Author: iampotassium

Dallas Day 3 – Fort Worth and what followed

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Hurrah! The rest of the zoo pictures are finally here! I hope you all enjoyed the rest of your week! I definitely did, though mine was crazy busy as usual… Probably my favorite part of this week was on Wednesday night a few people in my lab and I had a cookie party. Basically, every Thursday at 3, all the labs on our floor of our building have cookie hour. Each week, a different lab (or a professor) volunteers to bring cookies for everyone else. This week it was our turn so we ordered a few pizzas, opened a few bottles of wine, and set to work. We made: snickerdoodles, Mexican hot chocolate cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and these crazy brownie bites that I basically designed on the fly with chocolate chip cookies on the bottom, a Reeses peanut butter cup in the middle, and delicious brownie mix on top/to hold it all together. Everything turned out delicious and our cookie hour was definitely a success yesterday! Yay lab bonding!

Moving on… Back to Fort Worth for the conclusion of the zoo. I have some non bird animal pictures today (including that adorable elephant at the top) and then I’ll conclude with the rest of Day 3. Let’s go!

Animals at the Fort Worth Zoo

First another pic of that cute elephant up there. Dust bath continued…

Zebras! And a bird…

A giraffe happily sitting in the sun. I learned the other day that apparently the nerve that connects the giraffe’s voice box to its brain goes allllll the way down its neck, wraps around its heart, and then alllll the way back up its neck to its voice box. Craziness… what an odd creature!

So this was so cool… When we got to the lion’s cage, he started roaring! I’ve never seen a lion roar in real life before. It was kind of awesome… but also scary.

Another lion…

A shark at the zoo?! No way! Must be photographed…

I like this picture! I was taking pictures of this guy and then he started to turn and swim away from me so I got a picture of his snout under the water in focus and his head out of the water slightly out of focus. It makes for a bit of a creepy pic I think.

So this snake marks the point in the reptile/amphibian house where we got turned around because they were closing the zoo! Booo… but at least this picture turned out pretty neat!

That’s all folks. For more animals, you’ll just have to go visit the Fort Worth Zoo yourself! I highly recommend it if you’re going to be in the area.

So after the zoo closed on us, we made a trek to get some delicious Texan BBQ. C1 and C took A, Jem, Cobalt, and me to this smokehouse called The Woodshed Smokehouse. It was amazing. We got some delish Texan beer, wild boar sausages, and artichoke chips for starters. Then I got some goat tacos with some amazing tomatillo sauce and Mexican corn (yummmmmmm) and everyone else got such delicacies as ribs and wild game tamales. Mmmmm…. It was so happy. Plus the restaurant is right on the Trinity River so we sat outside on the patio and watched the river slowly go on by. Highly recommend this place if you like meat. After we finished our amazing dinner, we headed to this bar C1 and C had heard about and hung out there having desserts and (root) beer floats and chatting. It was a great end to a great day. Then we all had to say goodbye and Jem drove us back to Dallas… Once back at her place, we stayed up late planning our last epic day in Dallas. Watch out… it’s intense. We even got up early so that we could do even more stuff! I am not really sure how to break up this last day into blog posts so you’re going to have to wait until next week. One thing is for certain though – aquarium pictures. Tell me if you have a favorite fish!

Any fun plans for this weekend? I think I am going to get to go horseback riding on Sat and then I am going to a girls’ craft night on Sat night. Yay! I am super excited. Tell me what you are up to. How’s the weather there for you guys? Is it spring there yet? Boulder can’t decide… It snowed ALL day on Tuesday (like it was snowing when I went to sleep on Monday night and still snowing when I got up on Wednesday morning) and it was so ridiculously cold on Wednesday that my car windshield cracked :( but it’s supposed to be in the 60’s this weekend and then back to snowing next week… :-/

Okay, this post has gotten long. Bottom lines: tell me what fish (if any) you are excited about seeing next week, tell me what your plans are this weekend, tell me what the weather is like for you guys, AND a new question: tell me about the best restaurant you have ever been to while on vacation. What made it amazing? The food? the experience? the company? I want to know! :D

Dallas Day 3 – Fort Worth Zoo Birds

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Hello and welcome to the first part of Dallas Day 3 – the day that was spent mostly in Fort Worth. I went through my zoo pictures and decided that there are a ridiculous amount of bird pictures so they get their own post…. Thursday (or Friday… life soooo busy…) will have the remainder of the animals/the rest of the Ft. Worth story. Yay!

