Giving Thanks

I have many things to be thankful for this holiday season.
Among other things, I am thankful for my good health, my loving family, my friends, my job, my house. Its been a tough few months and I am glad that some things are getting back to normal. I am thankful that parts of the island are back on-line. I am thankful that most everyone I know is back in good living situations. I am thankful that my work will be up and running when I return from Christmas.

I am not thankful for the numerous layoffs that occurred last week that will affect research as we know it. I still do not know all those let go, but I know of several faculty members that will be greatly missed. I pray that they can find great positions in the coming months. Even with tenure, it is difficult how easily anyone is dispensable. It has been a very somber couple of weeks.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I hope to see you all over the Christmas holiday.

Evening at "Howl at the Moon"

Ryan and I had a great time last weekend with some friends at a piano bar in Houston called Howl at the Moon. Here are a few photos from the night

npr says it best

follow this link to see what npr has to say about UTMB and the layoffs.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97124797

"UTMB cuts 3,800"

"UTMB cuts 3,800" Quoted from the Galveston Daily News on Thursday. We received a email from our president Wednesday that they met with the UT system regents and they unanimously approved the cut of 3800 full-time UTMB employees, thats 1/3 of our workforce on the island! They are cutting the 550 beds to about 200! Currently the school is losing $40 million a month paying salaries of those that are still not back at work, which is roughly 3000 people. The hospital is still not functional because all of the food services, pharmacy, blood bank, etc were on the 1st floor. I guess the good news is that they will get paid through January.

We all suspect that this is primarily to get rid of the huge population of indigent care we provide. I guess they send them here from surrounding hospitals, but the government doesn't pay us for those services, so we are always in the red. They are also not fixing any of the section 8 housing on the island. I don't know where all of these people are going to go. You may be surprised but there are many people still living in 'the tent city' on the island provided by the Red Cross. FEMA is the worst run agency we have. My fellow students are still waiting on help. Did you know that people are still living in trailers in LA following Katrina! For this reason, they are not sending any trailers to Galveston. The island is still a mess. Piles of debris, non-functional traffic lights, clogged rain drains, etc. Several of favorite restaurants are still not open...and appear to be far from it.

I am still not back to working fully. We can only be there from 8-5 M-F and I still have no animals to work with! I have paperwork to do, but its not urgent so I don't feel like doing it. Unfortunately, I am getting good at wasting away 9 hours of my day! Some things are starting to come back online so I am crossing my fingers and hope that by December things will be back to 'normal'.

Okay I'll quit being a downer and post about the good things in my life

GNL opens

They dedicated the Galveston National Lab on Tuesday. Its a one-of-a-kind building for biosafety level 3 and 4 research. There were many big names at the event including Senator Hutchinson and Dr. Ksiazek from the CDC. Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci, the director of NIAID, was out sick. I was looking forward to hearing him talk about emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Next week I get to take a tour of the facility before it opens for research.

Students helping students

So both Saturday and Sunday last weekend we drove around Houston picking up donated items and delivering them to students' that were flooded and lost everything. We have about 40 houses to pick up from and about 15 to deliver to. Our graduate student organization is doing it all with too few trucks and too many hands...maybe too many brains. It has basically been a organizational nightmare and taken us way too long to get it done. Ryan helped out last Saturday nd was a huge help. Unfortunately we are only half done and will be doing it again this weekend. I can only take one more day of it and plan on skipping out on Sunday. Instead I am hosting a party at my house. It may be smaller than expected croud becasue many of my friends are going to the Houston Dynamo playoff game (soccer for those of you that don't know).

Post Ike House Work

I nearly forgot...here are the changes I made to our house during the weeks following Ike. I painted the master bedroom and bath. I put in before and after photos. I also painted the table legs, restained the tabletop, painted the chairs and put new fabric on the seats.

Hopefully the backyard is our next project.

Halloween

So Ryan and I went to a small Halloween party Friday, but were lame and didn't dress up. Neither of us enjoy it much and Ryan never does anything ahead of time, so I would have had to figure out our costumes. We did, however, carve pumpkins. They turned out pretty good. I was sad that we couldn't go to a pumpkin patch. The ones we bought at the grocery store were of pretty poor quality and from New Mexico! Ryan's pumpkin is on the left and mine on the right.

I am in the process of making scrapbooks for my brothers, Marques and Tanner. They were supposed to be high school graduation presents, but we were a bit slow in rounding up photos. So, I finally have them and thought you might like to see a few that corresponds with halloween...but let me assure you that most of them were not taken on or near Oct 31st!

Photos of UTMB....

It appears that my link to the UTMB website isn't working. I put a few of the photos from the slideshow on.

Pre storm photos- scroll down to see the water rise before the power goes out.

Post Storm water on campus- my building is the one on the left about 6 hours after the eye of the storm passes through

my building is out of the photo, but on the right side. This boat is about 200m from the bay on the left!

So I am still very unproductive at work. Still no diH2O, no autoclave and certainly no animal work. I am currently putting together a fellowship due in January, but with the deadline so far away I am not very motivated to get much done on it. It seems like much of the day is set aside for chatting. It is actually therapeutic to tell our experiences and how we are getting by. Most are still dealing with FEMA and windstorm insurance. Others that will be rebuilding are waiting on a green light from the city or the availability of a contractor. This weekend Ryan and I spent 2 full days picking up donated furniture from Houston and delivering it to Galveston students. It was quite miserable because there were so many homes, so many items and Houston is BIG. We only got half of the items, so we will be at it again this weekend too.

We had an inspector out to the house today and he said that we may need to replace the shingles on one side of the house because they were loose, but luckily there was no water damage in the attic or elsewhere. I think our windstorm deductible is about $600, so this may end up hurting a bit. FEMA won't be helping us because we didn't have to live anywhere else nor were we in a 'mandatory evacuation' area.

Unexpectedly, we have been infested with ghost ants since the storm. We finally had to call out an exterminator because the 50 ant baits throughout the house seem to be doing little. I've had to move the cat food from one end of the kitchen to the other to prevent the ants from finding it temporarily. Luckily we have not had to throw out any food.

On a happy note, we will be coming home for Christmas. Not that we can really afford it with all of the extra expenses lately, but for our sanity, need to. I found out last week that I received 2 scholarships, one for being dedicated to our graduate student organization and the other is an academic scholarship. They were a blessing right now.