sunny day

All the initial flume runs went well and I have one day to pull together some results to share with my advisor. Fortunately, having a laptop allows me to do this work outdoors. Today is a perfectly beautiful day in Oxford - the sun is shining, not a cloud is in the sky, and it is 57 degrees. Yeah! I've spent so many daylight hours sitting in a large concrete room with only a few small, cloudy skylights. This is a real treat.

I am looking forward to tomorrow's flight back to the PNW and another fun RRNW symposium. It will be a short stay, full of meetings, seminars, and courses, but at least I get to stay with my family!

multi-tasking

Everyone is talking about multi-tasking these days. Most of what I hear refers to students who are talking on the phone, sending text or chat messages, listening to music, and working on homework all at the same time. But how about at work? I would say we are in the same boat.

For instance, today I have three computers on (and doing different tasks at each of them); taking 5 minute measurements (which includes getting up to move the ADV every 5 minutes); shuffling through spreadsheets every 20 minutes to crunch numbers with a macro; working on this blog; coordinating travel and conferences; and staying connected via email. That is not to mention the continuous sound of water rushing in the background (it is not music, but it certainly has similar qualities and distractions). This seems like plenty to do all at once!

I don't mind multi-tasking, but at the end of days like this I can't wait to just take it easy. I want to veg out by watching a movie or do something else that takes me away from the computer. I swear that I never used to get this exhausted by doing so much at once. The word on the street is that being exposed to so many inputs at the same time is mentally exhausting. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not necessarily be used to do more at one time, right?

This makes me think of something I heard on NPR the other day - that music videos are getting flashier and cut between scenes more quickly than the past. This is in part so they are more easily viewed on small screens, but it is also so that they catch your attention. This makes me think that the advertising methods in the flick WALL-E are more possible than ever. I wonder how long it will take for us to ignore all the inputs...we are apparently training ourselves already.

my study

At times the day moves by way too slowly. I look at the clock constantly to see that only 1 hour has passed, see how many dozens of measurements still left before I can complete my workday, and I wail. Who doesn't have those kinds of days? But in the big picture, time is really moving by quite quickly. It seems like I have barely completed one day of work, go home to cook/eat, and relax for a bit, then it is to bed and back up at it again before I know it. Even though this pattern has been true all my life (though sometimes substitute play for work), I am still amazed at how time passes.

Work is going well these days. The sampling can be a bit monotonous, but I believe I am seeing the kind of results that I was expecting. This is good! That means that I am on schedule. I still have some pretty large decisions to make before I know whether it all will work out, but I have confidence that everything will be okay. Some of you have wondered about what it is I am doing, so here it goes:

In stream restoration work, one of the most common practices is to plant vegetation. These plants are important for many ecological reasons such as cover for animals or nutrients, but also for many physical reasons. Plants act as natural barriers to water flowing past them, slowing down currents and reducing bank erosion. Of course there are many other functions that plants provide, but my focus is on the last thing I mentioned - how plants act as natural resistance to flow.

So what does that mean exactly? I study how different patterns of plants growing on the toe of a bank influence how fast water is flowing over that bank. This is difficult to study in the field because you have to wait for different water levels and velocities, which are impossible to replicate, making comparisons difficult. That is why I set up an experimental study in a flume. In the flume I can control factors such as discharge, flexibility of plants and depth of plant submergence, which makes it easier to isolate the influence of plant patterns.

My flume is approximately 25 feet long (I'll update with a picture soon, for now you can look back through other blog entries). The first couple of feet are for the flow straighteners. The next 16 feet include an insert where about 1/3 of the bed is a flat "main channel" and the other 2/3 represents the sloped toe of a bank. I use two different bank toe inserts - a 15 degree slope and a 30 degree slope. About 9 feet of the bank toe has holes drilled in it for vegetation. The plants are spaced so that when scaled to a real bank toe, there would be about 24 per square meter. At the end of the flume is a weir. The flume empties into a stilling basin with a v-notch weir where I take my discharge measurements.

