Day Nine Hundred Twenty Three

Two days after returning from Washington, my immune system decided it would be a splendid time to succumb to a horrific cold. The past 4 days have been spent sneezing, coughing, and generally sounding (and feeling) like the most disgusting person ever. It's been a dream. So this post will be dedicated to reminiscing over my visit to Washington a week ago.

First up was a trip to my alma mater, St. Martin's, to give a grad school talk. As far as I know it went well, and it was surreal/wonderful to be back on that small, quaint little campus. I didn't realize how much I missed it until I went back. The evening ended with dinner at one of my favorite restaurants (Budd Bay Cafe) with some of my favorite people, Greg and Laurie Creighton. Thank you for the delicious salmon dinner!

Next up was traveling to Puyallup, where the wedding festivities commenced on Saturday morning. Here we are at Amanda's mom's house doing hair and makeup for the big event later that evening. It was a time of many curling irons and much hair spray.

Once we were all pretty, we got all dressed up for photos. The bridesmaids dresses looked great, but let me tell you...it was an adventure to travel with that thing between Austin and Seattle. Because it was winter in Washington, Amanda kindly supplied us all with fur wraps to keep us warm while we gracefully waltzed around Tacoma taking pre-wedding photos (and when I say "gracefully waltzed", I mean "awkwardly got out of cars while simultaneously trying to hold an umbrella and our dresses and trying to prevent getting the pale pink satin dirty with mud").

My old friend Mary and my new friend Annie at the wedding.

My roommate from freshman year at George Fox, Emily.

And finally, the beautiful bride, Amanda.

My time in Washington ended with gallivanting around Olympia with one of my other best friends, Abbie. We went by my favorite used book store, walked around the harbor, and ate at my favorite restaurant downtown. It was the perfect end to a perfect trip.

Day Nine Hundred Sixteen

I spent the last week in Washington and filled up all of my time there with people and places I love. I'm exhausted and overly emotional about having to leave what I consider my home state, but it was an amazing trip - with a highlight of getting to stand next to one of my best friends as she got married on Saturday. Amanda, I love you to pieces and am so honored that I got to be a part of your wedding. To many more adventures in the future!

Photos from this past week to come soon.

Day Nine Hundred Two

Today, I spent most of my work day with a delightful German man named Claus. I've learned that in grad school, at one point or another everything in your lab breaks (literally everything, including grad students). And when that item is your $17000 microscope, you get to meet repairmen like Claus. In his own words, the inside of our microscope was "so dusty you could plant a potato garden." Now you understand what I mean when I say the man was delightful. He flipped our microscope on its head (which made me very nervous, but he seemed totally comfortable with) and worked some kind of magic involving hammers, Allen wrenches, sand paper, and lots of grease to make our vintage scope work like new again. He even polished it for us while telling me about one of his upcoming service trips to a naval base in San Diego to fix a submarine periscope. In short, Claus was the coolest.

The rest of the day was spent having an office hour to which nobody came, going to a seminar about catalysis where I understood about 20% of what was said, and polishing up my grad school presentation I'll be giving next week at my alma mater. Because guys, next week I'll be in Washington. I'm so excited I can hardly stand it.

I also replaced a (very) small but (kind of) important part on the interior of my car today! All by myself! Granted it was just the little piece that the sun visor clips in to, but I was still pretty proud of myself. I accidentally snapped the original one in half last week when I apparently got a bit overaggressive with the visor because it was way too sunny out for the middle of "winter." This resulted in the clip flying toward the windshield and the visor flying back toward my face, which made my drive home on the highway ever so exciting. Atleast it only cost $3.50 for the replacement part.