Denmark: The Land of Licorice

Danish people love licorice. I mean, really love licorice. Think you are a huge fan of the stuff? Wrong. You do not like it as much as the Danes.

If you go to the grocery store, you will find entire shelving units in the candy aisle devoted to the stuff. However, the licorice here is not just any licorice. The local favorite is salty licorice, which is made salty by the addition of ammonium chloride, giving it a very pungent, slightly sour aftertaste. It is an acquired taste for sure. The concept sort of reminds me of the salted caramel fad that is common in the US. I like licorice a lot, but there are some kinds that are just too much for me. My favorite so far is the Pingvin Lakrids mix. A little salty, a little chewy, om nom nom.

How can you resist that cute little guy?

One of my colleagues from Sweden told us a story of how he was sharing a compartment with a bunch of Italian tourists on a train. Over the course of the trip, the Italian guys shared some wine with him. He was trying to think of the best thing he could share with them to reciprocate. "Ah, yes!" he thought, "Salty licorice!" However, as I said, it is quite the acquired taste, especially when you're not expecting it to be so astringent. Let's just say that he didn't get any more wine from the Italians after the sharing of the salty licorice. Ah, well. Maybe he should have brought along some kanelsnegles instead. :)

On a completely different note, I'm coming up on my final weeks at Risø. I have my last two TEM days on Thursday and Friday. Ahhh! I've got two more chances to get some awesome data to bring back to NU. I'm a bit anxious, as you can imagine, but hopefully, the experiments will go well. The upside of all this microscope time is that I can operate a TEM successfully without having a panic attack. Huzzah!

Tomorrow is a holiday, so I'll be working from home and exploring the area around my new digs. It's International Workers' Day (like our Labor Day), which is not an official holiday, but we get it off anyway. Maybe I'll go check out some political rallies? Who knows!

The Final Day: Back to Argonne

After a brief off-site respite, I am back at the Advanced Photon Source once more. I was just about to start running my sample, when the beam cut out. Then I had to reload my sample and restart not once, not twice, but three times. My sample just got started in the past hour. Oh well. The data looks okay-ish now, so hopefully, this keeps up! Right now, I am manually recording the temperature at which each pattern is being taken. I will personally pay for Argonne to automate this process if it means that I do not have to do this again when I come back.

In the time that the beam was down, I trolled around Pinterest for a while. Now, I'm not actually on Pinterest because I know that I would turn into that person who is ALWAYS on Pinterest. But that doesn't mean that I can't troll around on it occasionally. (Revelation: I just realized that Pinterest is a play on "interest." Don't judge. Just because I'm in grad school, that doesn't mean that I can't be slow to get things some times. :P Also, it is 2 or 3 in the morning.) I dug up a bunch of fun recipes, so I'll have plenty of things to blog about in the coming weeks. :)

We have about six more hours of beam time left before we head back to Evanston/Chicago. It's been a good experience, albeit a tiring one. Being here and seeing the capabilities has given me a bunch of ideas on stuff that I want to try. That's the problem with research sometimes....one idea can lead to twenty more (or sometimes, one meeting with your advisor can turn into three months of work).

I've got to go tend to my sample now, but until next time!

Argonne, Day Three

Day Three: Coffee consumption increases exponentially

Or, as our sector manager Greg said, day three is when the pessimism starts to kick in. But seriously, all in all, I think our session is going pretty well. We've broken just about everything you can break in our experimental setup, but at least we're learning what not to do and are getting some pretty legit data (okay, maybe that was some of the pessimism right there). Here is a list of the things I've observed so far at the APS.

1) You don't actually need special training to ride the tricycles. However, I discovered that I am really, really bad at riding them. Luckily, I made this discovery at 9 PM at night when no one but my colleagues were around to see me unceremoniously plow into the wall of our sector. Practice makes perfect?

2) The food at the APS is kind of icky. The "401 Grill" is basically a temporary desk put at the edge of the kitchen in Building 401 and serves generic burgers, sandwiches, salads, etc. Also, we are on the direct opposite side of the APS from where the food is. However, the breakfast buffet at the Argonne Guest House is delicious. Sweet potato pancakes with boysenberry sauce? Cinnamon rolls completely covered in frosting? Yes, yes, yes.

3) I can't understand anything that the audible alert system says. I just have to hope that what they're saying means that I won't get zapped with x-rays while I'm changing a sample.

4) The screensavers on the computer monitors for our sector are freaky. Especially at 2 AM. There's one of a cow that just bounces up and down for a good ten minutes. There's also another one that makes me think the girl from The Ring is going to jump out of the screen at me. Odd choices.

5) Opening and closing the door to the beamline hutch makes me feel like I'm in Star Wars. Also, the fact that everything is called a sector makes me think that I should be reporting my distances in parsecs or lightyears rather than meters and feet.

Tonight, I'm going offsite for a bit, but I'm going to be working the 2 PM to 8 AM overnight shift from Saturday into Sunday. Look for more updates to come! Cheers!

Argonne After Dark

Long nights in lab seem like the perfect time to write blog posts, don't you think? Well, this time it's not really my lab exactly. I'm out at Argonne National Laboratory with a few of my collegues at the Advanced Photon Source. The thing about the APS is that when your beamtime is scheduled from 8 am on Wednesday to 8 am on Sunday, this means that you start at 8 am on Wednesday and run 24/7 until 8 am on Sunday, not only-day-time-hours-between-8am-Wednesday-and-8am-Sunday. Thus, I am writing this post in the wee hours of the morning during an overnight shift monitoring our data collection. In the words of Lionel Richie, I am chillin' out at Argonne allll niiiight loooong.

