3 2016 Updates

This new year letter is almost on time -- only two days late. Let's see if that pattern of productivity will hold the rest of the year, eh?

As I was pondering what to put together for this letter, I went through all the photos I took in 2016. They neatly binned into a few topics and capture a neat snapshot of what this year looked like, so I've organized this letter around them.

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3.1 A Year in Food

My culinary skills have developed into a set pattern of habits: slow cooker meals, steaks, and fried eggs. Paired with a great deal of faith in my rice cooker, this menu has become financially and logically simple. Because I've inherited Mom's tendency to cook for an army of 12 and no matter how good pulled pork is no one wants to each it 12 days in a row, I've tried to host people for dinner more regularly. I had a Thursday night dinner series that lasted almost a whole month -- not bad eh?

In other news, 2016 has highlighted the importance of butter, and I recently learned that the drawer under your oven isn't the broiler, but the warmer (this explains why it took me so long to cook chicken down there...). When the weather was nice, and the days long, it became one of my favorite things to cook dinner up on the roof deck as the sun set.

Tea and Coffee: the means by which I get through graduate school. Also the most commonly found forms of free food around my laboratory.

3.2 A Year in Science

Laboratory work has been life and love and hate this year. Long hours praying the 3D-printer keeps working, the excitement when it does actually work, and so much hate when things seem to start working but never pull through. Let me explain what I do in two ways:

  1. The ten-thousand-foot view: Suppose you have a car accident and shatter your cheek bone on the steering wheel. Right now, there's not a great way to patch that up -- plastic surgeons will reconstruct it using one of your leg bones. As an alternative, the group I work in wants to 3D print a bone instead. The bone would be an exact match to your face, and be made of stem cells and plastic. The idea is the plastic is broken down in your body at the same rate the stem cells grow new bone, so after a few years you only have your own bone in your cheek.
  2. The first-person Ethan view: Growing hundreds of tiny bones with different conditions to see what happens. Trying new manufacturing methods to enable improvements to the design of those bones. Lots and lots of reading scientific reports, regulatory documents, and google. Writing protocols for human and animal experiments and trials. Moving two drops of this into that. And cleaning / running / chores / maintaining a laboratory.

3.3 Sisters...

All of the sisters have visited this year. Bethany and I had a really good time touring the American Visionary Art Museum and she made a return trip to see me demo 3D-printing at a conference. Hannah and Virginia came to Baltimore Fleet Week and I walked their-butts off. Lots of fun to see the Blue Angels and all the weird boats in the harbor.

3.4 Baltimore

Adventure is always right outside the door. The year started off with a wonderful pile of snow [#ExtremeWeatherIsBetter]! Then there was the weird light festival. I also attempted to grow plants -- the Poinsettia did pretty well, and I'm pretty sure my garlic chives are vampiric. None of my little pickles actually turned out, but they looked nice.

Early in the spring I came home to a three-alarm fire on my block. Turns out it only takes one coal to fly onto our tar-covered roofs for everything to go crazy. St. Patrick's day was stellar, with great weather and a good bit of bar hopping (And really good corned beef in the crock pot...I wish Harris Teeter sold it year round).

3.5 Charlottesville

The other place I prefer to spend time. I am happy to confirm that many of the noble and honored institutions are still up to standard [Bodos, but also Champion Brewing, Dumplings, Blue Moon, White Spot, and Wayside Chicken]. Also, the mountains are still there and the AT looks to be in good shape.

On a sad note, I only managed to go backpacking twice this year -- once on a PA section of the AT in nasty winter weather that almost froze us all, and again in the Summer just south of C'ville where we went South instead of North and all the maps were useless... #Adventure

That's all I feel like spewing out right now. Best wishes for everyone this year!

Cheers,

Ethan

P.S. Extra Photos: