Time to catch up!

Ah, where to start, where to start. Well, chronological order has yet to fail me, eh?

Well, the three day work week was quite chill, if I do say so myself. Pretty chill, though. My advisors have been pretty busy but I've been getting good stuff done. I'm a practice fortran file for generating electric dipole moments from density grids away from getting serious stuff done with the computations! If I haven't figured it out by the end of the week, Damian said I should probably just use Fransisco's (another undergraduate, but he actually lives/goes to school here and has been working on this project for the whole year) code for the dipole moments. I figure I'm smart enough to get that out by the end of the week and the internet is a wonderful resource (and I can ask at least 4 different people in lab for help if I really need it). I'm excited! Note: fortran is the programming language most research scientists use.

The weekend was quite fantastic. Had Korean food for the first time ever!!! The side dishes and meal were both really interesting and really good! Well, I'm not a huge fan of the meet and this one weird orange thing, but it was 90% super fantastic =D

Yeah, we were a pretty huge group lol. After we split up, most people heading out to a random party. Chirag already had an invite to a party though, and he invited me along too. We peaced over a couple of streets (ok more than a couple, but we just missed the bus and it was only 10 blocks in the grand scheme of things... in the rain lol).

But once we got there it was great! Made some awesome new friends, had some more awesome Quilmes, and just general good times =D Drinking the one night, making pupus the next (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqjw7kYQyLo&feature=player_embedded) They're little frijoles and cheese and whatever you want filled things of dough. The dough itself could use a little salt in my opinion, but they were super awesome when you have some good sauce lying around ^_^ (and yes, I listened to the song just now since I did bother to post the link here lol)

OH so the next day we had planned on lunch and I got a view from the top of the apartment. Too. Amazing.

I can't imagine what it looks like at sun- rise/set.

Anywho, I'm doing more and more on the experimental side and I'm loving it! We opened up the molecular beam apparatus (almost called it a particle accelerator lol XD) to change up the stock. Not enough diethylamine in our clusters, so we were trying to figure out how we could increase that. I thought I remembered them saying that cresol (something else that's clustering with the diethylamine and water) dissolves in the amine, so I asked if it'd be a good idea to just straight dissolve the cresol in amine before it was even cooking. We were dropping amine into the pipelines before setting up the vacuum and all that previously, so the amines were just picking up the cresol. Hopefully this plan works out!

We didn't get to try it because I got ferociously sick that night. Coughing WAY more than usual. It actually kept me up most of the night =C I called out sick and my advisors - seriously wonderful people - tried to figure out the best way to help me. They ended up calling in a doctor for me. There was some confusion as to whether they were gonna take me to a doctor/public hospital or whether they were going to call one in for me, though. That said, I wasn't sure what to expect and apparently the doctor had been outside buzzing my door for 20 minutes before I noticed... I felt really bad about it, but I did at least get to see him. It was like a 5 minute exam or so. He said to pop some ibuprofen (to reduce the minor swelling in my throat, I presume), use a nebulizer/breathe steam (to clear up my throat, I presume), gargle with baking soda (for its antiseptic properties, I presume), and get a chest xray the next day (the next day being today).

So I got some ibuprofen and had a nice, long, hot shower. Yesterday night I was coughing up maelstroms again though. It was pretty atrocious until I noticed that my close was open. I then remembered how extremely dusty my jackets got when I put them in there (the top closet, not the bottom one) and figured maybe there was just THAT much dust in there that it was killin' me not-so-softly. Well, upon closing all closet doors and taking some Aerotina (Argentine Claritin, basically), it took me about 10 minutes to fall asleep like a baby. I'm now incredibly sure it's just how dusty this place is and that me wearing my dusty jackets hasn't been helping. A cleaning lady will be coming in during or before this weekend, so once that happens I'll see how I feel and judge what to do from there.

On a substantially more random note, Argentine chemicals are much more philosophical than what I'm used to:

I was also incredibly delighted to see the caloric information come in kilojoules on the candy. All you science people are grinning a real big grin right now, aren't you?