I am collecting measurements on 10 experimental set-ups. Two are a "no vegetation" condition. The remaining eight are split evenly between the two different bank toe slopes. I have four different combinations of high/low density of plants and high/low projected area. Projected area is the "density" of vegetation that the water sees. In other words, when we normally think of plant density, it is as if we are above the plot of land looking down on it. You could measure it by counting the number of plants per area (just one of many ways). For projected area you would be standing on the ground looking into that plot of land. This time you are measuring by counting the number of leaves over the area you are looking at (also one of many ways).

With this study, I am hoping to quantify the difference in resistance due to the plants and the difference in shear stress applied on the bank toe. To gather this information, I collect 3-D flow velocity data along the bed and at 0.6 depth. With the velocity data I look more closely at turbulence along the bed, forces on the bed, and average flow velocity within the vegetation versus the main channel. I also look at how surface water elevation changes depending on the vegetation.

Back to the big picture - what will this help us understand? I am hoping that a project like this will help inform restoration activities in the future. There are two ways - one, by telling us what will give us the biggest bang for our buck. For instance, let's say you want to plant a bunch of saplings along a bank. It would be useful to know if a few sparsely planted stems with a lot of branches would give you a similar amount of protection as a densely planted bank of willow whips. Or say the bank is already sparsely planted, when it drops it's leaves, how much more vulnerable will it be to erosion than when the leaves were on? If they are different, that flood that happens in late spring will be different than the mid-winter flood.

So that's my project, boiled down to the basics. Throw in a bunch of fluid mechanics and a dash of geomorphology and plant biomechanics, and that's about it. I've seen a fun term describing the field of study for projects kind of like this (though generally a bit more field based) - hydrobiogeomorphology. Maybe I should start calling myself a hydrobiogeomorphologist just to see strange looks on people's faces!

what a week

All sorts of activities are keeping me busy these days. The go-go-go is frying my brain a bit and I am in need of a day off. Fortunately, one week from now I get to go back to the PNW for a conference and a brief visit with my sweetie.

As for now, I am taking advantage of this sunny day and the fact that I won't start the next flume experiment until tomorrow. I am sitting next to the window absorbing whatever sunshine I can! I even took a brief drive out to Sardis Lake and the Clear Creek Recreation Area to try and find a trail Lauren mentioned. I didn't find it, but I didn't look too hard either.






Well it is time to get back to work...gotta get some more done so that I don't have to worry about work too much when I am in OR/WA!

"vegetation"

Here's a short video of data being collected at the flume. Sorry about the weird clicking sound, I'm gonna have to work on that. Otherwise, what you make think is white noise is the sound of water cascading out of the flume down into the stilling basin. That's what I listen to for hours upon hours each day. At least the water isn't getting pumped in at full tilt, then you would have the sound of rocks bouncing around on top of all that! On those days I just wear ear protection.

pics

Some pics of the holidays and of my recent project in Oxford....



Anna and Casey at a Allann Bros in Eugene


Cameron at the same spot sipping on some jasmine tea


Miso aiming for some attention at home


Christmas Eve - Thomas taking a picture of Cameron and myself taking a picture of him using Skype


newly painted bookcase at home


home sweet home in Oxford


my "vegetation"


"vegetation" partially submerged

....and here is posted a picture of Cameron, dogs and myself with Elly, Deven and Raiko on our one sunny day during my visit back home...wait, no photo here...hmm...Elly, where is that picture? ;-P

pictures soon

I promise pictures soon...sorry so many words and nothing colorful to look at! But really, read the MLK speech, it is definitely worth your time!

mlk

There are many things on my mind these days, but today I would like to commemorate MLK by printing parts of one of his speeches. I found it so moving and relevant to today's atmosphere, though he was speaking about his opposition to the Vietnam War. Sometimes I feel we have learned nothing from the past. But one of the best things about an MLK speech is that he always leaves you filled with hope for the future.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967, Riverside Church:
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote: "Each day the war goes on, the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

