I know it's been radio-silence around here for a while, and there's a good reason. I've been in Germany! Work sent me to Munich for almost four weeks to help transfer our process to the site there.

The trip ended up being really great. It was a good cap to an amazingly busy year. My work assignment was straightforward (answer questions from the folks there, help a little in lab), and everyone associated with my normal job was in a completely different time zone, so I had absolutely zero urgent things to deal with.

And, unlike in my regular job, I had weekends free! That let me do things like see the Residenz Museum (at right), the previous downtown residence of the royal family.

And go to Wollmeise and get yarn for my sister that she can't get in the States.

And I saw the Dachau concentration camp memorial - where I ran into someone I knew! My dad runs into people he knows all over the place, with the most impressive one being that he ran into a guy he knew while crossing the White House lawn. But I think running into Kevin, who was in band freshman year, at Dachau when we both happened to be in Munich on business beats that hands-down. Since we were the only Americans we knew in Munich we went sight-seeing together. To Salzburg:




To Schloss Nymphenburg, the royal summer residence that used to be outside the city and now is accessible by all trains.
Where I took this picture I really like of a gazebo on the grounds.

We also toured monuments and fancy churches:


And Schloss Blutenburg, which had a moat!




I was also in Munich during Oktoberfest. While this made hotels difficult to find and expensive, it did mean that work organized a trip to drink beer. Here I am with Thomas from work with the Oktoberfest grounds behind us:



After I finished working I had two days off before I flew back and I saw Rothenburg ob de Tauber, a well-preserved medieval town:




And I visited the royal palaces Linderhof:



And Neuschwanstein, the one that inspired the Disneyland castle:


Neuschwanstein was gorgeous inside (and they allowed no pictures so I can't show it). Unlike all the other palaces I saw, which were rococo and gold leaf everything and swirls and vases, Neuschwanstein was supposed to look like a medieval castle and had a totally different style. More carved wood and murals. Really beautiful.

And then I flew back! By that time I was very, very tired of German food (which is mostly sausage, pork, and dumplings). But on the flight they announced that in honor of Oktoberfest they were having an Oktoberfest-themed meal! Curses. But the Italian food that I had there was great. I want to try making spaghetti carbonara again, because the stuff I had there was so good. I even had wild boar pappardelle at one point that was beyond delicious.

And since I got back I have had a horrible, horrible cold and have been completely out of it. I'm very glad at whatever foresight made me block off this week as vacation. Well, I'm not sure if it was foresight. It was more that I have an unbelievable amount of vacation and comp time I haven't been able to take, and grabbed the opportunity when it arose. But in any case, it worked out really well because I've just putzed around and watched TV and blew my nose all the time.

Poetry

Found this which I apparently wrote sophomore year at Tech. Sums up a lot.

Maybe if I weren't sober or if I weren't straight
Would I accept the impossible date
From the guy in my math class
Who stalks me all day
From morning till evening
He won't go away

He won't make eye contact
Except when he stares.
He's socially awkward
And hygiene impaired.

To Illustrate

I think graduating college has been good for my appearance.



2004 2010

I'm randomly at my lowest recorded weight since 2003 (the only upside to stress and long hours) so I realized before church this would be the perfect time to wear one of the skirts my mom made that are kind of tight at the waistband. Good choice, turns out at five pounds less they fit great.

Yesterday I went to an ice cream tasting thrown by a couple I know from church. (Balsamic Strawberry - yes. Miso Peach - no.) The husband told me that my Facebook post about salmon-flavored burps made him laugh so hard he wasn't able to post a comment. That makes a couple of people who have told me they like my Facebook posts. It's weird because they just come about because I have friends from every aspect of my life so I can't post about work, I try not to be about church all the time, I don't like doing politics, and that leaves the random little stuff. Like saying that after two years I finally got tired of Frosted Mini Wheats which bizarrely garnered the most replies I've had. It's nice to amuse people though I guess.

This week I've been eating cauliflower with American cheese melted over it. That always reminds me of food coloring.

When I was 13 I wanted to learn how to decorate cakes. The Wilton class at the party store was canceled so I taught myself. But my mom didn't believe in artificial food coloring, so I was limited to coloring frosting with cocoa, spinach juice, or beet juice. While I made some very pretty monochromatic cakes in shades of chocolate the Wilton yearbooks had amazing cakes in a rainbow of colors.

But then there was an incident that made my mom change her mind. One day I wanted to make a cake with pink frosting all over as the base for monochromatic roses and leaves. My mom remembered we'd had beets for dinner earlier that week and instructed me to use the collected juice from the bottom of the jar where the leftovers were stored. So I did.

But when we tasted the cake something was horribly, horribly wrong. What my mom hadn't remembered and I, at 13, didn't think was important, was that my dad had put the beets away in the same container as cauliflower with cheese. So by using the juice in that container for the frosting we had ended up with a cauliflower-, cheese-, and beet-flavored cake.

And after that I was allowed to use fully artificial, fully rainbow food coloring.

Until this week the only camping I had ever done were the yearly trips with my Girl Scout troop in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. What I remember about these trips are:

1. My troop was clique-y and with an odd number of girls, I was the odd girl out.

2. My troop wasn't that great at camping. One year we never got the propane stove to work and had to ask another troop to heat our taco meat over their charcoal fire.

