I'm not fired!

Hooray -- my ass didn't get booted back to Sweden today!

For various reasons, I normally don't blog about my work or the people I work with, but today there's definitely call for celebration. As part of the MCLS program (which I'm in) here at the University of Wyoming, there's a big exam at the end of year 1. For those of you who have the skinny on PhD'ing it in Sweden, think of it as the equivalent of Stora Tentan. Basically it covered the techniques involved in actually doing wet lab molecular biology (gels, pipettes, assays, screens, methods), the essentials of biochemistry and related fields. Needless to say, the scope of it all was somewhat... wide. And we were told that our continued employment here, and hence legal right to reside in the US, was contingent on doing quite well on it.

So I spent pretty much every waking moment for two weeks preparing for this nebulously described test of my abilities. "Tentaångest" doesn't even begin to describe what I felt the morning of Exam Day -- because you can always re-take it back home. This one was basically do-or-die, in typical American fashion. And after writing the damn thing for seven and half hours, I felt about ready to kill myself. Ten hours at the bar cured that impulse, but I still had to wait for the results all of last week.

Finally, at about 3 PM local time, the other shoe dropped. I received a boringly formulaic letter congratulating me on being "promoted to the second year of the program". A lot of stress dissolved reading those words, although I admit that the language used wasn't exactly encouraging. However, I imagine that the letter that about half of the incoming class got was even less encouraging: rumor has it 5 people got fired at the exact same time the rest of us were released from purgatory. I confess to a certain morbid curiosity about who it was, and by the end of the week I'll know. Actually, by the end of the day I might know -- as long as the shots I'm having in half an hour don't wipe that knowledge out. Have one for me tonight!

Twister

I've just had another genuine American West experience: getting hit by a tornado! I'm fine, though, since I wasn't particularly close to the path of it - and in any case, no known casualities in Laramie. It still had some pretty fearsome power, though: perfectly horisontal hail the size of marbles, all the cars in the Ford dealership getting their windshields blown out, equipment sheds flying around and big trees getting uprooted. Rumor has it that it killed at least one person south of us, where it was worst. The main effect in Laramie was probably knocking out much of the power grid, but fortunately it turned back on just 30 minutes ago. Hopefully no-one got hurt, although if there were people in the greenhouse north of Walmart (the tornado touched down there and ripped it open)...

In some sense I guess we should've seen it coming. The weather has been really screwy for days, with rain and thunder coming left and right. It also poured down for more than 12 straight hours, which has only happened once here in the last four years or so. And as a final Official Bad Omen, they showed the movie "Twister" on TV last night! We didn't see any green clouds on the horizon, but it's not like I have windows in my lab to see out of. Nonetheless, I'm a bit taken aback. Discounting the odd storm (Gudrun comes to mind) and some flash flooding, there is no such thing as a "natural disaster" back home. Being trapped at the Department for a few hours, waiting for the wind to subside, felt like something of a personal insult. Maybe I shouldn't move to California, after all.

But now all is fine and dandy. The fridge kept its cool through the power outage, so I'm enjoying some beer and cookies while I type this up. Didn't get much done at work, admittedly, but I'm pretty happy I was there instead of up at Vedauwoo -- my home crag reputedly got absolutely trashed by the winds. Guess we'll be pulling downed trees off the roads for a few weeks now. Bummer, because the summer climbing season proper had just started, with the very first Official T-Shirt Day coming in on Tuesday. The weather certainly is crazy here in the Cowboy State, but that's part of the charm. "Bless Wyoming and keep it wild", as Helen Mettler once put it.

Jag mötte Lassie

Back in the early 90's, Swedish-pretty-women-group Ainbusk Singers had a hit with their song "Jag mötte Lassie" (lit. "I met Lassie"). I don't even remember what it was about originally, but the phrase soon morphed (via a column in a local tabloid) into slang for meeting/seeing/being-run-over-by a celebrity. Preferrably it should be a B-list celeb, and even "meeting" them third-hand qualifies ("my sister's boyfriend ran into Siegfriend and Roy the other day!"). Lately, it seems I can't turn around without accumulating another "Lassie".

