So, I am down in CA for the holidays. I am working out of my in-laws house to try and get stuff done. The boys were supposed to go down for a nap, so I told Rachel to go ahead and go shopping. Of course, neither would sleep so I had the great idea of just heading to McDonalds to work. They can play on the play structure, and I can work in peace... and even get some food. So I had a McRib and pulled out my laptop to work. About 30 min in, my 4 year old screams at me "I gotta go poop!" My two year old is somewhere buried in the playland maze. I yell for him to come out immediately, he says "No Daddy." So what do I do? In a quick judgement, I close my laptop, throw it in my bag, and then just leave my 2 year old, Ben, in the play structure to head for the bathroom. So yes, I apparently value my laptop more than my 2 year old. I then get to the restroom, pull down Lucas' pants, and get it smeared all over my left arm, all over his legs, on the floor, even a bit on the wall... I clean him as fast as I can, then abandon Lucas on the pot to see if Ben has been stolen yet. Mind you, my laptop bag is on my back this whole time. Not even the best trained kidnapper could coax my Ben from this maze- so of course he is still in there. I begin my hostage negotiations and somehow convince him to come out. I think he figured out that something was wrong with Lucas, so he came out. We then headed back to the bathroom. I am sure he is still in there- because I don't care how sick you are, nobody was touching that shit smeared kid. So, I lock the bathroom door and finish the cleaning. Underwear were beyond saving, they got pitched in the trash. Spent about 5 min cleaning it all up without vomiting, although I felt worst for Ben. He kept saying "Daddy! I want out! I don't want to smell Lucas!" It was so much fun. Despite it being a nightmare... I still think the previous McDonald's crap my pants experience was worse...

Out on the river can be quite an adventure.  Today was  a doozy so it has surpassed the threshold that actually requires that I blog about it.  So after a tremendous day of amphibian hunting yesterday (30 toads in less than an hour), we headed out on the river to find more amphibians.  No big deal.  I have gone out on the river 5-6 times and nothing happened.  

Well we search for hours and find not a single toad.  Let me rephrase that, we cannot CATCH a single amphibian.  Heard a Cricket frog laughing at us... even saw a Leopard frog twice but it was gone in a second.  We keep driving in the boat and are all looking at a poten

tial spot for toads.  Then out of nowhere, I hear a huge splash.  I am thinking something is wrong with the boat, and then something large smacks me in the thigh.  My heart is racing only to discover a huge fish had JUMPED INTO THE BOAT!  After spending a full day out on the lake trying to catch fish with my brother, randomly a fish jumps into my boat!  I have no idea what kind of fish this is... so let me know if you happen to know.  

I just know it is an ugly fish.  So, after that choas  we pull up to a sweet spot with lawn chairs on a beach and find a couple toads.  Here is my favorite shot of one.  

We swab those guys for disease and decide to call it a day since Thunderstorms are threatening.  So I have my new Masters student drive the boat over to where I am at.  Apparently, she had never driven a boat before that moment.  No, she didn't lose the boat or anything crazy.  She just took awhile to get it over there.  And it was only a couple feet of water deep at points so it was a challenge to navigate.  I lounged in the lawn chair while hearing the engine rev up a bit too high at times.  Whatever.  She'll learn.  She gets close enough, and we jump in the boat.  I start crossing the river to the deep end and am cruising along and the engine dies.  Weird.  So I try to restart it.  It goes for about 30 seconds then dies again.  Sweet.  Mind you we have not seen a single boat on this stretch of the river the entire day.  I am stuck.  I call a grad student to come rescue us, but he is 2 hours away.  I call another grad student who comes to our rescue.  Of course we are waiting on the river for an hour for him to arrive.  I turn on the weather radio.  "Late Afternoon thunderstorms expected with heavy rains and quarter sized hail.  Potential for tornados to develop."  I turn off the weather radio.  Finally, the grad students arrive.  Apparently, there is a water port that spits out water to cool the engine and it was plugged from all the burnouts in the mud.  They brought a nifty air compressor and blew it out.  After that, no problems.  I high tailed it home.  Tonight was date night, and I was to not be late.  So I arrived home 15 min before the babysitter coated in sweat and suntan lotion.  A quick shower and all was good.  Just a regular day catching frogs.

