Annual Report 2003/04

Hi folks,

Since summer 2003 another year has snuck up on us and another half year has slipped by seemingly stuck to it. So consider this annual and a half report from us a bit late but containing a 50% added bonus section. There are probably also events that slipped our minds.

September 2003 started with excitement. Harry Manning, the father of a colleague and good friend of ours at BG, was racing a Mazda Miata at the National Championships at Mid-Ohio Raceway near Mansfield. Needless to say our crowd had to be there and Sebastian was in his element - engines loud and pushed to their maximum, futuristic suits with cool decals, colorful helmets, and the smell of burning tires. We scouted the camp and it was fun to observe the pre-race rituals that drivers go through - some give their machines a last exuberant spit and polish, while others decide to tear out their transmission a few minutes from the start. The little unit got to climb into Harry’s racecar through the window, he sat in the deep bucket seats, and we had a hard time extracting him against his will so Harry could make it to the start in time. During the race we were hanging out with Harry’s race crew, Rusty, who maintained radio contact with the driver. Watching anonymous racers compete is positively fun but when you actually know somebody in it, then it is positively captivating. The lead see-sawed and after an intensely fought battle our guy won. We stood next to the podium when the champagne sprayed, and finally left when his car and those of the two runner-ups went through routine examination by the race jury. All winning cars are completely disassembled to make sure that no illegal components are used.

Another impressive sight greeted us in October when a barn a couple houses west of us caught fire and completely burnt to the ground despite valiant efforts by all the fire departments in the vicinity. It was also time for the baseball playoffs with our friend Vern, a New York native and a Yankees fan with an intensity that is hard to fathom by anybody who has not grown up in this country. Still feeling ties to Boston where we had lived for a few years, and cheering for the underdog that had not won in close to 100 years, I made the mistake of getting wrapped up in this pastime and I rooted for the Red Sox. They really looked like they could do it this year. Like many generations before me, though, I was left heart-broken by the Sox’ last minute destruction at the hands of the team from the Big Apple.

Skating has become an integral part of our lives as Sebastian enjoys it a great deal and does extremely well in it. Mooi and I, of course, had to learn too and I am trying to stay ahead of the little squirt for as long as I can. I registered as an undergrad and took all hockey-related courses at BG, we have season tickets to the university Team - the Bowling Green State Falcons - and I joined a group of very hockey-competent friends for weekly practice games - called a shinny. Games are often followed by post-exercise, re-hydration at a local pub. Fueled by a couple of pints of Boddington’s we decided to ratchet things up a notch and take the show onto the road for an international hockey tournament in - Iceland. Many stories that won’t be told emerged from a week of sports, trekking around spectacular scenery, and partaking in Reykjavik nightlife (which takes up a good portion of the day as the arctic winter sun barely skims the horizon for a couple of hours a day). With a goalie from the New York Rangers, a forward from the Belgian national team and a series of good Canadian and Russian players in our regular group we also did well on the ice. The games were good-natured, competitive, but most importantly, a lot of fun. A local team hosted and played in each league, and ours, a team of select junior players, had done well in their first couple of games. We played them at 8:00 in the morning and their goalie failed to show up. As a good-will gesture we offered them our (ringer) goalie for half the game. As David warmed up with them he took some practice shots and completely intimidated them with his goal-tending. Their own goalie did finally show up just in time for the game, but the psychological damage had been done :-) We skated to a tie against them and left Iceland undefeated.

In November, Mooi, Sebastian and myself also traveled to Austria for a short, intense, and very pleasant thanksgiving week holiday. We visited, had our usual family get-togethers at the beer garden, and it was great to see that everyone was doing well.

