I used to be a grad student. And now I'm not (thank goodness). I spent a year as a post doc in industry in Baltimore before starting a "real" job with the same company. These are my tales of science, food, travel, and life.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Wedding in the Woods
I went to wedding #3 of the year this past weekend. My old roommate, Lisa, married Joe in a seemingly random little clearing in Sitgreaves National Forest. The wedding was lovely and laid-back, much like Lisa and Joe, and it was super nice to have an excuse to go up to the mountains to escape the heat in Tucson.
My roommate Liz has been living in and working near Alpine, which is only about an hour away from the wedding site, so I drove the 5+ hours up to Alpine on Thursday night so I could hang out with her Friday. All last week it kept feeling like it should rain in Tucson, but tragically we haven't had any monsoons yet in town, so it's still been ridiculously hot (105-ish) plus the humidity normally associated with monsoons. Even though driving windy, hilly roads sucks in the rain, I was definitely glad to hit it. Rain is always welcome relief from the heat out here. The rain wasn't nearly as bad as I've seen past summers, and made for some pretty awesome rainbows.
We camped Friday and Saturday nights (it must be a fun wedding if camping is a totally feasible option right??), and spent some time Saturday wandering around the area. I'd never been to this part of Arizona before, and it turns out it's really pretty.
The wedding was beautiful and simple. It was so exciting to see Lisa and Joe get married. They went on their first date about a month after I moved in with Lisa (and other roommates, including 2 of my 3 current ones), and while I've been happy for all of my friends who've gotten married this year, there's something really neat and awesome about witnessing the relationship from the beginning. I guess it's reassuring to think that that random first date really could be with Mr. Right and lead to marriage.
As I mentioned, the wedding itself was in the middle of the national forest. Nobody would have found this on their own, so everybody met at the reception site and caravan-ed up to the site. It was quite funny to see all the guests traipsing through the woods like some strange renaissance procession.
At dinner those of us from the old house sat with a friend of Lisa's from JVC and one of her friends. They were super nice and fun to talk with, and conversation was definitely not lacking. But at some point we all overheard the funniest off-the-wall remark, and we all instantly looked at each other intrigued. One of Joe's brother's was at the next table, and said that apparently if you drink 40 non-alcoholic beers that you would blow a 0.08, making you legally drunk. Pretty quickly we started to ponder the feasibility of this, our first thought being simply with the time it would take you to consume 40 beverages your body would have certainly started processing any alcohol. Then we wondered if you even could drink 40 beers. The beers we had in front of us were 12 oz...with some rough conversions we realized that 40 12-oz beers would be nearly 4 gallons. Even if 40 non-alcoholic beers contain enough alcohol to make you legally drunk, you'd never actually be able to consume that volume. Amusing idea, but (sadly?) not feasible...
At the reception Lisa's friends from college sang her a song by the Old 97's - a band I guess she introduced them to. This song is super sweet and I may or may not have listened to it on repeat today...
On the drive home, I pulled over in Salt River Canyon a couple of times to snap some photos. The canyon is pretty impressive, and the very slow, very windy drive was much more interesting during my daytime drive home than my nighttime drive up. Crazy that this view is only about an hour and change from the lush green of the forest.
My roommate Liz has been living in and working near Alpine, which is only about an hour away from the wedding site, so I drove the 5+ hours up to Alpine on Thursday night so I could hang out with her Friday. All last week it kept feeling like it should rain in Tucson, but tragically we haven't had any monsoons yet in town, so it's still been ridiculously hot (105-ish) plus the humidity normally associated with monsoons. Even though driving windy, hilly roads sucks in the rain, I was definitely glad to hit it. Rain is always welcome relief from the heat out here. The rain wasn't nearly as bad as I've seen past summers, and made for some pretty awesome rainbows.
We camped Friday and Saturday nights (it must be a fun wedding if camping is a totally feasible option right??), and spent some time Saturday wandering around the area. I'd never been to this part of Arizona before, and it turns out it's really pretty.
The wedding was beautiful and simple. It was so exciting to see Lisa and Joe get married. They went on their first date about a month after I moved in with Lisa (and other roommates, including 2 of my 3 current ones), and while I've been happy for all of my friends who've gotten married this year, there's something really neat and awesome about witnessing the relationship from the beginning. I guess it's reassuring to think that that random first date really could be with Mr. Right and lead to marriage.
As I mentioned, the wedding itself was in the middle of the national forest. Nobody would have found this on their own, so everybody met at the reception site and caravan-ed up to the site. It was quite funny to see all the guests traipsing through the woods like some strange renaissance procession.