Gearing up...

I got my boat, I got two Masters students, I have an undergrad, and stuff is finally starting to roll! I've even recruited a few researchers across the state to join in collecting data for me! I have a week of school left, and then have to deal with grading term papers and finals- but then I'm preparing to jump in full bore with a summer of active research. Lot's of planning to do, and lots to manage, but it should be fun! I'll be incredibly busy this summer trying to get as much data as possible to prepare for my first major grant submission next summer. Lots of work will be done out on the Missouri River- catching frogs. I took the boat out for the first time last week. I was a little concerned, it being the first time out- but the thing handled like a dream. Having handled my dad's ocean boat for so long- it took a bit to adjust to how little and light my boat is. So easy to pull off and put on the trailer! Engine purrs. Even a random guy on the dock commented on how quiet it was! I hope to take it out on the river for a trial run ASAP. Weather and availability of an experienced river captain are the limiting factors. Once I get comfortable running on the river, it'll be off to the races!

I have it parked in the garage right now. The boys love it! Climbing up here and there running around. Hopefully the weather will be nice for a trip up to the lake next weekend!

Staring at the tombs...

So yesterday I thought I would try out my new 2-way radios with Lucas. As I was outside waiting for him to put his shoes on, I started off the head up the bluff that we live next to. He was taking forever so I just kept on going up the bluff until I got to the top. What was up there? The Vermillion cemetary. I think that I knew it was up there somewhere, but it is like right above us. So I started touring around the graves and then came upon 4 or 5 like full fledged tombs. (Quite suitable for Easter). These things were built into a small hill on top of the bluff and the entrance to them look out over the landscape below with the Vermillion and Missouri rivers off in the distance. Quite a spectacular view. Unfortunately, now as I sit on my front room sofa- I can sit out and stare at the 15th green on the nearby golf course, but more directly I can see these tombs through the trees. Not sure how I never really noticed them before, but now that I know they are there... that is all I can see. I keep thinking about Return of Living Dead movies with zombies piling out and chanting- "Brains.... BRAAAINNSSS!" Perhaps some day 10 years from now my pair of bolt cutters will go missing and an hour later Lucas will come back saying... "Dad, I accidentally locked Ben in the Brookman tomb."

I now have a twitter.  i don't know why, but Kobe and Shaq have them, and that is reason enough for me.  I can now update my status as much as I want without feeling like i am annoying my facebook friends too much... HA!  I have added a feed to the right- you can read along there for updates or "follow me."

I am off tomorrow to Missouri to see my dear old friends Bryndyn and Taina.  I am not looking forward to driving through hellish weather- but it will be great to see them!

Nothing major going on, just thought I should blog since I have not in awhile.  I am typing on my new laptop- an HP Elitebook 6930p.  It is a "business class" notebook.  I finally figured out that my laptops might last longer than 2 years if I actually bought a durable one that was actually made to withstand 8 hours a day of abuse.  The cute thing it has is a keyboard light.  You know when you are typing in a dark room and the screen is plenty bright but then you try and hit some keys you don't normally use (numbers) and realize you can barely see them.  Apparently, this geeky light solves that problem...  The real treat with this laptop is that it comes with Vista.  I have yet to actually use Vista heavily until this laptop.  I have to say that I actually really like it.  Of course there are things that are different and take some more time to figure out.  But, it just seems "smarter" - much more Mac-like where you just plug something in and the computer figures it out for you.  Have not had to go in and find all these obscure menus to get something simple to work - like say a printer.  So, I give it a big thumbs up.  I think they have fixed all the major bugs that everyone had issues with.  

