Wayne and Erika Pfeiler

I snagged several pictures from Greg and Mary Beth's wedding and reception. You can check them out in the photo gallery.

Posted by Wayne at 12:41 AM | Permalink

Erika's been in the Netherlands since Friday last week for the 8th Lactic Acid Bacteria conference. It's held every 3 years close to Amsterdam. I'm not sure why they don't rotate the location, but the grad students who go seem to usually enjoy it. Erika's advisor is the keynote speaker, so they must think pretty highly of his lab and the work they do. They'll be back this Friday evening. We'll post pictures soon!

So I've been working on stuff around the house to stay busy, lots of little projects that needed to be done. Not too much else is new. We had a BME Dept picnic at Lake Crabtree Park which was fun. They had plenty of good food and we played volleyball until it got too hot. Yup... Pretty exciting stuff.

Posted by Wayne at 11:55 PM | Permalink

I've been mad-busy most of last week and this Monday finishing up an abstract for ORS. But it's submitted, so hopefully by the end of November they'll let me know if they want me to come to New Orleans to present a poster on my work.

Classes started last Wednesday too, and they seem okay so far. I'm taking a biotechnology lab course, and I'm really looking forward to it. It should be totally different from work I've done before, and the material seems pretty cool. Biotechnology can be thought of as genetic engineering. But don't get excited just yet, the fanciest thing we'll do in this class is play with bacteria. Still, it's pretty cool.

Posted by Wayne at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Tomorrow starts another semester of grad school for Erika and me. We're less than thrilled about the prospect of exams, homework, and lots of studying (all while we're also doing research and writing papers). But thankfully, we won't have too many more classes to take. This time we're each taking one or two "real" classes and then a few one-hour courses to fill requirements. Generally fewer hours means easier classes, but not always.

I've been scrambling to finish an abstract for yet another deadline coming up soon. I think Erika's lab is mostly unpacked, so they can enjoy and start to use their new facilities in Schaub Hall.

Ask Erika about what they had to put up with in the Flex building sometime... We've both noticed that the school's policy of taking the lowest bidding contractor doesn't work out so well. Imagine a contractor who thinks an autoclave should drain into normal PVC pipe, or a contractor who says he can set up a cell culture clean room (but doesn't know what a clean room is). That's just the sort of things we've noticed. At least it's good for a laugh.

Posted by Wayne at 11:45 PM | Permalink

I was just looking through my webstats, and I saw 77 people had views my tip on how to make a cell phone ringer for free. For our site, that's a lot of views for one page. So I looked deeper into it, and I found that most of those came from Yahoo! search engine. Apparently, we have the #1 result for the search string on Yahoo! Pretty cool. I may add a comments link soon for people who use that tip. Thanks for everyone's interest!

Posted by Wayne at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We ran back out to Knoxville this weekend for Greg and Mary Beth's wedding. The wedding was at 11am Saturday in Andersonville. It was held on the Lewis' farm in a grassy field. It was a bit warm, but it was nice. They offered guests bottled water and fans with the program printed on the back. The bride and her attendants rode up in a wagon pulled by her father driving a tractor. After the short ceremony, a reception was held at the Museum of Appalachia. They had bbq and food catered by Calhoun's and a bluegrass band playing music and sharing Hee-Haw style jokes. We didn't bring a camera with us, so no pictures to share.

We also got to see Nancy and Alex Detrana's new (3 week old) baby, Elizabeth. It'd been a while since we had seen such a young baby, and we almost forgot how small they start out.

After that, we went downtown with Michelle, Erik, and some of the Wisconsin people to the Downtown Grill & Brewery and Barley's.

On the way back Sunday, we stopped in Newport to meet Erika's family for lunch.

Posted by Wayne at 09:10 PM | Permalink

I've posted our Florida vacation pictures. We spent 5 nights in Fort Walton Beach with Erika's family. Tom's company had an annual managers' meeting there, and was nice enough to let us tag along with them. Thanks! We had a great time and enjoyed the beach, shopping, eating, mini-golf, etc while we were there.

Lucky for us, the resort managers were fast to repair the buildings and grounds after hurrican Dennis struck about 2 weeks before we came down. A few businesses around were still visibly under repair, but most everything looked great.

Posted by Wayne at 05:19 PM | Permalink

We're back online.
Last Thursday, the wonderful workers of Progress Energy (local power company) decided to do some utility work behind one of the houses on our row. In the process, they succeeded in screwing up our cable line in two ways. First, they somehow severed the line. Second, they crossed the cable line with a live power line which basically melted the cable line lose to the junction box.

So two days with no internet later, a TWC service guy came out and ran a temporary line to replace the screwed up one. This is basically good, except the temporary line will have to be replaced with a burried one at some point in about two weeks, right under the grass I'm trying to grow in the back yard. Oh well.

Posted by Wayne at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)