At dinner those of us from the old house sat with a friend of Lisa's from JVC and one of her friends. They were super nice and fun to talk with, and conversation was definitely not lacking. But at some point we all overheard the funniest off-the-wall remark, and we all instantly looked at each other intrigued. One of Joe's brother's was at the next table, and said that apparently if you drink 40 non-alcoholic beers that you would blow a 0.08, making you legally drunk. Pretty quickly we started to ponder the feasibility of this, our first thought being simply with the time it would take you to consume 40 beverages your body would have certainly started processing any alcohol. Then we wondered if you even could drink 40 beers. The beers we had in front of us were 12 oz...with some rough conversions we realized that 40 12-oz beers would be nearly 4 gallons. Even if 40 non-alcoholic beers contain enough alcohol to make you legally drunk, you'd never actually be able to consume that volume. Amusing idea, but (sadly?) not feasible...
At the reception Lisa's friends from college sang her a song by the Old 97's - a band I guess she introduced them to. This song is super sweet and I may or may not have listened to it on repeat today...
On the drive home, I pulled over in Salt River Canyon a couple of times to snap some photos. The canyon is pretty impressive, and the very slow, very windy drive was much more interesting during my daytime drive home than my nighttime drive up. Crazy that this view is only about an hour and change from the lush green of the forest.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Eep!
So Tucson doesn't have that many mosquitos (thank God...something I DON'T miss about StL)...but the bugs we do have are really freaking huge!
Reasons I Miss StL
In no particular order.
- 10 pm Mass (well, I guess it's technically the 9 pm Mass now, but same difference)
- My college roommates
- Dirty Shirleys
- 5 pm shots in the kitchen (sex with an alligator, mexican flag)
- The Hall of $h!t
- The Muny
- The Big Bang
- Grandpa
- Seasons
- Grass
- Lightning bugs
- City Museum
- Ted Drewes
- Uncle Bill's (really just for the 24-hour ghetto-ness and the Golden Alaska)
- Toasted ravioli
- Regular access to a piano
- Forest Park
- Direct flights to Boston
- Good music at mass
- The Ozarks and their beautiful, partially shaded, crystal clear water for floating
Thursday, July 8, 2010
You wish you were as cool as I am.
This is what happens when you go to student health and they decide the gigantic scrape on your leg is infected. I'm seriously considering getting out my leg warmers to put one on my other leg.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Ouch
It hurts. It hurts a lot. It hurts so, so much more after the fact. It didn't really hurt much at all when I actually did it.
Monday afternoon we played sloshball to celebrate the 4th. Sliding is clearly not necessary in a recreational game of kickball with a keg at 2nd base. However after so many years of softball, sliding is really more of an instinctive reaction than a choice. Clearly, a poor instinct.
Monday afternoon we played sloshball to celebrate the 4th. Sliding is clearly not necessary in a recreational game of kickball with a keg at 2nd base. However after so many years of softball, sliding is really more of an instinctive reaction than a choice. Clearly, a poor instinct.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Odds n Ends
I did P90X with my roommate K8 last night and again this morning. I can barely move, and any motion involving raising my arms above my head flat out isn't going to happen.
So far this summer I've found the heat significantly less painful than the past 2 1/2 summers. But today is a different story. It was 88 degrees at 7:20 am. And then 96 degrees at 9 am. It's just wrong. The high today is only 103, but it already feels worse. It doesn't help that it's the most humid it's been in a while here - 27%. I realize that most of you think that's nothing. But when the humidity is normally less than 10%... 27% and 96 degrees hurts. Almost as bad as my quads hurt from the P90X.
Paper writing sucks. Even though I'm only writing a 2 page communication, there always seems to be one more set of experiments to do (whose outcome is NOT going to change the major point of the paper!). Seriously, you can only fit so much data and discussion in 2 pages.
I finally have prospects for another adventure abroad! Ever since I came back from New Zealand I've been itching to have a big trip of some sort on the horizon. Well, thanks to my awesome friends who move and travel to cool places, I have an excuse now. Amy, the friend I visited in New Zealand, is moving to Amsterdam with her Kiwi/American boyfriend. Amsterdam is an excellent choice seeing as I haven't been to the Netherlands yet. :) And my friend/labmate Ashley, just received a fellowship that will send her to Paris-ish for 5 months. So yay! 2-4-1 trip to Europe next year! Well maybe this year, but more likely next year - I'm thinking either immediately after Christmas (cheaper airfare, more direct flights from Boston!) or March/April-ish, right before Ashley comes home... If I knew for sure that the canals in Amsterdam would freeze, I'd totally go with January just so I could ice skate on the canals. :P
I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees last night. I liked it. Not too heavy, but not light and fluffy either. (Nothing against light and fluffy...or trashy and dumb for that matter...the last book I read fell into these categories.) I could see it being a much heavier book to read depending on your life experiences though, say if your mom left you and/or died. While my mother is utterly insane much of the time, she's around (more or less). Anyways, I will offer no deeper analysis than I liked it, and I would recommend it if you're looking for something to read.