What else... selecting grad students is much harder than I thought it would be.  I have been really successful at selecting undergrad students to do research with me.  Perhaps it is the ability to meet them, but more so I am thinking that there was always a limited pool.  I found someone that was good- went with him/her and that was it.  Well this time around I, at last count, have 26 students interested in working in my lab.  Not 26 students that are interested in applying to our program generally, but 26 that want to work with me specifically!  So that of course makes me feel good.  Especially when I go seek others advice and their reply is "In my 8 year career I might have had 20 interested total."  I'd like to take all the credit, but it pretty much is what I do.  Everyone loves that I actually am trying to save the frogs and not just study them for science sake.  So after going through resumes, transcripts, GRE scores, and letters of rec- I just get overwhelmed with all the data.  I literally spent almost all day Friday in the front office going through files.  In the end, I think I have selected a top 5 for sure, and perhaps have two favorites.  The applications are not actually due until March 15, and I thought that I might have them selected ahead of time, but apparently I need to run my choices by the committee first before saying anything.  I am looking forward though to having students of my own!  Not only because it'll be cool, but because I keep getting involved in new projects and cannot possibly do all the work myself.

The grant has been submitted!  Which grant you ask?  A $300,000 request that will allow the department to purchase fancy molecular devices that do all sorts of cool things with DNA.  When bringing up the idea of submitting this grant to the rest of the faculty, I naively thought that they wouldn't make the frog guy write it.  Well... turned out that they overwhelming thought it was a great task to give to the new guy.  Which is awesome considering I have so little else to do.  Nonetheless, when requesting help 3 weeks ago, I was met with very little help or input.  In fact, at one point a professor suggested we just quit and submit it later.  Which actually sounded like a great idea to me because it was like moving a mountain trying to get anything going.  So, I told everyone that we were just going to wait 6 months and submit it then.  Well after taking a couple days off and feeling really good, I checked and realized that the grant was only offered once a year!  So I had to go around to everyone, and muster up support to get a grant that had basically nothing written to a full bore submission in a little over a week's time.  Of course, this week was also the week we started classes to add even more to the chaos.  So I basically spent the entire week writing, editing, hounding, getting signatures... working every second during the day, and well into the night to get this thing done.  In the end, everyone stepped up and helped, but it was exhausting.  I literally walked into my ecotox course at 11am and talked about playmates and pesticides for an hour, went over to the Dean's office for a signature, ate lunch while reading my teaching evaluations (more on that below), printed out the 81 page document to proof read, showed up at my graduate level class- Foundation in Ecology- literally without having ANYTHING prepared.  Apparently the grad students are used to it, and praised me for having buttoned my shirt correctly (commenting on how another unamed prof was in complete disarray when submitting his grant).  Somehow I managed to pull something together on the fly and headed back to my office for the final proofreading.  And now... it is submitted!

So to clarify some comments- playmates in class- I was discussing linear trends and found an interesting one that I knew the students would rememeber-

Teaching Evals- So I scored a 4.5 out of 5.  Which I would think is pretty damn good for my first go at it especially.  But, after some magical statistical adjustment it drops down to a 4.1 which is just average...  No idea why, but apparently it weights things like if the students are motivated to take your course then it penalizes you?  Since they are likely to give you good scores?  If you teach a course no one likes (like statistics) then it bumps up your scores.  Totally lame.  So the message I am getting is to teach crappy courses that no one wants to take.

I am taking tomorrow off since I worked all of MLK day and have missed this entire week- the inaguration, and even the season premiere of LOST!  Of course, there is no rest for me.  I swear ten seconds after I submitted the grant- I got an email from a journal giving me a second notice that a review I have to do is overdue...  Never ends!

One more blog for 2008!  I am on a roll.

