Gluten-Free! Day 1

So, I learned something while being able to drink here.  Beer may taste good, but my body does NOT like it.  It gets me drunk about four times as fast as any other alcohol.  Normally it's the other way around.  After talking with Eric, he said that his girlfriend Ali has the same problem because of her celiac disease.  Apparently 1/3 of Americans have some kind of intolerance to gluten.  So, I did some research for about a week.  Turns out I have almost every single side effect of celiac disease including the sensitivity to dairy.  Now, I am gluten and dairy free for two weeks.  That's supposed to be long enough for your intestines to start to heal and you to notice a difference.  Plus, it's kind of fun coming up with new things to eat.  If this does work, it looks like I may have a few illnesses I've been diagnosed with over the years suddenly disappear.  Wouldn't that be nice?!  I kind of hope it works, but at the same time, I will miss my bread.  But I did buy gluten free bread and cookies and pasta.  There's a tone of gluten free stuff out there!  There's even flour!  So, I can still bake. It's Day 1.  I've had one meal, soy milk and chocolate corn flakes.  Yes.  You heard right. Chocolate corn flakes.  And they're tasty!  I'll try out my gluten free bread with my dairy free hazelnoot paste for lunch and some applesauce.  Mmmm.  I'm not even hungry, but that sound delicious already.  I just realized I used the Dutch spelling for hazelnut.  Ha!  I guess I'm getting used to this country and the language.  Watch out when I get back!  I already now quite a few Dutch words!

Cake, cake and moooooore cake!

The carrot cake was an epic fail.  It was almost burning on the edges when I took it out, but it still wasn't cooked in the middle.  I ended up having to buy a cake from the store.  Oh well.  The party was really fun though.  We went to dinner and then went to a couple of bars, played some darts, came back to campus and played the drinking game Alex got me.

My mom sent me a lovely birthday package that I just got yesterday in time for my RAMAN CAKE!!!  Yes.  You read that correctly.  I got RAMAN DATA on my birthday.  That means my set up is working.  And now that it has been a few days I've got it working consistently and I have the data that my supervisor didn't expect me to have for another four months.  I guess he underestimated me. Ha!  Anyway, back to the cake.  I made an applesauce cake and Eric made the frosting for me.  Apparently after failing at frosting in his presence twice, he steps in. lol.  Just before I baked it, I got the birthday package with backing soda in it and shortening which helped a lot in the process.  And, one of my flatmates told me the correct way to use the oven. (One of my other flatmates showed me the wrong way, hence, mushy cake.)  Our oven is quite old and all of the writing on one of the knobs is gone.  Apparently I broiled the last cake instead of baking it! Oops!  This one turned out great though.  Everyone really liked it.  Some people even wanted the recipe.

As for colleges, I'm down to 52.  I'm going to start looking at the research interests of the professors now.  This way I can eliminate things a lot faster.  If it doesn't sound really interesting, it's off the list.  I did find someone that specialized in optical hole burning.  I bet everyone reading this thought the same thing I did at first, burning holes with a huge laser.  Though fun, that's not quite what he is doing. He's most likely making different laser modes (A laser mode is based on the number of bright spots and the pattern they are in.  A typical laser is in TEM00 mode with just on circle in the middle.) that aren't normally possible in a laser of that material.

Studying is going ok.  I'm working on Electricity and Magnetism now.  It's worth a lot of the test and I've forgotten a lot of it.  I think I'm going to have to test myself in all areas and hope for the best and review like crazy.  Hopefully I can move on to optics soon, but I don't think I'll spend much time on that since I just took an optics course at Lawrence and I've been working with optics this whole time. 

Well, here's my first shot at pictures.  I don't have many here because I'm on my work computer instead of my laptop, but here's a few.

This is my Raman data.  My data is in the blue, and the accepted data is in red.  Mine isn't as good, but it's clearly the same thing.

 This is our Mexican themed party with a couple of flat mates from Mexico.  I have no idea why I look pregnant in this picture.  I promise I'm not.  My shirt must just be doing weird things.

This last one is of me and Eric and Ali at the faculty bbq.