3. My troop was unprepared. Another girl and I were sent to a craft station to make wind chimes only to find out we were supposed to bring clothes hangers and a variety of metal objects to hang from them. We ended up digging in a fire pit for rusty bolts and suspending them with the provided red yarn from twigs we broke off trees.

In short, not fond memories. But I wanted to try again. I have since college - Ma Tech just never gave us enough free time to actually do it. But I have a ton of vacation at work (the unfortunate result of never getting a chance to take it), and Bonnie, my friend from high school, happened to also want to go camping. Her family camps a lot so not only was she experienced she had all the gear! So this week we took two days and camped at the Samuel P. Taylor park in Marin County in the redwood forest. And it was great! During this trip we did the following:

1. Slept late. Bonnie managed to sleep more than me, I was limited by my bladder capacity.

2. Ate. Turns out you really need a spatula to make pancakes, but we enjoyed lots of snacks and s'mores and meals that were either simply boiled or warmed.

3. Played with fire. I learned the importance of kindling, and also that even if your feet are still cold in your shoes the fire might be hot enough to bubble the entire bottom of your sneakers if you raise them above the rim of the fire pit. Also, of the options of pine cones, dryer lint, and marshmallows, marshmallows are by far the most entertaining thing to throw into the flames.

4. Went on a seven mile walk. Bonnie appeared unaffected. Two days later my legs are still hurting.

5. And for the majority of the time we sat around and read. I finished about a book and a half and two Entertainment Weekly's.

It was great. It was very relaxing, which I needed after this year at work. Everything was simple and basic. I like camping! Good to know.










We were very proud we managed to put up the tent.
















This picture captures the majority of our trip - reading by the fire.

Good trip!

My floor at work moves to another building next week so they can remodel the office space. New carpet, new paint, ceiling tiles that aren't brown from leaks, enough routes to the exits to comply with fire code, lots of nice things. Boxes were delivered yesterday for us to start packing, and now the office is a labyrinth of stacked boxes that I want to build a fort with but unfortunately have to act like an adult. The atmosphere is very like the end of the year in college, when everyone was madly trying to pack and move out while completing final exams.

Am officially an owner of a big flat screen TV now. Melissa came out last Friday and helped me choose one. Actually went with an LED, the newest technology. For someone who didn't own a microwave till 2007 this is quite an accomplishment. Gotta say, I love it. The picture is so clear and so big. I spend more time on the couch and less in my computer chair, which I realized I used more because it was closer to the TV.

I'm very tired. Though work has calmed down from the mondo-project that finished at the end of May it's still been busy, and I keep having to prioritize lab-work over the reports and presentations I also need to do. I need more sleep. Much more sleep.

In other news, successfully replicated a pilaf I liked from one of our lunch meetings. Here goes:

Abby’s Rice and Quinoa Pilaf
1 medium to large onion, chopped
1 pat (~1T) butter
1-2 tsp salt
¾ c quinoa, rinsed
1 pat (~1T) butter
1 ½ c jasmine, basmati, or long grain white rice
1 can chicken broth

Melt butter in nonstick skillet. Add onion and salt heavily. Cook over low to medium-low heat until soft. Meanwhile, rinse quinoa and put into rice cooker. Once onion is soft, add additional butter to skillet. Increase heat to high, add rice, and cook, stirring often, until rice is opaque. Add more salt if you feel like it. Scrape rice into rice cooker. Pour in can of chicken broth. Top with water to the correct marking for 2 ¼ c rice (on my rice cooker this is line “3”). Cook in rice cooker like rice.

Graham emailed me today with his belated analysis of the Lost finale. Since he had long since given up hope of having all his questions answered he was reasonably satisfied. He included some links to websites that summarized the show and/or listed unresolved mysteries. Then he asked if I am getting more satisfied with the conclusion as time goes on.

I'm going to have to write back that as time goes on I get more ticked off! Their "Light"/purgatory ending was hooey. Why were the Numbers important in WWII before many of the "candidates" were born, since the wall o' candidates indicated there were plenty of others throughout time? Why couldn't women on the island have kids? What was with Desmond? Seriously, how did each character redeem himself enough to get to go their their secular Heaven? Back when Lost first started it was such an amazing story, but being a truly amazing story requires a completely storyline, and sorry Lost, you got 80% of the way there and then went to the-"oh crap, we can't possible tie all this up, let's make up some magical light/life-force explanation and tack it on the end"-place.

Yeah, madder with time.

Through cajoling and machinations got three days off of work in a row. This would have been easier if my boss hadn't decided to take vacation overlapping mine, because as of Monday I was counting on her taking care of the lab work on Friday, but now it'll be taken care of by her boss, who is the one who trained me so I trust her to do it right. As long as the reactors get fed while I'm gone it'll be okay. The little buggers are eating a whole ton this time, too. This point of this experiment is to actually decrease the number of times we have to feed them, and then we happened to get a new type of cell that eats even more! Cleaning the reactors will be interesting this time - they grew so much there's swaths of thick yellow residue clinging to the exposed glass of the reactors, which is worse than I've ever seen.

New blog design comes courtesy of Melissa, who made some shots of Robosaurus into a banner that perfectly illustrates the title "Small but Weird."