Author: iampotassium

Snow Day

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Last Friday, we got a snow day! Turns out that between Thursday night and Saturday morning, we got about 23 inches of snow. Craziness… I haven’t seen this much snow since I was a little kid! Anyway, pictures…

To start things off, at the top is a picture of my friend A and me and our respective sharks (Fernando and Gustav) in the snow when it just started on Thursday night.

Fast forward to Friday morning when I decided it would be a fun idea to go cross country skiing through my neighborhood (why not?! There was snow everywhere…). So here are some more fun pictures:

First we have the picture of my faithful skiing shark companions: Shark Banana and Scrarmpl (Cobalt was there too but he was taking the picture… that is what he is not in it).

Then we discovered that Shark Banana has a loop on the end of his banana that was perfect for clipping him to one of my gloves. It was hilarious having Shark Banana on my glove, especially when I fell down (not shown!). I am pretty sure Shark Banana snuck a bite of snow while I was struggling to get up…

There we are trekkin’ through the neighborhood!

Thanks Cobalt for taking these pictures! :)

Chickens and other words…

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So there has been a lot of talk about most commonly used words recently. I am mostly referring to That Nolen Chick’s blog where she held a contest for people to guess how often words like “very,” “totally,” and “marvelous” appeared in her manuscript. Got me thinking about the words I use the most. I am sure the winners are the word “like” (trying to work on reducing the frequency of that one) and then a bunch of random noises that I don’t know how to type but sound kind of like this: “prggggggggg” (also spelled “grbbbbbbbb”) and “qwraaaahhhhh.” You understand? Yeah… I didn’t think so… Sorry about that.
But then I thought some more and realized that I say the word “chicken” more than I believe is necessary for someone who lives in a town where there aren’t very many chickens around (ask Cobalt if you don’t believe me). Curious…
Do you guys have a random favorite word?

About the pic – it’s from a short story by Clio Chiang called “This Time” in a collection of graphic short stories called “Flight Volume 2.” Apparently someone else says “chicken” a lot too…

In other news: SNOW DAY. First snow day where I am actually in Boulder AND I don’t have experiments running that require me to go into lab anyway. Look forward to some fun snowy pictures next week…

“Breakfast” for dinner

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Last night, Cobalt and I made these tasty pancake things with sautéed apple chunks on top (and inside the pancakes too). They also have powdered sugar on top. Basically we used an Aebleskiver (Danish Pancake Balls) recipe but then since we don’t have an aebleskiver pan, we just made regular shaped pancakes. They turned out delicious but I bet they would have been even more amazing in ball form (it was kind of hard to get the apple chunks to stay inside the pancakes this way)… Anyway, we got the recipe from this website. Try it! :D
Before you scold me for eating sugary goodness for dinner, I just have to remind you that one of the best things about being an adult is being able to eat whatever you want… In the case of last night’s dinner, we ate it with a salad which, in my book, means that it’s dinner (or lunch). For example, donuts are generally a breakfast food, but donuts with salad on the side… now that’s dinner. ;) What about you? Are there any foods that you eat for dinner even though they are technically not dinner foods?

Happy Groundhog Day everyone! Try your best to make it amazing just in case you get stuck in it for a long time…

(Note: Potassium does not eat donuts for dinner… just to clear that up in case you were worried…)

Wedding Shenanigans…

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This weekend was a crazy ball of wedding planning. Cobalt and I flew out to California, worked on wedding stuff for two days straight, and then headed back to Colorado on Sunday. Whew. At least California was significantly warmer than Colorado so we could escape the cold for a few days (yeahhhhh sandals!). And we got a lot of work done. For example, we got our cake designed/ordered (soooo excited about it), got the boys’ tuxes ordered, and I got to be fitted for my dress. Funny story about that: my mom is making my dress and we learned that I should probably not eat 3 extra servings of spaghetti for dinner before being fitted. >_< Bustiers and full tummies are NOT friends… :p
Regardless, it was a good trip – though the jury is still out on the wedding rings discussed last week. Today’s picture is of Cobalt and me being bored in the bridal shop while waiting for our consultant to draw up an estimate on the tuxes. Here’s another picture of me wearing Cobalt’s tie:

We’re super excited about how much work we got done this weekend and how our wedding plans are coming along in general. Is it August yet?! Now I have a question for all you ladies (or guys, I don’t care) out there…. what do you think: should tuxes have pocket squares or boutonnieres? (or BOTH?!) Are pocket squares really worth $8 per square of craziness?!

On Differences

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I have always been something of a “freak.” Seriously. I named my car Remora (it’s the suckerfish that lives on sharks). I love sharks (and most sea creatures actually) with pretty much an undying passion – I want to throw a stuffed shark instead of a bouquet at our wedding. I don’t really care about the things I think a lot of people care about. In short, sometimes I feel like I am doing the opposite of what everyone else seems to be doing.
So then it’s funny how much of my life I have spent trying to fit in. I don’t want to be put in someone’s “weird” category where they judge me for being different. I just want to be me, Potassium! But you know how it is, you categorize people: There’s that weird girl that I don’t quite get. There’s that guy who seems like he’s sooooo full of himself. There are those people who do (whatever) when I think they should be doing (this other thing). I think it’s natural in a way. But I also worry that sometimes it prevents us from really just embracing people as they are.