Our return to BG confronted us with reminders of the ephemeral nature of life. Our dearly-loved cat Sipho had gotten himself into a fight and, initially, antibiotics seemed to better his wounds. On the weekend his health quite suddenly took a turn for the worse and he died. Sebastian dug a little grave in our prettiest flowerbed and we buried him there. Even now, a year later, he sometimes gets sad and says that he misses his cat – and we do too. Then Rainer, a German postdoc in our department whom we had known since our postdoc times in Woods Hole, took ill. The prognosis was not good as it became clear that he needed a liver transplant and a variety of issues were not in his favor for being placed on the transplant list. As the only native german-speaker in his circle of friends I was faced with the grim task of telling his mother that her son was not likely to see Christmas. When I called Ingrid I was incredibly impressed by her strength. She was obviously distraught to hear the news she had feared to hear but she encouraged me to give her a frank assessment of the situation. A recent heart operation was preventing her from traveling and I tried to sooth her guilt about not being at his side as well as I could. We talked for a long time and the only real consolation I could offer her was the assurance that he was in good care here and that he had very dedicated folks, especially Jen, looking after him. We then talked about the arrangements that were to be made. Man, there really can’t be anything more awful than a parent learning that one’s child is dieing. It really sucks, as hard as any death of a loved one is, in the natural order of things, it is supposed to be the other way round. Rainer died a few weeks later waiting in vain for a transplant.

We spent Christmas in Durban with Mooi’s mom and family, met up with Judy who was visiting from New York, spend a few days surfing at Anstey’s Beach in a backpackers camp with lessons from ex-Pro Rudi, a few days running with Keith in the Drakensberg mountains, grasshopper collecting, and before you knew it we were back home.

In January, as a contrast program to summer and beach, the whole family packed up for our annual skiing trip with a bunch of friends at the Duckville trailer park – excuse me, the Duckville mobile home estate - in Holliday valley. As always we had a blast with deep snow, cross-country trails, downhill slopes, tire slides and late-night card games. As in previous years the cozy quarters provided the perfect incubator for pathogens and Sebastian competently stepped up to fill this year’s role of Typhoid Mary. Fortunately, major group symptoms only erupt after the weekend and thus do not cut into skiing duties. For us this trip provided also the perfect warm-up for our first skiing trip to the Rockies as Moira and I were invited as symposium speakers at the Winter Conference for Brain Research at Copper Mountain, Colorado. Scientifically, sessions are scheduled for early morning and late afternoon-evening, leaving the bulk of the day for skiing. Conference members are easy to identify by a sticker on their suit and rides on the chairlift turn into perfect opportunities to tell fellow scientists about your work – mainly because – there is NO ESCAPE. Most amazing to us at this conference, however, was the confirmation that Sebastian is an incredible talent when it comes to activities that combine balance, strength, and athletics. He had been skiing on only a handful of occasions and yet he seamlessly translated his skating into confidently bombing down the slopes in reasonably controlled fashion. On the first day we met friends at a slope that allowed us to do a blue trail while they would do the double black diamonds next to it. Sebastian and I missed the connecting trail to blue and found ourselves faced with a very steep hill, combinations of deep snow and ice, and bumps upon bumps upon bumps. The little one was unfazed, he whooped and hollered with joy, he bounced from bump to bump, and was among the first ones down in our group. On this run he hooked up with two of the most influential scientists at the conference, chairmen of two major neuroscience departments, and we skied with them for much of the afternoon. As Tom had stopped on the side, Sebastian skied up encouraging him to go on. Tom’s response was that he needed to catch his breath which was answered by the little one with “oh no, you should ski and breathe at the same time, like I do, see …” and off he was. Sebastian then mingled with a group of skiing instructors and ski-lift attendants who had taken off for an hour of their own skiing on this challenging terrain. From that moment on he was known on the entire mountain as the slope shark (his helmet has a soft cover with teeth painted on the front and a fin on top). No matter where we went, people greeted and smiled. At the final banquet we were sitting with a bunch of our friends of junior faculty, post-docs and grad students. The table got quiet in awe when Sebastian’s two big player buddies approached and joined us at the table – but they spent all their time chatting with him – instead of us. Upon return to BG the spring semester with a heavy teaching load then came and went uneventfully.

