Another year, another adventure

Dan and I have our bags packed and ready to go. We leave for Spain early tomorrow morning. Looking at the calendar I am amazed that it is already March 2011. I realized I only posted twice on the blog last year! Needless to say, it was a great year that flew by. Highlights of the year include a cruise through the panama canal, camping in Lassen Volcanic National Park, buying our first new car (Subaru Forester!), trips to Colorado, Chicago, and Northern California to visit family, and one year closer to the PhD. Here is a quick photo montage:

Going through the Panama Canal

Hieroglyphs in Acapulco

Zip-lining in Costa Rica

Sawgrass Park in Florida

Camping at Union Reservoir in the Sierras

Danny Jones' wedding get-away car

Birthday wine country hot air balloon ride

Entire turkey dinner in our little apartment

Labrador Pumpkin!

Sarcomere cookies ... the fundamental unit of muscle!

My sarcomeres! (courtesy Melinda Cromie)

Lassen Volcanic National Park

Dan and I have wanted to visit Lassen Volcanic National Park since we moved to California. Dan is a sucker for anything with "volcanic" in its name and I am a sucker for smores. In celebration of our third aniversary and to just go camping we headed up for a long four day weekend along with some friends, Arum & Steve.

Dan, Arum & Steve cooking dinner

The first thing I loved about this park was that, unlike the rest of the national parks in California, it was not crawling with people. We had many of the trails to ourselves. The second thing I loved was our campsite. We spoiled ourselves and car camped for this trip. We had a great site in the Summit Lake North campground. As the name suggests, this campground sits at 7500 feet right beside a beautiful small mountain lake. I loved finishing the day with a very brisk, but refreshing swim in the lake. Steve enjoyed fighting small children for the best logs in the lake which he used as his personal rafts. I wanted him him to try log-rolling but he thought the logs were much better suited as flotation devices. The campground also had incredibly clean bathrooms with flushing toilets and sinks ....very spoiled.

Summit Lake

The hiking in Lassen was the true highlight of the trip. The scenery was beautiful and the trails were empty. Here are the hikes we did:
1) Lassen Peak - The 10,500 foot mountain in the center of the park which is the southern most volcano in the Cascades and last errupted from 1917-1921. The 2.5 mile trail climbs 2000 feet to the summit with gorgeous views of the surrounding mountains and lakes.

Everyone at the top of Mt. Lassen

2) Bumpass Hell to Kings Creek - We divided in two groups, boys and girls, for this hike so that we could combine two other hikes into a one-way trek. The girls got the downhill direction while the boys were stuck climbing another 1200 feet for the day (thanks boys!). This trail reminded me of a combination of Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Park. Starting from Bumpass Hell (the dowhill direction), you amble through mountain scenery until you descend over a ridge into the valley of Bumpass Hell. The smell of sulfur is almost overwhelming and steam, mud-pots, and bubling lakes cover the valley floor. The second half of the hike was probably my favorite hike for the weekend. The descent from Bumpass Hell to Kings Creek passes through a beautiful valley with tons of wildflowers and mountain lakes. The one-way trek is 4 miles.

Steaming Bumpass Hell

3) Choas Crags - The erruption of Lassen Peak in the early 1900s left fields of giant boulders across one side of the mountain. We took a hike up to a small lake left in the middle of this field of boulders.

Descending the chaos crags

4) Lake Manzanita & Nature Trail - Lake Manzanita is the main camping and ranger station in the park. The largest campground is also on this site. Lake Manzanita is a larger lake (room for kayaking and fishing) with stunning views of all the mountains in the park. We did a nice relaxing loop around the lake and a short nature hike by the visitors center. I finally learned the difference between a few pine trees on the nature hike .... Jeffrey Pines smell like butterscotch or vanilla (I'd heard this before but didn't know what kind of pine tree had this unique smell ... go smell a bunch of pine trees til you find one - it is great) ... Sugar Pines have gigantic (12-22") pine cones.

Staghorn Lichen

Mt. Lassen from Manzanita Lake

5) Kings Creek Falls - On our final morning we fit in one last hike to a series of waterfalls. The climb down was steep as the actual trail had been shut down due to rock slides and another trail had been forged down the side of the cliff/hill. The view at the bottom was well worth the climb - the waterfall cascaded down a long shoot through a narrow canyon.

Waterfalls!

In our three days and three nights in the park I felt like we got to see the majority of the park; however, on the far East side there is a cinder cone (think black sand dune) and the "Fantastic Lava Beds" that I would still like to see someday ... just have to schedule time for another camping trip - and more smores.

