“Gratitude, that very specific feeling of thankfulness in your heart, allows you to see and absorb all you have, forgetting for a moment all you may lack. It connects your brain with your heart, and gives you the ground to be more giving, effective, loving human. Being grateful allows generosity to flow. And many believe it also makes us more receptive—as in, the more you love what you have, the more you get what you want.” by Valerie Reiss at BeliefNet.com

I’ve found adjusting to being pregnant a little bit difficult. While some girls seem to just love every minute of the experience, I’ve found it hard to make such drastic changes in my life. I’ve spent so much time complaining to people, that I thought I should take a minute to list out some of the fun and actually enjoyable aspects of pregnancy. They do exist!

1. Bigger boobs!
2. Eating ice cream – lots of it. (Hey, if I’m going to get fat anyway… !)
3. An excuse to take long afternoon naps.
4. Wonderful pampering from Mark.
5. Spending a little less time on work, a little more on massages.
6. A chance to feel sick so I can really appreciate feeling healthy.
7. Appreciating smaller victories (like climbing a 5.8 on toprope) instead of stressing over insane goals.
8. Learning about patience.
9. Incredible sense of smell and taste – food is a whole new adventure.
10. Making my whole family deliriously happy.
11. Feeling my baby wiggle around and imagining what kind of person he/she will be.
12. Crossing one more thing off of my “to do before I die” list (have a baby!)
13. Clear, pretty skin for the first time in years.
14. Learning about acceptance and giving up my usual attempts to white-knuckle control every aspect of my life.
15. Complements and smiles from so many people.
16. Starting out on a whole new adventure, one we’ve never attempted anything like before!

Yes, I know, mid-June is hardly “spring” any more, especially in places outside of Colorado. Around here, we just turned off our furnaces a couple weekends ago, and the world is green and lush! I’m sure summer will be hitting us soon, any day now.

This spring, gardening got a bit of a sideline due to morning sickness, but it was the first activity I turned to when I could get off the couch. Mark has really chipped in more than his share as well, and we’ve managed to pull together a good looking set-up this year.

Subtle Changes

Another reason I managed to pull together a garden between bouts of yaking is that I have manged to build up a good infrastructure for containers, a raised bed, and watering in the last few years. Based on my experiences from last year, though, we made a few little changes.

First of all, we wanted a tomatillo, but didn’t want it crawling all over the lawn this year. I’ve stuck it in a container hoping that will help restrain its growth slightly. We had discussed putting a tomatillo in an up-side-down grower of some sort, but Mark felt that if the plant wasn’t anchored to the earth, it might get free and run around the neighborhood, making “RAWR” noises and wearing it’s little green topsy-turvey hat.

We moved the big mountain tomato to a container as well, as I didn’t like my tomatoes hanging into the basement window-well last year. This left plenty of space for our pepper plants in the raised bed. They fit very nicely, but haven’t seemed perfectly happy this year. They got some hail damage over Memorial Day, and may be wanting more sun than that east-bed gets.

Little Successes

One of my proudest moments as a container gardener came last week when we decided to crack open the compost bin. I’ve had this homemade compost bin behind the garage for two years now. We made it out of a small black trash can, covered in holes and lined with window screens. I’ve spent two years filling it with leftover veggies from the CSA, egg shells, coffee grounds and other random greenness. And finally, it has all paid off. Under a layer of dry leaves, sat some of the prettiest, lovely dark compost I could have hoped for. I grew dirt! WOW!

We pulled about a cubic meter of the lovely dark organic matter out of there, and used it to fill in a new tomato container. Those two years of composting have now officially saved us $5 in bought soil!

If everything works out, we should be looking at a big load of crops this year. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, strawberries, pumpkins, sugar and snow peas, bush and pole beans, lettuce, carrots, onions, cilantro, basil, and lavender!

Last summer, Mark was talked into trying out CrossFit classes by his boss, and he rapidly fell in love with it. What’s CrossFit, you ask? Well, it’s a daily workout, focusing on whole-body and functional movements, that tests your mental and physical limits. In other words, he goes to the gym every day at lunch and works so hard he wants to die or throw up or both.

I have gotten trained on CrossFit, and attended several classes so far. The first one was so hard that I started hemorrhaging blood and ended up at the hospital! Since then, I’ve built a ton of strength, and I’ve started to, occasionally, beat Mark at body-weight only exercises.

It’s been a great ride for us so far, and we’ve seen incredible gains in our fitness and strength. One of the best things about CrossFit is the ability to compare gains and accomplishments through careful logging. So, based on this idea, and inspiration from No X in Espresso, we’ve started our own on-line CrossFit Workout Blog.

If you don’t do CrossFit, this blog is unlikely to be very interesting. But, if you do and you’re interested in the struggles and triumphs of other CrossFit-ers, check it out: ColoCalders CrossFit Blog.

One of the highlights of our meeting in La Jolla last week was a quick tour through the computing room at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. WARNING: The following post includes some serious geekery! Those who aren’t turned on by massive parallel computing prowess might want to stop reading now.

My research group is known for their innovative approaches to global circulation modeling, and if there’s anybody in the world who uses a lot of cycles on big computers, it’s definitely us. So, it made sense for a few of us to go check out the big computers at the UC San Diego center where our research has run more than a few trillion calculations.

The building and computer rooms are always in a state of flux in this kind of facility. There’s new machines brought in all of the time, new groups form to study new projects and new people come and go. Last week, when I walked into the building, the first door on the right was for a Neural Network (Artificial Intelligence) in-house research group. If anybody is going to create a computer that takes over the world, it would be these people.

We wandered through the computer room, looking at huge supercomputers, both old and new. The newest, biggest machine was the Triton Resource. This computer has 256-nodes with 8 processing cores on each node, which gives it a processing power of more than 500x that of the most powerful desktop computers. This certainly isn’t the most powerful supercomputer in the world today, but it has some unique features. Each of those 256 8-processor nodes comes with 24 GB of memory, which makes this computer very, very good at shifting through huge amounts of data very quickly.

This is the specific challenge of supercomputing that UCSD has decided to tackle: the overwhelming tsunami of data that results from these huge model runs. The image above is of a room-sized harddrive array. These people don’t even really know how much storage they have, the numbers are too big to wrap your brain around. But it’s what we need right now. With climate models doing 200-year runs, and saving the state of the entire world 4 times a simulated day, the trick is not having the cycles to run the model, but having the space available to store all that data. And UCSD’s Supercomputer Center has it all!

I made myself a snow ball as perfect as could be.
I thought I’d keep it as a pet and let it sleep with me.
I made it some pajamas and a pillow for it’s head.
Then, last night it ran away.
But first — it wet the bed.

- Shel Silverstein

It’s New Year’s Eve and I’m screwing around on the computer before we take off for our dinner reservations tonight.

It’s been a great year, better than I expected at the beginning of it all. I wanted to write a “looking back” kind of post, but I’ve run out of time now. I mean, nobody wants to read a post all about 2009 when we’ve all moved on to 2010, right?

So, here’s a quick run-down of some of the highlights from our last year. And here’s to a happy, healthy, wonderful 2010 to all of you!!

• Kate’s trip to New York and Jerusalem early last year.
• Mountain biking in Fruita with my brother TJ.
• Running into big moose, thunderstorms, and Tommy Caldwell while out climbing.
• A guided climb up the North Face of Hallets Peak (prolog, part 1, part 2).
• And a great trip to New Mexico as winter set in.