First I want to draw your attention to that magnificent toucan on the top of my blog. I fell in love with him and we had a little photoshoot with him modeling and me clicking away. Seriously, Jem can probably tell you, I was saying “Yeah… yeah… now tilt your head a little to the left… aw yeah… perfect… work it!” :-/ Anyway, hurrah birds. I apologize in advance if you’re scared of birds but I hope that all the fun colors and poses of these birds will warm your heart anyway.

Let’s start at the top. We slept in again. Then A, Cobalt, Jem, and I all piled into Jem’s car to go to breakfast at this place called the Kozy Kitchen. For some reason, I can never remember the name – just that its name starts with a K…. Moving on. This restaurant had a lot of gluten free and organic organic options… but it also had a lot of tasty meat options as well. I got this epic omelet complete with venison sausage inside and Cobalt got buffalo tacos! Yum…

Once we enjoyed our amazing brunch, we headed to Fort Worth to go to the zoo with one of my best friends from high school C1 and her boyfriend C. C1 and I played trombone in band together throughout high school and she, the T (my maid of honor), and I were fairly inseparable during high school/band trips/etc. Much hilarity ensued…

Here’s C1 feeding a bird at the Forth Worth Zoo:

Anyway, so we went to the zoo! It was amazing! Definitely one of the best zoos I’ve been to in a long time. The animals had really neat habitats and the whole place was huge. We were there for three hours and we still didn’t get to see everything before the zoo closed (we got kicked out of the reptile house because they were trying to close it and we just wanted to see the lizards)! Epicness. It was also a perfectly warm day and we Coloradans were basking in our sandals and short sleeved shirts. Ahhhhhh…. so this is what spring feels like (for the record, we are supposed to get 6-10 inches of snow and “blizzard-like” conditions here today…). Anyway, enough babbling! Let’s see some birds!

The birds of the Forth Worth Zoo
We’ll start in the part where they let you go hang out with these little birds. We bought sticks with birdseed on them so we could feed the birds (like C1 is doing up there) but they seemed full – possibly because small children had been feeding them allllllll day… :-/ I was so excited about being so close to them that my birdseed stick went mostly uneaten as I ran around with my camera…

I like this guy because he’s looking at the camera… He looks a little wary of me. Not sure why seeing as I had a stick covered in birdseed in my hand…

This bird kept closing his eyes when I was trying to get his picture. :-/

I wish I had gotten these guys’ tails in the picture but I like that they are looking at the camera too.

After all the cute little birdseed stick fed birds, we moved on to the birds of prey which were scary/magnificent. Especially because many of them were being fed when we were there. :-/ This guy was kind enough to pose for a picture. I love how pointy his beak and claws are. Yikes!

Another picture of the toucan, just in case you didn’t believe that he is real (he looks fairly plastic in the first picture, I’ll give you that…). It was grooming time after he posed for that first picture.

This bird looked so shy with its beak hidden in its wing…

Yay penguins! These little guys looked so silly with their little ear tufts. I like them.

I love this picture because the tufty penguin looks like it is freaking out and the other two penguins are like “… awkward! We don’t know that guy…” Cracks me up! Look forward to more penguins next week from the Dallas World Aquarium!

Flamingos! These flamingos were not very pink but they did appear very fuzzy. I especially like the one scritching its back – its neck is so fluff…

This concludes your tour of the birds in the Fort Worth Zoo. There were of course many more so really you should just go visit and see them for yourself! Later this week – more animals and the rest of our day in Forth Worth. You still have time to tell me your favorite zoo animal and I’ll see if I have a good picture of it for you! :) In other news, tell me what you think about these birds? Any favorites? Anyone want to write some captions for the birds?

pH and Dallas Day 2

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Some Dallas “wildlife”