For some time Moira and I wanted to upgrade to a more permanent settling in BG. We both had received tenure and were very happy with the pace of life, our department, and local colleagues and friends. We loved our property on the banks of the Portage River, which had a few acres with a very rural feel, was cool for fishing and collecting crawdads, had a great old barn, and was still just a few miles from campus – only, we hated the house. We really wanted to fashion a more permanent abode as a low maintenance, passive solar house with a small ecological footprint, designed around our life style, featuring basic amenities and appliances that one gets used to from living in Europe, and walls/doors/windows that positively keep out mice and retain at least a modicum of warmth. None of our plans for replacing the house on the same property turned out to be financially practical. So we had no option but to look for another well-suited property like our current one (but which did not have a house on it yet) and to then sell the current place once we were done building. After we had been very particular in our search for more than a year, Doris, the real-estate agent who had initially helped us find our Scotch Ridge Rd. house, came through again. She told us about a property that they were about to list in Pemberville and which she felt might just be unusual enough (and hold sufficient biological interest) for us - a 110 acre track of land with 80 acres of wetland woods, an old farm house, and 30 acres of farm fields. It is one of the largest wooded areas that now remain in the sea of fields that is northwest Ohio and it is unclear how it had escape agricultural and residential development throughout the past 150 years of Western settlement. It may actually represent the last small remnant of the Great Black Swamp that had covered much of the area before it was drained in the late 19^th century by German engineers (who had settled in Pemberville) and farmed by Scottish farmers (who had settled in Scotch Ridge). Moreover, it is located across the road from Eastwood High/Middle School and less than 10 miles from campus. An elderly lady living out of state had just inherited it and wanted to quickly sell the whole thing as one piece. We did not hesitate to jump on this opportunity and had acceptance of our reasonably offer in hand even before its availability had become widely known. We subsequently found out that we had just beaten out a developer who was interested in turning the property into a subdivision with golf course. We took possession in April and began exploring the property, mapped areas of specific biological interest (e.g., rare orchids), and saving/restoring the barn. We also began construction of a narrow walking/running trail through the woods, which eventually will measure around 5km.  To help with all that, Robert had an early and very generous visit from Santa who delivered a collection of rugged stuff including a Kubota tractor, backhoe, front loader, wood chipper, chain saw, etc. The clear next priority, however, was the sale of our old house on the Portage River.

While Sebastian was raising a duckling that had adopted him as mother, Moira and Maureen worked magic with a paintbrush and a credit card. The place, as the locals say, “…cleaned up really good …”. Dang-it we could have done this earlier. It really did not look half bad, especially after we had borrowed a bunch of artwork and furniture from Paul and Maureen to spiff up the humble abode. Bob’s main job was then to do the smooth-talkin’ and the sellin’. A “for sale by owner” sign, a web site, and an info brochure were ready when our neighbors began harvesting their strawberries. All the cars pulling into their farm stand could not help but notice our sign and the whole thing was over in a week. Moving out right away was no big problem as Paul was leaving for a sabbatical in Toronto and we were able to housesit their Victorian mansion in town. When we took possession of our property in spring we had also extended a further 6-month lease to the current tenants. So we have only recently begun renovating the farmhouse and we hope that this should be far enough along for us to move in early March.

While preparing our house for sale some shit hit the fan for Robert. This year marked five years of, often frustrated, efforts to return to his interest in long-distance running. It was hard to cut into the pounds that had accumulated since reasonably serious training had stopped. During those years I became increasingly creaky and rusty especially when I tried to get out of bed in the morning. Also walking stairs started to feel like a major workout, and any attempts to start running led to some niggling pains due to the serious pounding my lard ass was handing to my joints – clearly things weren’t going right… Friends had infected me with their excitement for biking and I also revisited my long-dormant interests in swimming. A plan to formalize this into a triathlon crystallized logically. January and February went like a peach, I lost a bunch of weight, I was riding high, and I signed up for the Chicago Triathlon. A brief down month for training was coming up as I would spend most of my spare time fixing the house for sale – I just did not consider the caveat to never take things for granted. While working overhead on a light fixture I felt a shooting pain in my shoulder and left arm. Over the next week the pain got worse, the hand got tingly and insensitive to touch, and most disturbingly, I lost most of the strength in my arm. A series of x-rays, nerve conduction studies, and MRI scans did exclude brain tumors and other major nasties, but I was apparently suffering from degenerative arthritis in my spine and hip. Arthritis in my neck was squashing nerve roots for my arm, turning it into a pained, limp, utterly useless appendage – clearly a triathlon was not in the cards now. A combination of intense physiotherapy and anti-inflammatories brought the arm back to life but the underlying problem of a rusting body remained. Not yet willing to resign myself to a fate of a body frozen into a contorted pretzel I decided to return to a life filled with exercise and stretching. With Chicago two weeks off and not anywhere on my radar screen, I took my first cautious steps with a bit of swimming. I stretched, did some biking, even tried a bit of running. To my great surprise, matters improved rapidly and I realized that exercise offered the best chance for holding it off for as long as possible. My plans had thus changed yet again, the Chicago triathlon now would not serve as an athletic event for me, it would mark the starting point of my endeavor to battle the debilitating prospects and hold them off for as long as I can. The race itself happened under a good set of stars. A wild and wacky trip turned into a celebration for a feat that had been all but impossible just a few weeks back. To top it all, we got to spend some time with Dave who took us to see Chicago’s spectacular new Millenium Park – though unfortunately his girls were out of town. As an unexpected treat we did get to meet Pete’s family, Charlotte, Miles and Emma, when they visited BG from Kenya over the summer.

