Annual Report 2001/02

Hi folks,

It is a cycle that repeats itself year after year. We plan to send an update of the last year’s events in our life - simply a token to express the value that we place on having good friends and to reflect the fact that we do think of you guys regularly, even if the hectic of the day often thwarts our attempts to express it. So, our previous plans were invariably bogged down in the daily hectic that surrounds the beginning of the year. We return from Christmas overseas to a desk that has piled high in our absence, a mailbox stuffed full with a combination of trash and essentials, the start of the semester takes over our lives and we never quite manage to finish and send those letters (and Christmas cards for that matter) that would reflect the importance that you all play for us. So, this year, I’ll try to send an update at a time of the year when we generally have a lot less on our plate. If you receive this letter, that means that this thinking worked :-)

For this first update, therefore, let me start a tad earlier with an executive wrap-up of 98-01. In 98 we were very ready to return to the US and we accepted a faculty position for Robert at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, OH, just south of Toledo. Mooi and I had never pictured ourselves in the middle of the continent, somehow we knew that we were destined for a coast – either coast really. A main reason for our decision to move to the land of the famed 'fly-over' people was the department’s plan there to hire a conservation geneticist in the near future (for which Mooi would apply) and we decided to give it a try. Now BG is not particularly blessed with varied geological features - picture a flat, agricultural wasteland with fields of corn and soy beans as far as the eye can see. It is a rural community of around 7,000 residents with another 18,000 students at BGSU, and the main activity around here is focused on skating, both ice hockey and figure skating. Because of the prominence of student life in town it has quite a nice feel, there are decent coffee shops, bars with exotic beers on tap, and a general vibrant buzz that other mid-west towns of this size lack. We visited after we received the offer, signed the contract, and, against our initial plans, decided on a house that we really liked – an old farm about 8 km from the biology building. Shortly later, Moira became pregnant with Sebastian and the logistics of the upcoming move became a bit more complicated. Without help from many of you, this could have been a major nightmare – if not impossible, this way it was challenging but doable. Robert left Austria at the end of June to prepare the new nest for the rest of the family to follow, Mooi wrapped up our place in Graz, packed everything into a container and shipped it off. This all now feels so long ago as much has happened since but these were our first steps into an unknown and quite frightening future. Looking back, though, we are very happy to report that all has come out well: Sebastian was born on January 28, 99, Moira was offered a tenure-track faculty position in our department a year or two later, and Robert received tenure last year – so we have found a new life that to date has turned out outrageously rewarding - personally as well as professionally.

01-02 Last summer began with a trip to Austria where Moira collaborated with a molecular lab in the veterinary school in Vienna. I had brought the baby jogger and Sebastian and I took to exploring the surrounds during day. We then took Moira for dinner to the places we had just found. We spent most of our time along the Alte Donau and the Donauinsel, the weather was great for most of the time, we rented boats on some days, we visited every playground along the river, and found outdoor restaurants which featured Budweiser on tap (no, not the abominable fermented horse-piss common in the US, but the fruity hop nectar from Czechia). Sebastian and Robert also hit the zoo, the Prater, the UN city, the Donauturm …

The remainder of the summer was mainly spent with research in our own labs. We took off a bit early on many days to play with the bud, work in the garden, or do little projects around the house. Probably the biggest project involved ripping out all of the horrible carpeting throughout the house and replacing it with hardwood floors. Considering the stuff that accumulates in and under ever-present, wall-to-wall carpeting, I am not surprised that most Americans suffer allergies. No, the destruction part of this project was definitely not pretty.

In September, Sebastian participated in a skating course for little kids at the BGSU ice arena. It turned out that he greatly enjoyed it and he appears to have an exquisite sense of balance – a trait not particularly present in either parent. So we broke down, bought skates for the entire family, and regularly go to the open skating sessions so we would all three learn to balance on these slippery pieces of metal. Robert joined a group of our friends, who are playing ice hockey once a week. It turns out that it is much easier to learn to skate with full hockey padding, where one is not afraid to fall :-) Another positive side effect has also been that this is one of the few activities that really tire Sebastian out completely. I never was keen on this Lorenz’ psychohydraulic model for behavior, which pictures motivation as a reservoir of action specific energies that will either be drained naturally during normal activity or will otherwise spontaneously release in often inappropriate fashion. When you raise a kid it would require special effort not to see the validity in this metaphor :-) Sebastian also continues to go to the Jordan child development center for a good portion of the day and we are very happy with the way this place is run and what the kids get out of it. The food they get there is well-balanced and adventurous, including items such as Sauerkraut, enchiladas or garlic bread, they interact well with kids from all ethnic backgrounds, and they have a playful exposure to education that would be hard to match in breadth by any parent. The play with all kinds of real instruments, naturally play with letters and numbers, plant seeds, read, paint, observe the incubation and hatching of chickens, take care of an aquarium with fish and frogs, or take field trips to local sites such as the zoo, science museum, library or nature reserves. Robert accompanied them on a recent trip to crane creek on lake Erie where the local naturalist told and showed them what they could find there. He was stunned what the kids came up with in fairly specific knowledge and it was obvious that they were considerably more knowledgeable than your average selection of adults around here. A snapping turtles shell was immediately placed into the reptiles by 5 kids jumping up simultaneously, and lizards and snakes were quickly named as other examples. When one kid mentioned that dinosaurs also belonged into this group, a few others jumped up and proclaimed that we don’t know really whether dinosaurs were reptiles, they could actually be more like birds – but they are extinct and that is a good thing because they would eat us. :-).

