Wave of Mutilation

I'd make this really full of links and stuff just to show you that I'm legit, but I'm feeling lazy right now.

I was scrounging around and been thinking, with all the babies born into and around the Lassen family, we should just buy an ultrasound system. I googled "ultrasound craigslist" and found one in Rhode Island in good working condition for $3000. Not bad. Brand new they're between $10,000 and $50,000 and even higher.

We're digging around all the utah craigslists and Ventura County's for cars lately. Looking for any Japanese car with under 90k miles on it. Acura TL's or Legends, Altimas, Galants, Accords, Camrys, and even Honda CR-Vs. Usually anything that looks like a steal turns out to be one "Oh I'm in the UK and can't drive my american car so I'm selling it for dirt cheap and shipping it for free if you use the 3rd party money handler I set up for you." FLAGGED for REMOVAL booyah.
I'm currently trying to find someway to easily save flash video files from the internet, there's a couple I've found but don't have the full capacity I'm looking for. There's an awesome YouTube video with the cast of SpongeBob Squarepants voicing over scenes from classic movies like Casablanca and the Godfather. Awesome.

I better go. Gotta get my nightly fix of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" with Emily. We used some Christmas gift cards and stuff to buy the whole first and second seasons and watch a couple of episodes a night. We did this a year ago when we first discovered Avatar and watched them all online. Excellent, excellent show. Anxiously awaiting episodes 14-21 of the third and final season. They took a break after episode 11 (December) while airing two more episodes in Canada, that we watched online (there's lots of copyright infringement occuring so everyone can watch).

Sometime before May they'll start airing 12-21 in the US on Nickelodeon as 10 Straight Weeks of Avatar. Oh man. Until then: where is Uncle Iroh? What's with the secrecy behind the Pai-sho game? Are there still other airbenders around? How is Azula and the Firelord going to get taken down? How cool is Zuko going to become now that he's changed his life around?

Mr. Grieves

This is just going to be a brief one.

I'm terribly disappointed in the American people for choosing John McCain over Romney. What on earth is appealing about this guy? I admit, reading the summary of his platform he sounds pretty decent. Except that underlying all of it is just a dumb guy with smart people working for him. He will not fix the foreign relations problems that we have right now, I think he'll only make them worse. He is just a "tough" guy who loses his temper easily and will only cause lots of problems. Despite his good intentions stated in his platform, I think he is too corrupt and conniving to do what's best for the country (just watch, he'll turn his back on Huckabee before this is all over, once he's done using him). I think he'll only do what's best for himself and his friends. (Note, these are some of the big criticisms of the Bush campaign, why elect someone who is going to perpetuate these and make them worse). Bottom line: I don't think he thinks very much except for how to serve himself.

Now, to be fair, there's definitely some of that in all of us, but the President of the United States is supposed to at least be better at hiding it.

I think much the same of Hillary Clinton.

But as for Barack Obama: here's a guy who I disagree with on many things, but I agree with on many things too. I like his stands on education, foreign policy, economics, health care, and most of the stuff on this page. His liberality concerning gay rights, I do disagree on, for moral and religious reasons. But he's smart, and he seems to think about what's best for the country. I'd trust him. (A good friend of mine says if a democrat makes it into office, he hopes it's Obama, because he'd be the least effective. This may be true, but also the damage control would be minor compared to someone like Hillary or McCain being in office).

I'm still praying and holding out for a good-sized miracle securing the bid for Romney. Keep the faith alive that something better will happen. But, as a plan B, pray and hope for Obama, not Hillary, to win the election. If it's McCain vs. Hillary, I think we're all in trouble. As my coworkers say, it's a contest between a douche-bag and a crap sandwich.

In the end, I guess it's good that the president is only in for 8 yrs max and has to contend with Congress anyways. Hopefully, one person can't bring the country to ruins. It was made that way on purpose.

Dig For Fire

The Robbins were nice enough to let us have one of their old digital cameras, and we got so used to not having a camera, we haven't been taking many pictures with it. Here's a few from the past couple months, just in case anyone forgets what we look like.

Grace's bracelets and accessories

Christmas morning at the Lassen's

Christmas lights at Temple Square in Salt Lake City

My ladies

Hey! That's me!
(there's not many good pictures of me, I couldn't be picky)

Broken Face

I bought my last pair of eyeglasses from this place called Zenni Optical. I think it's great because they're so cheap. I bought my glasses a year and a half ago for about 50 dollars (I upgraded the lenses because mine would be so thick and I'm pretty hard on glasses) which is still a sixth the price I'd pay at LensCrafters for similar frames and lenses. So when the frames broke over Christmas break, I only panicked because I didn't have any backup eye wear to see with, and I'm pretty blind. Our family optometrist, Dr. Braff, was real great and found some similar frames that would work for the time being to pop the lenses into.

Last night I ordered some new glasses of the same style (I did pay extra for my high index lenses, so I'll just keep the new free lenses as backups to the frames), but Emily and I decided I should have a couple pairs of glasses on hand in case something happens and since these are so cheap. I need your help picking out a few and since they're backups I don't mind them being a little less than "professional". Here's what I had in mind, if you see anything on the site, point them out and drop a link my way.