Subaru's first camping trip

Holidays

Holidays are over and a new year has arrived .... I can't believe it is 2010!! Weren't we supposed to have electric, flying cars by now??
We had a great holiday break in Colorado and Northern California. We took the cheap ticket and went to Colorado for the week before Christmas. This actually worked out great as we got to see everyone before they were too busy with Christmas plans and the weather was perfect. We did a few great hikes including one up Queen's Canyon at Glen Eyre. My parent's friend MegaMel was with us and you can check out the gorgeous frozen waterfalls in his YouTube clip.


I also learned to crochet from a group of graduate students before break and have been busy making simple potholders and a hat that I am quite proud of.

After a great week in Colorado we headed up to Northern California to visit Dan's family. This is the first Christmas we have spent up there and we had a great time enjoying all of Tina's great baking, visiting with the grandparents, and playing games with all the family. We also went to Fortuna's small theater and saw The Blind Side with Sandra Bullock which I really enjoyed (another inspirational football flick). Dan and his Uncle Doug went down to the river to shoot clay pigeons ... hopefully this extra "practice" will lead to a more successful hunting season this next year :) All in all it was a great holiday and we loved seeing everyone ... now it is time to go back to the real world.

Fall 2009

The past quarter has been the busiest since we moved to California - full of new adventures traveling, teaching, and keeping up with work and research.

Here is a bit of an update about what we have been up to:

Travel
Colorado
Over Labor Day weekend we traveled back to Colorado for a visit with family and to go to Amy Wilhoit's wedding. We spent our time with the usual hiking, tennis, card playing, and eating lots of tasty food. Amy & Jeremy's wedding was beautiful out in the Black Forest!

Boston & Wood's Hole
This fall I was lucky enough to attend a special conference all about muscle in beautiful Wood's Hole, Massachusetts. Two other girls from my lab were also going so we decided to head out a few days early to explore Boston and the surrounding area. Melinda finished her master's degree at MIT before coming out to Stanford and had some amazing friends in the area who let us stay at their place. We spent two days exploring the MIT/Harvard area (I never realized how close they were to one another) and historic downtown Boston. We got lots of tasty seafood and some amazing cannolli in town before it was time to head down the cape to Wood's Hole for the conference.
Wood's Hole is a cute tiny town which has mainly marine research facilities. The beautiful surroundings made it difficult to stay inside and listen but the content of the conference was great. A lot of the other conferences are really big so it is difficult to get to know other people but this one was small and included all the experts in the area which was a great opportunity.

Wisconsin
At the end of October we (finally) ventured out to Wisconsin to visit Dan's dad. The weather cooperated more than we thought it would so we got to play 3 different frisbee golf courses while we were out there. These courses were great - especially with the leaves changing colors - who knew Wisconsin would have the best frisbee golf I've seen? We spent the rest of the weekend playing with the dogs, going for hikes, eating tasty cheese and seafood (not together), and just relaxing.

Washington DC
Dan and I really wanted to go for an adventure over Thanksgiving break and after looking into Ireland, Spain, and about a million other places we finally decided upon Washington DC. The combination of cheap airline tickets and an endless supply of free museums sold us on the trip out East. We also got a great deal on a hotel right next to the capital which included an amazing buffet breakfast (and we are suckers for good food).
The red-eye flight was a bit painful but we arrived without any problems at 5:30am, took the bus & subway to our hotel, and the hotel staff was nice enough to let us check in at 7:00am when we arrived. We didn't stay at the hotel for long though and set out to explore the monuments before the museums opened at 10am (that is one of my only complaints about DC ... why do the museums open so late?). We ended up spending the whole day walking around all the monuments. My favorite part was going to the top of the Washington Monument which had amazing panoramic views. On the elevator ride back down they slow down for a bit to show the "fund raising stones" that are on the inside of the monument from fire departments, ladies leagues, etc. I think it would be so cool to be able to walk down from the top. At the Smithsonian Castle we joined in on a "members-only" tour (we get Smithsonian magazine) that let us see the upper flours which was a fun addition to the day. By the end of our grand monument walking tour we were exhausted (I don't think Dan slept at all on the flight) so we found a tasty Irish pub and called it a night.
Our second day was dedicated to government buildings. We started off with a tour of the capitol which was a lot better than I expected. They have a new visitors center which has a good movie and a very organized tour system. If we go back in the future I will definitely "talk to my congress person" a few months before we go so we can get tickets to go up into the dome and see the House of Representatives and Senate. Next we headed over to the Supreme Court and Library of Congress Buildings which included a stop in the Supreme Court cafeteria for lunch. Throughout our trip we found that the food in the government cafeterias was really tasty and about half the price of the food in the museum cafeterias. We finished off the day with a visit to the National Arboretum and American Indian Museum. The Arboretum had a great display of Washington DC buildings and monuments made out of all natural materials. After we got home my mom said they saw the same display in Iowa which seemed like an odd place for such an exhibit. I was also very impressed with the American Indian Museum - all the displays were well organized and not information overload like I experienced at some of the other museums.
The next few days were spent exploring the endless supply of Smithsonian museums. We spent a day each at the Air & Space Museum, Natural History Museum, and American History Museum ... and we probably could have spent even more time. One evening we went to see "Night at the Museum II" on the IMAX at the Natural History Museum which turned out to be a great, and very funny, movie. We also visited a special display of Spanish Armor & Art at the National Gallery of Art which had amazing specimens from the 14-1600s but that was about all we could handle for art museums.

