Shane's, Seminary, and moving

This last weekend I went up to my brother’s, Shane’s, home to visit with him and his family. Shane and his wife Becky have four kids at home: Nick, Gabe, Katie, and Mike. I drove up there on Thursday afternoon; it is about a five-hour drive. Becky was running a conference, so mainly I hung out with Shane and the kids. We mostly hung around the house. Saturday we went to see Robin Hood; great 2-hour prequel, it’s worth seeing. Oh ya, I went to visit my friend from USU, Mary, she and her husband were at her dad's in Manassas. It's always fun seeing friends from Utah on this side of the country!

While up in Virginia, I had the very special privilege to be the guest speaker at an LDS seminary, which is for high school aged students. After my brother introduced me I took the remainder of the time talking about facing, NOT overcoming, adversity. I made it clear that my message was based in reality; I was not there to tell of mystical sunshine and daisies. ‘Overcoming’ is not the word/message that I wanted to share because, while we may overcome a particular trial, we will always face some sort of adversity. I talked about five overarching themes: determination, hard work, being teachable, experience, and, underscoring the roots of reality, the value of failure. I would expound on these but stay tuned and you may see a new blog, by yours truly, dedicated to topics such as these. After the talk I had many of the students thank me; their sincerity was amazing, we have great youth!

In the lab I am trying to find a way to represent differences in MolProbity analyses for two related (identical) structures, one at high resolution and one at low resolution. This means I am comparing the quality of two very similar protein models. So, basically I sit at the computer and code (write computer code) all day. But I’m being paid and get to bike to the lab, which I enjoy immensely. The protein structure I helped with at Utah State, Mtr4, will be published in EMBO soon. I submitted another manuscript describing the software I wrote at USU, ResDe. Hopefully it will be accepted, that would be my first primary author publication!

Yesterday I moved rooms; I now live on the second floor of the house. The move took all day as I was organizing my room as I moved in. My new room is HUGE; by far the largest room in the house. I have a king sized bed and two sitting areas. I took pictures for y’all.

Looking into the room on way.

Looking into the room the other way.

Looking toward the two dormers.

Dormer 1

Dormer tw0; great east-facing window where I read my scriptures in the morning.

Looking back toward the door.

Me desk.

Me.

A wall with sconces.