Since we are staying away from home to what will be 6 weeks, one can expect the kids to go awry.  For Lucas, it is his pooping.  He held his poop for 5 DAYS.  Yeah.  I was so pissed on that 5th day out of frustration for sitting hours on end with him waiting for this poop to come, and also scared that this was getting dangerous and some part of his digestion would rupture from holding in all this crap.  Well the day came, and all were happy once again.  Apparently though, mom kept slipping him the medicine unbeknownst to me.  So the following day, I get a "Dad, I just pooped my pants."  Awesome.  I am glad that he pooped, and glad that he at least had the decency to poop his pants at a place where I could handle the situation, not like say in a McDonald's play structure.  So the next day, I am thinking I had better be on top of making him go to the bathroom since he is free flowing now.  We pull up to a McDonald's and I think, I had better make him go- it has been awhile.  Yet fast food restaurants are incredibly sloppy to begin with, and when you have a 3 year old in there that doesn't fully grasp the rule of touch as little as possible when in there, I decide to skip it until after dinner.  My mistake.  So sure enough, Lucas is up in the play structure like a hamster in a tube and starts crying.  I think, "OH CRAP" or something similar to that, and sure enough- "Daddy I peed and I pooped in my pants!"  Sweet.  "Lucas, go down the slide you are standing right next to." "NO, I CAN'T"  His 4 year old cousin goes in to help him- but Lucas just flips out and wants nothing to do with it.  So after 5 min of coercing him to come down, I just have to go retrieve him.  So my petite body starts to make its way up the tube slide.  After a sweet climb up the slide, I get to the top mad as hell and demand that Lucas come over to the slide.  Still, no.  So I go out and get him.  His pants are soaked and it smells RIPE.  So I throw him down the slide and realize that my only route of escape is the pee streaked poop scented slide.  AWESOME!  So after that delightful trip I am faced with the hope that there is another pair of underwear in the diaper bag.  I then realize that the thing I wanted to avoid, the fast food restaurant bathroom, was now going to be a lot nastier to deal with.  I reject that notion and head out to the parking lot with Lucas.  I strip him down outside (thank goodness we are not in South Dakota) and remove his pee soaked pants, and his loaded up Thomas the Train underwear.  After cleaning him up, I just throw the underwear in the trash.  Not worth trying to save.  I throw on his pajamas, and our dinner is finished.  I cannot wait to do all this again soon...

Christmas Gifts

So Lucas is still a bit inexperienced with the Christmas gift thing.  He asked Santa for a Wall-E toy that turns into a box, apparently the remote controlled $60 Wall-E my dad bought him earlier just wasn't cool enough.  So we are opening gifts at 

Rachel's house, and Lucas has the expectation that the present he opens is going to be this Wall-E.  I have this all on video- so I'll have to post it.  But he tears through the gift and opens the box to find... a shirt!  "Dad!  A shirt?!  This is not a Wall-E!!!"  Looks like Aunt Rebecca failed on that gift.  He turns to the next present which was a sweet monster Doctor's kit- 

which actually is a great gift because he plays with his cousins kit EVERY time he goes over there.  BUT- it's not a WALL-E!  So he clips that gift too and actually turns to his broth

er Ben's singing spiderman.  So I pull out the gift that might save Christmas (also from Aunt Rebecca) a box of "reject bots" from the Wall-E movie.  He is ecstatic!  Finally.  Of course, Santa should have dropped off the Wall-E that turns into a box at this grandma's house, because he had to wait until morning to get that.  So fast forward to Christmas morning at my parents house.  Lucas is happy because he opens like 6 different Wall-Es, Jake is happy because he got a Blu-Ray player, Ben is just always happy, but Rachel is NOT HAPPY.  I imagine Rachel will tell her side of the story on her blog-  but here is how I saw it.  

As a promotion to one of my massive lab equipment orders, they threw in a free Wii video game system.  Not too shabby eh?  Truth is, I got a sweet deal on the bundle as it was, but that definately sealed the deal.  Now, I think Wii's are cool, but no way I'd spend $250 on that when I could be that much closer to a PS3.  But, I admit they are fun for the whole fam

ily so we will have fun with this free one.  Now, since we are in CA for forever- the Wii was not going to show up before we left.  So, I think, this will be a fun surprise to present on Christmas instead of just going home and telling Rachel about it.  After ordering it, I see that there is a Wii fit apparatus I am pretty sure that Rachel would enjoy it- particularly since we are walled up in the single digit weather for months at a time.  So I buy it on black Friday and then decide I had better tell her I got her a gift because we originally were not going to buy each other Christmas gifts.  So, it probably would have been 

