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Friday, March 28, 2008

Checkin' In

Wow! (expressing surprise, not World of Warcraft). Kevin actually wrote in the blog! It's a miracle. Well, here's part of a blog I've been working on for a couple of weeks. I'll just fill in what Kevin left out.

First off, Riley is okay. He was given a clean bill of health (and we were told he now weighs over 90 pounds). His thyroid is functioning properly; he has a seasonal hormone change that results in the loss of hair. It has to do with the low amount of daylight and low productions of serotonin, much like humans suffering from S.A.D. Now that the weather has turned and the days are getting longer, his hair has grown back in. He's still shedding like crazy, but at least he doesn't have bald spots. I don't blame him for losing his hair because of the South Bend winter. We have more cloudy days per year than Seattle! In fact, our weather is often referred to as the "permacloud." But spring should be around the corner any time now...hopefully.

We had a good Easter. We were planning on going with some friends to Notre Dame's Easter brunch on Sunday, but they sold out of tickets early. So, we were forced to cook Easter dinner ourselves. It turned out great even though it was quickly slapped together. We had the full works and a full house.

We're managing to stay busy. I head to Florida this weekend and Kevin's going to a photography seminar in Chicago. There's always something going on, but we're still loving the Midwest and having a great time!

Wait... This isn't World of Warcraft




Look at this... I'm finally putting up a blog post. Its been a little while so I figured it might be something good to do since I have the day off. Besides, what else I'm I supposed to do eh?...

Sorry, I started that several hours ago but got side tracked playing... errrr doing something else. Boy this month has just flown by. Its hard to believe its already the 28th. We've been pretty busy with our normal work/school tasks. I'll just try to highlight a few of the things we did.

First off as the last blog post referenced work was pretty crazy for me. In a quick summery of what happed is that I ended up deleting the company website. oops I'm working on moving sites from one server over to another and during this process I hit the wrong button which overlaid one of the sites over the main internal site. We then tried to restore to a backup but we had problem after problem come up that prevented us from restoring to a backup. We would setup test environments that were identical to our production server and it would restore without a problem there. Well, after putting in about 120 hours in a 11 day span we finally were able to get the site restored back to how it should have been. Most of those hours were spent between the hours of 11 pm- 6 am since that is the only time we could really take down our production environment. Not a good week. I was ready to go back to Walmart. :-)

We made it to Chicago on St. Patrick's Day weekend to see the festivities there. We met up with the Behlings who used to live here in South Bend. It was fun to see the river dyed green and go to the parade. The parade was something that was fun to see but we probably wont do it again. We're not really parade people and it seemed like there was just a lot of random people walking down the street with one high school band after another.

We have also been busy trying to get our upcoming trips planned. Becky has to go to Florida the for a week to work with another lab down there on some techniques they use. We have also been trying to plan our summer trips to Germany and Uganda. It's definitely going to be a crazy summer.

Riley is doing well and is still as cute as ever. Its starting to warm up so I'm not sure what he is going to do without the snow. Its kind of funny watching him try to find the last patch of snow so he can flop down and roll around in it.

I know its been a month since our last post but I can't think of anything else to post. (that doesn't mean that there is not anything more but just that I'm horrible with recalling things.) I'll leave it up to Becky to come back and add more if there is anything I'm forgetting. :-)

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Work Sucks

Well, this week hasn't been the best of weeks. Poor Kevin has been working non-stop. He claims he'll be writing his own blog entry explaining what's going on, so I'll leave it at that. Besides being a hard work week, it's also been tough for our little Riley. I was brushing Riley last Sunday when I noticed some bald patches on his sides. At first I freaked out thinking I had brushed him too much. After being assured by a myriad of people that you can't over-brush a dog, I was told to take him to the vet. I took him in on Thursday. The vet wasn't overly concerned but thinks Riley may have a thyroid hormone deficiency. We won't know for sure until the results of the blood sample are back on Monday. If it is a thyroid hormone deficiency, we'll have to give Riley a daily hormone pill for the rest of his life. Other than that, there isn't anything else that needs to be done.

Another fun Riley story- Friday morning, after showering, I walked over to Kevin's side of the bed to give him a good-morning kiss when I stepped in something wet. I prayed it was just water from Riley's early morning roll in the snow, but when we turned on the lights we discovered a huge lake Riley had created sometime that night. We can't figure out when he did it. We let him out at 11pm, 3am, and 6am. Anyway, it was a great way to start the day. It took us a long time to get it all cleaned up. I'm just hoping it was an accident and not some sort of regression or rebellion on his part.

As for my week at school, things were good for the most part. It was a week full of meetings, so I didn't get as much lab work done as I wanted to. But great things came out of all of my meetings, so I can't complain too much. I was able to meet with some Ugandan ambassadors from the Uganda Martyrs University about possible collaborative research efforts in Uganda. I will likely be taking an exploratory trip in May or June to Uganda. I'm very excited about the research possibilities.

Not much else is going on. This upcoming week is spring break, but that doesn't mean anything to grad students except there will be less undergrads in the hallways. Oh, I should tell you that I'm writing this entry on my new desktop computer that Kevin bought for me. I think there are some ulterior motives, but I love it just the same. Stop eying my computer monitor, Kevin!