...The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

…These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now, there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression, which has now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago, he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. …

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. …

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

…A genuine revolution of values means, in the final analysis, that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft-misunderstood, this oft-misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love, I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response, I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I’m speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

…Now, let us begin. Now, let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter—but beautiful—struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

…And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

*********
For more of this speech and another from the day before he was assassinated, see Democracy Now's website (http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/19/dr_martin_luther_king_jr_1929).

living sustainably

"I’m going to wash my hair tomorrow."

When my grandmother used to declare such things, which sounded like an event, I always thought it was rather funny. I mean – bathing is such a regular activity, why would someone have to schedule it in? But just today I caught myself thinking, "I need to wash my hair tomorrow." And I do schedule it in!

No, this is not a sign of bad hygiene. This is a sign of sustainable and healthy living practices. We don’t need to wash our hair every day. Most folks probably don’t even need to shower every day. (I mean, you are sitting at a desk all day just to drive home, eat dinner and watch TV…where in that process do you break a sweat?) Each shower costs us gallons of water…usually water that has been treated to the condition where it could be drinkable. Then there is the soap. Most folks use non-biodegradable, chemical-laden soaps. Sure it is cheaper, but think of the cost on our environment…chemicals from soaps and shampoos from every household flushed down the drain. Dilution is not the solution for pollution. And finally, just appealing to the personal – using soap on your hair and skin daily dries it out. This is not healthy for you.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we don’t take showers or use soap (ick!). I’m just suggesting you think about the products you purchase and the amount of water you use. We should each take a lesson from our grandparents.

peanut butter and jelly

Today I had the best PB&J since I first arrived in Oxford. This is a hallmark of sorts for me.

When I first arrived, I went through a bit of shock as I tried to find foods that I recognized and the sort of stuff that I choose to make a part of my regular diet. Admittedly, I wasn’t entirely surprised since Cameron had done a good amount of food sleuthing for me when we visited last February. After making the rounds, he concluded, “Nicole, you are not going to be able to eat in Oxford.” In many ways, Cameron was right. I have found it difficult to eat in the same manner as I did before. I have resorted to eating a lot less fresh fruits and vegetables. Finding local foods has also been a bit of a challenge. There is a nice little market, but from what I’ve sampled the fruit and some of the green vegetables are not that fresh or tasty.

For the most part I’ve figured out how to eat in Oxford. I’ve been able to find good substitutes for what I miss most. And because I’m trying to cook and eat as simply as possible (i.e. not purchase tons of spices and such), I’m doing pretty well these days. There are only two items that are normally part of my diet that I still miss considerably – tofu and bread. Unfortunately, I have determined that finding good tofu is pretty much a lost cause. (What will I ever do when I move from Eugene permanently?!) Walmart is the only place that sells firm tofu and even that stuff isn’t all that tasty.

Bread has also been a troubling loss to my diet. Of course they have bread in Oxford, just not good bread. If I can make it to a local bakery/coffee shop/restaurant during their business hours, then I can purchase a locally made, fresh loaf of good bread. The trouble with that is I am rarely able to make it there during business hours. Fortunately for me, my landlord/friend/baker extraordinaire has offered to bake me bread when she is making some for herself. Yeah!

Now I am back to the beginning of my story. With a freshly baked loaf of Lauren’s 12-grain, I made myself a PB&J. Not only was the bread perfect, but the newly purchased peanut butter was tasty too. Whew! I’m finally finding brands I like too! So, now I can eat lunch in the land of Oxford.

I've been told it is sunny outside

And in fact, on my short treks to the bathroom I saw that indeed, it is sunny outside. It's wonderfully lucky to be in a location where there are some sunny winter days. It's too bad there isn't a window in the Hydraulics Lab. At least there are skylights....

