Carl Sagan Day

Ah, shitbirds. I didn't post this earlier in the day, but today, which is coming to an end here in the Eastern portion of the United States, is Carl Sagan Day. He was actually born on the 9th of November, but today was the celebration of his influence on popular culture through science and skepticism.
Got this from Bad Astronomy, and thought it'd be appropriate, if late.
This is done by the awesomely geeky Sara Mayhew, enjoy!

Halloween 2010

The semester is winding down and getting more insane with exams, projects, labwork. But we found the time to join in a little Halloween fun! My wife actually bought her costume from Target this year, but I for one, was pretty happy with the results. I spent way too much time building my costume, a bioluminescent jellyfish, but I'm glad I did it. Still photos don't really do it justice, but here you go:

And our lovely pumpkins:

Not sure how comfortable she'd be with me plastering the others all over the intertubes, so this is all I'll post for now:

Pride Festival.

I hate parades. Not a big fan of social events either. I'd prefer spending time with my dog than with most people. And even the ones I will spend time with, it still isn't as much time as I like to spend with my dog. All of that being said, we went downtown to the Gay Pride Festival where G Play, the band my wife is now in, played for the fest. It was awesome. Hot and sweaty, but really cool to watch them all play, and especially to see her back doing the very thing that really drew us together.

When we first met she was finishing up her senior year of college and playing out quite a bit for school, both her flute and bass. It is one of the things I loved about her and was a basis for our initial relationship.

I feel like we have grown accustomed to hyperbole in our everyday speech: everything is so wonderfully great, it makes us incredibly happy, there's no better feeling. But her getting back into playing music, it's strange how happy this makes me. It's easy to lose touch with things, even things we love dearly, in the daily grind. You have bills to pay, obligations to fulfill, work to get through. And we push something to the back burner for awhile, not realizing how easy it is to let that become the status quo. It's great, actually a really NICE feeling to see her getting back into the very thing that helped make me fall in love with her at the beginning. Here she is being the quintessential bass player.

LGBT Pride Festival 2010

And, as usual, once I actually got out and past my initial prickly reluctance at socialization, I had fun.

Another attempt to start posting more regularly. Again.

I've been back in school and swamped with the amount of work I have. All of my classes are science and math and it's both exhilarating and overwhelming jumping back in full time after being out of a classroom environment for 15 years. It's been 18 years since I took any mathematics, and unlike a great many subjects, that has been a use it or lose it subject for me. Other than basic math skills and some algebra and geometry, I haven't used any trig or calculus since the early or mid 90's. Let me just say, it isn't all coming back to me either.

Life has required some adjustments. I am definitely more stressed and I'm certain it makes me a less enjoyable person to be around for my wife. We have been working on our own version of the modern relationship. Less time together than before, but we communicate and it helps that my wife really is my best friend. I tend to forget about things like human contact and she really keeps me grounded. It isn't always an easy or pleasant job for her, I know, and I'm always a bit dumbstruck at how she really does make me a better person in concrete ways. I'm fortunate to have found a great woman who's intelligent, super hot and interested in genuine nerds. I still find myself humming that opening stanza to Once In A Lifetime,

You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
You may find yourself in another part of the world
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
You may ask yourself: well... how did I get here?

I honestly don't know.

Surfacing briefly...

to post this. Too cool not to help spread it, and since I've gone off FB to figure out if that's a route I want to continue on, thought this would be as good a place as any to share. Here you go, might see you all in another 12 months!

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Awesome

So I'm washing the dishes when my wife says to me, "Hey, what's this?". I walk over to the computer and there are little thumbnails of young Asian girls on the screen with strictly Asian script on the screen as well. Apparently, somebody had commented on my last blog post and went through the trouble of registering a google account and then going through the word verification process so they could spam my blog with porn (I think--I can't read any Asian script but the photos seemed to point in that general direction).

Now, I'm not opposed to porn, but it seems weird and a bit misguided to post that here. The internet is so wide open and seems to funnel people into previously unattainable niche markets, why go through the trouble and probable waste of time to post in a place where there is an exceedingly low probability of finding an interested party?

This is really just a curiosity question. I deleted the comment, like I said, not because of disapproval or disgust, but because it has no place here. Just curious about how, when a person only has so much time available to him (or her), that person wouldn't try and maximize the positive outcome from the effort by being more discerning about where they post.

Anyway.

And, oh yeah, Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife! ;)

From Just Another Blog

Back after a long hiatus.

My life has been chugging along and I'm a bit shocked at how much time I've allowed to pass since I last posted.

The quick and dirty run down of events in the last few months. Just before my wife and I went back to the town we both grew up in, I had gotten a false alarm call for a kidney transplant. We both decided that since I appeared to be much higher up on the last than we had planned for, I would just put a hold on my plane ticket and try and use it on a future trip. I was fairly certain that even being higher up than we had thought, I was unlikely to get a call while my wife was back visiting her family for five days. So naturally, four days before Christmas, and two days before my wife was set to leave, I received another call for a kidney, which ended up being a go. She was able to get an extension for her flight as well (thank you Delta!) and just before midnight on the 21st I went into surgery.
Of course, something can always go wrong with these things, but we got through everything without any hitches, and compared to a lung transplant, this was a walk in the park. I was out of the hospital in a week, and with my immediate possible future radically different than what we had expected, I got all of my plans in place in order to return to school and finish my degree in biology. I'm supposed to start this summer.
I've been trying to make sure all the hoops I need to jump through for financial aid and registration have been jumped through, and am focused on getting my health back. I honestly don't think the experience of declining health due to end stage renal disease is close to as bad as the experience of declining lung function, but I had forgotten how much better I felt before the renal decline.
As a cf'er, I've been fairly typical in being extremely lean my whole life. I'm not tall, 5'8", and the most I've weighed is 130 lbs. With the kidney issues my weight had dropped to 110, and in order to maintain that, I was basically force feeding myself in order not to drop any further. I had forgotten what it was like to have an appetite, energy, focus. My weight has been slowly climbing back up and I'm doing more than I have been able to in quite some time.
Life is going well. We're adjusting to the new reality, a much more expansive one than before, and I'm pretty happy I didn't die, again. I received a kidney much sooner than we had thought would happen, I'm going back to school to finish my degree, I have a new nephew on the way, we can actually look to the future and believe it may be longer than we had thought.

Maybe I'll put more down later, but I thought I'd get started with something small or I might never have gotten around to it.