It’s been a bit quiet on the writing front from my end for a while…but mostly because lots o’ things been goin’ down.. and some things coming up… My mother flew in last Friday night, and on Saturday morning bright and early I woke up with the worst case of ‘food poisoning’ I’ve had.. which I only worked out was not food poisoning when I managed to pass it on to Andy. Adding to that that the year is rapidly running out, we just had our work Christmas party (which involved writing and performing a science-based Christmas song (more on that later)), and we’re all getting ready now to fly south with the sparrows. And meanwhile… Winter is crawling slowly forward. Some of the first frosty leaves of the season: And at the same time, the last autumn leaves… One morning, the air was filled with a fine mist of water that had partially or completely frozen, and so caught the sunlight like glitter. Hard to translate into a photograph, but you can see a …

This year we bought our very own very first christmas tree. It’s the first real Christmas tree that Andy and I have had together- but also the first ‘European style’ tree that I’ve had. Usually at home we took a potplant, or a branch from a gum tree or something else ridiculously and beautifully Aussie.     This is a Storybook Tree.   After heading to the market and carefully choosing our baby, then having to lug her home, we took to decorating. I’ve been learning to knit- which explains the decorations…  but I also wanted it to be slightly more ‘homemade’ instead of just decorated with hundreds of cheap baubles from NanuNana. What do you think??

Our second and third day in Paris were museum days. Note to self and all fellow travelers- BUY THE MUSEUM CARD before you go to any museums if you want to see more than two or three museums. It’s worth the cost if you make it to three, and it lets you skip the line- which is priceless if you’re only in the city for a couple of days. Last time I was in Paris, it was the middle of winter, and all the Europeans were at school/working/hiding from the snow. So there were lines, but nothing ridiculous. This time it was not only a German, but also a French long weekend. I wanted to take Andy to the D’Orsay, which has a whole lot of Impressionist, post-impressionist and generally beautiful art that I fell in love with a little bit last time. But the line was H-UUUGE…So we headed across the park, to the Orangerie, where the line was much, much shorter, but also moving much, much slower. Andy wandered off to get food …

 A few weeks back, Pau and I once again hit a 1 year mark on our progression through time. To celebrate being now ridiculously old, we dressed up in our finery, and danced around the apartment. Which is a perfectly acceptable thing to do, as long as you remember to invite some friends. The theme was Movies and Music.. I’m something vaguely Gatsby, and Pau is Sandy, from Grease. (I should note that about half the photos below are taken from Pau- Thanks Pauli!) Andy, complete with Energy Dome, went as one of the members of the band Devo. Which no-one knew, so he spent the whole evening singing ‘Whip it‘ to anyone who would listen Harry Potter: Napolean Dynamite. Complete with Tatertots (a.k.a- pretty much the best birthday present I’ve ever been given) and moon boots: Adam also spent the night discovering that Napoleon Dynamite is less international than he had thought. A very beautiful fairy: Some cat-women Marylin-Marylin Manson: And Brian Molko from Placebo: And this very charming couple: (Heidi and Seal) Alice …

Day One In Paris I hope you know us well enough to guess that we left the whole ‘booking’ thing until the very last of minutes… But it turned out quite well. We came up against the option of paying x euros per person and being thrown into the smallest of rooms in the oldest of hostels in the furthest corners of paris, or paying x+ a little bit more and staying in a shoebox apartment in the 9th (the ”burbs’ in Paris go clockwise out from the centre). It was a pretty cool locale, not just in terms of location, but also in that it was one of these apartments that was originally for the maids and butlers- hidden on the hidden 6th floor (which you literally got to by pushing a wooden panel, ducking through this secret door and hiking up tiny rickety steps). Super cool! Tiny- but perfect! I’m standing in the kitchen area, which came complete with all the necessities including stove and microwave, the toilet is behind me, and the …

