Back with the dood!

We made it back to Anchorage this evening, and boy is it brisk.  The security guy at Seatac told us to take the cold weather with us, and I think we must have listened, because when we landed it was around zero.  

When we arrived home there was a big furry dood waiting for us in his kennel.  After a stay in his doggy cottage, and then a weekend with Jared and Kari, Banjo is finally at home again with us.  I think he was pretty excited to see us.  And we were glad to see him again.  He seems like he must have grown, or at least his hair did.  He's a giant!

I'm official

No, these aren't shoe-boxes. These hold the DNA of the convicted offenders of Alaska!
Here is the memo from our DNA technical manager deeming me properly trained.
Who is this goofy guy?
A CODIS analysts' best friend - the M48 Robotic Extraction machine.
I'm about to cut open these envelopes to access the buccal swabs.

As of last Thursday, I am an officially trained DNA analyst, able to process real-live convicted offender samples and upload them into CODIS. And since my beautiful wife was out of town, I celebrated by running said samples for 8 hours on Saturday, 7 hours on Sunday, and 8 hours on Monday (which are all my usual days off). I took these pictures of the lab while I was there all by myself on Sunday. I got to look at some of my data today, and it looks pretty good. It's nice to see the fruit of my hard work.

My lab had our holiday party/lunch-in today. It was a pot-luck (I made some lemon bars) and everyone made really good food. It was nice because Emily got to come too and she met a few of my co-workers.

The birth of Jacob

Happy birthday they one they call John! Not only is it Jacob Wayne's birthday, but it's a once-in-a-lifetime birthday at that - Happy 21! I'll have to take the not-so young Jacob out on the town once I get back for the holidays. Here are some photo's of Jacob when we were all down in Homer this summer.

Emily has safely returned home. She laughed at all of you Seattlites who complained about the 'cold' weather that you guys are experiencing. There was a low of -10 when I went into work on Saturday. So you can all stop your whining. Now.

Only 4 more days before we turn around and head back south for Christmas. I'm still really busy at work running all of our CODIS samples, but tomorrow my work is having a little Christmas party. Emily will come too so she can meet all of the crazy lab people that I work with.

Holy fucking shit - a Christmas miracle!

Yes, the language is excessive. But the tale is incredible...

So I wake up this morning at 6am to the sounds of Banjo barfing next to the bed. Next thing I know, he is racing around the bedroom, over and over our bed. Then I hear this 'plop' and the end of the bed, and some shakes. I get up to see Banjo on his side, legs flailing violenty with is his mouth wide open. I think he's choking, so I stick my hand in to remove the obstruction. I think I feel something, but I can't seem to get it out. Banjo is still flailing in obvious pain. I start to freak out, so I run down the hallway and burst into Matt's room. I tell him that Banjo is choking, and that he should call the 24 hour pet ER for me. But the time I get back to Banjo, he his mouth is closed, his breathing is a little labored, and he's still on this side. It seems like the is slowly working whatever is choking him down his throat. He is still struggling, but I think he's doing OK.
But then all of a sudden the stops moving. He's completely still, on his side. I shake try to shake him to see if he'll move. No luck. I stare in disbelief. Then I try and shake him again. Still, absolutely no movement. His feet are kind of stuck out to the side of him in a weird position that I've never seen before. An unnatural position.
Then the thought comes to me, "Holy shit, Banjo is dead." I start yelling and moaning, and I toss our bed across the room. I start thinking about how I'm going to miss him, about how Emily's going to take it, and about what the heck you do with a dead dog. Then as I get up from the ground (because I was wollowing on my knees), it seems like Banjo's head moved a bit. I wait a little longer, and suddenly the 'dood jumps up, good as new. I can hardly believe it. Just moments earlier I thought I had lost poor Banjo, and now he seems fine. I can't tell you how happy I felt right then!
After I look at Banjo to see if he's OK, I call up the pet ER to tell them what happened. Then I take a shower and take Banjo to have a vet look at him. The vet said his heart rate was perfect, he had a strong pulse, and his color was good. She also said that he could have had a seizure, or that he could have fainted from the vomiting. I still had a suspition that he had choked on something (b/c I really did feel something rigtht when I woke up. But it was 6am, my mind was racing and my heart was pounding - not neccesarily in the best of conditions to observe my suroundings) so Banjo gets an x-ray. Nothing there, just a lot of stool. So I put Banjo in the back of the car and take him to work, where I check on him every few hours.
This is probably the most frightening experience of my entire life. I don't know what I would have done if I would have lost Banjo. Maybe we should change his name to Lazirous.

The day Haru was born

Happy birthday to the greatest sister-in-law ever, Hannah!  This is a picture when she was up here for my birthday.  Pretty sweet fish there!  I hear Emily will be down in Seattle to celebrate Hannah's birthday.  Should be good times.

So I was this close to being deemed properly trained so I could run real-live convicted offender samples.  But, there was a little hiccup towards the end of the day, so I had make one more note on my training sheet.  But I should be all signed off on by tomorrow, so I can start running samples and adding convicted offenders to the database.  Since we have lots to do (and no wife), I might put in about 20 extra hours over the weekend.  Watch out bad guys, I'm comin' to get ya!

201st Blog spectacular!

Apparently that last set of pictures we put up was our 200th blog post.  Not too bad for 18 months.  Emily is down in Hotlanta this week, so it's my and the 'Dood.  I dropped her off at the airport early Sunday morning, and then I slid about 100 yards trying to stop for a red light driving home.  In fact, it's so icy out our garbage can slid across the street last night b/c we had a huge windstorm.  I fishtail almost every time I turn off of Arctic (a main street) onto our street, and I couldn't get up our driveway tonight after work with the 4x4 on and with the studded tires.  This picture was taken around Thanksgiving.

I went to court again today.  This time I got to watch our firearms expert, Bob Shem, testify.  He's been in the business for 28 years and is a pretty smooth at giving testimony.  One funny part was when the prosecutor wanted to admit his CV as evidence, but the defense protested b/c it was heresay.  So the prosecutor then took his sweet time to go over virtually every single line of Bob's CV - which is probably over 7 pages long.  His education, his previous job experience, professional organizations, positions held is said organizations, peer reviewed papers he's published, patents he had, so on and so on.  It took well over 40 minutes.  Usually it takes maybe 5.  I think the prosecutor wanted to give the defense a giant F-U for not letting the CV be admitted as evidence.  Tomorrow we will go back to watch Abi, our DNA tech manager, give testimony, since the court didn't have time to get to her today.

Oh yeah, so maybe you want to know about the case.  There was this shoot-out at a football game a few years ago.  53 shots were fired from a minimum of 5 guns.  One bystander got shot in the head, but he lived, and apparently totally turned his life around and started to do triathalons and such.  There were a lot of people in the gallery, and two TV cameras.  And one of the anchors of the 6PM news of the local ABC affiliate sat next to us.  She had on some crazy boots.

Oh Christmas tree! Oh Christmas Tree!

The best christmas tree ever

So, our tree was extremely large. Even with our really high ceiling it was about 4 feet too tall. So we had to saw off the bottom, and then it was still too high so the top was slightly chopped off. We went to target to get a bunch of ornaments and lights. They didn't have any good toppers so we went with the tacky looking white bird. On top it actually looks pretty cool. When I took it out of the bag the dogs started flipping out and wanted to eat it.