I totally meant to write my second Dallas post for you guys this week but life went crazy in grad school. One of my labmates defended his thesis yesterday. This means he has his PhD now! And that I am now the senior grad student (not counting our MD/PhD student) in the lab… craziness… Because the defense is probably the most important part of actually getting a PhD (even more so than walking at graduation), my boss came all the way back from her sabbatical in France for his defense. This whole week reminded me of the two skills I think are the most important to learn in grad school: 1) that it is good to learn how to be independent, in control of your project, and manage your time well because after all, the whole point of getting your PhD is to learn how to answer a complex question that no one has ever asked before and 2) while skill 1) is important, it is also necessary to learn how to be flexible with your time because sometimes your cells don’t want to grow, the microscope is on the fritz, or your boss shows up from France after not seeing you for 3 months and wants to meet with you… at some point…

I had all these experiments or ideas of experiments planned this week and they mostly still happened except not exactly in the planned order. In addition, this was an epic week for defenses (my lab mate and one of my other friends here are now PhDs!) so after crazy days of trying to fit everything experimenty in and having exciting conversations with my boss, there was a lot of celebrating going on… I also had a random soccer game on Wednesday (they are usually on Sundays)… Whew… I am so excited for the weekend…

Anyway, as promised:

Dallas Day 2

After all the epic driving going on on Day 1, there was much sleeping in the morning of Day 2. Poor Jem still had to go to work so A, Cobalt, and I slept in and then got up to explore our surroundings a little. We took a leisurely stroll to this restaurant called the Dream Café and had amazing breakfast (it was lunch time though). I got these super fluffy amazing ricotta pancakes. I am not normally a huge pancake fan but I was really craving them and these hit the spot perfectly. Mmmmm… I want more! After our tasty breakfast, we wandered around downtown Dallas taking in the sights. It was pleasantly warm and there was so much neat stuff to see! I longed for my fatty DSLR camera instead of my little iPhone camera… Regardless, here are some pictures of our outing…

A and a dog she found…
A bird pretending not to watch us eat our delicious breakfast
Cobalt “walking on water”
Potassium and A being normal (that means weird)

 

In the evening, Cobalt and I drove to see some of his family members that live nearby. I pretty much instantly bonded with all of them and it turned out to be a really nice evening. We celebrated their youngest daughter’s birthday with pizza, wings, and deliciousssssss homemade cupcakes and I felt so special to be included. :)

Next week – Fun times at the Fort Worth Zoo and Fort Worth in general. For now it’s your turn. Tell me about your work – are there skills that you have had to develop to do your job better? Tell me about food – do you enjoy eating breakfast? What is your absolute favorite breakfast food (I love eggs, hash browns and some variety of meat but I don’t often order it because I eat it too fast to enjoy it… :p)? Any fun plans for the weekend? Any requests for animals next week?

In other news, I saw something cute yesterday: pH (which is a measure of how many hydrogen ions are in something)=2/3 PhD… so I guess I’m pH right now…

Dallas Day 1 – ROAD TRIP!

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Fernando in the car. If you look closely at the steering wheel, you should be able to see Gustav…

We’re back from Dallas! It was an awesome trip full of good friends, tasty food, LOTS of photographs (I just uploaded 1.6 GB of photos from my DSLR and I have more on my iPhone…..), warmth, flip flop wearing, and a lot of driving. Yay. We did so much exploring my legs are sore from walking. Seriously, even when we drove somewhere, it was usually just to walk around more. Awesome. Anyway, it was apparently warm in Colorado the whole time we were in Dallas but now that we’re back, it’s decided to start snowing again… Thanks Colorado… :p

I am kind of in a picture coma right now because I get really overwhelmed with anything over 100 photos and I have ~700 from the DSLR alone so I have been doing a lot of sorting and trying to figure out how I want to present everything on here. Regardless of what I decide, the Dallas trip has earned its right to have multiple posts. We’ll start with a day to day summary (complete with pictures) and then maybe certain days will get extra posts because of the LARGE amount of photographs that accompany them. Are you excited? I am… I’ve already narrowed my ~700 pictures down to a “mere” 80…

Today’s post is primarily going to be about the first day of our trip but before we get there, I want to tell you my dear readers that you have a say in how the next few posts will go. We went to the Ft. Worth Zoo and the Dallas World Aquarium so if you have a favorite animal you’d like to see, leave me a comment and I’ll see if I have any pictures of it for you. :) In related news, I kind of had a camera love affair with a toucan at the zoo and the shark tank at the aquarium (who’s surprised about that one?) so they might be getting their own posts or at least large chunks of the zoo/aquarium posts. Yay!

