Periodic Table of Awesomeness

In my department there is a huge number of seminars to attend. As students we are generally required to attend the departmental colloquium, which is typically an outside, invited speaker, and the student seminar series of our division. In the analytical division, students usually give two seminars, a mostly literature-based seminar in their 2nd year, and then a research-based final seminar shortly before graduating.

At analytical division seminars it is customary for the speaker (or friends of the speaker) to provide snacks. A few weeks ago my labmate Slim gave his 2nd year seminar, and E and I jumped on the excuse to bake. Because we're dorks and ridiculous, we decided to make a periodic table of cupcakes for Slim's seminar. Here's the finished product laid out on my dining room table the night before:


Before the event, there was some curiosity and discussion as to which elements would be snatched up right away, and which would be left until the end. To satisfy inquisitive minds, I collected a few data points throughout the cupcake selection process. Here are the numbers extracted from the raw data (Periodically taken photographs, and I apologize for the mediocre quality of the images - it seems I can't make tables in blogger. I can't imagine why not.):


First, a few points about how the data and elements have been organized. (By the way, here's the periodic table we used for reference.)

• For the d- and f-blocks, the first number is the number of elemental cupcakes, while the number in parenthesis is total number of cupcakes in that flavor, i.e. including the 2 place-holder asterisk cupcakes indicating where the f-block inserts into the table.
• While La and Ac are more d-block-like in their electronics, they were included in the f-block seeing as the elements in the f-block are collectively named for them (lanthanides and actinides).
• Lu and Lr were included with the d-block because electronically they are more d-block-like.
  
• Including the unnamed, somewhat suspect elements at the bottom of the periodic table, there are currently 118 elements.
• The skinny, blank row in the table indicates when the seminar actually occurred - in other words, the division between cupcakes that were selected before seminar and those taken afterward.

Given that each block was a different flavor cake and frosting, the contributions from elemental preference and flavor preference are convoluted, making it difficult (ok, impossible) to draw any solid conclusions. Also, as one of my committee members pointed out, this experiment would have to be repeated to have any validity (I think that was a hint for more cupcakes...).

Sorted by flavor/block, the earliest cupcakes/elements selected:

Chocolate jumped out to the early lead, with 10 cupcakes, or 23% being taken early. It's not surprising that precious metals (Ag, Au, Pd) were selected early. Tungsten's (W) popularity is also not surprising, as it is an odd, but widely used metal. Toxic metals also seemed to be quite popular for the novelty of eating a "toxic" cupcake (Cd, Hg).

Seaborgium (Sg), and some other elements, might seem like an odd early-round selection, but I believe this to be due to the remarkable popularity of Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg among those in attendance. Seaborg won the 1951 Nobel prize in chemistry, and is the principal or co-discoverer of ten elements, including seaborgium (actually the last element to be named for a still-living person/discoverer), plutonium (Pu), americium (Am), curium (Cm), berkelium (Bk), californium (Cf), einsteinium (Es, also named for a still-living person), fermium (Fm), medelevium (Md), and nobelium (No).

As elemental/cupcake selection was a highly individual process, some observations on various subjects' methods:

• Many seemed to choose which flavor they wanted, and then select an element within that flavor block.
• The male post-doc who selected carbon works with carbon specifically.
• One female, 5th year graduate student, selected lithium, in case the seminar drove her crazy (2nd year seminars are frequently quite boring).
• One male, 2nd year graduate student selected seaborgium due to the previously discussed appreciation for (cough cough obsession with) Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg.
• One female faculty member selected a gingerbread cupcake (element not recorded) due to a recently upset stomach and the wishful thinking that a cupcake containing ginger would be more agreeable to her stomach.
  

Having considered which cupcakes/elements were selected early, now let us consider the cupcakes/elements which were not selected. Again, sorted by flavor/block, the cupcakes/elements left to languish (until the next day anyways):

Ultimately 100% of the red velvet cupcakes were consumed, however no firm conclusions can be made as to the popularity of the cupcake flavor or s-block elements as there are the fewest s-block elements. Ultimately the f-block, or gingerbread cupcakes had the highest percentage leftover (33%).

