Quick update from life here in WY the past few months

My Dad has been through a serious cancer scare as of late.

First, it was his thyroid; since ruled out as cancerous, but not definitively (I'm not sure what that means). Then it was his kidney and bladder; as of last week, ruled as again, indefinitive, but most likely benign tumors. Now it's his ribs. He goes in for a final rib biopsy on Wednesday. Each suspected tumor has brought numerous challenges to my Dad's health including paralysis of one of his vocal cords to the point that his speech is seriously compromised and difficult, excision of his entire thyroid, bouts of exhaustion, and pain off the charts in terms of biopsy complications. I am hoping to get home soon to help with his care. Dad, our thoughts and prayers go out to you, as you hopefully are nearing the homestretch of this medical ordeal.

In other news, we had a flash flood on Wednesday here in Rock Springs. Received about 3-4 inches of water in about an hour was the word on the street. And while I'm thankful for the rain in this part of the world (we desperately needed it), the concentration of water just about killed all of Chihiro and I's efforts at amateur landscapers (see below).

Continuing with said flood, seems as if the builders who constructed our house cut a few corners in terms of our roof. We had the sincere pleasure of seeing our ceiling bubble up in the computer room with good 'ole H2O. Verdict was some sections of the shingles of our roof were laid "out of plane" and had to be reworked with the underlying wood caulked.

And then, to add insult to injury, tamping down loose soil in our front yard seems to have been lost on the last bulldozer to leave our premises in November of last year. Significant subsidence of soil on the order of about a foot occurred in areas of our front yard. Our builder is meeting us on Wednesday to go over options on how to fix that. Good times!

Thankfully we are still within our year time frame and the builder assumes all costs on these repairs. As the old cliche goes, every dark cloud has a silver lining, and I guess ours is that the 100 year rain, as the locals are calling it, exposed the deepest flaws in work done on the house. Instead of griping, guess I should be thankful the majority of the kinks in our house hopefully will be fixed because of it. Keep you posted on that one.

On other notes, Chihiro and I have spent most every night after work, and the majority of our weekends for the past few months since Chihiro's parents left in April, trying our hand at landscaping our yard. It's been a HUGE amount of work, and if I had to do it over, may seriously consider hiring a professional (if we could afford it). But I have to admit, the whole experience has been quite an educational one and rewarding to boot. There's just something about digging in your own soil and trying to make the sand, silt, and clay work to produce something of value that makes all the backaches and mental anguish go away. Which, given the aforementioned flash flood, made it all the more painful to deal with losses to some of our soil and plants.

In terms of our jobs, I've been working mandatory overtime instituted as of May. Hopefully this will be the last summer we'll be so shorthanded with soil scientists in the State. While the money is good, I'd love to have my 3 day weekends back. Oh well, next summer. Chihiro's work seems to be going really well with more and more firms in Southwestern Wyoming turning to GIS technology for displaying their spatial data. Chihiro seems to really enjoy what she's doing and we're again, extremely thankful to have both found jobs we like here.

On some other notes, our friends, Steve and Julie, came to visit us over the 4th of July. We made it up to Jackson Hole, the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. It was great to see you guys again. Thanks for making the journey all the way from Champagne, IL!

And finally, I have the luxury (some see it as a burden) of having to drive about an hour and half to my field site every Monday through Friday. The luxury comes from a little gift Chihiro bought me for my birthday last year. It's a radio transmitter and charger to play my iPOD through the car stereo. I can listen to it anytime I want now while driving, even in my work truck. I really love it! I've become quite the science/history/politics/Japanese language learning podcast junky and download as many as I can get a hold of on a weekly basis. It's like having a really interesting college prof at your fingertips to teach you all the stuff you may not have learned because, well, if you were like me, you just weren't paying attention.

I'm going to try and post more often some of these podcasts that I find interesting and hope maybe to get your thoughts on what is currently going on in the fields of science and the like.

One that caught my attention this past week was from The National Constitution Center.

Dad, you'll get a kick out of this one!

The podcast was entitled "Dover Intelligent Design Case" and was originally aired in December of 2005 when the court case was in full swing.

Now, I normally abhor these kinds of discussions because they end up being shouting matches with little to nothing of substance accomplished. However, to my surprise, this was one of the most civilized discourses on the debate that still rages on in forums all across the nation. The major drawback I will go ahead and give you a heads up is the fact that they did not have a scientist on the discussion panel. If you are a scientist, you will both cringe, and most likely, be challenged to form your own responses to some of the questions put forth.

Hope you enjoy it!

Thanks for reading this long post and I hope to hear from some of you soon.

Best wishes for a great summer!

Sincerely,

Drew (and Chihiro and Caesar)