Something we all can relate to....

So I was spending some downtime look around the Internet and a great comic strip that has gotten very popular is phdcomics. This is a funny comic strip about graduate school, not everything relates to me exactly but many of the comics are very entertaining! :)  Here is one I think almost everyone can relate to, it was actually a 3 day series of strips but I put them all here in one. Enjoy, and remember why are you going to work and working so hard? :)

Catch-up: June 16th Part 2: Golf after party!

So after we had all our golfing fun we had everyone and their family members over to our house for a grill out, drinks, and socializing, it was a lot of fun! :) Here are some pictures of the after party.



Part of the gang, relaxing in the back yard. Trying to stay in the shade.



Our cute babies at the party, Nina, Ean and Evelyn. Enjoying the new rummage find in the wagon... big hit in the back yard.



Ean was getting sick of the wagon (and crazy lady taking pics) notice how the girls are both all worried about him getting upset... kids are awesome! :)



Mike swimming with Nina, she really loves the water... what a cute little water bug! :) Nice pool too, huh? :)



Catch-up: June 16th Part 1: Golf outing!

So for the last 4 years Mike (mostly) has been putting on a family (and friends too) golf outing. I must say it has been very successful and lots of fun, so I think it will stick around for a long time to come! :) So every year around father's day weekend we get a bunch of family together to golf in a scramble tournament. This year we had 28 golfers! It was a new high for us, we have grown every year. I love to golf, wish I had more time to do it. Mike and my team did not win this year, but it is not about the winning, it is about the competition and camaraderie! :) Here are some pictures I took as we golfed.

Beautiful morning to golf and a great day for it! :)



Waiting to tee off, we had 7 teams of 4 golfers!

 

Here is a picture of the winning team of this year's open, Aaron, Amy, Mark and Tony, they were behind us so I could catch a few pictures.



Here is a picture of the 'Steinhardt' group, with a little father-daughter golfing in honor of the special weekend! :)



Here is a picture of our special 5 person team (grandpa just rode along for a little while).



Snuck in a picture of the defending champs from last year. They teed off first, but I still got a picture across the river! :) 

 

Finally a picture of my super awesome teammates consisting of some of my favorite people! Here my dad is driving in red, my love, Mike is behind him with the white hat, and Mike's uncle Ray is with us. We had a great team, and came in second... we did pretty well, but not good enough... OH well here is to next year! :) Hope you can make it too, just let us know when it rolls around! :)



Catch-up: June 9th weekend

So I am going to be playing a little catch up with my posts. So back in the beginning of June, I being the sneaking little stinker, convinced my wonderful husband to get a pool. Yes it is not a big fancy pool but it is a pool. Probably every day of summer when I was younger I asked my parents to get a pool, or when I went to play by my cousin Michelle we asked her parents to get a pool. I can't say we were terribly deprived, cause we often went to Mauthe Lake to swim in the summer. None the less, the Intex company has come up with a genius plan for people like me. These pools are very reasonably priced and pretty easy to use and keep clean, and it has been lots of fun so far! Here are some pictures from our fun new pool! :)



The new pool! Here it is out where our garden area used to be. Notice how dry and brown our grass is! We need rain bad!!!



This is a little closer up version. We have a solar cover for it to keep stuff out and to warm up the water! :) It is about 3&1/2 ft tall and 15 ft wide. It is great for floating, soaking and cooling off! :)



What we have been up to....

Well our house has been busy busy, as usual! I convinced my wonderful husband to let me get a swimming pool!! :) it is just one of those smaller intex ones, but it is 15ft wide and about 3&1/2 ft deep, so adults are able to have fun and lounge around in it!! So two weekends ago we were pretty busy with that and getting it up and leveled and all that good stuff.  Also went out to a movie with friends and drinks after on our deck... had the cops called on us, yeah we had 5 people sitting and chatting, drinking some drinks and smoking cigars on the deck while listening to my ipad (volume like 3/4) and we had the cops called on us!! I felt bad for the cops cause I really think they were almost embarrassed that they had to come to such a quite noise disturbance!! :) hahaha!

