At home and sick with time for stream of consciousness

So, for all of you faithful readers, you may recognize this as a bit of a change. I haven't done an update like this since I took time off for Hannah's birth and most days I feel like I just don't have the time. But today, I am home alone, feeling under the weather, killing time on the internet while avoiding work-related activities, and inspired by reading my friend's blog. And with Sarah at her parents with the kids, all I have is time. So I thought I would give you an update on Murry life in San Diego from my perspective and try to make up for some lost time. Brace yourselves, this promises to be long.

For the most part, I really like life in SD. Maybe I am a little overly optimistic about things, but even though I have rarely left my bed this afternoon, life still seems pretty good. I think, for me, living back in southern CA is a little strange because it has been the home I didn't live in for the last 10 years or so. Being back is comfortable and familiar, but still new and a different way of life than we are used to. Hannah gets to play with dandelions, rollypollies, and snails. Okay, so she more stepped on the snail than played with it. Sarah assured me the clean-up was gross. All these are things I did growing up too and I don't remember seeing them in Boston. I am also really looking forward to a good beach day so we can take the girls out, dig holes, play in the waves, and go to tidepools. For those of you on the East Coast whose sense of warmth has been warped by winter, 70 degrees is not a good beach day.

Familiar CA things: we drive the 5 an ungodly amount (Sarah is probably on it right now), everything is made of stucco, being green means recycling or buying a fuel efficient car but having less than a car per adult is crazy, public transit is impractical and empty, stores come as chains in strips, homes come in subdivisions, and rain doesn't come.

As for the last part, it's not totally accurate. Soon after we arrived, it rained on my way home and I decided that, if biking is going to be my primary mode of transportation to and from work, I would need fenders. After living in Boston, this seemed self evident. I thought, even if it doesn't rain as much in the summer, this is the rainy season and I'll want them. The local bike shop didn't carry them and thought it odd I asked about them, but I found some at a bike commute place. After two more months of "winter," I have not needed them once. I am going to take them off when I am healthy and have a free moment. Maybe my Dad's solution is better--he gave us a bike rack so that Sarah can pick me up when it rains or maybe I will get dirty a few times a year on my ride home.

Biking to work has been great so far. At first, the big hills between here and there were intimidating and I even thought about getting an electric bike (though my dad assures me the physics don't work out . . . battery weight, gravity, big hills apparently a bad combo), but after the first few weeks I got used to them and they don't bother me anymore. There are a lot of reasons I like it: I have to exercise to get to work, its green, its cheap, and the only girl I have to impress is my wife. Usually when I get home, I feel invigorated from the exercise. Except today, when I decide to come home early because I feel sick and my wife is out of town. Biking today sucked.

Back to SD. If you want to get away from the stucco in SD, you have to get near the water because that is where people get creative, like the place where I work. I think the Salk building is really cool:

Apparently, so do the tourists, because we often get people wandering around taking pictures. The only downside is I kind of feel guilty sometimes if I talk to someone in the courtyard too long and ruin the tourists' picture. At harvard, we got tourists taking pics not because it looked so good (though the Med school marble isn't bad), but because it was "hah-vud." Here the tourists want to see one of Louis Kahn's masterpieces--for those of you who don't know him, like me a few months ago, he is a famous architect. The view of the Pacific also doesn't hurt. Sometimes when I walk into the courtyard, I actually utter "Wow!" under my breath because the view is awesome. Maybe I shouldn't admit to talking to myself.

On the topic of good views, a few days ago, I met my aunt and grandparents for lunch at the gliderport down the road from my work.
The building in the top left corner is the Salk. The white building on the edge of the grass is the gliderport with its little cafe.


My grandma was funny because she couldn't believe how casually I was dressed for work when they picked me up. What I didn't tell her was that the collared shirt I was wearing actually meant I was dressed up that day. Acadamia may not pay much, but it has its perks (like, based on my income and number of dependents, the federal government gives me an incentive to keep working instead of quiting and going onto welfare). The little gliderport deli seemed to be a hit, even though it was so foggy that you couldn't see the ocean (really thick fog) and there was no wind so there weren't any chutes in the air. On the way back, I tried to convince them that I chose the Salk for its science and not because of its location. It wasn't easy. Still, I haven't made optimal use of the location yet. I have only been surfing in the morning before work twice and was pretty rusty at that. I need more practice.

I warned you this would be stream of consciousness.

