Isn't it Fe-ic...

CAUTION: extreme nerdiness ahead

ok, you were warned...

last night i learned something that was actually interesting in my adv. inorganic class. i doubt anyone else will find it as cool as me, but-- oh well. we had the assignment to read a journal article and be prepared to discuss it in class. i had skimmed through it but didn't actually read the whole thing, so i missed some of the details. it had to do with developing photosensitizers being used to treat certain types of tumors. being an inorganic class, we mainly dwelled on the symmetries of 3 different metalloporhyrin molecules. porphyrin is a basic structure that is present in all kinds of enzymes and biomolecules. it looks like this:

the point is, all those double bonds happen to be conjugated (meaning every other one, double, single...). so it has the capacity to absorb tons of light energy, especially visible light. thats why its in molecules like chlorophyll, b vitamins, hemoglobin, etc. the hole in the middle is occupied with various metals depending on what it is. so when all that energy is absorbed, it has to go somewhere... it just so happens that it is just enough energy to turn triplet oxygen (safe) into singlet oxygen (not so safe... it can cause cell damage, like sunburns).

from a medical standpoint, this is huge. tumors are being treated by essentially raising the levels of porphyrins in the persons body then using fiber optics to target the tumor and give it a really nasty sunburn from the inside, causing it damage, and hopefully death. pretty amazing if you ask me...

but what caught my attention last night is this: there are medical conditions that cause people to have excess porhyrins in their bodies, usually the type without the metal ion in the middle. sometimes they tend to concentrate in the skin and can cause a person to sunburn very quickly. Their bodies are always trying to find more metal ions (like iron in hemoglobin) to insert into the porhyrin ring to reduce these effects. another compensatory effect is growing excess hair in an attempt to sheild the skin from light. these people would likely become nocturnal.

wait-- lemme get this straight.

they only come out at night....

looking for bloody iron....

or they're reeallly hairy...

sounds like vampires and werewolves to me!!

i dont know if my professor meant to share this with us the week of halloween or not, but the irony was not lost on me! i love learning about the roots of our holiday traditions and how they get slanted over centuries. and since halloween is one of my very favorites, this was too cool. hope you all have a great holiday weekend!! watch out for those little blood-suc-- um, i mean... precious children!!

This Old House: The Doors

well... as i mentioned earlier, most of what's new about living here, we love. there are a few things, however, that we don't.

one of the reasons we chose this place is because of its move-in-readiness. we loved what the previous owners had done with the place. we want to change a few things, but they're minor, right? during recent remodeling the doors in the master bedroom were changed to six-panel ones from the old flat ones probably original to the 1975 house. thats great, but they didnt change the rest of the ones in the hall so now they don't match. it also seems that their little angel was a budding graffiti artist and was in the middle of a new piece on her bedroom door, what we affectionately refer to as "the pink room." --a topic for a future post, indeed. so, for those reasons, we decided to finish updating all the doors in the hall and two others to match the new six-panel ones.

easy as pie...

first of all, matt and i were in complete disagreement as to what we should even buy. i figured all we needed was the actual door, since thats all that needed replacing. matt thought we needed to buy the doors already pre-hung in new jambs because "everyone" said it was easier that way. so much so that the 3x price increase over my idea would be worth it. guess which ones we got...

once we borrowed his dad's truck and several big tools we went to one place and bought them out on the sizes we needed. we were still missing 2 so we decided that since we had the truck, we'd just go to lowe's and get the other two. 2 doors there turned into doors, plus a ladder, 5 gallons of kilz, and allllll the little neccessities we could think to buy with our coupon... all but one.

we got home and matt started busting out trim and a (perfectly good) door jamb. after SEVERAL attempts at hanging the thing, we did what all good gen-x'ers would do... youtubed it. bob vila makes everything look sooo easy! have you ever noticed hes not the one actually doing the work?!? anyway, we tried a new way which required several shims. ya know the little wooden wedges-- the one thing we didn't get on our earlier trip to lowes? good thing we live so close now!

after all that and 3 hours of work, we finished!! one door, that is. only 5 more to go! after a few tips from a friend of ours that can hang one in 10 minutes, the rest hopefully won't be so arduous. we'll see... i'm just glad we didn't go for the "fixer-upper" that was next on the list of purchase prospects!

This Old House: H2O

since we don't have a kid to gush about all day on our blog (i'm not knocking you, i'm just sayin'), i figure i can write about what makes news around here, not to mention that it takes up a lot of our time and nearly all of our spare cash these days. sounds close enough to a child, right? that said, welcome to the first installment of a series about our new home.

every day it seems there is something new or different that makes us grateful/excited to be here. its usually good but occasionally its, well, sobering. after all, i'll be the ripe old age of 54 when we pay this thing off, assuming we stick to the payment plan and never move... not likely.

this morning while showering, i realized yet another thing i love about our house: water pressure!! we have a shower head in the hall bathroom that matt has confessed to using as "a water-pik for his grill." its truly awesome. you see, our apartment was upstairs so we were fighting gravity anytime we wanted a shower, or anything else. not only that, it was on the same meter as P&R's house so that probably didn't help. don't kid yourself though... that shower was magnificent after a few weeks with no power/water after hurricanes.

so if you want a "moral of the story" it is to appreciate even the smallest luxuries in life. meanwhile, i'll be taking extra long showers and enjoying the feeling of my hair getting *almost* blasted off my head. :~)