Matts' Views

I promised in a previous post that I would outline how handicap accessible the KU campus is.  I have already mentioned the craters and large ledges in the sidewalks that will stop a wheelchair in its tracks, but what I am going to show you now takes the cake.  These are actual scans of what the university hands out to disabled students as part of the disability map of the KU campus.  These are the directions which explain to disabled students how to get from Sunnyside Ave. (The street that runs between Haworth and Robinson) and Jayhawk Blvd (Where Strong Hall is located.)

I am not entirely sure how to include the images into the text of the blog very well so you are going to have to work with me on that one.  But as you can see it is quite the involved process to get from Sunnyside to Jayhawk.  If you take the route that is suggested (and there is no other route available to take) you have to go through 5 buildings, 3 elevators, and the mobs of students that are either madly rushing trying to get to their next class or are wandering aimlessly trying to discover the meaning of life.

I have also recently found the handicap door openers to the ground floor of Malott don't function.  This makes getting into and out of the building an interesting challenge.  I am glad that my Dad is here to help me navigate the campus.  Since we still don't have a handicap parking tag, we have to park down in the yellow lot by the rec center and hoof it up the hill.  It would be pretty hard to drive that manual wheelchair up the hill without someone else there to help push it.

I have written all of this stuff, but I have left the best part 'till last.  My Dad and I were trying to make the journey up the hill from Malott to Strong Hall.  We had a meeting scheduled with the KU disability office which is located in the basement of Strong.  So we embarked on this epic adventure that took us through many buildings and across vast expanses of student filled sidewalks to arrive at the Anshutz elevator.  This elevator is great because the Hummer won't fit in it directly.  It is not deep enough, so you have to pick up the Hummer and put it in almost sideways.  After coming out of Anshutz, we crossed over to Budig hall following the handicap door buttons.  (Never a good idea unless you know where you are going).  So we barged into the computer lab of Budig.  There is a reason they tell you as a handicap person not to go in there... THERE IS NO WAY OUT!!!  It is a handicap person deathtrap.  Once you get in there you are never going to see the light of day again!!!! (Insert evil laughter here.)  The only way we were able to escape with our lives involved a lot of hand to hand combat and extensive use of the Hummers missle defense system.  Luckliy, the techs didn't see us coming and we had the jump on them.  Once we had fought our way hither and yon and had escaped the evil clutches of the computer lab techs, we rounded the corner to the lower level entrance of Budig.  Here you can take the elevator to the main level, or the various catwalks that run through the top of Budig to the tops of the ginormous lecture halls.  After missing the right floor multiple times we were finally successful in reaching the level that exits out onto Jayhawk Blvd.

There is more to the adventure, but this post is getting pretty long so I will stop here and continue the story at a later date.

Posted by msherrill at 03:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

     It is amazing how busy you can still be when you really can't physically do all that much.  Between trying to make it to classes on Tues and Thurs, keep up with my school work, and putting together random posters that have been assigned to me, I stay pretty busy.  I had a meeting with my research advisor, the director of the CEBC and another graduate student that is going to be working on my project for the CEBC with me. (The CEBC is part of KU and they happen to be the ones that are paying me this semester).  We got to talking about the direction that my project is going to go, and it was decided that I needed to put together a poster over the things discussed in the meeting to present in St. Louis on Oct. 1.  So for th remainder of this week I have been gathering all of the needed data and putting together the poster.  I submitted the draft of it to my research advisor today, so I will have to wait and see what kind of response I get from him.

     I have developed a new found respect for people that who are in whhel chairs for their entire life.  It is not until you have to rely on one of those things for transportation that you realize how oblivios the rest of us are to the setups of the buildings and things around us.  Most of the "handicap accessible" buildings may be legally accessible, but in reality, they aren't.  How many people have ever tried to get a wheel chair over one of the 1" or larger seams in the concrete sidewalk.  You know the ones where the tree root has pushed up a part of the sidewalk and when you walk over it if you weren't paying attention you would hook your toe on it?  Those things are almost unsurmountable obstacles in a chair.  Also the thresholds to buildings... Some of them are huge and are very hard to get a chair over.  Anyway, enough ranting about that.  You will have to read the post that I am planning on putting up about the best way to get from Sunnyside Ave. (the road that goes below the chemistry building) up to Jayhawl Blvd.  If I can still find the insert from the KU disability map I will scan it and post it so everyone can see how ridiculous it is.  We all know there are a tremendous number of stairs to go up if you want to go from say Malott to Strong Hall by way of walking either close to or through Wescoe.  Try to think of a way to do it in a chair.  That is a challenge for you.  (Sorry for the building references for those of you who are not familiar with the KU campus.)

     So that has been most of my week.  Classes and putting together a poster.  I am hoping since I have gotten most of the school reponsibilities out of the way, I can update the site and put a few more entries into my blog.  Speaking of updating the site... I should probably get started on that now.

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So in last night's softball game the Beer Barron Brigade played the who cares what their name is team and lost.  The fact that we lost both games was not surprising.  At this point the season we have a perfect record.  We are 0-8 or something like that.  Basically, we have never won a game.  On the upside, the guys came really, really close last night.  The score was tied at 10-10 at the end of regulation, and it took another two innings to determine who the winner would be. 

 I have already given it away by mentioning the fact that we lost, but it doesn't matter.  Everyone played a great game, and it was much more enjoyable to watch than the previous week's crushing by the Run Rule Recipients when we were beaten 40 something to 8 and then high 20 something to not very many.  Made for some very short and dare I say embarassing games? 