Number 1
The black ones (for these frames, I'd have to go for High index lenses otherwise they'd be real thick looking on bottom the edges.


Number 2
Any color. I'd wear these with matching tinted color lenses for when I go to the club and wanna look real slick





Number 3
In brown, these would be old-style professor glasses to make me look smart and retro at the same time.



Number 4
I kinda like these in the clear/blue variety.

Tame

I have to admit, Macs are great machines. They're like the Audis or BMWs of the computer world. Those who own them, love them, and for good reason. I'm still no fan of the Mac Operating system, but the hardware is excellent and it creates an entire package feel that just clicks real well. But like their automobile counterparts, when they break, they really break. And lately, they break a lot more often than anybody wants to admit. At work, we used to be about 50-50 Macs and PCs, with the most macs on campus in our college. And lately, it's shifted to about 70-30 Macs to PCs, mostly because the guy in charge of buying computers is a huge fan of the new Intel-based Macs that you can load Windows onto (with extra software that must be purchased by the individual, not the school). So he is talking all the faculty into switching over, with moderate success.

We see a lot of macs, and a lot of them break, much more often than the PCs. And when they break, its almost always hardware which must be replaced at your own expense unless you bought the 3-year AppleCare Warranty. And the funny thing is still, when you go onto HP's website and put together a laptop with equal or superior hardware to the Mac laptops, it's still a few hundred bucks cheaper. We've done it a few times just to make sure. What Mac does have is a great deal of innovation and they pull if off with a sense of prestigiousness. Perhaps thats why they attract those mentioned in this article describing a survey of Mac users that describes Mac users as more openminded, liberal, less modest, and generally have a sense of superiority over the general public. In my experience I'd have to agree, but since I didn't conduct the survey myself, I have to take someone else's word for it.

Of course, I wouldn't mind having a MacBook Pro or iMac myself.

Bone Machine

I've been shown this video by no less than 3 professors now and I still think it's cool.

It's not nearly as good quality as on the main site, so watch it there if you can. Some of it appears magical, that's cause it is. The animation is all based off of real molecular data, so the shapes and movements of the molecules is as accurate as they can make it. The trippiest looking guy is the Dr. Seuss-style motor protein walking along the myosin (big tube) highway, pulling along the vacuole (storage sack), through the cell. The smaller tubes are for structure

In real life though, the cell is a much more crowded place, no free space. The big cable things zipping and unzipping can do that because they are saturated in fluid that has all the pieces right there.

Also, the little zip lines are mRNA (info from DNA that can be sent into the main part of the cell), the little globs clamping on are Ribosomes and they spit out little proteins ordered from the info on the RNA.

The whole cell is supposed to be a white blood cell traveling on the inside of an artery or vessel. It crawls along with the sticky interactions of it's membrane proteins.

It starts out in the vessel, looks at the surface proteins, the upper side of the membrane, lower side of the membrane, skeletal structure of the cell, highway system of the cell (with centrioles in the background as the hub), nucleus and ER with mRNA going to protein, vacuole formation and golgi apparatus, vacuole merging with the outer cell membrane and dumping proteins and contents outside the cell, proteins making contact with the surface, and then the white blood cell flattens and leaves the vessel.

Cecilia Ann

I had a great time in Camarillo for the holidays. Here's a recap:

Christmas eve with the Lassens at Peter and Gayle's house. Lots of fun. Check out Cristin's blog or other family websites for pictures.

Christmas day we opened presents and stockings and had a merry ol' time. Later, we went to Leo Carillo, in the wind. The ocean was beautiful, the waves were amazing to watch as the wind would pick up the lip and spray off the tops of the waves, creating beautiful little tubes with mohawks.

New Year's Eve we played Bingo and Guitar Hero up at Peter and Gayle's house. Lots of fun. New Year's Day, I went with my cousin Jacob, spearfishing. He's got a 5ft Trident Pole spear and a little raft. So we decked ourselves out, drove up to Emma Wood's kelp forest and made our way out.

The water was so murky, we couldn't see the tip of Jacob's spear when you held the end up to your face. So we just swam around a bit, fought the wind by tying kelp to the boat, and braved the cold water for a few little dives into nothing. I swam around shooting kelp strands until the rope on the spear came loose and the spear kept going. I hesitated too long, and down the spear went.

Several dives later, and after recovering a wind blown raft, we gave up trying to find it. A sea lion showed up about 30 yards away checking us out. He followed us in, until he met up with a partner near the breakers.

I bought Jacob a replacement spear at Sports Chalet on the way home. If anyone's diving around Emma Wood, there's a polespear up for grabs.


The rest of the week, Emily and I took turns working for my dad and watching Grace until we drove to Erik and Cristin's on Friday in the big rain. It was really nice being with them at their place in Tehachapi. Saturday we drove home and hit some snow around Beaver, UT thick on one lane, but clear in the other and we had to slow down because it was falling so thick, but nothing too bad.

Yesterday, we spent the evening with the Robbins and played in the snow a little bit. Their gazebo got smashed over the break after collecting a few feet of snow on top of it and gale-force winds during the night. That's a bummer. But Grace had a blast sledding down the driveway.

This morning, Grace and I are hanging out while Emily is at her orientation for nursing school.