All last week we were cleaning cleaning. We always like to say we like to have parties at our house cause it makes us clean up more, and we did, so that was nice, almost like a little spring/summer cleaning! The house looks great! We tackled different rooms on the week nights together (yes I love my wonderful husband who cleans as much if not more than me, we really are a team!). We did all this cleaning cause we had our 4th annual family golf outing! It was a blast! We had 28 golfers (new record) and golfed 18 holes at hon-e-kor golf course in Kewaskum and then had everyone over to our house after for a cook out and drinks and a little swimming in our new pool! It was super fun! Then Sunday we had my parents and Mike's mom over for some steak for fathers day, it was yummy and we had some more swimming, just what I always wanted, a summer full of swimming in the back yard pool! :)

It is now Wednesday and I am writing this from work, cause well Monday I was working hard at home finishing a poster for a presentation I am giving at The 10th International Conference on Zebrafish Development and Genetics. Yep, so I am going to a conference in Madison tonight through Sunday. So I was not able to get any posts done earlier cause I was finishing my poster and then packing and hanging out with my little girl, I think this is the longest I will be away from her yet... I was a little sad this morning dropping her off, but she did give me lots of kisses and some hugs! She melts my heart, I love that little person so much, it is amazing how much a parent can love their child.

OK well that is an update on our life. I promise that either Sunday night or early next week I will get up some more posts and more importantly some pictures of these fun activities!! :) Have a great rest of the week and weekend!! :)

Happy Friday! :)

Here is our funny little girl again... she is so much fun! Have a GREAT weekend, I am sure we will cause we get to hang out with Evelyn! :)



This is Evelyn's face when I ask her to say 'cheese' now... she gets all squinty I am not sure where she gets if from... maybe me?

 



laughing like a goof here! :)



Memorial Weekend part 2.... Some Evelyn

Although I did a bad job of having my camera with me for things we did like making cement stepping stones with the kids handprints, or the crazy swimming in the cold water or the apple pie liquor my dad brewed up, I did get some of Evelyn to share. I might try to get some more from my sister, but don't hold your breath... if you are friends with her on facebook (yes she finally joined) you can see the pictures there... or I think I am tagged in some too! Anyway here are some fun ones. PS - Still working on the video tour.

Here is Evelyn on the way up, she makes this goofy smiley face at me lately... she is silly.



She decided that this little log made a good chair... hahaha



Cutie!



Playing with the work goggles... this was funny!



Seriously the cutest little person I know! ;)



Mike, Evelyn and my mom. Evelyn gives her a lot of greif... she just teases her a lot.



Drive home, sleepy but fighting falling asleep, and being a crab, but still cute! :)



Memorial Weekend part 1... Up North

So as I mentioned here our cabin in the Three Lakes area is very important to me, my family, and now Mike and Evelyn. Well we try to get up there as often as we can, and often that is on Memorial weekend. We always have lots of fun. This time I was not so good at taking pictures of the events of the weekend however as we were packing to leave I remembered I had a request to give a cyber tour of the cabin to better explain what our cabin is. I will have a few still pictures (of the main large room where most the activity happens) here and try to post a video tour next in a separate post... if my computer doesn't blow up in the process! :) I will explain the pictures in the captions.



Here is the 'front door' of the cabin, this is facing east what you see when you drive down the road to the cabin. It is usually the first thing we see of the cabin so it stirs lots of excitement! :)



The green door above is the main front door and when you step through it and turn directly to your left you see this image. this is the fridge, stove, sink and start of cabinets.



Turning a little to the right from the above image you see our big bay window behind my mom, our packer parifanialia, and in the bottom is the large kitchen table that is very important to us because my dad's dad or my grandpa Honey (he called eveyone honey) made this table. It sits ~12-14 comfortably.



Again to the right a little, you see half the deer heads, our game machines 2 gambling machines, 1 bowling game and darts. The door to the left of the picture behind Gerald goes to the living room and bathroom, and the door to the right of the picture goes to the 'george room' or the 'small bunkroom'.



Turning to the right some more you see on the bottom of the picture, our newish pool table, with a nice wooden cover fashioned over it, to protect it and to serve as another table/serving area. Behind the pool table is our very important Jute Box, this is the 3rd (well that I can remember) one we have had cause we have had to upgrade over the years.



