Monday Meanderings

 

• Up at 4:15am.... hit the trail at 4:58am.  Ran 14.3 miles (~23 km) this morning.  Beautiful morning that was cooler than the last several mornings at 64 degrees (~18 C).  Wore a bright florescent yellow shirt to make sure I could be seen as it was still before dawn.  I am not sure if my NOT being in "Sasquatch Mode" facilitated this or not... but I saw six deer during my run, along with at least a dozen rabbits, two squirrels, and a whole plethora of birds during my run.  
• There is a new addition to my lunch today that I refer to as "deer droppings".  It is a concoction that is "theoretically" healthy with virtually no fat, very few calories, but a lot of flavor.  My oldest daughter found the recipe and I modified it a bit.  It is made from pumpkin puree (canned), ample cocoa powder, a bit of protein powder, and just a VERY LITTLE BIT of sugar to take the edge off of the bitterness of pure cocoa powder.  These ingredients are mixed together and baked lightly to create soft, bite sized morsels that taste richly chocolatey.  Some research suggests that pure cocoa is a potentially healthful phyto-pigment/phyto-agent that may potentially improve health.  But, for me it is just a way to get to have the flavor of chocolate in a relatively "healthy" form.  
• The above "deer droppings" do not supersede the rest of my "work food" in my lunch pail, but are additional nuggets of flavorful nutrition.  I still have the big bowl of fruit, a banana, a bowl of high fiber cereal with blueberries, a yogurt, a few roasted almonds (usually 6-7), a piece of toast (no butter, but usually some fruit preserves or orange marmalade), my three oatmeal-banana healthy "cookies" (one each of molasses, peanut butter, and cappuccino (coffee and cocoa)), and a hard boiled egg. 
• I worked for a couple of hours this morning with two of my new research students.... having them see me demonstrate about a dozen different lab and organismal procedures, and have given them the task of writing detailed and professionally formal protocols of these procedures along with images and data collecting sheets and Excel files for data analysis.  This is a facet of my "Work Smarter and Better"  internal initiative that I have set for myself this upcoming academic year.  In years past, I would typically show procedures to a group of newbies each year, and have them also teach each other.  I will likely still do a bit of that, but I think these written and formalized protocols/data sheets/Excel files will help prevent "procedure drift" (akin to the way gossip tends to drift and transmogrify as it is passed along like in the famous Rockwell painting, "Chain of Gossip").  I also think reading what the students write will help me more easily identify their misconceptions in these procedures.... so that the final versions of these procedures (me editing their work to get it "up to snuff") will be wildly useful for all in the lab. 
  
• PCS - a very comfortable 5 today.  The "hard edge" of craving a pipe and feeling frustrated has ebbed.  I still would very much ENJOY a pipe, and I still very much think about them and imagine them throughout the day.  But, the frustration in NOT smoking my pipe is mostly absent.
• No remembered dreams yet.  I have now taken to holding a pipe when I am drifting off to sleep (a good suggestion given to me in the comments last week by my friend who goes by "Unknown").   But, while there has  yet to be a remembered dream, when I have awakened, it FEELS like I had a more "vivid" sleep of some sort.  It feels like the trend line is moving in the right direction.

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