work, and people that looked out for me.

1. My last violin lesson freshman year - 1996. I had started the y
   ear in the top symphony but no matter how hard I practiced I seemed to get worse and worse. My teacher used to have these intense two hour lessons and I felt broken. My last lesson I brought a quartet I had written and we played it together and told him I was quitting because I felt broken. My teacher agreed and told me that all was going according to plan and now I could start to relearn all of my bad habits that were all broken. I could move with him to New York. I declined and gave up any pretensions of being a violinist because I stayed broken. Instead, I left on a Mormon mission to Nicaragua.
2. Bus ride in Nicaragua - 1998, Near the end of my two years in Nicaragua, I was riding on the bus back to Managua and talking to a rice farmer that was sitting next to me. He explained how he wished he could grow a different kind of rice because what was profitable and successful for him was a short grain rice that he exported to the US and not the kind of rice he liked to eat. When I took a genetics class and realized people do things like that. At the time I was working on the grounds crew and with the snow coming I was going to have to shovel snow at 4 AM and was looking for an alternative. My genetics teacher - Polly Yoho, was a graduate student and she helped me get a job in the lab genotyping tomatoes and making interspecific crosses to find virus resistance genes and I joined the new plant breeding major.
3. Birth of first child - 2000. I planned on going to Purdue for grad school, but when my oldest daughter was born and my wife wasn't quite finished at BYU, I needed to stay longer. My wife convinced me to apply for funding from the Benson Institute and Drs Jellen and Stevens helped design a project working on quinoa instead of tomatoes. This funding paid for my fellowship but also to send me to Bolivia to make my mapping populations and work in the field. I also taught part of a genetics class. The prof - Alejandro Bonifacio, ran trials around the Altiplano and I used to ride on the back of his motorcycle to field days to demo the new varieties. After harvesting and showing the results to the local farmers he would play the charango and we would eat with the village.

More to come:

1. Poster session at Plant and Animal Genome Conference- 2002
2. Likelihood - A.W.F Edwards and The Analysis of Messy Data- 2004
3. High speed video of popcorn popping - 2008
4. Reorg right after I started at Monsanto - 2009
5. Early corn trials and visit to Canada 2014
6. Nigeria IITA cowpea advancement - 2019
7. Cotton design team 2023

Thoughts for an old friend

 My father died almost 10 years ago.  When he passed away I had contact with him for like 5 years and only sporadically by phone and once or twice a year when my work gave me the opportunity to travel to Hawaii as part of a rapid cycle corn breeding in person.  I am grateful for those visits because otherwise I wouldn't have seen him before he died. When I wrote about his death 10 years ago my feelings were a little raw. I didn't know how to process the complexity of what I felt when he died. This has shifted or softened or changed over time.  I have more nostalgia and fond memories of him now than I think comes through in his obituary that I wrote then.

When he died, his friends had a service for him in Hawaii that I did not attend. My father had converted at some point to the Baha'i religion.  He never mentioned this to me in any of our conversations, but his friend Bill from the Baha'i had helped set him up with an apartment and got him on disability so he wasn't homeless. I had a couple of quite frustrating and emotionally draining conversations with Bill leading up to the funeral because I wasn't following the Bahai traditions for burial. Bill was trying to convince me to follow Baha'i practices and bury my father in Hawaii. I did not have the money to pay for a plot in Honolulu. Total cost for a burial plot and casket in Honolulu that complied with Bahai rules would have been almost 100K and I had no instructions from my father on how to handle his funeral. So I had him cremated and the ashes sent back to me. My mom and brothers found a small plot in Nampa. We had a family graveside service where we buried the ashes in a small wooden box. And I didn't know what to do with his personal effects that were piled in a terrible mess left after his death in his apartment that the police told me they would arrange with the landlord to take care of it because it was a biohazard and there was nothing of any value inside. He had no money or will or physical things worth salvaging so none of us went to Hawaii. Bill sent me tapes from the Baha'i service but I couldn't make it all the way through them because I was angry and heartbroken that the person they eulogized was a stranger to me.   

I had one emotional wound that I kept circling back to.  It still is a sore point that I haven't quite forgiven or forgotten. In my last conversation with Bill, he said to me - "It sounds like you feel like your father abandoned you." 

I paused for a long time and told Bill, "He did. I didn't see him for more than 20 years." 

Bill couldn't believe this.  He said my father talked about us kids all the time - I asked him if he talked about his grandchildren. Bill said he didn't know that he had any.  He didn't even know my children's names. My father didn't ever ask about them or much about the details of my life after we finally did get back in touch.  He did tell my sister he was proud of everyone for all of their education and professional achievements but thought I just pollinated corn for some seed company - not the worst description of my job, but I was a heck of an expensive corn pollinator. 

Recently, my old bishop from my childhood ward/church contacted me with a conference talk and bearing his testimony again about the church and inviting me to come back.  It poked this old wound because this was someone that I desperately looked up to as a father figure, but as I moved away, got married and built a life I lost touch with him. There were three men in that ward that were pillars of support for me when I was a teen - they were mentors and confidants and friends. They took me on campouts, fed me dinner with their families, and helped my family both financially and spiritually and emotionally.  I will always be grateful for them, but when I graduated their job was done and they went on to focus on their own families and new church responsibilities and projects.  I didn't hear from any of them for 20 years. 

Then I wrote about leaving the church and posted it on Facebook.  Suddenly, I was a project again and they reached out to talk to me about my "potential" and how sad they were that I was making this choice, and to send me scriptures and conference talks.  I know intellectually this is Mormon for "I am thinking about you and care about you." but it still smarts in this same kind of way because my old mentor doesn't really know me as a person now or my family.   

DNA Replication Real Time!