Continuing on to Cappadoccia! (many pictures under the cut, beware...)

( Clicky Clicky! )

I apologize for the long delay - I'm slowly catching up from my computer crash last weekend, and I don't have all my software reinstalled yet, which is making it a bit difficult to organize and process my pictures. But I'm slowly chugging along, so I give you...

( Istanbul! )

Anyway, that about does it for days 1-3 in Istanbul. Once I get photoshop back on my computer I will do the Cappadoccia stuff, and then back to Istanbul for the end of the trip. I promise I'll get through all of this by the end of the summer...

I'm going to interrupt the travelogue to mention two other things that have been going on recently. First, we got a cat:

( Meet Izzie! )

Second, I bought my first ever pair of cleats. I'm not sure what that says about me and my somewhat abnormal development as a child (in terms of my extracurricular interests and focus on ballet to the exclusion of everything else), but I've got them now, so... yeah. The reason I got them is that I'm playing ultimate frisbee this summer, and have all of a sudden discovered the necessity of being able to turn quickly on grass. Hence the need for cleats. We'll see how this goes - I'm not particularly good, but our team is a lot of fun so it should be a good time regardless...

Continued from here... I apologize for being very slow about posting these, but I promise I will get it all online eventually :-)

( Cinque Terre! )

Enjoy! Istanbul coming up next... I'll try not to take so long with that one.

Continued from Thursday...

( Florence! )

After the adventure in Florence, we headed to the Cinque Terre region for a group retreat/extended group meeting. Stay tuned for more on that tonight.

So, as some of you know, I was recently in Europe (Italy and Turkey) with a few other members of my lab. I'm still going through my pictures and pulling out the ones worth sharing, but I'm going to start posting about the trip in bits and pieces as I go. So here is Part Ia: Rome!

( the adventure begins... )

Well, folks, Easter was last weekend, but I am only just now getting around to uploading pictures of the easter eggs that Lauren and I have made this year. Actually, that statement is a bit misleading - we're still making them, even though Easter is already past! They're really rather fun and a good project thaty ou can finish off in an hour or two, so I think we'll keep the dyes and wax and such out for a while.

Anyway, on to the eggs. The first is one that is from a design in the first design book from the Ukranian Gift Shop. I took several pictures of this egg, because no one by itself did justice to the design:

( Flying Carpet )

This next egg is one that I improvised last night. I started putting the design down on the egg and rather quickly decided that it looked like a mariner's compass, but that this particular seafarer must be lost at sea, because the entire design is tilted off the axis of the egg (sorry, that's not quite apparent from this picture, but I hope you can use your imaginations.)

( Lost at Sea )

And this last egg is one that I'm particularly proud of: I decided I wanted to try an egg that looks like stained glass, with black leading between the colors instead of white (by the nature of this technique, it's much easier to get white lines as the basis of the design than black, because the colors always build up from lightest to darkest).

( Stained Glass Hummingbird )

I've done a few others as well, but these are the ones I'm particularly proud of right now. Hope you enjoy them :-)

"unlike the men and women of this country, not all acids and bases are created equal."
- me, giving lecture to the freshmen on Monday

(Yes, I'm a bit of a revisionist historian sometimes :-P)

I am unmotivated to post much text right now. However, I did upload a ton of pictures relevant to things I've been doing recently to flickr and to facebook. For anything with people in them, you'll need to check facebook, but here are some of the others, to keep you entertained:

This is from the day that Lauren and I decided to walk across the lake to picnic point. I just really enjoyed the way the sun broke through the tree branches:

( peaceful )

I have been very productive with my knitting... witness fingerless gloves and a finished lace shawl:

( stitches marching one by one )

Lauren and I have also continued on the cupcake baking sprees. I liked the way we decorated the carrot-cake ones, and I was particularly amused by the way the red velvet cupcakes we made for Valentine's day were almost a perfect match to our kitchen aid (yes, we now have a kitchen aid):

( YUM! )

Yay :-)

it snowed today!

and lauren and i went to late night knit night with a few other people from the chem department, which was a lot of fun. yay for cold weather and knitting, I guess?

I got through 49 in under 3 minutes, but somehow I missed Louisiana. How on earth do you forget Louisiana?

