Polymorph (NOUN).
A compound that can exist in two or more crystalline structures. In polymorphism, the chemical composition remains the same, but the solid-state arrangement of the molecules is changed.
After a few failed attempts to achieve the kind of footage I wanted, I finally got it right. I stopped in Brownwood, Texas, to get a second SD card and then was able to film the entire trip to Lubbock in the "time warp" setting that I had envisioned. The best part of this drive is how stunning and lonesome the wind farms are. Unfortunately, that wasn't the kind of mood enhancement I needed yesterday.
To make things worse, Texans living in wide open spaces enjoy publicly broadcasting their political and social opinions with all kinds of signage, both commercial and handmade. It's intense and ugly, y'all. The enthusiasm was reminiscent of our drive to Fort Davis in November 2016. For all you city folk friends, please don't trust the polls. This November can go either way.
Here's the entire trip:
Here is the part from Brownwood that I was able to capture in a way that I liked:
I will cross over into New Mexico this morning, so maybe the drive will be more interesting soon and I'll start to feel better. Let's go see Albuquerque, shall we?
I don't have a lot of words right now, but here are some photos...
Handmade greeting card from Krystal :-)
Here's the first thing I filmed with the new camera:
Here's the full excerpt from the London Symphony:
Finally, I made a time warp video of part of my drive to Lubbock today, but it's taking forever to upload, so I'm going to sleep. You aren't missing much. The most exciting part of the desolate drive through Texas is the spectacular wind farms. I will upload the first footage tomorrow and let you be the judge.
When I started this post, the title was “Five More Days…” Hopefully, I will finish the update I have wanted to give you this morning, and the title won’t change to “Three…”
The boys do not seem very upset that I am leaving soon, which is easier for me. This has been a week of goodbyes, so the fact of their resilience is a comfort. They know from my travels that I call them all daily when I am away, so this will merely be an extended period of mom-from-afar.
Kyle, on the other hand, seems pretty blue. Knowing I will be driving out of Austin on Sunday to go live 2,000 miles away is rattling both of us.
I am also sad about leaving these little chaos goblins. I wish I could take one of them along for company, but the Airbnb where I will be staying for the duration of my time alone in Bend has a strict "no pets" policy. They will fly to Oregon with the family when Lonza moves us next spring.
All of my mentally difficult chores are complete, ending on Monday with a prednisone/lidocaine injection in my left heel. "Ouch, ouch, ouch, breathe, breathe, breathe..."
I hope to finally end the heel pain that has limited my walking ability this year. When I arrive in Bend, my first task will still be shopping for and purchasing a bike, but I want to hike again soon, especially in those gorgeous mountains. I am looking forward to some major lifestyle improvements in Oregon.
Speaking of my future new bike, as I had my last long coffee with a friend yesterday morning, I realized that the GoPro that I have been wanting for my music stand for the past two years is finally warranted. She asked if I would be filming my bike rides…absolutely! After saying goodbyes to my flute choir friends at my final rehearsal last night, I checked out the cameras at Best Buy. I came home, researched, and landed on an open-box Hero 12. I’ll pick it up today and record an orchestral flute excerpt I’ve been tinkering with for the past few weeks.
Brett and I played one last open mic at Batch on Monday night. We played the Irlandaise movement of the Bolling Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (“Irlandaise, Javanaise, mayonnaise,” Brett laughs in my head), and a fantastic upright bass player from the crowd joined us.
Here’s an excerpt from Monday night’s final impromptu performance, with Brett, a bassist whose name I didn’t catch, and me:
Here’s Sir James, doing the flute part better (and with the final piece of the jazz trio: percussion):
The next performance recordings I make will be from the Bend Pops Orchestra and Central Oregon Flute Ensemble. I am looking forward to those and counting on them to make my time alone in Bend pass more quickly.
I’m also taking my watercolors. Here are the fun things I have been working on this week.
I am also determined to see the lunch bag project through to the end.
Eddie helped me remember this morning that I started sending decorated lunch bags for him and his brother when they went back to school in person after the COVID school-from-home period ended. I started making them just to doodle, but then, when Billy got to 6th grade, his teacher started collecting them, and she still does. So, I will be shipping lunch bags home in batches this year to complete the collection. Here's a sampling of some recent lunch bags.
Okay, that’s it for now. I will not bore you with tales of clutter cleanup, packing, and other logistics. The rest of this week will be continuing goodbyes, the last of Eddie’s halftime shows that I will get to attend in person, March-a-thon, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners with friends and family…I may or may not post again before I leave, but I promise to begin posting regularly from the trip to Bend and beyond.
We are headed to Oregon! I leave on September 15 to start work on September 23, and Kyle, Eddie, and Billy will follow in May.
Apologies for not posting sooner...here is what I wrote about Bend after I traveled there and before I interviewed in Rahway (sometime between 7/22 and 7/30).
I loved the people and the possible position at Lonza so much that I would be devastated if they rejected me. This job and I were made for each other. I know I would enjoy the work based on my experience doing what I have loved over the last 7 years. For me, it takes two things (besides comfortable wages and benefits, of course):
✅ Welcoming, smart teammates and mentors.
✅ Work that involves coming up with creative technical solutions so that it doesn't feel like work.*
*(In my final year at UT NMR, it definitely felt like drudgery and the Sunday scaries were a real weekly misery.)
