He Loves Me

Six months ago today Matthew and I were sealed for eternity. I seriously love being married to Matthew. He is an amazing husband. He works hard in school, at work, and then when he gets home he helps me out with anything I need. Also a year ago today Matthew told me that he loved me for the first time. We were in Utah at his aunt Diane's for his cousin Zane's mission farewell. When Matthew and I were dating he was in Laramie, and I was at home going to school at NWC and working so it was way tuff to be apart from each other. I had never felt like wanting to be with someone every single minute I had as I did Matthew. So I knew I loved him, and I will always love him forever and ever. We have had a great 6 months of marriage.

Also for Valentines day Matthew got me 2 dozen beautiful red roses. Valentines was great. Matthew's Mom and grandma were here to help out with Emily's new baby girl . We all went out to dinner. Then later that night Matthew and I helped chaperoned the youth stake dance. We had a blast dancing and spending time with our friends.

Its A Girl

Tonight Emily gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Matthew and I are babysitting Stetson while they at the hospital. We were able to go over and see the baby, Emily and Michael tonight. We got some flowers, mt. dew for Michael, and a little pink bear with a blanket for Stetson to give to the baby. Stetson was so excited about see his new sister. When we got the call that they had a little girl, I told Stetson when I got off the phone you wanna go see the baby. He was grabbing his coat and shoes and was so excited to go see the Baby and Mom. They don't have a name yet, but she is defiantly a cute 1st Asay Baby Girl.

Milking Goats

Yesterday I got to go with Matthew to help him milk the goats, that he is helping do research for the spider silk. They use the goats milk to produce the spider silk. The goats that they milk are named Sweetie and Kanga. Matthew milks the goats at night time during the week, and milks morning and nights during the weekend. They use milking machines to milk the goats, and the goats stand on the stand while they are being milked. Matthew is really enjoying milking the goats and being involved in the research for the spider silk. ( included: Pictures of sheep, and Buffalo from the State Vet Lab).

Our Art Gallery

We have our own little art gallery in our house now. For Christmas Matthew got a print that he has been wanting for a while, and I really like it also. It is the Waiting for Chinook by C. M Russell. We also hit up the Buffalo Bill Museum at Christmas time and got a couple of other prints there. We got Roping a Grizzly by C. M. Russell, and Cold Winter by Koerner. We have them all framed now and hanging up. My little sister Brandy loves painting also, so for our wedding she painted the sun set picture for us. The Van Gogh's Starry Night we picked up at Michael's on our way out from picking up our last print that we got framed. Our guest room didn't have anything on the walls so we put that one and my little sisters painting. We are really enjoying our new paintings and wanted you to all enjoy it also.

7 Things

7 Things
7 Things I can do-*
Run about a mile*
Eating out*
Love Matthew*
Be understanding of others to a point*
Sing*
Clean my house*
Watch funny movies and laugh hysterically for hours
7 Things I can't do-*
Survive on 4 hours asleep
* Totally understand math- it just doesn't click for me*
* Do homework as soon as I get home
*draw or any artistic thing*
watch the history channel for more then 5 minutes *
Eat 5 pieces of pizza
Eat generic mac n cheese
7 Things I say often-
* OH man*
Whatever man*
I'm for real *
Yay! I'm so excited!!*
I miss ya like crazy*
* I Love You so much
Ur crazy
7 Things I love about Matthew*
He helps me out with things around the house*
He is such a joker*
His Testimony/Love of the gospel*
His amazing knowledge of everything
He has goals and dreams *
He is such a hard worker
He loves me no matter what
7 Favorite foods-
*I love pasta*
pizza*
steak*
Gumbo*
tacos*
soups and salads*
fruit and veggies*
7 People I tag-* Mom* Emily* Jill* Aspen* Sonnie* Lindsay* Brittany*

The First Twilight Book

I started the first twilight book before Christmas, and I finally finished it yesterday. The week before Christmas I was just at home while Matthew was working, so that's pretty much all I did was read my book. Then when we went back home there was no time to read it, there was so many family to see, and things to do. I really enjoyed the book. I decided to start reading them after I got put into the Young Women's because that's all those girls talk about. I seemed to be the only one who hadn't read them. I am super excited to see what happens in the 2nd one, which Matthew got me for Christmas.