I actually did choose to go to the Salk for the science and have been glad I did so far. Many have asked what I am now working on and I know Sarah often has a hard time explaining it, so here is a brief summary:
I am back to working on HIV, which I worked on as an undergrad. Back then, I studied drug resistance and now I study its basic replication. Before I joined the lab, another postdoc there discovered that sulfation is required for HIV replication. Sulfation is a process by which your cells add sulfur groups to lots of different things. So, you might ask, why does HIV replication require a process that adds sulfur to things? We don't know. That is my project. The idea is that if we can block HIV by inhibiting a process in the host cell, it will be harder to get drug resistance. Of course, that is bad if the host actually needs said process. Fortunately, new cancer therapies have figured out how to target non-essential host processes and we're hoping we can find one too.

So far, I really like the work. I was most optimistic early on when I was reading up on things and planning experiments. It is easiest to explain things when you have none of your own data to mess up your theories. Fortuntately, the results come much faster in this system than in grad school when I worked on TB. With TB, most of my experiments took at least a month. Now, they are taking 2 days or less. It's awesome. The results themselves have been a bit mixed. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. My old boss from Davis once told me that 90% of what we do in science doesn't work. Maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration, but suffice to say that science requires patience, optimism, and stubbornness to go along with a healthy dose of skepticism. I feel like I started with the stubbornness, my faith in God gives me the optimism and grad school taught me patience and skepticism.

The people in my new lab have been great so far. The other postdocs and grad students have been very friendly and the lab manager (who runs day-to-day ordering and stuff) has been running everything forever, so he seems to have developed a system that works well. My new boss has lots of good ideas and has been helpful and encouraging so far. He also gives me the freedom to make my own work schedule, which lets me find my own work/family balance. After working for Eric for the past seven years, anything else would have seemed intolerable.

As for family, I love them and they keep me really busy. Usually, after work, I come home and relieve Sarah of kid-duty while she finishes up dinner. Hannah and Kate keep us busy throughout dinner (see Sarah's earlier post on dinner). I feed Kate baby food and then start my own meal as Sarah is finishing hers. Then we play with the kids 30-45 minutes before starting the bedtime routine: bath usually, followed by jammies, Sarah feeds K and I brush H's teeth, read to her from a kid's Bible, sing her Jesus Loves You and put her down, then take full K from Sarah, wrap her in 2 swaddling blankets and repeat song(s) and bed with her. Then I do the dishes. On a good night, Sarah and I get an hour to hang out and talk, watch a tv show on the internet, or go in the spa nearby (with baby monitor). Then comes bed. Usually, that means I put Sarah to bed and stay up to 11 pm to give Kate her first night feed before retiring myself. On good nights, K doesn't wake up two or three hours later and cry for an hour. The new day starts with breakfast before the kids wake up and then leaving for work around 7.

Maybe the sleep deprivation has something to do with why I don't want to leave bed today. I usually blame the girls for being little germ incubators. I guess I could say the sleep deprivation is their fault too, though that isn't quite fair because much of it is self induced. I can't say I slept all that much before H either. There are never enough hours in the day.

If you read Sarah's "Fireproof" post, you know that Sarah and I have started a Bible study through our new church for married couples. Despite the hokiness of the movie/book, it has actually helped us think about ways to help each other out. She has done the dishes for me a few times during our usual post-dinner pre-bed play time, which gives me more unwind time at night. I took the girls out in the double jogger yesterday morning for a dawn adventure to Starbucks to get her a morning coffee. Before the book, the idea never occurred to me. Even if it is a temporary boost, it's been good to spend some time just thinking about little ways to break up the routine and show each other we care.

Actually, the hardest part about being away from Boston is leaving all the people behind. I miss our church, my co-workers and fellow grad students, our neighbors, and all the other families we knew, especially the McFaddens. If we could just move them all here, life would be perfect--at least for us. The slow task of building new friendships is beginning but it never goes quickly enough, especially when you are at home with kids all day like Sarah. We do love being closer to our families. I feel like the several days that I have been able to hang out with my parents with nothing else to do has already helped me get to know them at a different level. Now if I could only get my siblings to come back too . . . maybe it'll be tough, but I hold out hope.

Anyway, I apologize that this post doesn't really give the people what they want--pics of H and K. Sarah took the camera and the girls with her and you don't want pics of me lying in bed typing anyway. Stay tuned for better posts from Sarah.