Those pieces are there. I would be reporting to a great manager on a team that says it is not micromanaged. The work would be "incubator stage R&D," assessing and perfecting technologies and techniques before they are offered to clients. A big bonus here would be the return to drug substance work in addition to drug product.** There are hoods and equipment for small-scale synthesis in the Tumalo lab.
**Drug substance refers to the drug molecules and how they are synthesized. Drug product, the area of pharmaceutical science that I have mostly been working in for the past 7 years, involves the formulation of those drugs: what additional compounds the drugs are mixed with and their final dosage form.
That brings me to the next big draw: Tumalo.
There are two labs. The formulation spaces are in a large facility in north central Bend. As one would expect, they have spray dryers, melt extruders, powder labs, fluid beds, tableting equipment, and other mainstays in addition to more exotic formulation toys. I would mostly be working at this site.
Their GMP manufacturing and QA/QC groups are in a separate facility on the same campus (this is great for many reasons!) The R&D engineer who gave me the tour of that site said that when he gets called over to manufacturing, he is always in "mission specialist mode," like Howard Wolowitz, not in batch-record-signing operations mode. This is also great. Trying to plan your work around batch records and line clearances is stressful in an endless, cyclic hurry-up-and-wait kind of way.
In the second lab, the samples generated in the formulation lab are analyzed, and this lab is...how to say this?...glorious. It has been on the edge of the Tumalo State Forest since Bend Research was founded in 1975.
I would faint if there is ever a backlog for someone to use an HPLC. There were at least a dozen LC systems, and it felt more like two dozen. At least one had Charged Aerosol Detection, which is complementary to LCMS for molecules that don't ionize well or don't have a chromophore. I counted at least 5 DSCs in addition to a chip-DSC. There was a full suite of dissolution vessels of all sizes, multiple thermal activity monitors, two XRDs, mass spec, half a dozen microscopes, including an SEM with EDS attachment, and other things that I probably forget to mention. There are two NMRs. I am overjoyed about this. I love NMR data. Their 600 MHz, which runs both solid- and solution-state samples, is getting a console upgrade to a Bruker Neo. It should be up and running by November.
The best part, though, was the space itself. The story goes:
When Bend Research built the facility in Tumalo, the founders didn't know if their business was going to be viable, so the site was constructed like a farmhouse, complete with a fireplace. That way, they could sell it if they failed.
Now, that facility is almost 50 years old, so it has undergone several renovations, but it is still charming. Windows looking out on evergreen forests are everywhere. I noticed more than one skylight, and the breakroom is a glassed-in solarium. The facility has hiking/running trails to the north. No wonder it is known for so much fantastic science. It is the perfect place to think.
Thinking back to a month ago, I was on my way to Glasgow:
The best part about writing to yourself is having a record of your thoughts to look back on. When I wrote my answers to FAQs at the end of June, I was very concerned about choosing my next move based on its location rather than on the work itself. That concern has been alleviated. Five of the people who I interviewed with have been there over 10 years, and at least three have been there over twenty.
So here I am again, on August 10, 2024, delighted that I wrote all of this.
I now have 36 days to finish up in Austin. Although the pay, non-discretionary bonus, relocation, and benefits are incredible, the PTO policy is good, but not great. In hindsight, maybe I should have tried to negotiate it, but I am just so thrilled at the total compensation that I am just going to suck it up and be as present online as I can be for my kids. Daily face time to talk about school and life.
The job is going to be very challenging, and I am going to show Lonza exactly why they made a great decision in hiring me, so there isn't going to be a lot of flying back and forth from that little airport in Redmond. Southwest has a "Young Travelers" policy that will fly the kids to Eugene. It looks like the drive is about the same distance as from east Austin to IAH in Houston. Not great, but it's only nine months. We can make it through, and we will spend next summer together in a new place in Bend.
7/21 note: I started this draft in Amsterdam, and it is still incomplete, but I am posting anyway. Sorry for the delay. I am now on my ride to the airport, heading to Bend!
From Schipol, 7/11/24:
I completed my abstract for my presentations on my flight to Amsterdam and in my hotel room. The link to the document is here for the handful of you who might want to read it.
The Lonza interview is scheduled for Monday, July 22, and the one at Merck will be on Wednesday, July 31. I feel good about my ability to communicate with and relate to my interviewers. We're starting to cut this close to the start of school, though, so our plans for the coming year depend on where we end up going. There's a lot to think about.
On Tuesday, my last day in Scotland, I went on another tour.
Gary, the tour guide, spoke slowly and almost continually. During the roll call, my name was 4th, and he understandably stumbled over it. "Would you do me a favor? Sit in the jump seat?" Shotgun!
The first stop was at Stirling Castle. As we approached, Gary talked about the William Wallace Monument that we could see as we climbed the hill to the castle. He told the story of Andrew Moray, William Wallace, and the Battle of Stirling Bridge...and then he picked up a theme that echoed a pattern among the Scottish people I had talked to so far. They roll their eyes with contempt at Braveheart and are likelier to recommend The Outlaw King on Netflix.
There are four problems, Gary said, with Braveheart.
Mel Gibson. He's Australian, not Scottish.
Mel Gibson. He is not 7 feet tall. William Wallace was 7 feet tall.
Mel Gibson. He didn't bother to include Stirling Bridge in a movie about William Wallace.
Mel Gibson. He wore that blue makeup that was completely incorrect. Blue paint was associated with the Picts and evidence for their use of woad is limited.
(Credit for Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle images: Wikipedia)
Windy. I did try to get selfies, but they made me feel silly.
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