Okay… let’s start at the top.

DAY 1

was mostly spent driving. I also spent a good chunk of it sneezing (thanks Colorado for another cold…). Cobalt and I picked up our friend A at 6:00 am and we rolled out of town around 6:15 am after a brief stop at Einstein’s Bagels for some tasty breakfast. Mmm…

We stopped in Burlington, Colorado for our first coffee/bathroom break. I used my fancy phone to tell us where a coffee shop was and it picked out this amazing local coffee shop. We ended up chatting with the barista for a while about farming and GMOs, etc and then she gave us a few sheets of monster and owl stickers that she uses to put over the lid of her coffee cups (the adhesive is non toxic!). She said they are very popular in town but that she wasn’t going to use those colors. Cobalt’s car is decorated with stickers now….

Then we entered Kansas and it took forever…….. Btw, shout out to my friend E if you’re reading this. We wanted to go see you but I think you live too far away from where we were… :( I made Cobalt look it up though just to make sure…

Potassium and A and their respective sharks (Gustav, Scrarmpl, and Fernando) at a rest stop in Kansas

Once we got to Oklahoma, we headed to OKC for dinner with our friend/Cobalt’s best man T. We ate at this restaurant called Nhinja which you should totally check out if you live in the OKC area and like sushi. It was tasty and kind of a neat little restaurant. Plus it was good to see T. Then we were back on the road for the last ~4 hours to Dallas….

Here’s where we started to go a little car crazy after spending so much time in the car… When we stopped next for gas, it was at this station that was across from a huge casino with all these bright lights and colors. A and I were mesmerized by the colors and lights and we dragged Cobalt across the street to the casino for our bathroom break. We thought it’d be funny to take a picture of us in the casino as if we actually went there to gamble (which we didn’t… we like our money thank you very much!). See below…

Warning: these people are CRAZY

After another hour or so of A and I giggling every 5 minutes and Cobalt trying to ignore us, we settled down into impatient waiting… Luckily it wasn’t too long until we reached Dallas and got to Jem’s house (around 11 pm)! We unpacked the car and then proceded to stay up until almost 1 am catching up with Jem before crashing into well earned sleep.

One other thing: my favorite conversation with a random lady in Oklahoma. We were washing our hands in a gas station bathroom and she turned to me and asked “What is it about driving that makes us look so tired and ragged?! We’re just sitting there…” Yes… it’s so true.

Now it’s your turn. When was the last crazy road trip you went on? Where did you go? How long were you in the car? Did you feel like you were going to go insane by the end?! Don’t forget to tell me what animals I should be posting in the coming posts (most likely next week)…

“Spring” Break?

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Gustav wonders why we aren’t still skiing because he wants to make it all the way to the Flatirons you can see behind the hill we are on…

It’s spring break here in Colorado. Unfortunately for grad students like me who are done with our classwork, spring break doesn’t really mean much except that there are less undergrads everywhere. We still have to go to lab and we still can’t park on campus because spring break doesn’t count as a holiday for the crazy parking police. Booo…

Even with that said, my spring break has been pretty exciting so far. First my mom came to visit this weekend! We had so much fun even though it snowed almost a foot (yeah Colorado doesn’t really get the whole “spring” concept). Below is a list of fun activities that my mom and I did together:

  1. We went out to lunch at this fancy French restaurant in Boulder. We pretended we were in Paris and babbled a little bit in French while eating our super fantastic meals… mmmmm
  2. We made homemade rosemary crackers from scratch… Oh man they were so easy to make and so delicious. I wish I could post some for you guys to try on here…
  3. We watched the crazy snowy USA vs Costa Rica game (which happened in Commerce City, CO… not too far from here) on Spanish television and screamed GOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL along with the newscasters. I also babbled along with them in Spanish whenever I was happy that I knew a word or phrase.
  4. We made delicious shrimp tacos for dinner for Cobalt since he had to work late.
  5. We braved the crazy snowy streets to go run some errands and get tasty breakfast at Mom’s favorite breakfast restaurant here: The Buff (it’s on Man vs. Food – the Boulder edition if you want to learn about it).
  6. We had a party for the 50th anniversary of The Birds because it was mostly filmed about a 30 min drive from my hometown/where Cobalt and I stayed on our minimoon and because my mom had never seen it. I always get super homesick when I watch it so it was nice to watch it with my mom…
  7. I worked on trying to make alligator earrings in a similar style to my shark earrings…
  8. We planted the seeds for Cobalt’s and my summer garden. Obviously they won’t be heading outside for a while…

