Steve's Place

Today was a very relaxing day at The Aerie, and I realized that since Penny came to be part of our pack on the day after Memorial Day, that today was her first holiday at home.

There was plenty of resting…

And a little curiosity about the gardening we did

And a little curiosity about the camera

And finally, a nice Happy Hour hanging out with a good drink and a good book.

Happy Independence Day to all!

It’s a nice calm easy Independence Day weekend at The Aerie this year.  In addition to our national holiday, the weekend is always one of the biggest for tennis fans – this is the weekend of the Wimbledon finals.

So, to honor, I’m sorry, honour our nation's forefathers and tennis heroes alike, we made a very good cocktail from the latest issue of Imbibe Magazine.

The English Afterthought

3 oz gin
¾ oz St Germain liquor*
1-tablespoon fresh blueberries
1-tablespoon finely chopped ginger
Ginger beer**

In a Collins glass or large tumbler, muddle the blueberries and ginger.  Fill the glass with ice and add gin and St. Germain.  Stir and top with ginger beer.  Garnish with a skewer of blueberries.

This drink is very tasty and effervescent – perfect for a relaxing summer afternoon.   The mix of the tart blueberries, sharp ginger, sweet liquor and aromatic gin make for a great drink.

Cheers!

* St Germain is an elderflower liquor that has a very light, sweet honey-ish-but-not-quite taste.  It rocks.  In a pinch, you could probably substitute Drambuie, but I’d use less, I think.

** Ginger beer is a carbonated ginger soda that has a more intense ginger flavor than ginger ale.

So, when I was a young scientist, I didn’t work on drug targets or diseases or anything remotely seen as practical.  I worked in a fairly esoteric field – protein folding and protein stability.   Why?  Well, because I thought it was cool.  No, really.

Anyway, everyone outside of certain parts of Kansas and Louisiana knows that DNA is the genetic material that makes us what we are.  However, DNA is BORING.  It sits in the nucleus under essentially cellular lock and key.  How come?  Well, mostly because it’s so important that you don’t want it out in the cellular milieu because it could get damaged.  And in the good-bad scheme of things, that’s bad.  So, DNA does what any good manager does, it delegates.   And it delegates nearly all the cell’s to-do list to proteins.

Proteins are long chains of amino acids that fold into three-dimensional structures in the cell.  This structure dictates what they “do”: whether it’s be an enzyme, a receptor, a structural component, a messenger, and so forth.  In the 1970s, it was shown that proteins could reversibly fold and unfold – but the “whys” and “hows” of that were still a mystery.

So – I worked on some of that.  Why some proteins folded more readily than others and what made some more stable than others (those two were not always correlated).  But what was it good for my wise mother would ask me?  And I’d tell her,  “Errrr, well Mom, it helps our understanding of biophysics and blah blah woof woof…” until her eyes glazed over.  Later, I became disenchanted with the “academic” aspect of protein folding studies and moved onto real-world drug discovery and got into anti-infectives and endocrinology.

Guess what?  As it turns out over the next decade or so protein folding (or mistakes in it) have been implicated mechanistically in several diseases – including Alzheimer’s Disease, cystic fibrosis, mad-cow like diseases and even some cancers.

Today, I came across a paper in which scientists in San Antonio examined differences in the behavior in proteins between mice and bats.  Why mice and bats?  Well – no offense to pigeons – bats are essentially rats-with-wings and genetically very similar.  One difference is that bats live a lot longer than mice.

As it turns out, proteins from bats are more resistant to oxidative damage than their murine counterparts (oxidation is linked to age-dependent damage and disease) and their protein folds are more stable, too.  

Go figure.  Rather than blather on to my mom about biochemistry and biophysics, I could have told her I was working on the Holy Grail of biology: Longevity.  In essence, the Fountain of Youth!

Oh – and guess where the bats from that study live?  Florida.

This past week, we had some friends visit us at The Aerie for a too-brief visit but there was still a good collection of quality San Diego vacationing.  On Sunday, we all trooped over to the beach for a great day (even if it was a little over-cast and breezy).

Monday, our guest family went over to Sea World to visit with Shamu and yesterday, we all went to the San Diego Zoo.  For me, this was a nice bookend on the day the Beloved and I had to the Wild Animal Park a couple of weeks ago.

It was a gorgeous day at the Zoo and we arrived pretty early to try and beat both the heat and the crowds.  Tourism seems like it’s off a bit around here, because it was a pretty light crowd for what is usually a pretty busy place.  As always, I just loved walking around – watching the animals and have them watch us, too.

Going early is good, because more of the animals are active before they get onto some serious settling down in the heat of the midday and afternoon.

One of the hard parts for me is seeing the great apes.  I mean, I know they are being slaughtered in their homelands in Africa, but the gorillas always seem so sad when I see them.

There was also a lot of munching to be found – camels eating hay and polar bears eating carrots.

As always, the Zoo is a great place to stretch your legs and get to see some of our animal cousins.