Some of the unselected p-block elements seem surprising (He, S, Ar, Po in particular), and I suspect a higher percentage of p-block elements would have been selected had they been a more "exotic" flavor rather than vanilla cake with vanilla buttercream frosting. The popularity of chocolate cupcakes was expected, however some of the specific elements left behind were surprising (Sc, Ti, Y, Os, and Ir in particular).

Despite the complete lack of justifiable conclusions, we're going to call the periodic table of cupcakes a success. :)

Hm. What next? Part II

So in thinking more about what I want to do "when I grow up," and in seeking advice/information on various options, I've decided it could be helpful to think about what I want in a job.

Based on my last post on this subject, it's fairly clear that I want a job where:

• I generally like my co-workers. I realize there's always going to be the one (or more) person I absolutely can't stand, or drives me up the wall, but it's important to me that for the most part, I like my co-workers and enjoy working with them. It would be the pits to loathe the people with whom I spend 40+ hours a week.
• It is feasible to have balance between work and family/private/home life. As I said before, my career is important to me, but so is family - the family I already have and the family I someday hope to have. Both my parents have advanced degrees and have/had high-level, demanding jobs. Granted Dad's job has always been considerably more flexible and "9-5" than Mom's (night and weekend call is certainly an obstacle to flexibility), but I never felt neglected, or like I didn't see my parents enough, or like they weren't there for important things. So I guess my point is I know it's possible to have a successful career in science and still have a family, therefore I won't take (or stay in) a job that doesn't leave room for other priorities.
• I never become completely removed from the lab that my expectations are ridiculous. A lot of PhDs get sort of pushed into a management track, where it seems all too easy to lose understanding of what it takes to make something actually happen in lab. On one hand I like to be in charge because I like to be sure things are going to get done right (um yes, I can be somewhat bossy at times). Although the older I get the less I care because less and less often do I think the stress and pressure are worth it. Maybe someday management will be more appealing than it is now. I guess it's a good recent grads wouldn't start out in a position like that anyways. I also discovered during grad school that I really like to tinker. I enjoy disassembling, trouble-shooting, replacing parts, and reassembling the instrument. For now at least I want to be able to continue getting my hands dirty.
  

I think those factors will go a long way towards me being happy in my job. There are some other things to think about too.

• Travel. If you know me or have been reading this blog for a while, you've probably figured out that I'm a wee bit addicted. I love going to and experiencing new places. Most business trips likely wouldn't really allow time for sightseeing, but you still get the chance to meet and interact with people from somewhere different - something I almost always find interesting and valuable. And maybe I'm weird, but I always get this thrill just walking through the airport looking at all the gates as pass thinking, "Oo! I could go to Seattle! Or Memphis! Or Montreal! Or Tokyo! Or Cairo!" And the list goes on, and on, and on. Dad commutes to DC (from Boston) almost once a week. I don't think I really want to do that; it just seems draining. He takes a 6 or 7 am flight down and then gets home between 9 and 11 pm. And then goes to work at his normal 6 or 7 am the next morning! Besides, who wants to go to the same place over and over and over again? :P
• Benefits. Growing up we were very fortunate that we always had great health insurance as part of one parent or the others' benefits package. Now in grad school, paying too much for pretty mediocre insurance makes me really, really appreciate the value of good benefits. I'm really looking forward to having better health insurance, hopefully with vision, dental, and prescription included!! While we're at it, let's admit that money is nice, my travel addiction is expensive, and I'd like to think I will have toiled through let's not think about how many years of graduate school to make more than $30,000/year. Oh, and a decent amount of vacation time would be appreciated.
• Mass spec vs "other" analytical chemistry vs "other" chemistry. I'm pretty sure that I want to stay in mass spec. Most chemists seem to wind up in positions drastically different from their dissertation work. That's not necessarily a bad thing - I most definitely don't want to do the same thing forever. That said, I really like the wide variety of applications, instrumentation, and problems encountered in mass spectrometry. Which brings me to my next point,
• Variety. I absolutely do not want to do the same thing everyday for the next year, let alone the rest of my life.
• Learning opportunities. Whether that's in the form of in-house seminars and classes as very-BC talked about at lunch, attending conferences, training from instrument companies, and who knows what else. I certainly don't know everything I'll ever need to know, nor will I when I've actually finished this stupid degree.
• Interaction. As much as other people drive me crazy sometimes, I ultimately do want to interact with lots of people in my job. Working by myself all the time would get really boring really quickly. Fortunately science doesn't happen in a bubble.
• Application. I like coming to specific results or conclusions that can be of use to other scientists or people in the near-ish future. I loathe strictly theoretical or computational work. As an analytical chemist this isn't likely to be a problem. After all, the whole point of analytical chemistry is to measure stuff. I'm also really not attached to doing true research. I'm ok with more application-oriented problem-solving.
  