Spider Silk from Goats Milk?????

Matthew and I both work in the Lewis Lab where they are doing a project with spider silk. I only wash the dishes for the lab, but Matthew actually gets his hands dirty and works in the research and works with the goats. He has been able to help in the process of the birth of the baby goats. He has really enjoyed it. To make the story short they are making spider silk out of goats milk. But here is an article that I found on uwyo.edu that talks more about the project for all who are interested.



Untangling spider silk's structural mysteries
THE 6,000 LB OF GOAT MILK sitting in Randolph V. Lewis' laboratory freezer at the University of Wyoming takes up a lot of space. But it's only one part of the biochemistry professor's effort to understand spider silk and replicate its remarkable properties.
Of course, the caprine concoction is no ordinary goat milk. It comes from Montreal-based Nexia Biotechnologies, a company that made headlines a few years ago when it announced it had created genetically modified goats that produce milk laden with spider silk proteins. And understanding the chemistry and biophysics behind spider silk's remarkable properties has been at the heart of Lewis' research for nearly two decades (Chem. Rev. 2006, 106, 3762).
Courtesy of Randy Lewis
Polypeptide Zipper Antiparallel strands of helices made up of GGX repeats come together like a zipper.
To begin with, spiders don't make just one type of silk, Lewis noted. The ingenious arachnids produce silk in up to six varieties of varying strength and elasticity. Of these, Lewis said, dragline silk has attracted the most commercial interest.
Spun by orb-web-weaving spiders for their web's framework and for the spiders to catch themselves during a fall, dragline silk is about as strong as the bulletproof polymer Kevlar. Unlike Kevlar, however, dragline silk is also extremely elastic, which is why it takes 10 times more energy to break dragline silk than it does to break Kevlar.
Spider silk is made almost entirely of protein, so from a molecular standpoint, what is it that makes dragline silk so strong and also so elastic?
Thanks to fiber diffraction studies, scientists have long known that spider silk proteins possess crystalline regions of β-sheets. "The problem is that almost all the information we get is on those crystalline regions," Lewis explained. Although those β-sheets are important, they don't tell the whole story. The protein structure that gives spider silk its amazing elasticity is still something of a mystery.
Courtesy of Randy Lewis
Protein Nanospring Repeating β-turns take the shape of a springy β-spiral.
Because spider silk is insoluble in all but a few organic solvents, scientists can't use traditional protein characterization methods, such as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, to suss out its structure. So Lewis' team decided to see what they could learn from examining the silk protein's amino acid sequence.
Lewis pointed out that one of dragline silk's proteins contains stretches of polyalanine of up to seven residues alternating with repeating sequences of three residues: two glycines (GG) and a third amino acid (X) that is either tyrosine, leucine, or glutamine.
On the basis of computer modeling, Lewis thinks this repeating GGX motif forms a helical arrangement in which each triplet makes a complete turn in the helix. In that structure, all the X residues extend outward from one side of the helix. The models also show that if two antiparallel strands of this helix come together, their X residues can interdigitate like a zipper. "We believe this is a key factor in terms of tensile strength," Lewis said.
The modeling studies have also led Lewis' group to propose that dragline silk's elasticity comes from a pentapeptide motif of glycine-proline-glycine (GPG) and two other amino acids (XX). This GPGXX sequence is thought to form a β-turn, and multiple β-turns from GPGXX take the shape of a springy β-spiral. "Looking at the structure," Lewis said, "you can imagine that if you pull, that spiral stretches."
Comparing the sequences of a variety of natural spider silks, Lewis noted that proteins lacking this GPGXX elastic segment can't be stretched beyond 5% of their original length. If a silk protein has nine of the elastic segments, however, its elasticity is 20 to 30%. And if the protein has 60 GPGXX repeats, its elasticity is more than 200%.
To test these computational models experimentally, Lewis' group, including postdoc Florence Teulé and undergraduate Alyssa Cooper, has made 18 different variations on the dragline silk protein. They tweak amino acids to see which factors are the most important in terms of strength and elasticity in spun fibers.