Well, I hope that satisfies the need for pictures for now.  It'll be a while before there's more.  I keep forgetting to bring my camera places.

IT'S MY BIRTHDAYYYYYY!!!!!

Sooooo excited.  Alex already gave me presents this morning, approximately half an hour after I woke up.  He gave me an interesting looking drinking game that involves Jenga, and a beautiful silver necklace.  He's so sweet.

It's almost time for cake at work.  I made a carrot cake with cream cheese frosting.  It's a dutch tradition that you make a cake for everyone else on your birthday, a little backwards compared to American style.  But I love baking, and it was fun because I've never made a carrot cake before or cream cheese frosting.  Hopefully everyone likes it!

Narrowing Down the College Search

I am officially down to 55 colleges to choose from.  Most are in the US, a few in Canada, one in Scotland and one in the Netherlands. (Take a wild guess which one.)  The most surprising is that UW didn't make the cut.  Their optics program is virtually non-existent.   That was one of my top two choices until about five minutes ago.  And Washington State, the one college I've made fun of all my life as a huge Huskies fan, made the cut!  How weird things turn out.  Well I'm past the first two stages of cutting based on location and whether or not they have optics.  The next step will be a lot longer :(

At least work is going well.  I may not get my Raman data before my birthday, but it will be close!  As for studying, I'm supposed to be doing that right now..... um. yeah.  I should do that...

Frustration & success

Apparently people don't realize that when electronic keys break, there should be a back up.  I left my medicine in my office thinking that I would be able to get back in there.  However, the key system was down.  So, I went to security and since only one guy was on duty I had to wait until the Sunday morning to get any help.  On Sunday morning, someone did try to help me.  No luck.  So, I was stuck without medicine.  I couldn't work.  I couldn't study.  Basically I didn't know what to do with my life.

Thankfully today the key system was fixed when I got into work.  I am so close to getting data.  Before I'm going to look at molecular vibrations, I'm going to look at fluorescence.  Basically I'm looking at a colored piece of plastic to callibrate my set-up.  Now I just need a little help from my supervisor and I will be ready to go!

Ah yes, the plan for my birthday is coming together.  It will be dinner somewhere in town followed by fun at the Irish Pub.  Because why wouldn't you go to a bar in a foreign country that celebrates a different foreign culture that still isn't your own? 

My first post on my first blog. EEK!

I have a few friends who blog, and it seems to work really well for them.  So, I decided to give it a try.

This Friday is my 21st birthday!  I feel like it would be a little more exciting if I were back in the states rather than in Europe (where I am currently drinking a very tasty German beer).  I'm still not sure what I am going to do.  I could go bowling or go to a bar.  I think I might end up going to the Irish Pub in town to have dinner and drink a bit.  But, of course, I have to get my free birthday drink at the campus bar. lol

Work is going quite well.  I've been given a difficult talk of building a Raman spectrometer from scratch.  Basically it's a fancy microscope that looks at vibrations of molecules.  It can identify exactly what's under the microscope just by looking at the different vibrations.  Cool right?!  I'm almost done.  I've been having quite a bit of trouble with the camera.  However, now that I'm using the correct computer program (oops!), things are going a lot smoother.  Hopefully I'll be able to achieve my goal of having Raman data before my birthday.  *fingers crossed*


When I'm not working a lot of my time has been spent studying for the GRE Physics exam.  I've been studying about 3 hours a day for it.  I've only gotten through classical mechanics though.  So, I still have a ways to go.  I should start Electricity and Magnetism tonight.  My worst subject.  *groan*

Lately, I've also been looking at potential graduate schools.  I realized how far behind I am at the college search.  It takes so much work!!  So far I have two that I am for sure applying to and a list of about 200 maybes.  I really need to work on narrowing that list down!  I know I want to go into optics, and that's a start.  I also know the countries I want to be in (US, UK, Netherlands). Canada wouldn't be terrible either.  I just hope I never get one of those accents.

I made a delicious potato soup tonight for dinner.  I can't wait until tomorrow when Alex gets back and can try it!