I'm sure there are other things I'm not thinking of now, and probably things I won't realize I care about or should have been thinking about until after I've had a "real, grown up" job for a while. This is a pretty extensive list though, and hopefully thinking about what I want from a job will help me decide what will be a good choice for me.

Eventually I'll get around to musing over various options...

Students say the darndest things...

Stuff like this makes me miss teaching:

"I've been trying all semester to get it up, but I just can't!" ~ Pre-med gen chem student

("It" being his (her?) grade of course...)

Reasons Tucson Isn't Such a Terrible Place

So almost all of my friends and classmates here are not from Tucson...and most people tend to knock it pretty badly and plan to leave the split second they can. I won't stay in Tucson much past graduation, mostly because the job market here doesn't really match what I want to do (like I really know what that is anyways) or what I'll be qualified to do (nothing really). But I really don't think it's such a bad place, and for 5ish years, I'm happy living here. Or so I'm trying to remind myself as I'm feeling particularly anxious/antsy to move on.

• Warm winters
• No shoveling snow
• Snow nearby if you really want it
• Eegees
• Hiking
• Easier access to all sorts of neat stuff in the west I haven't had a chance to see before
  
• Year round fresh local produce from my CSA (this is a big one - I'm really, really going to miss this)
  
• Airport so small you don't need to show up more than an hour before your flight
• Effortless year-round tan
• Awesome roommates
• Excellent and authentic Mexican food
• The smell of rain in the desert
• Beautiful spring flowers that smell fantastic (seriously, my entire walk to school around March-April smells absolutely amazing)
  
• Monsoons
• How much bigger the sky seems
• Bookmans
  
• That every (decent) apartment complex has a pool
• Mountain views in every direction
• Bike-friendly (mostly)
• Spectacular sunsets (see previous big sky and mountain points)
• No need to wear a winter coat over your Halloween costume!

I'm sure there are other things I like and appreciate that I can't think of now, but that's a pretty good list. Maybe I can convince myself to be excited about another almost 2 years here...

Quote of the Day

More like quote of the week since it's been my gchat status for days now, but here it is:

"After I got my PhD, my mother took great relish in introducing me by saying: 'This is my son. He's a doctor. But not the kind who helps people.'" -Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Lunch

Lunch on Friday with very-BC was good. It was actually really laid back and comfortable. It didn't feel like an interview-in-disguise at all. The two people who took us were PhD chemists, both U of A alums, and they were very helpful in explaining in a broader way what their jobs are like and what they do. It was good to get an idea of their career path - what their background was, what kind of position they were initially hired into, how often/early they changed projects or groups within the company. It was interesting, although slightly dismaying, that neither of them work on anything remotely related to their PhD work. Like not even the same field of chemistry kind of unrelated.

For me at least, I think it was nice to see that they had both worked on a variety of things since joining the company 30 and 13 years ago, respectively. The idea of taking a position with the idea of staying there and possibly working on more or less the same thing indefinitely really weirds me out. So far, every big decision I've made has had a very clear end date. As long as you're not Van Wilder, college has a definite and foreseeable end, as does studying abroad, and graduate school (even if sometimes it seems like it doesn't). This might be one of the reasons doing a post-doc appeals to me - it's another obviously temporary move.

They were also able to give examples of projects on which they've had a lot of independence and decision-making ability, as well as explained the project in a way that makes it sound cool. Because honestly, the idea of working for a company like very-BC and telling random people/my grandmother that I work on deodorant, or paper towels, or boxed cereal or something equally inane sounding, is really weird and not so awesome.

The (free!) lunch was good, and it was nice to get at least two perspectives on what working in industry is like. I'm not sold or super gung-ho at the idea of working for very-BC in particular, but they didn't say anything to sway me away from industry or really big companies in general, so I figure that's good.