I think there’s a fine line between respecting people’s differences and using differences to isolate people. I’d rather use differences as a jumping off point for getting to know people instead of as a label and a reason to stay away. It’s hard but maybe it’s something good to strive for.

About the picture. It’s from a graphic novel called “Bayou Vol. 1” by Jeremy Love which has great art even though I don’t like the story. I thought the picture was fitting for today’s post though…

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring

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Wedding expo?

This weekend, Cobalt and I are doing a crazy amount of wedding planning. I hope this post is awesome for you guys because I am pretty sure we’re going to be too busy for me to update over the next few days. So what’s going on exactly? Well, the biggest reason is that we are going to a wedding expo. That’s right… filling out tons of forms to win free stuff that we probably won’t win and being overwhelmed by a variety of local products that we probably can’t afford for our wedding. Cobalt and I are specifically interested in looking at local jewelers’ wedding rings. We have been looking around here in Boulder at various wedding ring vendors and nothing has really struck our eyes as the PERFECT pair of rings to represent the perfect pair that we are (;)) so we’re hoping maybe some local jewelers at the wedding expo will have some fresh ideas for us.

Do you have any stories about wedding rings? Are you only into the precious metals like white and yellow gold? Or do you have a thing for the weird metals like tungsten and titanium (or cobalt!)? Do you have horror stories about crazy rings or crazy jewelers? Use this as a forum to vent, compliment, or do whatever your hearts desire on the topic of wedding rings and jewelry. I am all ears (Cobalt is too, so speak up, guys!).

About the pic. Yes, this is my engagement ring! Prettiness huh? If it helps with the ring discussion, Cobalt and I would rather have rings that match each other than me having a ring that matches my engagement ring. Okay… Discuss! For real! I’ll be at work in lab awaiting your responses…

Egg rolls for the new year

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Last night, Cobalt and I made homemade egg rolls for dinner! Here are some pictures:


Baby egg rolls waiting to be cooked


Cooking egg rolls (yeah yeah… we don’t have a wok… wedding registry?)


Cobalt eating the first egg roll! (He looks dubious but I assure you he liked it). This pic is also neat because if you look closely, you can see the steam coming off the egg roll… Yay! Steam captured.

Happy days. I love cooking… I especially love trying new recipes! What do you guys like to cook?

On Multitasking

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When I was in high school, I worked at a vet clinic. It is more or less one of the reasons why I have awesome skills at things that are not super important to life (such as walking dogs and making surgery packs* – I haven’t made surgery packs in a long time but I’m sure if you gave me the necessary tools, I would still be awesome at it. For that matter, I haven’t walked a dog in a long time either but I’m sure if you gave me a dog and a leash, we would be walking pretty in no time…) and also why I have some odd quirks (such as I can’t handle the Smurfs theme song… a story for a different day…). Anyway, working at the vet was pretty much the perfect job for my high school self because I love animals and also because at the time, I wanted to go to vet school (why I am now in grad school is also a story for another day…). So as I was working at being awesome at making surgery packs, walking dogs, giving cats baths, etc, my boss would come up with tips for me for when I went to vet school. One of the best tips was that a vet needs to multitask so I should practice multitasking.

I was thinking about that the other day in lab when I was doing two experiments at the same time. They both had 1-4 hour breaks and so I would work on the other one during the first one’s breaks and vice versa. It had the potential to end terribly (both breaks are over at the same time so how do you choose which to work on first?!) but I think it worked out okay. What’s funny is that on top of it all, I was chatting with some of my friends on Gmail’s chat feature and looking up wedding stuff during the times when both experiments had breaks. I believe that is the ultimate multitasking experience right there. The only thing that could have topped it would have been also being on the phone I guess. My old boss would be proud of my multitasking skills.

I wonder though if it’s good to have your brain spread out to so many different activities at once. It might of course lead to mistakes (doing the next step for the wrong experiment, looking up wedding stuff in the chat window, etc) but it might also lead to extreme exhaustion and a need to constantly be doing too many things at once (I might start to feel lazy doing only one experiment at a time). It’s something to think about I think in our overworked society…

Anyway, your assignment: tell me about the craziest multitasking you have ever done and how it worked out for you. Complete failure, total success, or somewhere in between? Are you multitasking while reading this post?

About the picture: Another “cool” thing from working at a vet is that now I own a lot of scrub tops and pants. Pictured here is a younger Potassium (16 to be exact) and her best friend T (and T’s awesome dog) dressed up for Halloween in scrubs…

* for you non vet people out there, a surgery pack is the tools that you need for a specific surgery all folded into a neat little package and sterilized. I was very good at the organizing of all the tools to make it into the smallest package ever. I think it has to do with the perfectionist in me.