    Yay! Mini plant greenhouse!
  9. Did I forget anything Mom?

After my mom left, I took advantage of the crazy snow everywhere and went cross country skiing around the hill by my house. No one else was out so it was a peaceful adventure through the fluffy snow for me and my sharks (Gustav is featured in the picture on top).

And now for the reason why I didn’t write on Thursday last week – I’ve been working extra hard in lab (except for when my mom was here) so that I can take some time off to actually have a spring break. Cobalt, our friend A, and I are road trippin’ to Dallas to see our friend Jem later this week! So exciting (so excited about WARMTH too…)! So I might not write this Thursday either… Or maybe I’ll make Jem cowrite a post with me (you were warned Jem… ;)). Jem and I have already planned to work on our street photography techniques as she shows us Dallas. Also, maybe Jem and I can finalllllly get our Etsy store up and running! So much excitement!

Now it’s your turn. What kinds of things do you do with your family when you visit them or they visit you? Is it spring there yet? What is your ideal spring break activity? Do you want that tasty cracker recipe? Have you been to Dallas? If so what do you think of it?

Sharks gnawin’ on my ears…

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So the other day, I was wearing my awesome octopus earrings to lab and my friend wondered why I didn’t have any shark earrings, specifically shark earrings that looked like they were eating my ears. I thought that that was a good question and began a google search for shark earrings in general. As it happened, I happened to find a google images search image of clay shark earrings much like the ones I had dreamed about. I drooled over them for about half a minute until I realized that that girl had posted a tutorial on how to make them! Hurrah! Craft time!

So I headed to the store, picked out the required colors of Sculpey III clay and earring posts/backs and set to work. It was hard work. I ended up making two sets of earrings because I would practice on the first two sharks and then try again for the second two sharks. Also, I was at a loss for how long to bake my shark earrings seeing as the directions on the Sculpey III package said to bake at 275 degrees for 15 minutes per 1/4 inch. Ummmm… how long for shark earrings? I ended up calling Cobalt to come downstairs and check out my earrings a billion times winging it – about 25 minutes – and then letting them cool overnight. Here’s an Instagram of the shark earrings fresh out of the oven…

Anyway, I LOVE them. I wore them to school yesterday and got so many compliments. Plus it just feels so me to have sharks eating my ears. I can’t wait to get more time to make more (such a perfectionist…). Also I have already decided that I want to try to make miniature alligator earrings too. Yay!

Your turn: what do you think of the shark earrings? Would you buy some if I sold them in an Etsy shop? Tell me about your latest craft project. How was it inspired? Did you just dive right into something completely new or was it something that you worked really hard on for a while to accomplish? If you don’t like crafts, tell me about a hobby of yours! :)

In other news, my friend/labmate K passed his oral exam yesterday – if you’re not in grad school, let me explain – think of a test that you study for for months and then three professors try to figure out what you don’t know and then ask you questions about that for 1.5 hours. Are you shivering? Yeah… it sucks. But passing it means you are an official PhD candidate (read: you now have a masters degree and can continue on the path towards getting your PhD). So yay K! So proud of you! :)

I love Comic Strips

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Yes… Cobalt and I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to comic books…

So I love comic strips. When I was growing up, my favorite thing about getting the daily paper every day was catching up with my favorite comic strip characters. I guess it didn’t help that I grew up in the town where Charles Shultz (Peanuts) lived… When I went to college, I was really sad that I couldn’t keep up with the comics via the daily paper anymore so I started reading the Seattle Times online every day to keep up with my news and my comic strip friends. I also have quite the collection of various comic strip books that are very slowly migrating from my parents’ house in CA to my house here in CO.