Sometimes I find that the books I read tend to cluster – for example, this time last year I found myself reading a bunch of post-apocalyptic fiction.   Recently, I’ve been reading a few mystery-thrillers, and in particular what I would have to think of as the very narrow sub-genre of Murder Mysteries Involving Missing Children in Northern European Locales.

In The Woods by Tana French is an Edgar Award (2008, Best First Novel) – which follows the investigation of a slain child by Detectives Ryan and Maddux in a small town outside Dublin.  The case is fraught with ethical and emotional problems for Ryan as he was the lone survivor when two of his friends disappeared in the same area when he was about the same age as the victim.   Very well-written and with better characterization than in most mysteries, this was a very interesting read – with lots of interesting questions:  Are the two cases intertwined?  Do you want them to be?  Is Ryan a liability to the investigation?  And of course, whodunit?   This book is very deliberately paced, and early on I longed for a little more action, but after a bit I settled comfortably into its dour mood.  In a way, the slower pace helped build the suspense – and unlike many mysteries everything doesn’t necessarily get a tidy clean-up at the conclusion.

Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin was also an award-winning first novel.*  Set on a lonely island in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden, the story follows a mother’s quest to find some peace after her only son disappeared on a foggy day many years ago.   Not a typical detective story, the daughter and her estranged aging father investigate a current death that may have bearing on their own tragic family history.  This story does a wonderful job of creating the desolate landscape of island and the quiet dour people that live in its remote towns.   This is also a story that develops slowly and steadily becoming very engrossing at the end.  Theorin also did a good job of keeping me guessing throughout and even springing a couple of surprises that I didn’t see coming.

*My library seems to specialize in Scandinavian mysteries (this won a Swedish Mystery Writers' Award) and I’ve read a couple previously set in Sweden.  This has been my favorite though.

What prevents your city/town from being the best place in the country to live?
Submitted by Cherney.

Ummm.... let me think.  Oh, that's right.  Nothing.

Happy Summer

I was thinking the other day about where my blogging mojo has gone... time has been spent with Penny and the piano, but really I think all my mental energy has gone to playing Word Twist.

Of course, it could be a good day for a nap.

A close look will see that my teddy-bear (creatively named Teddy) had some physical trauma that resulted in the loss of an eye.

We're also having guests come into town and stay with us this week (starting tomorrow), so maybe we'll spend some quality time at the beach.

I wonder if I can still get a pair of hexagonal shades?

There's that old chestnut about people eventually looking and being like their pets, and I think Penny and I are off to a quick start.  It's pretty apparent to all that we're both white with orange spots.

And another thing we have in common is that we both like playing with tennis balls.

Of course, she likes the camera in front of her more than I do...

So, this morning I had a surprisingly pleasant little excursion.  I certainly didn’t think it was going to be because the first place was a trip to Discount Tire to repair-replace a tire that had picked up a “foreign object” while I was driving around the other day.  I was afraid that I’d have to replace the tire, or worse both front ones (gotta keep ‘em balanced, right?)  Fortunately, the tires I have are run-flats, so the car could sit in the garage for a couple of days and I could drive it over this morning.

When I arrived, Discount Tire Guy was all "We see this all the time...we'll have you fixed right up..."  so I left my keys and walked over to a nearby Panera for a coffee and a not-so-good-for-me-but-tasty treat and my book.

Forty minutes later they were done and the repair was $ 0.00 (because I'd bought the tires there last year, so repairs are free).  Works for me.

I had a rescheduled piano lesson at 11, and had a little (more) time to kill, so I drove over and hung out at Seagrove Park in Del Mar, sat in the shade and read my book.  I tempted the notoriously fickle Del Mar Parking gods by wagering that 105 minutes in a 90 minute spot would work out ok.  (And it did).

When I got home, Penny was very happy that I was back and we hung out in the back for a while and she tortured herself by watching me eat lunch (she’s a big girl now and only gets fed twice a day).

We sat in the shade of our jacaranda tree and I read and she chewed on her towel.  Later, she decided it was a little cool under the boughs and opted to stretch out and grab some rays.

Not a bad start to the week, I’d say.

So, there I was, trying to beat Cori at WordTwist while Penny was asleep in her crate when there came a flutter.  And I mean a bigtime whooshwhooshwhoosh flutter.

Yep – bird in the house. (We keep our screenless backdoor open when it’s warm because there aren’t really any bugs to speak of here…)  I walked out and there on the transom was one confused male California Quail.   Apparently one of our favorite birds decided to come on in and see what was happening.

He made another fluttery flight for the dining room window – which unfortunately for him was closed.  THONK!  Sorry buddy.

I think that left him scared and/or dazed enough to permit me to get him to hop up onto a broom that I slid out towards him.  I slowly moved him to the back again and as soon as I tipped him onto the patio, there was one more big flutter and he was off to the safety of the nearby scrub brush.

So – after yesterday’s snake and today’s quail, I find myself wondering what’s going to happen tomorrow!