The weekend before Easter, Andy and I popped up to Amsterdam to visit Ikumi.. and on the day we flew out I stumbled across an amazing fabric market. I told Andy to ‘go on ahead’, spent about a hour touching and cooing and stroking, and many euros (although surprisingly few for the amount and quality of fabric), and an extra check-in bag later, we made it home to Berlin.
Last month was undoubtedly, the worst month of my Phd so far. Germany is good, don’t get me wrong, but experimental science can be the most heartbreaking of quests. The worst part is when the input doesn’t equal the output. When things don’t work, and you don’t know why. At these times, we scientists unanimously turn to our other lives. We swear to become bakers. Crochet tiny animals from twine. Start knitting, drawing, felting, sewing. And grand desserts parade from our kitchen. And the freezer is full of falafel. And the house never looked so clean. We want to do something, that does something. That produces a tangible product. Like a mobile!
Happy Hump Day! Here’s some lovely Aussie flowers mixed with some lovely Aussie woods, to brighten your working week.
At this point, Greece was so long ago that blogging about it seems to require a bit of a ‘throwback Thursday’ theme. But today isn’t even Thursday… GAH! this Phd business is being so exhausting right now! We’d seen the ruins of the Athens Agora peeking out at us through the trees, and boy did it look lovely. So, early* on the 27th we set out to gambol in its glory.
I actually can’t work out which is more glamorous. The lady or the unicorn.
I work for a scientific institute. And the institute, well, the society that my institute is a part of, they own a castle.
Sometimes, the biggest surprise of travelling, is the surprise of finding out that the place you travel to is unexpectedly closed.
I started sewing up this ‘dress’ a couple of months back, and finished it right before the Christmas break. Finished should also be in quotation marks, because there are still a few things I want to do with it before it’ll really be done, but we’ll get to that later. (I probably should have also ironed it before the ‘photo shoot’, but, you know, I don’t want to overreach with the domesticity).
So said my sister, after being met with confusion when asking whether we had visited the Temple of the Olympian Zeus. Turned out we had visited it, but we hadn’t really realised what it was called. And that’s the thing about Athens, you’re walking through a fairly ordinary looking city, and then you turn around, or you walk up a hill a bit and …BAM!…
Today felt like a ridiculously long day. Mostly because our group meeting ran for three hours… which turns out to be at least two times longer than the ‘sitting still’ capacity of most experimental scientists. Luckily, ‘being an adult’ means getting to reward yourself for hard work, in your own chosen way.