Even though I'm being facetious about this whole thing (probably due to lack of sleep and overabundance of cookies), the opportunity to be out at the APS is kind of awesome. I thought that I wouldn't really have need to come out here given the nature of my research, but I'm really glad that the cookie crumbled such that it was possible. You can get data here that you really can't get anywhere else. People come from all over the world to work here, and it's right in our backyard!

In between frantic periods of sample changing and gas line fiddling, there's a whole lot of waiting, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of hovering over an instrument somewhere. Luckily, the folks at the APS thought of this and gave us office space full of spinning, rolling office chairs. Hours of entertainment. Also, to get around the APS, there are, I kid you not, adult-size tricycles. I think you need special training to ride them, but oh man. Oh man.

More on Argonne adventures later...now it's time for some frantic gas line fiddling!

Dillo Day (er, Memorial Day) Weekend

Hello, friends! I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day weekend! It was mad hot here in Chicagoland on Sunday and Monday. I went into work yesterday, but mainly I did so for the air conditioning. I told this to my advisor, who thought it was hilarious. I booked my SEM time smack in the middle of the afternoon so that I could hang out in the frigid EPIC microscope rooms. Best idea ever.

In addition to Memorial Day, it was also the infamous Dillo Day on Northwestern's campus this past Saturday. I still don't quite understand the origin of Dillo Day, even though I've read the Wikipedia article on it, and thus, clearly, I should know all about it. Anyway, it is basically an excuse for the undergrads to drink a lot and be rowdy. The undergrads are entertaining, but I think my favorite moment of the observation of the rowdiness was the entrepreneurial kids who decided to open a lemonade stand on the street leading to campus to catch all of the inebriated, dehydrated undergrads en route to the Lakefill. They even had Red Bull and water as the day went on. These kids are going to make it big one day. I look forward to their future business ventures.

The Dillo Day concert lineup was a little unimpressive this year. We tried to go see Cold War Kids, but the storminess of the morning had caused quite a tizzy, meaning that the first act hadn't played. Thus, they hadn't opened the gate, and the line was absurd, so we decided to come back and start up the grill a little bit earlier than planned. I'll never argue with earlier grilling.

We finally make it to the Lakefill later in the day to see some of Reel Big Fish's set. They were a bit aged but still put on a nice show. Having these guys in the lineup was definitely more for the grad students than the undergrads. Pretty sure some of them weren't born yet when these guys were popular.

Reel Big Fish playing for a sea of undergrads (see what I did there? Bam.)

After weeks of walking by I Dream of Sweets on my way to campus, I FINALLY got my hands on the famed Dillo Day cupcake that I had mentioned a few posts ago on my way back from the concert. It got a little squashed, but look at the cute chocolate frosting armadillo! Eeee! So adorable. The cake was very caramel-y (and as my friend Kayla mentioned, smelled kind of like maple syrup, in a good way) and moist. Thumbs up!

Dillo Day cupcake! Om nom nom.

Overall, I did a good bit of baking/cooking this weekend. Andy had reign over the grill and made some delicious grilled pineapple (thanks to a stroke of genius by our friend Adam), brats, burgers, veggie burgers, and hot dogs. I made baked oatmeal with blueberries and bananas for breakfast along with some chocolate chip cupcakes. The oatmeal was awesome, not too tricky, and pretty good for you, so it's a definitely make again recipe. I bet it would be awesome with other berries, too! For later in the day, I made this taco dip, which I made again on Sunday for another BBQ (which was on the roof of a 43 story building in Lincoln Park. Amazing views!). One can never have too much taco dip. Mwahaha. Also, in preparation for breakfast and burgers, we bought four pounds of bacon at Costco, cooked one pound, had another pound of bacon brought to our apartment by Kayla. Meaning that we still have three pounds of bacon left at our apartment. Problem? I think not. Awesome? Definitely. 

While I've had a lot of kitchen success lately, I sadly had a bit of a snafu with a cupcake experiment, too. Andy's mom had given me a bunch of mini ice cream cones left over from the graduation at Case last weekend. I thought, hmm, what if I made cupcakes...but made them INSIDE the ice cream cones?! I was not the only one on the internet who had thought of this, apparently, as there are myriad pages devoted to this very topic. However, as you can sort of see in the picture, some of the cupcakes rose nicely while most of them kind of sunk back into the cone, uncooked. I tried baking them longer, baking them again, baking them at a higher temperature but to no avail. I used Betty Crocker yellow cake with pudding in the batter. Maybe I needed the cake mix without the pudding? Or maybe I'll make my own next time? Meh, I guess you can't win them all. I'll definitely try it again, though. The idea is too cute!

They had such potential. 

Inspired by another Costco purchase of medjool dates, I'm planning on experimenting with making my own homemade Larabars this week. I love, love, love these things and would eat them all the time when I worked at Whole Foods Market, but the habit can get kind of pricey after awhile. Thus, I decided to get creative. I'll report back on my findings in the next post or two!

Hopefully, the weather will cool off was the week progresses. I'll take wearing a sweatshirt inside to sweating buckets outside any day. Cheers until next time!