Thought I'd share the most recent batch of cupcakes. These are from a week or so ago, but I've only just uploaded the pics to my camera.

( yummmm! )
While I'm in a picture-posting mood, I thought some of you might be amused by this shot of the Madison farmer's market yesterday morning. It's not artistically a great shot, but it does illustrate something interesting about Madison:

( farmer's market )
Speaking of weather, though, it's cooled off here a bit. Mornings are now around 45 or 50 fahrenheit, and it gets to 65-ish by the afternoon. The curious part is that our apartment has stayed at around 68... despite the fact that I haven't had the heat on all weekend. This evening, in fact, the temperature went UP from 68 to 70 over the course of about two hours, even though the heat was off and the outside temp was about 50. I wonder if we're just absorbing heat from the rest of the building?

Last but not least... this totally reflects my impression of Sarah Palin from the debate this last week... gawd.  I know people have been saying she acquitted herself rather well, but I really think it's just because she wasn't quite as much of a trainwreck as expected.  Still definitely not someone I want having a shot at hell in running the country...

The nytimes has a really interesting article on people's innate math sense today; they suggest that people with a better intuitive feel for real-world "which is more" situations (which line is longer at the grocery store, for example) are also better at abstract math, which is an interesting proposition and could have impacts on how math is taught. 

The fun part, however, is that there's this little interactive test that you can do to see how good your sense of "which is more" is:

fun with yellow and blue circles!

I played with it for a few minutes and got 21/21 right.  It's amazing that you can look at a picture of, say, 8 yellow circles and 10 blue ones for just a fraction of a second and be able to tell that there are more blue circles, even if the picture contains more yellow because the yellow circles are bigger!

It's interesting: seven years removes the sharp edges from a lot of memories. I didn't even realize that yesterday was September 11 until this morning, when I read a friend's blog. I mean, I knew the date; I'd asked Lauren so that I could write it down somewhere. But I didn't realize the significance: my first thought was not about what happened 7 years ago (as it always has been in the past), but instead about the fact that in five days I will have been in Madison for a month.

These things always recede into memory - how many people regularly remember that December 7 marks the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, for example? - but at the same time, seven years seems like such a short for something for which I was alive, for which I actually remember watching the horrifying media coverage, to fade away like that.

Hm.

It's hard to believe that Bob Dunne won't be teaching anymore...

RIP :-(

a selection of the ads that facebook is showing me on my profile page:

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It's almost like Facebook is trying to make me depressed about my love life/lack thereof.  LOOOVELY.

Also, the ONLY thing I have accomplished this morning is giving myself a pedicure.  I actually consider this to be a bit of a public service at the moment, as my toenails are still bruised (and one has fallen off) from dancing on pointe in March, and people tend to find that to be a bit disgusting to look at (hmm, I wonder why? :-P).  Hence: IF (wearing sandals AND have bruised toenails) THEN (polish toenails with opaque polish).

But perhaps I ought to do something a little more worthwhile with my afternoon.  Such as... oh, I don't know, maybe PACK???

yay

this is kind of awesome:

Campaign, XKCD style!

... this will probably only be funny if you have a good sense of internet memes. and if you read xkcd.

also, PhDcomics has been great this week, though again, you'll probably only find it funny if you're as science-geeky as I am.

*sigh*. I'm a dork. maybe I should just go to bed and hope I'm more normal in the morning.

...

GAH THE INTERNET IS, LIKE, HALF BROKEN. The only sites I can reliably access are ravelry, google/gmail, and yahoo. bahhhhhh. I suppose I'll have to wait 'til tomorrow to post this.

Saw this somewhere... sorry, copied and pasted it earlier today and can't remember whose journal it came from! Oh well. Whatever.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

I've also put a star next to the ones I had to read for school.



30/100 aint terrible.  Though 13 of those were for school, and only two of the class-required books (To Kill a Mockingbird and Lolita) are books that I actually really, really liked.  How 'bout you guys?

I randomly ran across one of the urbandictionary.com definitions of "chemistry". Know what it is?

The only natural science that can be broken down into the categories "making drugs" and "blowing stuff up". Unfortunately, chemistry isn't all fun and games, mostly because of chemistry teachers, who are always bitching about things like "significant figures" and "molality versus molarity".

Pure awesome.