And now it is later and it is dark outside. Haven't been out yet, but I'm assuming that it is a clear, starry night. Though the moon is past full, I bet a good chunk of it is lighting up the night sky.

Lots of hours passing me by while I sit with the cascading water of my flume – leaking all over the darned place! I've got quite large puddles forming here and there. I am not troubled yet, but just wait until I turn the pump up a notch....

Just one more thing – anyone got time to spare and an interest in designing a way to slide an ADV up and down in a precise, easy way? You should definitely talk to me! I've got a project for you!!

twilight

Though I am thousands of miles away I felt drawn in to this month’s book club book…or in this case – books. There’s nothing like teenage vampires to get a discussion going! Funny enough, it’s very likely that as I write this, the ladies are gathered in a circle chatting about all four books (and the hint of book five that is already on the internet).

I will admit that I happily cruised through the first book, Twilight – barely putting it down to get a few hours of bumpy red-eye plane ride sleep. The book was well written (well enough for entertainment) and had a good pace. That alone usually keeps me along for the ride. And a good vampire story is always fun! In fact, just a couple of weeks ago I finished Fledgling by Octavia Butler. (Her vampires were very different and it was fun to compare and contrast while reading.)

Only one thing bothered me about the book - Bella’s adoration of Edward’s body. Now, I have read all about how teenage girls have a fascination with looks so I know I am supposed to find this believable. And believe it or not, I do remember what it was like to be a teenager and remember a good number of my friends with posters of “hot guys” hanging on their walls. But honestly, I really never understood my friends fascination with Fabio and I still don’t get all gooey excited about Edward’s dreamy eyes. Sorry. Of course, there is also the argument that vampires draw you in – make you want them so badly that you can’t think of anything but giving yourself up to them. So in the end I find Bella’s adoration feasible, but still annoying.

The sexual energy in the book was fun, but just a tease. I can understand the need to have books for teens that are not seething with sex, but still tantalize the urge (see the very well written Atlantic Monthly article about Twilight and teens written by Caitlin Flanagan http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires). Yet I couldn’t help but realize that I’ve gotten to a point in my life where teen romance just doesn’t do it for me anymore. Then again, knowing that I read Harlequin Romances from the age of thirteen on, I’m not entirely sure it would have done it for me then either.

Overall, I would give Twilight a ‘thumbs up’. Good brain candy! And soon I’ll start the second book….

i'm back!!

Hey everyone - hope you had a great holiday season! I really enjoyed being home - it was both relaxing and packed full of visits and projects. I believe it was gray and rainy nearly every day I was home except for one brilliant Saturday. It was such a lovely day that Cameron and I headed outdoors with our friends Elly, Deven and Raiko, as well as our two four-legged critters. A joy as always, Miso chose to roll in some choice stuff and make our stroll a pungent one.

The rivers in Oregon are rockin' and rollin'. Exciting! Nothing turns my head quite like a flooding river. You just gotta love those rain-on-snow events for making life real. And even though it is rainy and gray, I do miss the Pacific Northwest.

Of course, I am not about to complain about the lucky couple of days we had here in Oxford (60's and sunny! beautiful!!). Even though the weather has turned back to winter, I do like having some sunshine in the morning. It certainly makes it easier to get up and go!

As for work - some unfortunate leaking has postponed the beginning of my flume runs, but hopefully tomorrow I will be up and running. I've installed the "plants" (all 800 of them), which in the short testing I've done, appear to be doing what I had hoped they would do. Installing them didn't take all that long, but I managed to wear holes in my fingers and thumbs. Fortunately for you, instead of providing a photo of my "injuries", I have included one of the installed "plants". They are made of acrylic and bend like a sapling should. Hopefully this all works out well! Over the next couple of weeks I will find out if my carefully laid plans will pan out or whether I will need to do some tweaking. Tweaking will definitely set me behind schedule...so please everyone, cross your fingers for me!