pH and Dallas Day 2

April 5, 2013April 5, 2013 iampotassium1 Comment

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 bird pretending not to watch us eat our delicious breakfast

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!

April 2, 2013April 5, 2013 iampotassium2 Comments

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…

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)…

Chasing Ice

February 28, 2013February 28, 2013 iampotassiumLeave a comment

Awwww yeah… I got a signed poster for this movie! :D

On Tuesday night, I went to go see the documentary Chasing Ice. It’s about a photographer who uses time lapse photography to show several glaciers across the world dwindle over a 6 month period of time – a visual representation of climate change in action. It was simultaneously very beautiful (from a photographer’s point of view) and depressing (from a member of earth’s point of view). I really enjoyed the film for several reasons – first because of the cool photography in it. Think about how much work goes into putting fancy DSLR cameras in a really harsh environment and then telling them to take a picture every hour only during the day. You need engineers and computer people and someone to design a home for the camera and photographers, etc etc etc. What a project!

Another reason I enjoyed the film was because they experienced some of the very same challenges I do on a day to day basis with my own research in the lab. At one point, the main photographer is infuriated and frustrated because he spent all that time and energy planning this whole project and when he came back 6 months later, the cameras weren’t working! His reaction was pretty much spot on to my own reaction when I come into lab after letting the microscope image my cells all night only to find that the microscope computer actually froze within minutes of me leaving the lab the night before. I’ll let you imagine what this reaction looks like but I assure you it is full of rage.

Finally, my favorite thing about the movie was how much it inspired me. These are two things I am very passionate about: photography (with DSLRs or microscope cameras) and making science accesible to nonscientists. What an awesome way to use both creativity and science hand in hand! I haven’t talked much about grad school and my plans if when I graduate on here but I can tell you that this movie definitely has gotten my brain whirring about how I can use my own creativity to bring science to nonscientists. I am so excited about what my future career will be like (because right now it is still a mystery…)!

In other news, please see this film. It’s definitely worth seeing 1) as a member of the planet earth, 2) if you are curious about climate change and you hate boring statistics, 3) if you really like photography, 4) if you have never seen glaciers before/would like to see a lot of Greenland and Iceland, 5) STOP READING THIS AND GO SEE THIS MOVIE ALREADY!

Oh wait… before you stop reading this, tell me what you think about climate change. And if you think that’s a boring topic then tell me about a movie that inspired you recently and why. And then go see this movie (and come back and tell me what you think).

Golden

September 25, 2012September 24, 2012 iampotassium3 Comments

This past Saturday, Cobalt and I went up to Aspen with our friends A, J, K, T, and L to continue our search for fall (which officially started this weekend). The seven of us checked into our condo and immediately headed for the fancy hot tubs and pool.

Then we spent the rest of the evening feasting on Chinese delicacies mostly made by T, J, and K, though we all helped. There was sooooo much food that we all totally overstuffed ourselves.

In the morning, L and K made us an epic breakfast consisting of eggs, bacon, pancake balls stuffed with red beans, and Korean pancakes. Oh and Cobalt found this crazy Dragonfruit when we were shopping on Friday night so we ate that too. Then we headed up to the Maroon Bells (two mountains near Aspen) to check out the beautiful changing aspens (all that gold in that top picture comes from the aspens). It turned out to be a wonderful day for running around and being silly in the midst of these gorgeous trees and mountains. I ended up being a crazy photographer who would lie down in the middle of the trail just to get the perfect shot.

K and J with the prettiness behind them…

The first set of pictures I took were pictures of everyone jumping up and down. T was especially good at it as you can see in this picture.

Jumping

Then we decided to take some “Hunger Games” shots, so named because I would focus on the aspens and hold my camera steady while everyone else ran through the trees, getting slightly blurred, not unlike the way the Hunger Games movie was filmed.

Hunger Games

Finally, here is a picture of part of our group towards the end of the trip, J and K had already left at this point.

This trip was so much fun. The drive to and from Aspen was beautiful (the changing trees made the scenery look painted gold), I had a ton of fun with my friends, I got to see the Maroon Bells (which I had never seen before), and I got to have a lot of fun being really creative with my DSLR. I was talking to A today about “life changing experiences” and how I feel like I’ve had a lot of them this year (getting married was obviously one). I think this trip was definitely a life changing experience too. It was so neat to see everything come together – from shopping for food with T, A, and Cobalt on Friday night, to riding the bus up to the Maroon Bells, to running around like crazy people through the aspens… I think it all lead to me feeling at peace with myself and the world for a bit and that was awesome.

Because I posted this today and not on Monday, all bets are off on what the rest of the week will look like. Also, if you want to hear more about the trip/see more pictures/learn about how I took some of them, I have about 173 more pictures left so I can always post more in another post if anyone is interested.

Now it’s your turn. Is fall happening where you are right now? Do the trees change color? What is one of the best life changing experiences that has happened for you recently? Let’s discuss.

Potassium Photography

A Day in the Life of an Active Metal

Category: Life changing