There is a Hole in the Wall of the House

And this is hopefully a good thing - barring disaster, the new bathroom window goes in today.  If you don't hear back, we fell in the noble battle to not have the neighbors be able to see into our shower from their front door.

RAT Cake

This is just a quick post to show off the rat-shaped cake that Ana made. She recently acquired a new (enormous) cake decorating kit and had an excuse to try it out when I finished my PhD qualifying exam, which in this department used to be called the 'readiness assessment test' or RAT. It may have been trial instead of test, but something with a T at any rate. The official name is now just Readiness Assessment because they didn't like people calling it a RAT, but everybody still does.

I was asked to cut the head off just after being informed that I had passed and the multi-week process was over. Ana did hers last spring and may hold the record for earliest passed exam in the department, but I responded like an adult (with champagne) not with rodent cake. Ana has her own craft blog and talks about the creation of the cake here if you want to know more about the technical details. Anyway, here it is:

Prior to transport and incision

RAT cake with head cut off after the end of the exam

Knobstone Trail Hiking

Indiana is rightly noted for being pretty much flat and covered in corn and soy but waaaay down by Kentucky they have some dirt that is hill-shaped rather than being flat and on this hill-shaped dirt they have a trail called the Knobstone Trail. We visited this with some friends for camping and hiking purposes and found it was pretty nice (aside from the seven(!) ticks Ana managed to pick up).  Full picture set on Flickr and selections below.

We had to drive to get there so it was car-camping which allows for considerable luxury vs. backpacking. 

 Indiana apparently possesses large bright yellow and green spiders. 

The horizon goes forever when you're on the one tall part of a whole flat state. 

 Camera's panorama function remains cool.

 Hiking pictures now featuring more than just Ana!

Interesting tree shapes may be related to a major tornado that passed over this specific area a couple of years ago.

Wasn't it Spring yesterday?

April 11 - temperature in the 70s, sunburn, sandals and t-shirts, gorgeous Springfest.

April 15 - snow covering the daffodils and hyacinths. Welcome to Indiana!

And Now For Something Completely Different

Spring has finally sprung, and to celebrate, Ana visited Purdue's Annual Springfest, featuring a Bug Bowl with cricket spitting competitions and an open house at the School of Veterinary Medicine. Purdue gets over 40,000 visitors, mostly families with children, for this event. It's packed. I only stayed for a short time and hung out around the vet school for the most part. I ate no bugs and spit no crickets this time, but there's always next year!

The campus was filled with yellow-and-white striped tents, all packed with parents and their children, run by student volunteers. The temperature reached the 70's and I got a bit of a sunburn while walking around; it was a perfect sunny spring day for Springfest. I headed over towards the petting zoo.

They had your typical llamas, goats, and rabbits. They seemed to be mostly hot and tired. There were fans in the barn, but the animals were just starting to shed their winter coats due to our extra-long, extra-cold winter and the day was just too much. The veterinary students had posters hanging by all of the animals discussing their proper care and general facts about them. They had a stethoscope with at least one of the rabbits so you could hear its heartbeat; that was surrounded by kids so I didn't get too close. They also had some ducklings and chicks to hold and pet. It was small, but really cool and it seemed to be a great learning experience for the kids. They also had a cow.

This is Buttercup. She seemed pretty done with the crowds and the day by the time I got there. She was the main attraction and had a pretty long line waiting to see her every time I walked by. Why, you ask? Do you get to milk her? Does she do tricks? Not exactly, but she does provide a very unique learning experience.

Can you see the appeal? Towards her rear, she has a fistula. What is a fistula? It is a hole. A hole between her stomach and the outside. It has a plastic ring around it and has healed nicely. This hole allows people to stick their hands inside her stomach and feel her digesting food. Yes, that's a human hand probing the cow's innards, feeling her stomach contract as it deals with the hay and grains she's eaten recently. Medically, this allows them to get healthy microbes to treat sick cows and gain a greater understanding of what might be going on inside a cow's 4-chambered stomach. It's also really cool.

Of course I did it too. It's creepy. Really creepy. But also really cool.

This guy is a retired greyhound. He's in his second career as a blood donor dog. He gives blood to have on hand at the animal hospital for surgeries and emergencies. This was an educational event, so they had a lot of really interesting exhibits to show what they do and to teach the community more about animals. Like these horses:

That is the digestive system of a horse, painted on its side so the general public can see. I couldn't tell you exactly what each organ was, but there they are in their color-coded, painted glory.

The second horse in that paddock had his skeleton painted on. I think this is a really cool idea, something I hadn't seen before. All in all, there were a lot of nice students presenting some very interesting and innovative educational experiences involving animals.

As I was heading home, I wandered through another set of nice students presenting educational experiences involving animals.

Yep, they're cooking mealworms for the audience to try. There was a cockroach exhibit and a few other things, but this one was the only picture-worthy exhibit I could get close to in the Bug Bowl area. If we have time, next year I'll drag Lee and make him spit a few crickets or try some mealworms. Stay tuned!

6th Full Day of Bathroom Renovations

Since the last bathroom update we've visited Buffalo and Louisville, submitted drafts of conference papers, and dealt with assorted other work and research stuff, but didn't really touch the bathroom.  Also when we got back from Louisville they closed all the roads (ALL the roads) to non-emergency traffic due to snow and extreme cold, which gives you a reason not to go to Home Depot for supplies for your next step.  There had been some minor touching up (I closed off the hole in the decking from moving the register box for instance) but the biggest difference was that all the wet nastiness has dried out completely, as far as we can tell.  All the wood that is still in looks good.

