Colorado Conference

I spent the last week in Denver, Colorado at the Gait & Clinical Movement Analysis Society (GCMAS) annual conference ... I know it is a mouthful. We had a big group from Stanford attending as we ran a tutorial on the OpenSim software and four of us gave podium presentations during the week. I gave a presentation on Thursday entitled, "Accelerations produced by the gastrocnemius and soleus during crouch gait" ... basicallly it was about how we can use dynamic simulations to understand the role of individual muscles during common movement disorders in cerebral palsy. The conference was hosted by the Denver Children's Hospital where I used to work which added another fun component to the conference as I got to visit with them and see their new gait lab at the new hospital.


After the conference my parents came up to Denver for a visit on Saturday. We went to the old house of the "unsinkable Molly Brown" from the Titanic (... it turns out her actual name was Margaret or Maggy but Molly sounded better in the Hollywood song). However, the real excitement came in the afternoon when my mom and I went indoor sky-diving. Basically it is a huge wind-tunnel turned on end. Air rushes up allowing you to float and move around. It was enough work for me to just figure out how to get stable and move forward and backward but our instructor could do flips, dives, and a ton of tricks. It was a ton of fun and although it is expensive I would recommend it to anyone to try once.

Elephant Seals

Each winter elephant seals invade the beach at Ano Nuevo State Park, about a half-hour south of Half Moon Bay to breed. Last year we went down in the middle of March to go on one of the guided tours of the beach but had missed most of the seals and only saw a few of the remaining babies. Today we went with a group of fellow graduate housing CAs, just about a week before we went last year, and saw a ton of seals! The male elephant seals are huge but I don't think a saw a single one move the whole time we were there ... they look like they are dead on the beach. I found the baby seals more entertaining as they slowly waddled across the sand barking at one another and trying out their swimming skills in the small tide pools on the beach.

Next year we hope to go in late January/early February when the beach is supposed to be completely packed with elephant seals and the males are fighting with one another. Supposedly you have to book in October to get on one of these tours but I think it would be worth it.

Ph.D. Candidate

As many of you know I've spent way too many hours over the last month studying for my PhD Qualifying Exam which is the last hoop before becoming an "official" PhD candidate. I'm happy to report that I had my exam Friday morning at 8:30 and passed! It is an all oral exam that starts with a talk on your research before getting quizzed on topic areas by four professors. Although some questions surprised me a bit and left me searching my brain for a few minutes, I was amazed by how fast the two hours went by. It ended up actually being a fun experience, minus all the stress leading up to it, and now I'm very ready to move on to other things.

As for the last month in which I have been MIA we have still been able to find a bit of time for adventures around studying. We had quite a few visitors during the month of February including Bryan and Caryn Carruthers who spent a weekend visiting from Colorado and Dan's mom who finally made her first trip down from Northern California to visit our tiny apartment. Unfortunately this has also been the rainiest month since we moved to California which dampened some of the "touristy" plans but we still enjoyed taking tours of the campus, visiting the coast in Santa Cruz, and taking some hikes around the area.

Along with the rainy weather Dan and I have also ventured to the coast a few times to watch the big waves that the storms have brought in.
We've also been playing lots of sports like usual. I'm proud to announce that Dan is the Barnes ping-pong singles champion (after beating me in the finals .... grrr) and our lab volleyball team has made it to the quarterfinals so far.

It seems like I'm always saying this but I can't believe that February is already over and another quarter is almost gone! I'm just happy to be done with my qualifying exam and am looking forward to a little time of relaxation over the coming weeks.

Wow, it is 2009!

What can I say? Time is flying by ... I can't believe it is already 2009, let alone that January is already over. Where in the world is all the time going. Anyways, here is an update of the DK life since I last updated the blog:

Christmas Vacation: Colorado and California
We started off the Christmas holiday with a short visit from Dan's Dad and Anita in the bay area. They used to live out here so we stuck pretty close to the Stanford campus for the weekend. Dan took them on a forced walk ALL the way around campus and we watched the Stanford men's basketball team cream Northwestern University. We also visited the new California Academy of Sciences which is amazing! It has a huge planetarium, aquarium, and rainforest dome ... lots of neat exhibits, but a bit pricey. The "natural" roof of the California Academy of Science's

After another week of work for Dan we headed out to Colorado for Christmas and a lot of family, friends, and food. All of the neighbors were home for Christmas which meant that the "kids" were still at the "kids" table (you have to realize I am the youngest "kid") and it felt like not a whole lot had changed over the years. Other highlights of the trip included completing a puzzle of the world and taking a trip up to Cripple Creek for poker and a cute melodrama, "Miracle on Bennett Avenue."

We headed back to the Bay Area just before New Years and drove straight up to Northern California to visit Dan's mom, brother, and grandparents. Dan's aunt, uncle, and cousins from Idaho were also in town visiting so the days were full of card playing. We also got a special treat from Dan's mom ... homemade pheasant soup (delicious!).


Good Hikes
The weather so far in January has been gorgeous ... sunny and 60-70s. We've been taking advantage of the weather and have gone on a few new hikes in the area. The Coal Mine Ridge trail is just about 10 minutes up Alpine Rd. and winds back into the hills overlooking a valley. Yesterday, Lindsey and I went to check out Edgewood Park which is just up I-280 and although it does sit right next to the highway it is suprisingly secluded and has some great views.

Our Orange Tree!
We are also very proud to report that our little dwarf orange tree actually produced oranges!

Well ... now its time for the SuperBowl ... GO .... who's playing again??
Take care everyone!

Da Vinci at the San Jose Tech

Yesterday we headed down with Lindsey and Matt to the San Jose Tech Museum to see the special exhibit, "Da Vinci: 500 Years in the Future." By the end of the exhibit I was convinced that Da Vinci must have been a very eccentric man and most certainly a genius. The sheer volume of designs he made, buildings he built, paintings he created was over-whelming. The exhibit had a bunch of replicas of machines that he and other Renissance designers created. It was amazing to see how they created complex gear, pulley, and screw mechanisms to accomplish pretty much everything.

I was also really impressed with the rest of the museum. They had so many hands on exhibits! If I wasn't already tired from the extensive Da Vinci exhibit I probably could have spent many more hours playing with all of the exhibits. They even had one where you could inject genes from jellyfish into bacteria to make them glow! We also watched their "Adrenaline Rush" IMAX film. It was all about base-jumping and sky-diving which was really neat on the IMAX screen. They also built a copy of Leonardo's pyramid-like parachute and had a professional sky-diver test it out. They dropped him from a hot-air balloon at 10,000 feet and it worked! However, they didn't make the guy land with the 200 lb structure which I think would have been the real test to see if it really "worked."

Done!

Finals are done and I am now officially a holder of an MS in Mechanical Engineering - hurray! Now I just have to figure out that little question of if I want to stay for my PhD ...

Gingerbread House and Waterpolo NCAA Championships

What can be better than an afternoon of candy-house building and a brutal waterpolo match-up? We started the afternoon off getting into the holiday spirit by going to the graduate students' gingerbread house making get-together. They gave us a great kit that had all the gingerbread pieces and, of course, tons of frosting and candy for decorating. I think we did quite well (Dan would like to point out that he decorated the little man ... nice job hubby!). Of course, he also doesn't mention that there were 2 little men. I wonder what happened to the other one?

After decorating the house to our hearts' content we headed over to the water polo stadium to watch the National NCAA Waterpolo championship game between Stanford and USC. The stadium was completely packed. Sadly for Stanford, USC finished off their perfect season undefeated. Stanford gave them a pretty good run for their money but, in the end, it just wasn't enough.