Email We Just Received from Our Admin

Hi everyone,

Just a quick reminder that [director of research from the overseas R&D headquarters] from [instrument company] will be visiting tomorrow so please make sure labs are clean and presentable and that you are clean and presentable as well. :) Please make yourselves available if needed. Thank you and happy Monday!

[Admin]


It's too bad the grad student(s) who need this reminder most are also the most likely not to pick up on the less than subtle hint.

Wedding season is officially OVER!!!

THANK GOODNESS!

Wedding #5 was mostly fun, and the blue dress fit perfectly, but I am SO over going to one wedding after another. I'm very glad I don't know of any more weddings in the foreseeable future.

Hm. What next?

I got an email this morning telling me that representatives from a Very Big Company (Very-BC) want to take me and a few other grad students out for lunch tomorrow. Two PhD alums and Very-BC employees have been on campus all week conducting interviews. They've been doing on-campus interviews for several years, though this year they seem to be "recruiting" particularly hard because unlike in past years they have permission to hire 25 PhD-level scientists over the next year. So they've been interviewing grad students who've applied, and requesting resumes from other almost-ready-to-graduate students who didn't. It seems they do quite a bit of asking around as to whom they should be scouting/recruiting, because they've also assembled a list of slightly younger, not-quite-ready-to-graduate students to start talking to now. (This is the group I'm in - sadly, and at the same time thank goodness, I'm not that close to graduating.)

Even if I'm not terribly close to graduating, I'm close enough that it's not unreasonable for this company to be feeling me out while they're here, which begs the question, what do I want to do after grad school????

Last month when I was in StL for my college roommate's wedding, her brother asked what I wanted to do with my PhD. My response (literally): Um, do I need to know the answer to that? He laughed and replied that at some point I probably do. It's starting to look like that point is sooner rather than later. Crap.

For most of grad school, and during ungrad too honestly, I've given fairly glib responses to that question. Especially because people always seem to ask it insanely early, like asking what I want to do with my PhD before I'd even moved to Tucson. Especially since opinions and ideas are so likely to change with experience, I've never really seen a reason to have a big Master Plan. (Seriously, sometime I should write about applying to graduate school.) I kind of figured I could figure the next step out when I actually got there, and so far that's worked out pretty well for me. I'm not sure how well that approach would go over in an actual job interview. (Yes, the grad school admission process is sort of interview-ish, but uncertainty is much more tolerated in a culture where the liberals/wanderers/philosophers/curious seek shelter rather than a company with a bottom line and a product to get out the door.)

At this point you may be thinking I pulled a Peter Pan move and went to grad school to avoid growing up (or making any "real" decisions). Honestly there may be some truth to that, but it's certainly not the whole truth. In my undergrad research lab, there were some undergrads who were quite competent and worked independently on their own projects, and there were other undergrads who were, shall we say, less competent, and did monkey-work under the direct supervision of a grad student. I was well aware that I enjoyed being in the former category, and did NOT want to be an HPLC-monkey for the rest of my life (where many bachelor's level chemists end up). I'm sufficiently intelligent and opinionated that I want to be figuring out stuff myself.

So far, I've mostly narrowed the post-graduation options down to "not academia." I don't want to be an academic PI. Yes, academia totally has its advantages - among them being able research/study (almost) anything you want and a lot of flexibility in terms of schedule (which hours, not how many). But the cons...

• The longer I'm in academia, the crazier I think everybody here is, and the more certain I am that I don't want to be here forever. There's an absurd amount of politics, game-play, back-stabbing, and trash-talking. And I'm in a department with a really good reputation for how collegial, friendly, and collaborative it is. I'm sure "not academia" doesn't avoid this pitfall entirely, but in my 8th year at a university, I'm tired of all the crap. I guess I'm hoping different crap will annoy me less in its novelty.
  