As you may or may not know, we’re sort of at the end of an era here with newspapers – no one is reading paper papers anymore and papers are losing a ton of money. Therefore, newspapers are turning towards their websites to make up the extra slack. Seattle Times.com is going to start charging you to subscribe to their website later this month – a prospect that makes me sad because as a poor grad student, I probably won’t be able to afford it.

Pretty much in time with the crash of the newspapers comes this film – Stripped, codirected by Dave Kellett, who writes Sheldon. This movie interviews a lot of comic strip artists (from Jim Davis who writes Garfield) to Bill Waterson (Calvin and Hobbes) about how comic strips have affected society and what is going to happen to them with the death of newspapers. I think it’s going to be amazing! But they need our help – in order to finish the movie, they need access to various archives (such as the Peanuts short films) that are really expensive. If you care about comic strips half as much as I do, check out this website. It has a neat trailer for the movie, their goals, and rewards for becoming a backer. As of right now, it looks like they’ve reached their first goal now but now they are trying for a second goal (and even more exciting things for their movie). There are some pretty cool rewards for becoming a backer… :)

Now it’s your turn. Tell me what you think about comic strips. Do you have a favorite? I think one of my favorites (it’s not super well known) is Sherman’s Lagoon. I had the Sherman’s Lagoon screensaver on my computer when I was a teenager – you could hear fish getting eaten down the hall when we were eating dinner… :-/

By the way, today is Pi Day! Happy Pi Day! Go eat some pie and think about what an awesome number pi is… :D

One Slimer Cake Coming Up!

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So my friend J wrote a blog post last week about this crazy vegan avocado chocolate cake that she made. I was intrigued because 1) what would a cake made with avocados instead of eggs taste like? and 2) it has freakin’ green avocado buttercream frosting to go with it. So I got the recipe and Cobalt and I set about making the cake. It turned out pretty good actually. It doesn’t really taste like avocados – mostly like chocolate and bananas strangely actually… Also, if you don’t like the idea of slime-green frosting, you can add cocoa powder to your frosting. I think it’s kind of neat green though. Might make for a fun cooking activity for kiddos…

Anyway, upon frosting our cake yesterday afternoon, Cobalt and I decided that it reminded us of Slimer from Cobalt’s favorite movie ever, Ghostbusters. Thus, Cobalt decorated our cake in proper Slimer fashion! Shown above – our claw machine Slimer gazes in awe at himself in cake-form. Below – slimer cake eaten… Yummmm…

In other news, I’ve been in kind of a photography funk lately. I tried to challenge myself this weekend – taking some self portraits of my new octopus earrings (Now I have black ones and I got some yellow ones as a gift too!) and taking some pictures of the ice we acquired from rain/snow on Saturday and I was frustrated with both activities. Booo… I just got some new photography books from the library… I’m hoping they’ll inspire me…

You know what time it is now… Your turn to comment on my post. How do you feel about avocado chocolate cake? Yay? Nay? Curious about that ridiculously green frosting? It’s REALLY sweet. I’ll tell you that… How about hobbies? What do you do when you’re feeling frustrated with your hobbies? Any advice?

So… what’s going on with you guys again?

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I apologize for the lack of post yesterday… food poisoning makes fools of us all… :(

Anyway, it’s time to continue the Cobalt and Potassium saga (part one is here in case you missed it)!!! Are you excited?! You should be! It’s time to learn about the “not dating” years….

This is a perfect example of us “not dating.” Look how disinterested we seem to be in each other at this party…

Year One – What do you do if you really like someone but you are scared of relationships?
We left off on the beginning of Cobalt’s and my first date, back in October 2007… I was super nervous as I was getting ready for our date that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about. It turned out to not be a problem and we had a great time. We went to go see Dan in Real Life and then we went out to pie! It took about two dates for us to realize that we really liked each other but we were both a little too scarred from past relationships to really start something serious. So we decided to go slow. This worked out great for both of us because we got to hang out pretty much all the time getting to know each other.