Last time I went to Paris (with Ashlee and Lauren), we were way too poor to even contemplate biting into ‘les macarons’…. …this time, I endeavoured to make up for that lack. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit where my first french macaron came from: Andy had been prattling on for months about how he intended to eat Mc-arons and Mc-Donalds in France, and to tell you the truth we all thought he was talking bull. But lo! The mc-mass-produced mc-macaron: And to be honest, they’re not too bad. Better than 80% of the stuff you could find in Perth a year ago when everyone thought they should try getting on this new trend and charging 3 bucks for stale/overbaked/flavourless biscuity things. Quite mild on the flavour with the pistachio, and perhaps not so melt-in-the-mouth as possible. But they have a range of the basics- chocolate, choc/orange, strawberry, pistachio, and they only cost 90c a pop. Andy claims that they were his favourite out of all the ones we tried. But this is a …

Last night there was a ton of wind, and when we stepped out this morning most of the golden leaves around our Potsdam haunt had taken their final Fall. Losing autumn comes with a sense of dread, correlated with and caused by ‘winteriscoming-itis’, has only been accentuated by the loss of our daylight saving hour. Now, when you look outside and the sun is setting, it really is only 4:30. So let’s have have some photos from the blur of snaps I’ve taken in the last 10 days or so…as a loving tribute to Autumn. In Memory: Last weekend we headed to the big city to catch up with friends and climb some rocks. Andy decided to practice the climbing before we got the Klettern world: He’s such a filthy communist. These look a little bit Aussie to me…. How great are those colours?! There is something so cool about a day when you actually get a (fairly) blue sky, and you have golden light matching and bouncing off golden leaves. I’m sad to say that the …

I only took a couple of photos on our final day in Budapest.. partially because it was really only a half day, and partially because the weather finally gave in to Autumn and everything looked a bit like this: In order to escape the misty drizzle that had descended, we headed to the Great Market Hall.The building I quite lovely, with a slight air of ‘old British station’ to it, and the ground floor is filled with fruits and vegetables, cheeses and meats and all manner of lovely and unpronounceable (in Hungarian) things. Ellen and I were in search of some Langos, which I had not managed to try yet during our stay, so we headed upstairs. Which to be perfectly honest, I would not recommend. While the ground floor has a fairly open feel, upstairs is full of narrow, corridors, with too many stalls, too many people and not enough space. While they do have the lovely needlework, the area seemed to mainly be dominated by tourist tack. We did find some Langos though… …

On our third evening in Budapest, after doing our traditional walking tour and then wandering around in the dark, we headed to Szechenyi Baths (as recommended by the lovely Szilvia). The Baths look something like this: With the large bath in front being set at a delicious, E. coli incubating, 37 degrees. Inside the buildings out-of-frame to the right, are a whole range of baths of different temperatures, as well as a group of Saunas. Personally, I have yet to see the peer-reviewed science that tells me that jumping from 18 degrees to 40 and then back to 22 only to then spend 5 minutes in an 80 degree sauna is in any way beneficial to my health. It certainly isn’t enjoyable. After kind of adapting to 37 degree- kind of because it felt too warm when I was actually in it-everything else felt amazingly icy, and after a couple of half-hearted attempts I just refused to go in anything that wasn’t plus-or-minus two degrees from 37. Ell and Andy were a bit more adventurous, and not …

The IMPRS retreat was two days of scientific lectures and discussion. Plus evenings for partying the the third day for froicking in the an autumn awesomeland (like winterwonderand?). So if you don’t like pretty pictures like this: (who am I kidding, this is the nicest one) Or posey pictures like this: You should just move along now. We went to Mirow, which is a tiny town somewhere nearly directly north-but-just-a-little-bit-west or Berlin, and nearly-directly-east-but-just-a-little-bit-south of Hamburg. As mentioned, there was Science, but the only photo I have to track its passing is this one of the lovey Max. For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with what I do, he’s made a very accurate picture of a plant cell. The big blob is a vacuole (for storage of stuff), and the smaller ones are presumably chloroplasts (for making sugars from the sun and carbon dioxide) and mitochondria (for making energy from the sugars). We also have mitochondria, and small, unawe-inspiring vacuoles, but because we are not awesome and are too lazy to evolve to …