• Despite a fair amount of progress, academia, especially in physical sciences, is still an incredibly difficult option for women who might like to have children someday. Like me. I know women who have had babies during graduate school, during a post-doc, or after making tenure. It seems like there is no "good" time to have a baby, but that these are the "less impossible" times. At this point, I'm unlikely to find myself otherwise situated to have children before finishing a post-doc, so that means I should wait until I can be classified as AMA to start trying to have children? Maybe I'm projecting too far and considering too many really big "ifs," but someday I do want to get married and have kids. I know that even in "not academia" that still puts me at a disadvantage career-wise, but at least it doesn't mean not making tenure and losing my job. (For reference, there are currently 6 female professors in my department of approximately 40 faculty. My advisor is the only one with a child. A child as in one child, that she had the same year she made tenure. Maybe this also reflects the "kind of person" it takes to survive in academia and not just the incompatibility of tenure and biological clocks.)
• For the most part, I enjoy lab work. I most certainly enjoy it more than reading and writing (as necessary as those parts are). There are relatively few professors, especially as they advance through the ranks, who spend any significant amount of time actually in the lab, doing experiments, and analyzing their own data. It drives me crazy sometimes how out of touch my advisor seems sometimes. Because she hasn't done these experiments in so many years, or in some cases, ever, she can have ridiculously skewed ideas about how long something takes, how difficult it is, or occasionally whether its even feasible. It's not that she's deliberately being difficult, I really think she's just forgotten what it's actually like. I don't want to spend all my time reading, writing, going to meetings, and telling other people how to do their science.
  
• The final big drawback is I see how insanely hard many of the professors work, only to never seem caught up. It's one thing to get the 11pm email from your advisor, or maybe the 5am email. But sometimes we get both (plus who knows how many one-line emails between meetings during the day). We're constantly pestering her to read something for us. We're the ones actually doing the labwork, data analysis, and even much of the writing, and yet she still never seems to have the time to stop working for a bit and just enjoy life. I don't want that. The assistant professor down the hall from me is here more than I am. And I'm here a lot. It's really, really rare that I'm at school and he's not. The sad part? He probably won't make tenure next year. And to sound not entirely naive, I know industry jobs are hard work, too. My dad (with a PhD in physics) has worked in industry my entire life, and he's worked hard my entire life, and sometimes had stuff to read or work on in the evenings or on weekends. But it never seemed all-consuming and soul-crushing like academia does (to me).
  

That more or less sums up why I don't want to work in academia. The sad thing is, if somebody asked me on an interview why I wanted to work in _____ ("not academia"), none of the reasons I described above are acceptable interview answers. It's not ok to say, because I'm tired of the petty bitches/assholes in academia, I want to have babies, and/or I don't want my job to take over my life. Having a career I enjoy and care about is important to me, but it's far from the be-all-end-all or how I want to look back on my life.

Part of why I think I'm so uncertain about what I want to do is I have no direct experience with chemistry or research outside of academia. I know why I don't want to be an academic, but I don't know why I do want to do ______. At this point I have are observations of my dad's job from growing up, and the data collected from the 118356 million questions I ask of almost everybody I can in various jobs. My mentor from when I started grad school (the senior student who trained me and whose project I took over) is now working for a pharmaceutical company, and I regularly quiz him about what he actually does, and what he likes and doesn't like about it. I'm not sure how to remedy this - other than to keep asking all sorts of people about their jobs (I really wish there were more appropriate and candid situations in which to do this!!) and trial and error (making the best decision I can, and possibly hating my job and having to figure it out all over again (with one more data point!)).

Ok, this is getting really long. I'll come back to this rambling another day.

European Vacation!

It's official! I'm going to Europe immediately after Christmas! I just bought my plane ticket this afternoon. No set plans yet, but I'm flying into Amsterdam, then the tentative plan is to spend New Years there, then head down to Paris, Lyon to see my host family, hit the Alps for some utterly frigid winter outdoorsy-ness, and then fly home from Geneva. Let's see what kind of trouble Amy and I can get into... :)

Mmm smell that brand new notebook!

Some graduate students might measure progress by time, or maybe number of papers published. The publications one is valid, and I know several people who invalidate the idea that time spent in graduate school = progress towards graduation, but one of my favorite ways to measure progress is by notebooks. I finished my second lab notebook over the weekend.

I LOVE getting brand new, pristine, never written-in notebooks. Especially when they have graph paper and nerdy things like designated lines for page numbers and signatures...

Editing

So I've been working on this paper since, oh, about June. I know that sounds completely ridiculous, and it is, but most of the comments I've had from my advisor and collaborator have been only minimally painful. For the most part they haven't meant large amounts of additional work or rewriting. The most painful part of the whole process has been waiting weeks on end to get a round of comments back from them.

I've been working on the latest round of corrections this weekend, and it's got me thinking about editing.