best if I just wrapped up the Wii fit and taped the promotional ad to it so she could see that I didn't spend money on it.  Sadly though, I did not take that route.  I had her open up a controller first- to which she would realize that I had got a wii.  Then she opened up a second part to the controller (the nunchuk)- to which she said and I quote "A numchuk?!  Whatever that is, thanks a lot."  She was pissed.  Lucas opened up a Wii Cars Movie game, I opened up a Wii Star Wars game and lightsaber attachments, she opens up a Dancing with the Stars game, and then thinking it is the actual Wii- opens up a Wii fit.  She is totally flipping out at this point thinking that I have pissed all this money away on a Wii and is especially mad because while she will enjoy it, there are so many other things she 

would have spent that mone

y on first.  Finally, after torturing her for 15 min and even having my dad tease her by quoting Lucas from the previous night "This is NOT A WALL-E!" I pull out the ad.  She realizes that it was free and suddenly changes her entire countenance.  She now realizes that it is pretty  cool, but is still not cool with the what I pulled on fooling her.  I do regret it now, because I didn't think she would react to that degree, but on the other hand it was pretty funny.  I only wish her dad could have seen it- because he is the king of those types of pranks, and once I told him my plan I just couldn't go back...  

So much to say...  Life has been crazy and I really do need to be better at updating this blog, but if I can do it once a month, I'll consider it a success. 

So we left Vermillion, SD the week before Thanksgiving.  I gave a seminar at my old alma mater Pepperdine University and met to talk over a paper I am writing with my old advisor.  Once that was done it was fun with Thanksgiving.  The big fun was watching my laptop die a few days previous to my trip to Mexico.  I had yet to finish my 30 min talk for the conference I was attending when suddenly I just could not get it to start.  Nothing.  Awesome.  Luckily, I had access to the hard drive, and I am a big time prof with a research budget- so I just went to Best Buy and bought a "netbook."  It is a laptop that wieghs only 3 lbs.  It is not high powered and would probably melt if I tried to run statistics on it- but it is the perfect little thing to throw on your lap and finish your presentation on.  It is also sweet in that it is small enough to use on the plane without tilting your screen completely forward because of the seat in f

ront of you.  I am sure I'll have to deal with folks from purchasing for not going through them, but that is old hat for me now.

The conference was great.  I met some people, hung out with others I knew, but most of all- I was able to travel with just my wife!  We left the kids at her parent's house, and Rachel sat poolside reading while I went to talks.  Then in the evening we toured  around the old city of Merida.  It was great.  We took an evening trip to see the ruins at Uxmal, which were really cool- 

we stayed for the "lights and sounds" show there though- which was really lame. 

We then returned and have been bouncing back and forth between my parents house and hers.  I haven't done nearly the amount of work that I had hoped to do, but about the amount I expected to get done...  It's all good though, because I got to sit in the Premier seats at Staples Center t

wice.  Once for a Lakers game, the other for a Kings game.  Also took the kids to the Long Beach aquarium- that was pretty cool as well.

  Unfortunately, I had scarred Lucas for life on entering small dark places with lines of people.  Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.  My aunt Jackie was gracious enough to take us all to Disneyland once 

again.  We started off well with Dumbo, but then I thought Mr. Toad would be fun.  Nope.  It basically ruined Lucas for the entire day.  Any ride after that he pretty much flipped out on.  It was a miracle to get him onto It's a Small World.  When he saw the boats outside going he was ok with it, but once he saw the boat go INSIDE- nope.  I did what any good dad does and forced him onto the boat kicking and screaming.  Luckily it worked this time, because even though that ride is a little scary to me (lots of dolls

 singing gives me Chucky nightmares) Lucas thought it was ok.  

Christmas was great... but I am going to save that special story for after lunch... Yes two blogs in one day!