Again already?

Another month of many happenings! First off I would like to congratulate Andy and Lisa Baxter on the birth of little Jacob! I’m excited to no longer be the newest member of the Baxter cousin blog and look forward to reading his updates soon. The pressure has been taken off to produce the first Baxter great-grandchild!

This month we discovered that our cat Kiki likes ice cream. It started one night when I left my ice cream cone unattended for just a moment and when I returned Kiki was daintily licking it. “That’s cute” I thought as I snatched my ice cream back away. Since then eating ice cream in our house has become much more complicated. As it turns out Kiki was instantly hooked. Now the minute ice cream is being eaten she insists on sitting on your lap in the hopes of getting another lick. Convinced to not let our cat indulge in “people-food” there have been several instances when I have been forced to hold my ice cream bowl above my head in order to keep it away from Kiki’s persistence. Mind you Kiki isn’t dumb either…she is already fully aware that ice cream comes in dishes, cones, and sometimes even chocolate covered bars on a stick! In hindsight it makes sense cats would like ice cream since it’s basically sweet frozen milk, but at the time I was rather naïve as to how attached a cat may become to ice cream after only one try. Moral of the story: Don’t do drugs.

We’ve made it up to visit Jason’s grandparents’ ranch twice in the past month (outside Logan, UT for anyone who cares to check a map). The first trip we spent a night at the ranch and then hiked to White Pine Lake at Tony Grove the next day (about 40min NE of Logan). The flowers were beautiful and the temperatures at an elevation of 8000 ft were around 15 degrees cooler than down below making it a pleasant 75 degrees. This past weekend however was a different story as our hiking plans were rained out (SNOW above 8000 ft in August?!?). Instead of hiking we decided to detour and take a driving/sightseeing trip instead. We drove up past Bear Lake and into Idaho…both places I had not previously been. The sightseeing was fun although the temperature sensor in Jason’s blazer was around 50 degrees for much of the day and at one point outside of Preston, ID the rain was pouring so hard there was standing water in the road. (You must understand any rain at all is an unusual sight in UT in August!) I was sure glad we decided not to hike! In several areas around Salt Lake we set record low high temperatures for the first week of August with a high of just 70 (20 degrees below normal) on August 8th.

Data collection for the latest research study at work wrapped up this past week. The picture I have included demonstrates the typical running setup. The red lights from the cameras in the background reflect off the shiny silver balls attached all over this kid as he runs on a treadmill with a built-in force plate. It’s the same technology they use in the computer gaming industry only we use it in the Biomechanics lab for research. Simply put, this particular study was looking at the differences in forces and movements between intact athletes and amputee athletes from jogging to top sprinting speed. Although the research questions are varied, I basically spend quite a bit of time either attaching reflective markers to half-naked study participants or playing an advanced game of connect the dots on the computer. School starts on the 24th of August….hopefully one of my last 2 semesters. If I’m lucky, the data we just collected will be the data I use for my thesis. Some of that should be shaking out in the next couple of weeks.