First off, I've been drinking and watching hockey with Bryce, a man who is not only the world's foremost expert on Bigfoot photography, but who also actually works for Jane Goodall. The one condition is related to the other, bizarrely enough. Being a famous scientist, and specifically an expert on primates, Goodall was once asked in a radio interview whether or not she believed in Bigfoot. She replied in some way that didn't completely and vehemently deny that Sasquatch is lumbering around somewhere in the Canadian woods, and because of that she was quickly turned into the darling of the Bigfoot "research" community. A great way to legimate any "sighting" would be to have Goodall endorse it as real, and before she could say "Yeti" twice she was being buried in blurry pictures and shaky-cam videos. Bryce, who was her webmaster at the time and as such the go-to guy for any digital audio/video work, got tapped as the man who should weed out the obvious fakes. So the way he tells it, he's probably the most experienced man in the whole wide world when it comes to identifying Abominable Snowmen -- or rather fraudulent versions of the same.
As an aside, it took me quite a while to figure out who his boss actually was. He'd just mention a "Jane", who did some sort of charity work, but that didn't exactly register as unusual. However, phrases like "She used to work for National Geographic: they needed someone who looked cute in a pair of shorts on TV" and "It's amazing how human those chimps seem" started to make the rest of us a bit suspicious, and eventually it all came together. Bryce is still fighting the good fight for both animals and people online, by the way -- check out the Jane Goodall Institute Community for Social Change.

Second up to bat is someone who's more legitimately famous on his own... but only if you're a climber. And possibly only if you're a climber with a perverse fetish for climbing the man-eating offwidth cracks. Bob Scarpelli's fame is steadily morphing from legend into myth in Wyoming, and I'd bet my bottom dollar that his reputation as a fearsome crack climber extends all over the Front Range. He's spent better than 40 years climbing at Vedauwoo, and what he doesn't know about the intricacies of jamming body parts into rock isn't worth knowing. He's also almost inhumanly strong, especially for his size (he's my weight but six inches shorter), and seems to be one of these Old Hard Men who just get tougher with age. The gigantic hands that are attached to his tree-trunk-sized arms don't exactly hurt him, either -- he can fist jam what us mortals need to shove two hands and a knee into. I was out with Jen (more on her below) and him one fine Saturday, and got absolutely schooled on their warmups. But I probably learned more that day than in the whole previous season, and it's inspiring to watch him go. He's twice my age, but somehow he's mastered the art of just flowing -- seemlingly without effort -- up sections of rock that either spit me off immediately or eat whole pounds of my flesh on every attempt. I've got something to shoot for now...

Descending into not-even-C-list-celebrity, I've started climbing with Tom and Jen. Both of them achieved some sort of fame-by-proxy about two years back, with an article by Pete Takeda in Alpinist about climbing with Scarpelli in Vedauwoo, and a number of very nice photos by Greg Epperson. I actually read the article prior to moving here, and quite enjoyed it, but I certainly didn't recognize either Tom or Jen from their descriptions in Takeda's fine piece of prose. Tell me, does this look like someone who "mixes the physique and dark good-looks of Franco Colombo and a PhD intellect"?



On the other hand, I do buy his characterization of Jen as "cute spunky lawyer [...] who herself uses language that would make a sailor blush". Indeed, she's by far the most foul-mouthed woman I've ever met -- and a good friend and amazing climber:



As usual, I don't have any pictures of myself doing anything particularly heroic -- I can't very well take them myself, and my belayers are blessedly concentrated on keeping my fat ass off the ground. Possibly my greatest achievement so far this season has been learning how to really tape my hands, although it hasn't stopped me from donating more and more blood:



With my shiny new tape job, I've managed to pick off some Vedauwoo classics in the moderate range, including Plumb Line and Lower Progressive:





Those climbs aren't long, but they are "more deceptive than imposing", as Takeda puts it. I've also flailed about on some harder stuff, like Beer Crack:



But of course, post-climbing beers are almost the best part of the day, regardless of whether you sent or not:



With these people sheparding my ass around the three-star climbs of Vedauwoo, and providing motivational speeches like "You don't get any beer if you fall off this, doofus" and "Oooh, is your vagina hurting a little bit?", I'm sure to improve by leaps and bounds this season. Now, if the goddamn snow would just stop falling...