Further to the right is the bar. you can imagine a lot of time is spent here. there are 13 bar stools to go around the home-made bar. There is a double wide cooler/keg-er-ater on the other side and my dad is a huge advocate of always having a keg, most often High Life, on tap. Also we like our bar signs that you can see in the back, and the home-made sign of our cabin's name 'Avenue of the Giants'. There is also awesome surround sound speakers and outside speakers so it can get pretty loud! :)



This is the furthest to the right, or if you walked through the front door and turn to the right. Here what you can't really see is couple of shelves with liquor and chest-type freezer to have frosty beer mugs, another small freezer, and a water cooler (which was new this weekend, we are always improving and getting new awesome things!)



What is important to remember is that this cabin started as a small house that my family bought for a hunting cabin first off, we have done a lot over the last almost 25 years to make it what it is, but the deer heads remind of us why we have it, and also you can admire some beauties!

 

For my fellow hunters to enjoy! This is look at the front door, see the fridge and stove....



Part of that World....

So this is going to be an interesting blog post. I am warning you now, it might be a bit of a rant, and difficult to follow... I have lots of thoughts going through my brain at the moment.

First sorry for the lack of posts the last few days, this week has been a bit of a bad week for me, which is spurring this post. As many of the followers of this blog know, or know partially, cause even my immediate family and maybe even Mike can't completely understand where I am coming from, but I am in training to be a scientist... in graduate school.... but that right there usually throws people off. My school is not like the typical school you think of... I really don't have classes anymore, and I don't have a set end of schooling date, "well how is that school?" you may ask, well I am at the point of my field where I can not learn from a class or books, cause I am on the cutting edge and it is not in books or able to be taught by your typical teachers. Sounds exciting right? well yeah most of the time it is awesome, and don't get me wrong I love what I do, seriously I LOVE IT, how many people can say that about their jobs? But maybe that is where it starts to get difficult... that is when (think of little mermaid here) I start singing/dreaming about being "a part of that world" as in the 'normal' world, because I feel like I am in two different worlds, shuttling back and forth trying to keep track of both simultaneously! :)  

The world of scientific research is a different world, I mean really different, kind of like mars and earth... light years apart! I feel like I am doing the splits across these worlds and I am barely holding on, and well this week I think I fell right between the two, pretty much feeling like I suck at both!  This is not the first or the last time I will feel this way I am sure. Here I sit at work/school Saturday morning waiting while my sequencing reaction is cleaned by the robot, all so I can put it on the 3730 sequencer and have data to analyze of the potential clones I just generated, which are of the wild type sequence of the upstream region of a gene which I am investigating because I found a mutation in a human patient sample with an ocular disorder. Yeah, did you really and fully understand that... :) My friends here at school who might check this post out would understand, that would give me like 4... then a few of the random scientific people who stumble across it, but I am not naive enough to think that many of people in the world read my blog. So the majority of the family and friends probably don't fully understand what I am doing, which is fine cause I sure as heck don't understand the majority of what my family does (lots in the insurance world, over my head!!) :)

So a lot of scientist, probably the majority, eat, sleep, breath, science! Which is great and awesome and I admire it, but I guess that is where I start to feel like I fail, I love science, but I love my family, all of them and my friends! There is this unwritten rule or thought in the science world, and that is (and especially so for the grad students) that you need to work like a 60-80 hours a week a least to be truly dedicated and successful. well I am a person that is not willing to sacrifice family for this expectation, but I feel then that I have this black cloud hanging over me, "well there is that student who had a baby in grad school, what was she thinking, she must not be serious about her science". Seriously there are other scientist that think that! Yeah most likely I will not be uber successful, I won't have a bunch of Nature, Science, or Cell journal publications (those are some of the big time ones), and I won't get the Nobel prize, and I know people who strive for that and again I admire that. At the same time I have this guilt that when I stay late or have to go in on a weekend I am not spending time with my amazing daughter. Also I am sending her to a sitter for the majority of the day and I am limited to a few hours ~4-6 hours a day with her and most of the weekends... that makes me feel like I am failing at home. I guess for me, it is selfishness, I want it all, I want to do what I love and make a family and be with a family that I love, and I need to work on balancing the two a little more I think... but it is hard. I wish there were just 4 more hours in a day. Time to get home to hang out with my family, go to a family wedding and relax until I have travel to the world of science again on Monday morning! :)

Well thank you all for reading this and understanding, I am sure many of you are feeling the same in your situation! We have each other to turn to! I love you all, seriously if you read this post, I love you, you care about me and you are willing to hear my ranting thoughts! :) Feel free to comment and share some of your own thoughts or issues or trials and tribulations, I do love to listen, I really do!