This is from before scraping the wood clean and drying it out - from before we left for Buffalo.

This is the after bleaching, scraping and drying - looks a lot better.

As you can see from the picture above, we decided to remove the plaster from the ceiling.  We originally hoped to keep that but when touching up some of the edges to try to get a flatter surface to mount sheetrock to, it became clear that significant areas of the plaster were already detached.  It was either drop the plaster or face the likelihood of a lumpy ceiling - we dropped the plaster.  The lathes look more level and they're holding up the insulation so I hope to keep those.

 Also I got serious about electrical stuff and put routing holes through the studs that should make putting in all-new wiring a snap, complete with nail plates so nobody like me later electrocutes himself installing a mirror or something.  One concern is that it appears that this room and like, half that side of the house are on a single circuit that MUST be original - it is cloth-wrapped and mounted on ceramic insulators and it goes all over the place.  As a lot of the attic floor is already up and I dug through insulation to find all the connections  (OK there are still a few missing, but I found a lot of them). I think we're going to go ahead and replace that monstrous circuit with about three separate smaller circuits that make more sense (ie, one per room for three rooms).  I will probably leave the old circuit in place, run new wiring where it needs to be, and when the old wiring is no longer connected to anything I'll just disconnect it from the source without removing it.  I will need to pull another 2-3 strategically placed pieces of attic decking, but once that is done I don't think doing the cable routing will be that bad - most of the walls are open to the basement or crawlspace and I already have several clear shots to the attic open.  I am going to need a lot more wire though.

It is now clear that we will not complete the renovation before the end of the break, in part because on Friday we're going to visit friends in Cincinnati.  Still, I am pretty sure we are not going to have a day as dirty as today again - that was the last of the plaster.  One of these days we're going to stop tearing things out and start putting them in.

We also spent a couple hours looking at vanities, fixtures, and fittings.  We bought some things, ordered some things, and haven't decided on some things.  Most of these aren't holding us up but the plumbing items are...Ana blames me for making the plumbing 'her' project, thus assigning it her luck instead of my own notably superior luck.  Everything we wanted or needed was out of stock everywhere, with expected restocking in March.  We won't be waiting that long and have chosen different components.  Not thrilled to pay more for stuff we like less but it will all be fine in the end.

Mammoth Cave National Park

Haven't been bathroom renovation updates for a while because we haven't been at home.  I am sure everyone is waiting on the edge of their seats for more about that.  We went to Buffalo for Christmas, which we will not be blogging, and then to Louisville and Mammoth Cave National Park to meet up with my (Lee's) sister for a couple of days to hang out.  We drove down in a snowstorm but didn't drive into a ditch, stayed at a decent hotel in downtown Louisville, and ate at a couple of pretty solid restaurants. Since we're no longer in Japan and documenting food and whatnot we're only blogging Mammoth Cave.  A complete set of pictures is available here.

Mammoth Cave National Park is about a ninety minute drive south of Louisville and it wasn't a big deal getting there and back, so we signed up for both a morning and afternoon tour to see different parts of the cave.  The morning tour focused on history and went through areas of the cave that were explored starting thousands of years ago.  Apparently, Native Americans explored about 12 miles of the cave with torches thousands of years ago, which I think would be pretty scary - if you're 12 miles from the entrance and your torch goes out I expect it would be very challenging to get back to the entrance.  Fortunately for us, the trails have since been paved and lit with electricity so it was a pretty easy saunter for most of this tour.

This is the 'original' entrance that has been open for thousands of years

Our little handheld 'adventure' camera did really really well with pictures in the dark; more came out than didn't.  Mammoth is a 'dry' cave (meaning water is not still dripping through most of it) so while it is the biggest in the world by a large margin, it is somewhat less decorative than a wet cave that would have more stalagmites and so forth.

The clear path, lighting, and handrails made the cave feel almost like a fake cave, and disguised how far in and down we were - we went about a mile laterally underground and about 350 feet below the surface with a bunch of twists and turns.  Most parts were very open but in some we had to duck or contort to get through openings - they preferred to make the path fit the cave and not the other way round.

In some places the roof had been marked by candle or lantern smoke from 19th century explorers.

Fat Man's Misery was narrower than some other areas and the walls have been smoothed and polished by the passage of millions of people (literally).

Smoke from 1855

Many passages were...Mammoth...in proportions.

The "new" entrance was blasted by dynamite in the 20's or 30's.

Wooden stairs handled this entrance until the 60's but then they were so rickety they needed to be replaced and this entrance was closed for a while while they figured out how to best replace them.  According to the rangers, they went through a number of contractors that said it couldn't be done before hiring a company that generally fabricated submarines and knew a thing or two about stairs in confined spaces.  They weren't allowed to change the cave so the stairs spiral downward in elaborate and unusual ways.

Sometimes the stairs crossed through more open areas (this one has a BIG drop underneath it).

At a few points in both tours the rangers would stop and give a talk on the history and geology of what we were seeing.  Sometimes there were benches for people to sit on at these points, especially if the rangers planned to talk for a while.  Ana has a new record for distance below ground she has knitted of about 350 feet.  She was only knitting when seated, to keep hands free for railings, etc, the rest of the time.

Some walls had lichens on them but I'm really not sure how they survive down there.

We did see one area with dripstone formations that was pretty neat.

All in all I would recommend Mammoth Cave's tours as a relatively easy outing with good education about caves and geology.  We may go back for more tours and maybe the really difficult spelunking tour when they only take fit adults of less than a certain size (too big and you'd get stuck in a passage) sometime before we leave the area.  We'd also be interested to see some of the other notable cave national parks.

See Mom?  We didn't die.