Late winter early spring 2023

 

In February we visited Grandma Joan and Grampa Ed because Heather's first 2023 BPO concert was at Carnegie Hall. Tessie learned how to play Yahtzee.

The orchestra's conductor has studied Beethoven, who was an early adopter of the metronome and marked pieces with tempos. Apparently the Ninth has been slowed down over the years and the Boston Phil restored the original rapid pace.

Tessie didn't appreciate how special it was for her Mom to play Carnegie

She was in a better mood for her end of year championship swim meet

Caroline's Sci Oly team competed in the state tournament. I drove her and one of her friends, who said that she hoped the final score didn't come down to her event, Write-It-Do-It. Sadly, Lexington came in 2nd by 9 pts and lost 11 pts in one event, WIDI. Caroline took home 2 first place medals for Disease Detectives and Forestry. While some states get to send two teams to Nationals, Massachusetts is not one of them and there will be no trip to Wichita in May. Acton-Boxborough has won states for over 10 years running but Lexington has been closing the gap recently. Maybe next year will be their year.

Our bedroom renovation job finished. Here is the before pic of the windowless closet wall

and the after of the windowful desk area

The alcove dead space became a

the bathroom with a new window

and the handicap accessible big bathroom became

the walk-in closet. 

The cats quickly took possession of the new accommodations

Aunt Katy and kids came up to visit in early March and brought our only dose of winter, which enabled downhill skiing for the kids and 

cross-country for me and Katy

We visited Boda Borg of course

Later in March I took my first work trip to Europe. This is Cambridge UK and their "mathematical bridge", first built in the 1700s out of straight timbers, which is apparently mathematically challenging. To me, much of Cambridge looked and felt like this bridge, old and in decay.

This Lego model is of the mitochondrial ATP synthase that keeps you and me alive by producing about 60 kg of ATP per day. The prof that we visited is in the same institute as John Walker, who received the Nobel Prize for work elucidating the molecular mechanism of ATP synthase. At a reception, I met Prof. Walker, who is a scientific advisor for Pretzel.

From Cambridge we went to Gothenburg, Sweden, which coincidentally was featured in the Boston Globe travel section.

I can attest to the sustainability of the city, with plentiful recycling

compostable candy wrappers

and food and drinks delivered in reusable glass containers

Back home Tessie helped me pick up non-recycled paper, plastic candy wrappers, and food containers along the roadside

For Easter we had our outdoor egg hunt

and an indoor quest. This year's theme was Top Gun, and the girls had to earn their call signs by first doing household chores like swabbing the porch.

Caroline was Evergreen, Erin was Duster, and Tessie was Ponygirl. For some wrong answers the punishment was push-ups.

One task required selfies with the kitties

On April 13th we hit our first 80+ degree day, actually 88, and got ice cream

Tessie wanted us to get rid of fanged Elmo, but in the spirit of sustainability, we found a resting place for him that perhaps future generations will discover.

Winter 2023

 
Our track club secured practice time at a brand-new professional-caliber indoor track in Boston. Erin remains shut down with her heel tendonitis but Tessie ran sprints and the long jump.

Meanwhile I completed some DIY projects like replacing the pumps in 1 of the 2 sumps that keeps the basement dry. Funny story, while the workmen were in our house, one of the plumbers, of all people, unplugged these pumps in the morning and forgot to plug them in when he left. By the afternoon the garage and this entryway were under an inch of water. A more catastrophic flood of the basement was saved by the other sump pump in the original part of the house. When it comes to home dewatering, you can never have too many backups.

Part of the home redecorating included moving family room supplies to the basement. Those bookshelves were a tight fit at the top!

While in construction mode, we decided to reclaim space in our laundry room and uncovered a need for new floor tiles to match existing

I found a box in the basement with 7 tiles left by previous owners, not enough for the job. For the first time I used the wayback machine on archive.org to learn more about the old tiles. They were last seen on the internet in 2001, but fortunately Home Depot stocked a reasonably good match. 

In the basement we unearthed a Nintendo 64 set from the late 90s and sold it on eBay for $206 

I started my new job at Pretzel Therapeutics. The focus of the company is discovering drugs that act on mitochondria, those ancient organelles inside our cells that perform oxidative phosphorylation to power metabolism. In my welcome package they sent a postcard of mitochondria (above), probably to help explain to family and friends that the convoluted membranes inside mitochondria resemble pretzels. They also sent really yummy chocolate pretzels that I was hoping would be freely available at our office.

Sadly not. Our office is in a non-descript building 10 minutes from home. Our labs are in Sweden and England and so far the time zone dynamic works well, with mornings busy with project meetings and then the afternoons quieter to allow catch-up on other things.

One of our get-to-know-you sessions involved baby pictures. Finding one of me apart from Katy is near impossible, but thanks to Mom and Claire's digitizing efforts, I could crop out this one.

Tessie is no longer our baby, but she does love fruits and veggies, like these tomatoes

and she still annotates some of her schoolwork

and her night-time notes sometimes make me laugh out loud. At the bottom that's a sheet from the boardgame Clue proving that the culprit is Mrs. White with the needle in the hallway.

Caroline's varsity Science Olympiad career was in full swing. She competed in Forestry, Forensics, and Disease Detectives. For 6 weekends straight from late Jan to early March her team attended invitational meets at local colleges. 

Their first meet was at MIT, traditionally the biggest and hardest of the invitational season. The team receives a score for each event based on their ordinal placement. For example Lexington was the best team in Rocks and Minerals but 53rd team for Detector Building. They weren't pleased with their overall placement of 20th, especially because their Massachusetts rival Acton-Boxborough had 2 teams finishing #5 and #6.

Next weekend was at Columbia in NYC and Heather volunteered to take a load of kids down there. They finished #3 on paper but actually #2 due to a scoring mistake in the Trajectory event.

Caroline earned some hardware for finishing #1 in Forestry, #1 in Disease Detectives, and #3 in Forensics.

Events are not all tests and builds. In Write-It-Do-It you're given some strangely crafted contraption like the one on the left and then you write instructions for your partner to construct from starting materials. Caroline says that sibling pairs are the best at this one. 

Harvard's meet was the next weekend and LHS took the top 2 spots

At Brown's meet, LHS finished #3 overall, but behind A-B again by a considerable margin. Next up is the state championships on March 4th.

1990s BritPop bands The Charlatans and Ride played a show at the new concert venue at North Station

Jerry was in town for work and we revisited our college music days at the show

VR in the new bedroom

Caroline turned sweet 16 and wore her Outdoor Voices sweatshirt (thanks Katy) to school and a crown that her friend made

Being 16 let her apply for her driver's permit

Our newToyota  RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid finally arrived after a 12-month wait. Sorry Caroline but you will learn to drive on the safe and scuffed Camry, not my new EV

Tessie's indoor meet

Charlatans UK

Ride (needed the earplugs for this one)