One of my labmates does not eat vegetables. Or fruit for that matter. E and I have made it a personal challenge to sneak vegetables into dishes when we all have dinner together. This morning in the shower, I decided what whenever my labmate has children, as a baby gift I'm getting her children's books about vegetables. And when they're a little older, and have a play kitchen set, I'm getting them the sets of plastic fruits and vegetables.
My younger brother asked for recipes for his birthday. This fall he'll be a sophomore in college, with his own kitchen for the first time. So I wrote out a book of various recipes, cooking tips, and meal ideas. Everything from really, really simple how to roast vegetables or how to make a quesidilla to various recipes we grew up with. I included lots of vegetable recipes, along with a guide to different kinds of squash. He promised to at least try the vegetable recipes. I guess the book showed up in the mail yesterday or today, because my sister called me to voice her complaints with the book. Her biggest objection? My suggestion that he try cauliflower. She really needs to come visit so I can make her eat all sorts of weird things. :P
I got a spam industry email the other day that started "Dear Dr. ...." I'll admit it was kind of exciting and it will be even more exciting when that's actually the right title.
So far this summer I've found the heat significantly less painful than the past 2 1/2 summers. But today is a different story. It was 88 degrees at 7:20 am. And then 96 degrees at 9 am. It's just wrong. The high today is only 103, but it already feels worse. It doesn't help that it's the most humid it's been in a while here - 27%. I realize that most of you think that's nothing. But when the humidity is normally less than 10%... 27% and 96 degrees hurts. Almost as bad as my quads hurt from the P90X.
Paper writing sucks. Even though I'm only writing a 2 page communication, there always seems to be one more set of experiments to do (whose outcome is NOT going to change the major point of the paper!). Seriously, you can only fit so much data and discussion in 2 pages.
I finally have prospects for another adventure abroad! Ever since I came back from New Zealand I've been itching to have a big trip of some sort on the horizon. Well, thanks to my awesome friends who move and travel to cool places, I have an excuse now. Amy, the friend I visited in New Zealand, is moving to Amsterdam with her Kiwi/American boyfriend. Amsterdam is an excellent choice seeing as I haven't been to the Netherlands yet. :) And my friend/labmate Ashley, just received a fellowship that will send her to Paris-ish for 5 months. So yay! 2-4-1 trip to Europe next year! Well maybe this year, but more likely next year - I'm thinking either immediately after Christmas (cheaper airfare, more direct flights from Boston!) or March/April-ish, right before Ashley comes home... If I knew for sure that the canals in Amsterdam would freeze, I'd totally go with January just so I could ice skate on the canals. :P
I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees last night. I liked it. Not too heavy, but not light and fluffy either. (Nothing against light and fluffy...or trashy and dumb for that matter...the last book I read fell into these categories.) I could see it being a much heavier book to read depending on your life experiences though, say if your mom left you and/or died. While my mother is utterly insane much of the time, she's around (more or less). Anyways, I will offer no deeper analysis than I liked it, and I would recommend it if you're looking for something to read.
One of my labmates does not eat vegetables. Or fruit for that matter. E and I have made it a personal challenge to sneak vegetables into dishes when we all have dinner together. This morning in the shower, I decided what whenever my labmate has children, as a baby gift I'm getting her children's books about vegetables. And when they're a little older, and have a play kitchen set, I'm getting them the sets of plastic fruits and vegetables.
My younger brother asked for recipes for his birthday. This fall he'll be a sophomore in college, with his own kitchen for the first time. So I wrote out a book of various recipes, cooking tips, and meal ideas. Everything from really, really simple how to roast vegetables or how to make a quesidilla to various recipes we grew up with. I included lots of vegetable recipes, along with a guide to different kinds of squash. He promised to at least try the vegetable recipes. I guess the book showed up in the mail yesterday or today, because my sister called me to voice her complaints with the book. Her biggest objection? My suggestion that he try cauliflower. She really needs to come visit so I can make her eat all sorts of weird things. :P
I got a spam industry email the other day that started "Dear Dr. ...." I'll admit it was kind of exciting and it will be even more exciting when that's actually the right title.
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