In the fall semester Moira taught an honors course in intro to biology, while I taught my usual animal behavior course. These kept us quite busy until the family packed up and left for Durban to help Moira with her field-work on grasshoppers. The 16-hour flight Atlanta-Joburg with Sebastian was considerably less trouble than we had anticipated. Each seat was equipped with a monitor and on-demand videos. As Sebastian almost never gets to watch TV at home, he was glued to the thing from departure to landing. A special hit was a 10-minute cartoon featuring a snowman, which he must have watched at least 500 times on route. Once there, we traveled extensively up the north coast, to the Natal midlands, and the valley of a thousand hills. We found some animals but not as many as in previous years, the weather had been unusual as it seems to be everywhere these days. Sebastian and Robert managed to wrangle a few play days out of the boss. We met up with our trusted Comrades running buddy, Keith Binge, and his family on a North Coast beach for a braai. He looked all athletic and in great shape, which is not surprising as his training for Comrades 02 had been in full swing. Bob, in contrast, was not :-(, we had done little exercise in more than a year and the comfy life with lots a food and beer had added some major, bulging love handles to the midsection. Standing next to Keith, witnessing the extent of the damage, some resolutions were made, and quickly forgotten - no, not forgotten, they went into temporary hiding. We spend a nice Christmas with Mooi’s family and had a few short surfing trips to Ansteys beach on the bluff.  Moira’s new postdoc, Vanessa, joined us for a trip up to the natal midlands near Bulwer. On our return flight back to the US we had a seat in the bubble of a 747 and Sebastian found a friend with whom he played, which again assured a very pleasant uneventful travel home. We returned in mid January to balmy temperatures and a semester in full swing.

The following week temps dropped and snow storms rolled in providing a perfect setting for the annual BGSU Neuroscience group ski trip to holiday valley. Rick, Ann and Sophie joined us there. The trip was great and a lot of fun, but was marred by the fact that I was responsible for Sebastian running down the bunny slope and straight into a pole - fortunately he wore a helmet which prevented the worst. Bleeding from his mouth, unable to move his jaw, teeth wobbly, and very unhappy about all of that, he was fixed up in the medical room and fortunately nothing major had been damaged. The little unit lived off milk shakes for a few days and I don’t think that I had ever felt so bad in my entire life before. Nonetheless, the next day he was back out on the slopes in his skiing suit that had blood splattered down the front and he was unhappy not being allowed to go “faster” – or make that “phaphter”. When we returned home, we put up a little ice rink in the shade on the north side of the barn and although last winter was not a particularly cold one, we still made consistent use of it until the end of March. Half an hour of skating before bed was great to tire Sebastian out but he also became quickly comfortable on skates. For his second skating course at the ice arena, he was moved to the class of 5-6 year olds so he would get something useful out of it. It was neat to see that he was not afraid to physically interact with kids much larger than him and that he was quite able to hold his own in the little plays they were doing.

For some time we had been thinking about getting an all-wheel drive car, mainly for the winter when our roads don’t get plowed for hours or even days. In winter we also can’t park our car in the barn because we would not be able to get it back out of the driveway whenever it snowed. So in February we finally decided to buy a second car, we found a used Toyota RAV-4 with low mileage and good price, and it has become a very useful little vehicle for our non-daily operations and longer trips.

