Hood 2 Coast

This doesnt really go along well with the whole theme of this blog, but as it is my blog and my life, I shall do as I please.
I went back to oregon for 5 days to run hood to coast with a few fellow alumni from BU (that is a scary phrase to say). I was feeling sickish before I went to the airport so I was really quite afraid the whole race might be a disaster, but it managed to clear up over the next few days.
So first, the plane ride.
I had a great seat next to the window, and this nice lady sat next to me. I started talking with her about life and germany and all sorts of other things. She was quite interesting an oregonian who studied abroad in germany then went back to chase a guy and started all over. The best part was, after talking for awhile I looked down to check how much time we had, and we had been talking for 6 hours. I had just had the longest conversation of my life with a complete stranger. I do not know about you, but I find that to be incredible. I almost made it the whole flight without knowing her name, but she let it slip near the end. I think I should write a book called the sociology of long distance airplane flights.
After getting back I kind of laid low for awhile, watched some much needed tv, and relaxed. That night we had our team dinner where we got to meet our last minute add from eastern oregon. My sisters found the whole ordeal quite awkward, but I enjoyed it quite a bit, and the food was excellent. I had nothing to do with any of it beyond sending an email to my parents.
The race itself was awesome. At the start we saw teams from all over the place (germany, france, texas, italy, florida) most of whom had planned themes and outfits (except the french who just wore berets and french flags like they normally do) We had some really really fast people on our team and made a huge number of roadkills (when you pass someone).
We were able to sleep at the mac for a little bit which was really nice, but far too short as always. The night running was nice because it was cool and the roads were much less busy or completely closed off in my case. By the third leg, I was pretty exhausted and had difficulty walking normally, but I was able to run as fast as I have run in my life. So go figure on that one.
The final celebration at the beach was nice, although everyone was pretty tired and some people were starting to become frazzled and a little loose with their comments (guilty).
Somehow I was able to convince my mom and sister to come pick me up and bring me back to portland so I could relax and sleep in my own bed. Which was a wonderful experience. Those races are so much fun, exhausting, but definitely worth it.
I was also able to see my relatives in oregon before I went, making the trip not entirely for some silly race.

Finally my flight back to frankfurt (I almost said home, weird) was similarly exciting with a much younger women this time, about 25 or 27, I think. She was really interesting to talk to, and had a completely different life experience than I did. We talked for the whole flight save about 90 minutes when 21 was playing. She might have said her name once, but I do not remember. So another person on the list of people I know tons about except for their name.

When Science Meets Video Games

So it has been quite awhile since I have updated this. I have been mildly more busy at work, but mostly I have just been lazy about it.
So things have still been going wonderfully. I am really enjoying all of the people I have met here, the middle school like drama from earlier seems to be fading, and I have my own real project to work on at work. So unfortunately it looks as if Switzerland can only be worse than here, because I cannot envision how I could enjoy myself more than I am now. But that is neither here nor there as one of the elements that makes this wonderful is how short it is. I do not know that I could do this much longer, but perhaps a little longer wouldn't've hurt.

So the weekend of the 1st of August we went to Strasbourg in france. It was a beautiful city that happened to have some of the worst looking buildings I have ever seen. Literally the law school looked like a facility only clowns could consider training in. Also nearby the Greenhouse was a quite disgusting unkempt facility that reminds one of scenes in Lost World when they find the abandoned labs. (In reality the fact I have made it this far without a crichton reference is impressive)

Last weekend, I went to Munich to meet up with someone who went to high school with my dad. We had met the family together last summer, and they invited me to come down. It was a fantastic weekend with friday spent at Hofbrauhaus, and another bar with students in an International Literature Summer School (a good balance to the scientists I spend every waking moment with). On saturday they have a german family reunion and fantastic BBQ. The food was all great and I likely consumed too much of it. I also was able to brush up on my table tennis and german since on of the kids was 9 and thus had not begun english studies (Yea!). Sunday we went to Alledamer Lake southwest of Munich. This was also wonderful as you could easily see the alps in the background (pictures will come soon). The lake was also relatively warm and I was able to swim around in it although my attempts to swim across were thwarted by being informed it was 3km across.

This week at work has gone very well. I have been productive on my own project and hopefully we will have some very cool/useful results soon. The highlight of my week being on Thursday when we broke our last tip for the AFM instrument and still had measurements to make. I was able to call Veeco in Mannheim, arrange to get the tips and fly over on my bike to pick them up (I dream about having a job that requires clutch biking skills). I also had to cleverly stash the sensitive tips (the last 2 in the region) between my head and my helmut so they would not be vibrated too much.

This all leads to the meaning of my title. The picture on the right is an SEM (a 1.5million dollar machine that focuses electrons through gold coated) image of some polymer that my friend made today. And I was just fantastically impressed how much it looked like the ghosts from mario. (or as they thought the Scream painting from Munch, I am clearly much less cultured)