Before the nubulation I used to play right field for the team.  I enjoyed the games that I did get to play in, and sitting in the stands last night I was really wishing that I could be out there playing with them, but alas... my wounds are still too fresh.  I am looking forward to next season though.  We are going to knock them all out and show them how a team that should be playing in say H or I league ball plays C leagues ball, and I can tell you right now, it is not going to be pretty.  Look out, we are going to be crushed by you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Insert war cry here)

So I took some pictures last night while I was sitting in the stands so I think I will try to post them in the this blog as that is what I have seen a lot of people do.  The question is how do you do it?Let's see... 

Ok, so I think I have a picture of Jimmie at Bat posted in this entry.  It it showing up as a dead link, so I am not sure if it will work or not.  I will have to wait until I get this entry published to see if it works.  If it does, then I have some other things I can slap in here as well.

So from watching the team and playing with them for a couple of games, it would seem that we as chemists are not very well suited to play softball.  There are things that we do well.  Synthesizing various molecules, both organic and inorganic depending on your tastes, analyzing said molecules, and then tellling world why we think that they way we made the molecule is better than anyone else's method of making the same thing.  And... consuming a large amount of a golden EtOH enriched liquid at deparmental functions.  Those are things that we are good at.  Softball really isn't our forte.  Good thing it is all for fun.  It is not entirely clear how much fun the players have during games when we are getting crushed, but our loyal band of trveling hecklers gets a huge kick out of seeing us get dominated every week. 

So allow me to leave you with a random really bad chemistry analogy.  Chemists and softabll appear to be a heterogenous mixture.  They sort of mix fi you really stir them up well, and reactions do occur, but seemingly more slowly then under optimum conditions.  Chemists and beer are a homogenous mixture.  Everything mixes together well, and reactions happen so fast they sometimes exotherm on you and there is absolutely no way to control them.  So maybe we can use the beer as a phase transfer catalyst to help boost the softball playing performance reaction.  Would that be like using a performance enhancing drug?  Someone should try it next week.  See if playing drunk increases a chemist's ability to play softball.

Posted by msherrill at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I should probably start by clarifying what I mean by being on drugs before the DEA or some other grad student regulating agency comes busting down my door @ 3 am while I am sleep to haul my butt off to jail or at least to take away my GRA for the semester.  The presciption, that is the key word prescription, drugs that I am taking are doing interesting things to me.  Since the Nubulation (the making of the Nub) happened, I have been in a reasonable amount of pain.  To help control said pain, the doctors prescribed some nice pain killers.  Although they are really great about helping to alleviate the pain associated with the Nub, they are also great at bringing most higher brain functions to a complete halt.

When I wake up in the morning, I find that most of the effects of the last dose of drugs that I took right before I went to bed have mostly worn off.  Then comes time for the next dose.  After I have taken the pills, I have discovered that I have less than one hour of true brain function left before I turn into what I like to call the oblivious vegetable.  I will describe the symptoms of this state in a minute.  This morning I used the limited time of brain function to proof read a portion of a grant draft that my boss Michael Rubin is preparing to submit next week. 

So that was all tjat I was able to get done this morning that was productive before turning into the oblivious happy vegetable.  This process starts with a slight warm fuzzy feeling that begins to grow of deep inside.  From there the vision begins to get slightly blurry.  Not horribly blurry, but the kind of blurry that you get when you have a good buzz from drinking a bit too much alcohol.  Next to go is the concentraion and the ability to think about anything that actually resembles rational thought.  You could have been working on solving the deepest mysteries of science and doing well at it, take some of these drugs, and the only things that you can contemplate after that is why if I hold my breath, I can't take any more breaths.  (You can see how much sense this whole last paragraph is making to see my point.)

So I spend the rest of the day in this vegetable like state doing a lot of not much.  I have been updating thenub.org a lot recently and learning about developing webpages and everything that goes along with that.  Plus I have gotten into this blogging trend.  Not sure how long it will last though.  Those were some of the random ramblings of a drugged grad student for the day.

Thanks Tiff for the comment and the encouragement.  I have to do something with my time or I would completely blow a head gasket, so I am going to try to keep everyrhtng updated at least until I get back on my feet and back to work. 

Now I need to put together an entry about the softball game last night.  I have it... the drugged musings of a grad students on the effects of chemists on softball...

Posted by msherrill at 09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The original date of this post was the 15th of September, but due to some drug related stupidity, I had to start all over again and so the date on this post is off by a little bit. 

Ok, so I am new, very, new to this whole being on the web thing.  In the past week I have bought a domain name, put up a not very good website, and then started playing around with it.  I have been trying to learn the in's and out's of webhosting.  So I came across this option for my domain and that is to add a blog to it.  I have never blogged before, but I know a lot of people out there who do, so I thought that I would give it a shot.

Recently there has been a lot of stuff going on in my life.  Most of it related to the motorcycle accident that I was in two weeks ago.  There have been a lot of changes too that have been brought on by that same incident.  It has been really, really good to have family friends around to support me.  Without them, this recovery would be a whole lot more difficult than it already is going to be. 

 One thing that I have found really difficult is the change in pace.  I went from working 60+ hours a week in the lab on my research, to sitting at home doing very little due to the limitaions placed on me by the injury and the side effects of the pain medication that I am on.  I find that when I am taking the meds it is really hard for me to focus on anything and get anything accomplished.  It takes me forever to update the website when I have just taken the meds as I also have to battle the drowsiness that they bring on.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw this out there and see what it looks like and how the blogging thing works.  I will use this to keep everyone that is interested posted on what is happening in my life, and how the recovery is going.

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