When late spring came this year we started to tend our vegetable garden, we planted a number of trees and many perennials. Mowing is not one of our favorite activities, so as more of the garden gets taken up by beautiful plants, the less we have to ride around chopping the lawn. We had planted hops (my favorite brewing kind – cascade) a few years back and it never did much, until this year, when it exploded and took over a major portion of our picket fence. The fence is now covered with fragrant little green flower cones and I might just try to use it in a home brew shortly. As also the wildlife awoke we saw a great number of birds at our feeder, many of which we had not noticed before. Easter Sunday was special like last year when we saw our first bunny in the garden. We also realized that we do have some larger predators when we found a half-eaten cat (not ours) in the garden, and that half was gone the next day too. Most likely we have coyotes along the river and it is nice to know that a food chain can still extend intact that far up even in an environment with a lot of human impact.

In June we finally received the letter that we had been anxiously awaiting. The INS told us that our application for green cards was approved and that we should come to Cleveland and pick them up. We were there the next morning, got our stamps in the passport and off we went again. It was a little administrative step but for us this has had great emotional meaning. We had lived on and off in the US for much of the last 15 years, but we always were on some limited-time visa - we were temporary visitors to this country. Officially, we had for example to maintain an address outside the country as our permanent home address. Permanent residency, however, means that we now are considered immigrants to this country and we have joined the crowds from many generations, which have come to this country in search of a better life. Although there certainly is a mix of emotions, overall we are very happy that this step is now behind us. Sure there are things that are odd here, we are worried about the current administration with an almost mind-boggling display of incompetence, an electoral system that sees the spending of unfathomable amounts of money, just to have two unelectable folks as choices, one a soulless droid and the other a couple of tacos short of a combination platter, and then having the one with the fewer votes become president, the prevalence of guns, little public concern for environmental problems, the discrepancy between rich and poor, the excesses of a materialistic culture gone mad, or the difficulty to obtain decent news about world events – but when we add things up in our minds, our blood pressure is a lot lower on a daily basis here than it was in either Austria or South Africa. Society is functioning rather smoothly, decent public support is provided at low tax, we feel a lot more in control of our own lives, and the presence of infrastructure is guided by the wishes of the folks on the ground, such as when it comes to the availability of day care centers of shopping hours. In this society, responsibility lies at the level of individuals and is not at the hands of an all-mighty system that claims to know what is best for us. You can be a wacked-out anarchist in your private life as long as you are polite, shop, and don’t hurt anybody. I guess it is difficult to live here without observing with some curiosity and these opinions are a work in progress. So be prepared for more musings from the land of big-butts at the buffet …

In the earlier parts of summer, we drove to three conferences, one of which was the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society hosted in Bloomington, IN. Sebastian had a long chat with Harvard Professor and plenary speaker E.O. Wilson about ants. He told him that we had ants in our garden, that we should not step on them, and that some could bite you. EO, in exchange, showed him how to draw ants and told him that fire ants might more likely sting than bite.

A few weeks ago Robert underwent eye surgery in the medical center in Columbus to repair an ocular muscle that was damaged during retinal surgery 20 years ago. It had been hard to focus the two images on one central location and the surgery under local anesthesia made a big difference. Initially, blood oozing from the eye with sutures under the lids was disconcerting – especially to Sebastian, but this healed within a few days.

We now have two bee hives in the garden. A local, commercial breeder discontinued his business and was looking to sell his hives. Robert had toyed with the idea of keeping bees for some time and this provided a great opportunity to get into it with most things already functioning. We bought a suit, tools, and two complete hives with multiple brood chambers and supers and I chose two successful colonies - one a strain from northern Russia with better resistance to mites, the other a productive strain from Yugoslavia with interesting behaviors.

Also Robert’s running has started again seriously, or at least as serious as it can be with an additional 20 kg stuck to his midsection. His goals are to continue consistent training, build up the mileage and maybe run a Fall marathon. The previous intensive training has been helpful allowing him to distinguish between signs of trouble leading on to injury and temporary discomfort that one can recover from quickly. It has been tough to get excited about hours on the road when the surrounding is really not that appealing, we had been spoiled by wonderful running trails in Graz, along the river, the Lechwald, the vineyards in Mariatrost – none of that here. The more one runs here though, the more this area grows on you. Sure it is not particularly scenic but there is a certain level of peace that one gets from running off into the fields, no traffic and cars, to use dirt roads cut like canyons into corn higher than ones head. It requires a bit of a different mind set to step out the door and to see the white barn on the horizon that marks a common turn-around point at 4km - with a perfectly straight road leading up to it. As I let go of the eagerness for encountering something wildly exciting and unexpected, and as I realize the comfort I find in the balance and predictability of the surrounds, my running is again beginning to flourish. Similarly, there is an inherent pleasure associated with the existence of well-worn tracks in ones daily lives.