Andy and Darcy’s Blog

Ah, summer. I can’t wait to go back to the farmers’ market!

Saturday, June 21, 2008

We’ve been going to the farmer’s market in Rochester fairly often. As you can see here, we achieved strawberry nirvana.

Below are pictures from a few days before Christmas. We were still in Rochester when these photos were taken. And on this day we wrapped gifts for family in KS, exchanged Christmas stocking with each other, and opened gifts from family in Michigan. As you can see, I’m still letting Picasa do all the work for me.

Today I got my copy of the Rochester Buyer’s Guide, a small newspaper-like flier that has been effectively junk mail to me since I have moved to Rochester. Well, I have changed my mind.

This week the Rochester Buyer’s Guide has a front page article about how Olmsted County is selling 1200 Earth Machine composters for $40 on June 7 at the Apache Mall south parking lot across from Macy’s. This is so cool!

Here is a link I found for this event.

In the past I have spent a lot of time looking at composters. They can be really expensive, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one less than $50. Back then, I didn’t know there was going to be an awesome offer like this. Andy and I found our own solution, and it cost about $15. And because my mom was so curious, I blogged about it here.

Since then we have expanded our composting solution with another $15 plastic trash can that holds only finished composted dirt. This container stays in the garage. It is awesomely convenient to open the container, scoop out some dirt, and then shut the lid.

If I had to do it all over again, I would definitely buy the one from Olmsted County. I am that lazy. So maybe this will help someone else out.

If you’re on the earthmaker.com website, you should also checkout their compost turner. I think I need one of these.

I have never lived anywhere else that I have seen this weather phenomenon. And I’m talking about sun dogs. On Monday we saw them driving to work, and we also saw them driving home from work. In both cases, there was one on each side of the sun but its hard to capture that on a camera like I have.

Here they are in the morning…its kind of hard to get a picture without power lines on the way to work.

And here they are on the way home. We hardly ever see any daylight in the winter, since its all during our working hours.

Maybe this could be considered another of the silver linings to living somewhere where its cold way too much of the time.

So if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that I went on a tour of Mayo with SWE. And I couldn’t fit all of my blog into one post, so here is the rest of it!

It was Saturday so there was no one at the clinic (I assume the Methodist Hospital and St. Mary’s were quite busy). We went into admissions and saw the process by which patients are admitted and go through the system. It was designed for efficiency. On the floor I saw, there is a central station where people who know things work that connects to three hallways of exam rooms and one waiting room. I think there is something similar on every floor. They have a system of lights for every room that indicates its status…patient waiting, doctor is in the room, etc. The doctors use pagers to communicate when they’re needed somewhere.

We then toured the engineering department which provides custom devices for the doctors, replications of scanned organs, and improvements to the processes at Mayo. They have a lot of CNC machines and use cad tools for much of their work. They fabricate a lot of metal devices, and we saw a flow jet machine as well. We saw a jaw socket that was in the process of fabrication. They also showed us a device for inserting the sensor for deep brain stimulation on a pig.

The clinic has its own scientific glass blower, and we saw a demonstration of his work. He demonstrated blowing bulbs into cylindrical glass tubes, bending the glass into corners, and attaching glass tubes to larger glass vessels. He makes all kinds of things…the most notable of which were heart / vascular system replicas so that people could practice angioplasty surgeries.

On Saturday I toured Mayo with SWE. It was a really cool tour, and I even learned the names of some of the Mayo buildings, something I had never been able to do even after living several years in Rochester and interacting with a few Mayo people. We started the day by gathering at Victoria’s for lunch. After lunch we walked through the underground tunnels to the clinic. We began the tour with a few presentations. The first presentation was about the history of the clinic. The town of Rochester existed because it was a low point in the Zumbro river, where it could be forded. A tornado devastated the town of Rochester in the early 1900’s and the Mayo family (a father and two sons — all doctors) started a hospital with the help of the sisters of Assisi Heights. They adopted the technique of aseptic surgery. This meant that they were sterilizing things, so they were known for success in their practice of medicine very early. They hired more doctors, including Henry Plummer, a doctor with an engineering background. They eventually converted their practice into a not for profit organization, and it also became a medical school as well, but I’m not sure when that occurred. The Mayo Clinic was the site of the first heart lung machine and it was used to correct congenital heart defects in babies (called blue babies). They have one of the early heart lung machines on site, but that room wasn’t open on Saturday.

The second presentation was about deep brain stimulation, research on going at Mayo. Deep brain stimulation involves inserting a sensor into the brain and monitoring chemical levels. The results that they showed us were amazing. We saw a video of one man with Parkinson’s who could barely walk. We saw a video after his deep brain stimulation procedure and he could dance. They also use deep brain stimulation to treat many other neurological problems like clinical depression. I was impressed with the results they were achieving and by the end of the presentation I wanted my own brain sensor.

We then toured the Plummer Building which has beautiful architecture. If you’re in downtown Rochester, it is the building with the bell tower. We went through the reading room for the medical school library. This is an awesome room with beautiful leaded glass windows and tables for reading. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Except for the picture of the windows, that is. I am not good at taking pictures of windows, but take my word for it…they are cool.

Yesterday, on Saturday, we got up early and took some winter pictures. We started at 50th Avenue, where there is this very cool red barn surrounded by corn fields.

We made our way to Essex Park and got some pictures of the creek.

Then we went to Silver Lake Park, and it is not pretty there. The massive anti-geese project must be going on right now. I know they are trying to grow long grass around the lake so that the geese won’t want to spend any time there. And there are lines of twine with shiny reflecting strips strung up about 3 feet above the ground around the lake shore to scare the geese away. Guess what? The lake is still warm from the warm waste water from RPU, and there are still lots of geese on the lake. And it is really ugly now so we didn’t take any pictures.

And then we made our way to the Mayowood trail and bridge. Some of the lake is frozen, but I don’t think you want to ice fish there.

Andy’s pictures are here.

We were back from our trip to Michigan, we had been to work for a day, and then we were ready for New Year’s Eve! Those few people left in Rochester joined us at Casa de Andar to watch the ball drop at 11 pm, play games, and eat snacks.

And here are just a few shots of the food, and maybe I’m putting these here just because I take too many pictures. There were crab cheese meltaways as well, but I guess those went too fast. On the right is the new tasty treat we tried, Banana Pudding Bites, that we saw on Sandra Lee’s show.

We didn’t spend Christmas in Rochester, but we did have our own little Christmas celebration before we left for Michigan. We gave each other stockings, and we took this time to open up a few gifts that were sent home with us by my family at Thanksgiving.

We had an awesome dinner of pizza at our Christmas celebration.

Here is Andy’s stocking. As you can see Santa couldn’t fit everything into Andy’s stocking, but who knew a palm size helicopter would be so big??

Here are a few gifts from my relatives. Our thanks to my parents and grandparents.

And then Andy proceeded to learn how to fly the palm size helicopter. Let me begin by saying that now, as of January 6, the palm size helicopter is broken. But I think Andy had fun. I didn’t actually try and fly the helicopter, but it looked difficult. It was fun to see when it got going, but the landings were usually a little rough.

The pictures are a little late, but that’s another story in itself. Here are pictures of our pre-Thanksgiving Day dinner in Rochester.

The day started out with a light dusting of snow, our first of the year. And like all pre-Thanksgiving Day dinners, it was cold. This year we fried the turkey in the back yard.

Here are shots of meal time preparation. Andy is carving the 17 lb. turkey.

And here are shots of everyone eating. Our family room was more or less cleared out for this event. This was the first year we tried the “one long table” arrangement. It made me realize how important the passing part of Thanksgiving is.