Unfortunately for us, some of our friends thought we were going too slowly and took the matter into their own hands. By February 2008, I was starting to do a lot of traveling across the country for various grad school interviews (I was gone pretty much every weekend on a different school’s dime – kind of cool but also really exhausting…). Around Valentine’s Day, I was in Washington state and one of our friends told Cobalt that I needed more out of our relationship (not true at all… I was quite enjoying the glacial pace of our relationship to tell you the truth). So when I got back from my trip all excited to hang out, Cobalt told me that we had to “break up” because he couldn’t handle being in a real relationship. I put on airs about whatever because we weren’t in a real relationship anyway so we couldn’t even break up… but it actually really hurt because I realized how much I actually liked him…

Thus began the really awkward phase of our relationship where we “weren’t dating” but we still really liked each other so we still hung out all the time and pretty much acted the same as when we were “dating.” We had weekly date nights, I went to see horror movies with him and the guys, Cobalt pretty much refused to hang out with some of his other friends unless I was there (there was an incident when he and one of our mutual friends, C, showed up at my apartment one Friday night when I was curled up in my pajamas watching TV because he wanted to see me… C was annoyed… for good reason), we attended all parties together, we danced together at clubs, etc. The awkwardness was compounded of course by the fact that I was most definitely moving come August 1st to start graduate school in whatever fine institution I decided to attend…

Year Two – Potassium moves away….
So, as you know, I chose to move to Boulder in the end. It seemed like the best fit (as much as I complain about grad school now, this school seemed like the place I was supposed to be when I moved here) and it was a nice 7 hour drive from Cobalt (I’d be lying if I said I didn’t take that into consideration when I chose this school… even though we were in an awkward not dating phase, I still felt like he was important in my life). Two problems: 1) I didn’t have a car and 2) as soon as I moved, Cobalt and I both realized that we wanted to be in a relationship with the other person but we were unsure about how the other one felt about us – thus providing the awkward context for year two…

Cobalt dealt with it by casually dating other girls because he wanted to see if it would make me jealous (it did) and because he was convinced I was going to find the love of my life here in Boulder and he didn’t want to be heartbroken when it happened. I dealt with it by throwing myself headfirst into grad school (which isn’t hard to do when you have research, classes, and teaching to do every day) and, after discovering the Cobalt was dating someone new and then not talking to him for two weeks, pretending to not be jealous whenever other girls were brought up in the weekly letters we wrote each other (except for those two weeks). Things went especially funny when I did occasionally get to visit NM and Cobalt and I fell back into our normal not dating but doing everything together pattern only to be forced back to reality when I had to go back to Colorado. Towards the end of my first year, things started to change though and I think we both started to (finally) figure out that we might mutually really like each other. Of course, it would be too easy to come out and just say that so it took the whole summer for us to really figure it out. First Cobalt came to visit me in Boulder in May 2009. It was like a change of scenery (hanging out in Colorado instead of NM) was all we needed to allow our relationship to go from really liking each other and pretending it’s not a big deal to really liking each other and maybe being open to admitting it? Nothing really happened and we didn’t talk about it. We were just kind of cute in that “I really like you” way that we probably were like in the very beginning of our relationship back in 2007… Then I bought a car (finally…) and later in the summer, I drove down to NM for a week long trip to congratulate myself for officially finishing my first year of graduate school (complete with finishing the first part of my qualifying exams – a really really really hard written exam on pretty much ALL of biochemistry). This is when it all FINALLY clicked and Cobalt and I actually had the “do you like me? cuz… I kinda like you… a lot…” talk and we started actually dating – though secretly… kind of… because it was still scary to admit we were in a relationship after all those years of confusion…

Speaking of confusion, our friends were very confused. They’d pretty much given up hope about us ever getting together after that whole Potassium-hasn’t-talked-to-Cobalt-for-two-weeks! thing. It took until Halloween 2009 for the majority them to finally figure out that they were actually together! I’ll tell you though… it made me SO HAPPY.

Whew… that was long and convoluted… you’re lucky you just had to read a few paragraphs of craziness instead of live two years about it. Now it’s your turn. Last time you all told me awesome stories about how you met your SO. Now tell me the gory details about the beginning of your relationships! Was it all good and fine once you finally got together? Were you helplessly confused? Did your friends mess it up? Did your friends approve? I want to know all!