Early this week my student told me that the uni travel agent was having troubles booking us lodging in Finland--that they were only able to find one room, a double, available anywhere within 60 km of the university in Oulu, where we were going to do some work on the microprobe. Neither my student nor I wanted to share a room, so I let him have the ( Read more... )

We had a couple of delightful couch surfers the first part of this week. They arrived Tuesday afternoon and stayed through to Friday morning. She is from California (grew up in Santa Cruz, went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and is now at UCLA for a PhD studying butterflys), and her boyfriend/traveling companion is from Portugal--they met because ( Read more... )

This week was the first week of my Swedish for Immigrants Course. ( but before I get to how it went, let me re-cap the diagnostic test I took before the course started )

We had a very nice, largely lazy weekend. We did host a couple of couch surfers from the Netherlands. A delightful young couple. Greeted them with a late lunch upon their arrival, took them out to Gammelstad to see the open-air museum and church village, then took them to the summer cabin of our folk dance teacher because they wanted to see the ( Read more... )

When I woke up this morning the Alps were visible from my apartment. This is always a good thing, and had me start the day in a good mood, despite waking up kind of early in relation to when I went to sleep. Since it was also early with respect to the sun, which was still hiding below buildings and not causing much heat yet, I celebrated by going ( Read more... )

This weekend I hosted an Italian couch surfer who has been living in Japan for the past five years. Talk about a fabulous guest! Not only was he pleasant company to visit with (which meant I got some progress made on the underdress I started right after returning from Vienna), he also insisted on doing a bit of house-work in thanks for hosting ( Read more... )

Last weekend was largely spent working--I now have the next two capsules filled and welded properly shut and ready to run in my next experiment. I also managed to visit the other SCA house in Milan to spend a few social hours and work on my underdress in progress. This week has been even busier with work--I now have a complete list of which ( Read more... )

I was up way too late last night--went on a driving tour around the city looking at the pretty buildings lit up at night, and didn't get home till after 11pm, and I still needed to do yoga before going to sleep. However, since I had a talk to do at the confrence today, I still got up before 7 and enjoyed a nice bike ride in. Took slightly longer ( Read more... )

I finally managed to get back on line today, now to see if I can remember what I've been up to while off line ( Read more... )

Since I've had a few days recently where my hours doing uni work were a bit lower than I'd like, I was pleased to have hit a pocket of inspriation today, resulting in a total of nine hours of work and only just over 2 of e-mail. Today's progress consisted of re-staring the experiment we started yesterday (it got shut down early yesterday evening ( Read more... )