Thanksgiving Day our friend An and her mom were kind enough to invite us over for dinner. It was the first Thanksgiving I've had that included egg rolls and soy chicken (someone doesn't like turkey?!) but they also had all the traditional fair and it was delicious. We "worked-off" all the tasty food with a few hours of Wii after dinner.

We had a great time in DC over Thanksgiving and I would definitely recommend it as a great turkey-day destination. The hotels are cheap, the crowds are small, and the weather is still nice. There is so much to see in DC - even after a week there I feel like there are many things that we still didn't have time to see.

Teaching
This fall I took my first ventures into teaching as I co-created and taught a new course along with my labmate Melinda - BIOE282: Performance, Development, and Adaptation of Muscle. Last year we were having a discussion about how we wished Stanford had a good, interdisciplinary course about muscle and a year later we found ourselves teaching a great group of 12 students including juniors, seniors, and graduate students. The field of muscle research is huge and a solid understanding of the fundamentals involves an interplay of biologal, medical, and engineering knowledge. Our hope was to provide students with the basic knowledge required to enter the field ... from a multitude of perspectives ... and to inspire them to work on the many problems still unsolved in the field - all of which have the potential to improve quality of life for millions of people. This was also my first "test" as to whether or not I would enjoy teaching and being a professor and at the end of quarter I can honestly say that I loved organizing and teaching the class. Of course, having a group of highly motivated, hard working, positive, and participatory students helped immensely. You can see a bit more information about our class at bioe282.stanford.edu although the Materials and Resources pages are only available to students.
Our class with their pipe-cleaner models of sarcomeres.

Turkey
After returning from Washington DC Dan decided he still wanted to try cooking a turkey and went out and bought the biggest turkey he could find in the turkey sales. We ended up with a 24-lb turkey that just barely fit into our oven and roasting pan but turned out amazing. We still have a bunch of the meat frozen in our freezer and have been using it for sandwiches and leftovers. One of my favorites was this delicious Turkey Tortilla Soup.


Tidepools
As Dan headed up to Northern California for the first weekend of turkey season I headed to Moss Beach with some friends to explore the tide pools. It was one of the 'super low-tide' days so we could wander out along the rocks for a couple-hundred feet to explore. I was surprised by how amazing this trip was - there were tons of colorful starfish, sea anemone, and other sea creatures wherever you looked. We ended the day at a nearby restaurant that had fireplaces outback overlooking the sea and sunset - truly idealic.









Tracker (100,000!)
Our 1996 Geo Tracker finally reached 100,000 miles this fall! The momentous mile came as Dan was driving home from work on a rainy day. Dan thinks this marks the perfect opportunity to buy a new car but I'm still not convinced :)






















Tasty Treats
Dan and I entered our graduate building's bake-off this fall. Dan's beautiful chocolate cake won 3rd prize!

4 v 4 Volleyball Tournament

Yesterday we spent another glorious day out in the sunshine playing in our second outdoor volleyball tournament. This time we teamed up with Fraser, a girl we met at the last tournament, and Daniel, a great undergrad who lives in our building for as 4 v 4 grass tournament. This tournament was significantly smaller than the first tournament with only 6 teams. In the morning we played games against all the other teams and came out in first place! We were feeling pretty confident about an easy trip to the finals after this strong showing, but I think we had worn ourselves out and lost early in the afternoon double-elimination tournament ... oh well, we'll have to wait for next time.

Berry Pies

The last couple of weekends Dan and I have been stumbling upon lots of ripe berries so I figured it was time I try making some berry pies. Last weekend I made a delicious peach-huckleberry pie which even had a lattice top and this past weekend I made a blackberry pie with a crumble top. Delicious ... I feel so domesticated :)

The Stanford Theater

Tonight we went with a group of graduate students to the old Stanford Theater in downtown Palo Alto to see My Fair Lady. This is an amazing old theater complete with an organ that rises out of the stage before the show and during intermission for entertainment. I had forgotten how much I loved the movie My Fair Lady and also enjoyed the experience of watching it in a full theater. Dan even found the movie funnier and less of a "chick-flick" than he remembered it.