Most of the comments from my collaborator were adding additional words that I found unnecessary for the clarity of the paper. If I weren't hard up for space already, they'd be fine. They're not ridiculously wordy additions. But in a 2-page communication, there is absolutely no room for words that are anything less than 110% necessary, so I ignored a fairly high percentage of his "corrections."

As I was getting ready to send the latest version to my advisor, I found myself worrying that my collaborator would be annoyed at me "ignoring" so many of his comments. (I really didn't ignore them, I considered all of them, weighing them for importance vs length added.) I know that when my labmates ask me to read/edit something, and then I see a later draft where a number of my corrections have been ignored, I know I tend to be irritated. But thinking about this further, I decided that most of the instances where I'm annoyed is when the author is a non-native English speaker.

Now I'm really not trying to rip on international students, some of them work very hard at improving their English, and have reasonably good grammar. I'm fairly sympathetic to constant corrections that are clearly a result of different syntax/language construction. For example, Sri Lankan students almost always omit articles (a/an, the), so I assume this is such an issue. But I get annoyed when I'm correcting things like subject/verb agreement over and over and over again I get annoyed. I've learned enough of a foreign language to know that you most definitely learn this sort of thing whenever you learn a language. Occasional slips, sure, but every second sentence? Good grief! Anyways, I know this sounds snobby, if you've specifically asked me to read/edit for correct English, you really shouldn't be ignoring so many of my comments/corrections!

Editing is particularly painful when the English is so jumbled that I have a hard time figuring out what you're trying to say. Really. Even in graduate school, it happens. (I have serious doubts about the TOEFL.) In this case I correct based on my best guess at their point/the correct science, and make a note that they should make sure it still says what they want. (Even worse is the occasional instance when you think the author is mostly an idiot and suspect that they don't know what they're trying to say/what's correct either.)

Anyways, hopefully my collaborator won't be offended that I omitted so many of his suggestions, and please please please please please let them both read this round soon and be done making changes!

Look!

Look what grows behind my building!!


I had of course seen these shrubs a million times, but not long ago my labmate pointed out to me that they were rosemary!! None other than my very favorite herb. :) (This may be in small part because my grandma's name was Rosemary, but I really do love its flavor.) And those bushes in the photo are only a fraction of the rosemary bushes behind my building, so there's no risk of me depleting my source.


I am never buying rosemary again. (Not as long as I live in Tucson, anyways). This is very exciting, because herbs are expensive, and I can go through a lot of rosemary. That focaccia E and I made last weekend had rosemary in it and on it, and I used a whole bunch the other night making my very first grown up pot roast (my roommate thinks I'm crazy, but I've always thought of pot-roast as a "grown up" think to cook, even if it is apparently super easy when you throw everything in a crock pot...) and these rolls.


These rolls are utterly delicious. Sadly they didn't rise as much as usual, probably because I was short on time and used the cheater method rather than letting them sit out all afternoon. But they were still good. You should make them. So good I might even make my family eat them when I go home for Christmas. They're far more likely to like these than any of the other new (to them) dishes I'm tempted to make them eat...

Academic Karma

About a year and a half ago one of the professors in my division left for a position at another university. Now I don't know what any of the other professors really thought of him/her, they're all too professional to say, but among the students s/he was not well liked at all to put it mildly. S/he played favorites in a painfully obvious way among students in both his/her research group and classes. A number of students were also bothered by his/her assertion that S/N = 2 and n = 1 are totally acceptable.

After leaving for his/her new job, s/he and one of his/her especially despised grad students (really, this person was/is a total @$$hole) published a paper in a perfectly respectable journal. As we don't work in related/overlapping fields, I took no notice, until E forwarded me another paper this morning from the same journal, a "comment" on the previously mentioned paper.

In just over a page, the comment lays out in perfectly clear terms, why the conclusions in the paper this professor published were crap. Hilarious. This paper appeared online yesterday, and it's already made the rounds of this department. One of my labmates used to work for this professor, and switched into my group when he found there was no getting past not being one of his/her favorites. He pretty much roared with laughter when he saw this "comment" paper.

I have just about zero desire to stay in academia after graduation, but man, academic drama is super funny. I can't wait for the rebuttal to the comment.