Before the end of the outdoor swimming season Robert added the half-ironman Pineman Triathlon near Deer Creek State Park. Teaching had finished on Friday and a few minutes before we left town I had heard that my NIH grant was to be funded – another race as a party and spirits were running high. During the 2km swim and the first half of the 80km bike leg I felt like a thousand bucks. Then reality set in and I had to summon all of my will to finish.

Another fall meant another epic battle between the Yankees and the Red Sox in the baseball playoffs, which undoubtedly should ultimately end as sad for the Sox fans as all the previous ones over the last 100 years. Not this year though, against all odds, the Yankees fell apart. November was finally also time for the national election, which had dominated public life for the past 2 years. Mooi and Sebastian did their bit helping at the local Democratic headquarters but it was ultimately a sad time … don’t get us started … The oddest experience for me was to see a society where (1) basic, decent humanistic, liberal, enlightened principles as the basis for a civilized society are increasingly portrayed as some outlandish, ultra-left-wing conspiracy to take over their daily lies and (2) a rational study of societal problems is viewed as inferior to guidance from religious authorities on these issues. The complete disconnect between the blue states on the costs, and the red states in the middle, is very real. Midwest rural folk, such as the ones around here, are unable to appreciate how society has become increasingly individualistic, somewhat anarchic, with “everything goes as long as it does not interfere with other people’s lives” attitudes. They just don’t get it and desperately want to retreat to the “good old days” of the fifties – that is what Bush was promising them. I think the majority here does not necessarily want religion to run their lives, thy rather expressed their disgust for the abundance of greedy and “amoral” individuals they see in everyday business, sports and politics – and they don’t want to hear about a weak-willed president who gets blow jobs in the oval office.

Robert continued to accumulate a somewhat patchy record in house renovation. Actually after his initial attempts matters could only get better, here is what happened … Thaksgiving had provided us with a few days of uninterrupted work to begin tearing bits of the house down to the studs. We had just started when a strong storm picked up, tore the roof off the car port and tossed it over our electric pole – which came down with a crash, pulling an anchor and siding off the back of the house. During the clean-up of this mess, the back-hoe broke a gas line - which afterwards turned out to be a old disconnected one. As I was frantically trying to respond to the perceived emergency, I managed to ding the real one. I was then bending some trees out of the way when my hand slipped and smashed into the spike-studded bark of a honey-locust tree. A large thorn went thought the leather glove, pierced deep into the joint of my ring finger, and broke off. With my wedding ring in place, the finger swelled up quickly to impressive dimensions. The spine was embedded so deeply that Moira could not get it out. The hospital visit brought about a wedding ring cut-off, a finger butterfly-ed and a surprising number of stitches to bring it back into roughly roundish shape. As I was resting on the couch thinking about how things had gone astray, Moira was writing the screen play and Chevy Chase has agreed to star in the movie playing - me.

As for now we are playing cat and mouse with contractors and learning the hard way of how to get them to actually do something. Of course Robert cant wait to do more deconstruction, so stay tuned for the latest happenings.

All our best wishes for a happy and healthy 2005. Stay well,