Kat's first par!

Dan finally convinced me to take golf classes this summer so I've been hitting the driving range two days a week at 8am to hit 100+ balls. It has actually been a ton of fun and our teacher has been great - giving me lots of tips and drills since I'm not as advanced as the rest of the class. The Stanford golf course is beautiful and offers great rates for students ($13 vs $117 for non-students) so Dan and I have been going once a week for the last three weeks along with some other friends. Needless to say, my scores have been pretty horrible (112!!) but I figure I can only get better. Last night on the 17th hole ( a par-3) I finally got my first par ... yay! Let's see if next time I can get two pars ... and not so many double, triple, or quadruple bogeys.

TWO YEARS!

I can't believe it has already been two years since Dan and I got married. The time has definitely flown by. Unlike our first anniversary, I didn't have to go to a conference this year so we took some time to celebrate. On Thursday (the actual day of our anniversary) we went to the Melting Pot for an amazing (and huge) fondue dinner. We were there for over three hours as we enjoyed our cheese fondue, salad, wine, cooking a huge array of meats and veggies, and finally demolishing the chocolate fondue (complete with cheese cake, brownies, marshmallows, and fruit). This dinner for two is definitely big enough for three people but we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Over the weekend we took a trip down to Monterey and Carmel to continue our celebration. On Saturday we started off the day with a trip to one of the frisbee golf courses at the University of California - Monterey. This frisbee golf course was awesome - set in a strange landscape of abandoned military buildings and athletic facilities with lots of challenging holes. After a quick picnic lunch we headed to the Monterey Acquarium. Although I have been here a couple of times since I was a kid this was Dan's first time. Despite the huge number of people (go on a weekday if you can...) we loved all the exhibits, especially the sea otters and the sea horses exhibit.
Sunday we continued our exploration of the Monterey peninsula with a loop around 17-mile drive through Carmel. This is a toll road that takes you by a ridiculous number of golf courses (including Pebble Beach), huge houses, and along the rocky coast. Although the coast was beautiful my favorite part was Huckleberry Hill where we found the bushes covered with tons of huckleberries. We stopped for about an hour and filled the tupperware container we had with us. We finished off the weekend with another round of frisbee golf at another course at UC-Monterey that was much smaller than the first but once again set amid a bunch of abandoned buildings (kind of strange as these buildings looked just fine and some still had remnants of furniture inside). On our way home we made a special trip through Gilroy so Dan could finish off the weekend with his favorite treat ... a Sonic slush drink ... a good end to a great weekend.

Santa Cruz Frisbee Golf

There is a serious lack of good frisbee golf courses in the bay area so yesterday we decided to head down to the coast to meet our frisbee needs. We woke our friendly neighbors Phil & Elizabeth early in the morning for the trip down. The course was in the wooded hills behind a middle school just outside of Santa Cruz. The course was on a very steep hill so we spent a lot of time wandering up and down the hills searching in the bramble for our frisbees ... surprisingly more enjoyable than it sounds. Sadly, Dan did lose one frisbee in a giant bush of bramble and poison oak, but for how intense this course was I didn't think that was too bad. This was Elizabeth's first time playing frisbee golf and although it was a tough introduction she did great and was catching on quickly by the end. She also packed an amazing picnic lunch for us which we enjoyed along the coast after we were done with frisbee golf. We finished up the afternoon with a bit of delicious ice cream before heading back to campus. I love frisbee golf!

Asian Volleyball Tournaments

One of my volleyball friends invited me to play in two weekend tournaments over the past month. I, of course, agreed but the piece of information my friend left out was that these were Asian-American volleyball tournaments ... not exactly fitting my demographic. Upon arriving at the gym for the first tournament I felt a bit tall and out of place although my friends assured me that "you don't have to be Asian to play." For the first tournament I ended up being the ONLY non-Asian in the gym. However, my team also seemed to have all of the tallest Asians in the bay area so we dominated throughout the day and ended up taking away the gold medal (which has Chinese text on it and cannot read).


Despite my non-Asianess I agreed to play in the second, larger tournament since the first tournament was so much fun. I was a bit relieved to find that there were a lot more non-Asians playing in this tournament so I was not completely out of place. For this tournament we had an EVEN TALLER team featuring Chuck who was well over 6'9'' and Danny who was a former Stanford varsity player. We had a blast playing during the day (I could set the ball anywhere and they would put it down) but we lost in the finals since we didn't have the greatest defense (although it is pretty entertaining watching all those huge guys dive for the ball). So I had to settle with a silver medal for this tournament which, once again, I could not read. Check out how short I look in the picture below.