Almost Like Fall

Flagstaff was lovely and lots of fun. The weather was perfect - just about 80 degrees in the afternoon and mid 40s overnight, a perfect breeze, and a wee bit of rain - and there was lots of time spent cooking or just lazing around.

Even the 3 1/2 hour drive up was fun - E and I were highly entertained by J's "data collection" for efforts to find me the perfect boyfriend. As J put it, "We're trying to match Anne on 22 levels of J's compatibility." This mostly consisted of J asking a series of questions and me answering. Sometimes the questions were accompanied by "scenarios" for clarification. The funniest questions were probably the ones for which J needed me to further explain my answer. At some point E and I were puzzled as to in what sort of order these questions were meant to be, to which J replied, "We're taking a top-down approach to finding a boyfriend." My comment? It's like proteomics! E thought the funniest part was my reaction to the boxer/briefs question, and I'm not going to elaborate other than to say man-thigh is not attractive! I'm not sure what he's going to do with all the information he collected. He claims he's going to find my a boyfriend (what I requested for my birthday), but I'm assuming that if he actually knew anybody suitable to introduce me to that he would have already done so.

Saturday after biscuits and gravy for breakfast we wandered around Coconino National Forest and Sunrise Crater National Monument. It was cool to go from pine forest to volcanic crater to open desert within about a 30 minute drive.


On the way back to E's parents' cabin we saw the most amazing rainbow I've ever seen. A double rainbow, where you could see the entire arc of both rainbows. It was crazy. Unfortunately I wasn't far enough back and my lens isn't a wide enough angle to catch the whole thing.


E's mom made another feast for dinner - ribs, baked beans, and cole slaw. E and I made this caramelized onion focaccia that I've been drooling over ever since I found the recipe months ago. It was delicious, and actually quite healthy - no eggs or butter in it.


Sunday morning I went for a run, and didn't die nearly as badly as I thought I would running at 6800 ft. And I'm glad I ran, because the feasting continued with a delicious pancake breakfast. We pretty much spent the rest of the day lounging around and baking. We made a ton of cookies and apple tarts. I was super excited to discover my favorite apples were in season (honeycrisp!), so I think there may be lots of apple dishes in my near future...

In all it was super nice to get away for a bit and not think about school. It's even cooled off a bit in Tucson. This morning was the first time in probably 9 months that I was chilly walking to school in a tank top. C'mon fall! You can do it! Come to Tucson!

Best Bridesmaid Gift Ever and Other Noteworthy Items

As part of my bridesmaid gift, my college roommate gave me an apron. Not just any old apron, an apron with unit conversions printed on it! AND printed on it upside-down, so that when you're wearing it, they're in the right direction for you to read them! It's brilliant!


I got the chance to break in my B.A. new apron Tuesday night when E and I went on another baking spree making everything pumpkin for my labmate's 2nd year seminar. We still had a ton of frozen pureed pumpkin from the pumpkins we got in our CSA share last year, and we figure it's probably only a few weeks until we start getting pumpkin again... So it was time to use it up! We made pumpkin cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, pumpkin cookies with brown sugar glaze, and pumpkin cranberry bread. I was astounded that one batch of cupcakes (that supposedly makes 1 dozen normal-size cupcakes) made 100 mini cupcakes!


In other news, I'm still down all of my illness weight loss, and the blue dress fits so well that it zips up so easily I can zip it myself! Yay! 2 weeks until the wedding...

I registered for another half marathon last night. The same one I ran last March. And it looks like we've got 3 out of 4 runners needed to do the relay marathon in December... Any takers? It's only 7ish miles...

I'm pretty set on going to Amsterdam in early January now...time to buckle down and commit to a plane ticket. I emailed and heard back from my host family in Lyon, so I'll go see them too. I really miss them and think about them nearly every day, but I've been an absolutely wretched person and really haven't kept in touch at all, so I'm really quite grateful and lucky that they still seem to want to see me. Now to email my advisor to ask for an extra long Christmas break...

Yesterday it was 103 degrees in Tucson. On September 30th. Absolutely freakin ridiculous. The average high at the end of September is apparently about 90, but we broke the record high the past two days. Thank goodness I'm going to Flagstaff for the weekend with E & J - it's only going to be about 80 during the day and 40 degrees overnight! So excited! Also thank goodness it's supposed to cool off into the 80s next week!

Have a good weekend!