i'm back in a dorm room!

Hello from Colby College! I'm stuck in this beautiful dorm room for the next few days while I'm attending a conference. It's severely lacking of any wall decorations and is kinda creeping me out.

Note the fan... so of course, there's no air conditioning. And also my lovely nightstand, aka my small suitcase. I'll survive, but it's still a bit strange to walk into the bathroom this morning and the vice-chair of the meeting is standing there in her panties and a tshirt... and you're talking to her.
So, other than the half-naked vice-chair this morning, I met a couple of nice people last night that do electrophysiology.... they're going to teach me all about it today at the poster session since I usually zone out whenever it's mentioned and really don't understand it all that well. They're all only post-docs, so no job offers as of yet. But my poster session is tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes... I'll keep you all posted!

Roberto's going away party...

Last night a bunch of us got together at the Great Escape, of course, for Roberto's going away party. He's heading to Yale University in the United States (yes the Yale) to do his post-doc for a couple of years. It's very strange to think of life in Lausanne without Roberto because I met him right after I moved here. I don't know what we're going to do without Roberto at the Diablerets conference this year! Good luck Roberto!

-Roberto before beer
-Roberto after people started buying him drinks

In other news, I'm busy preparing for my conference next week in freaking Colby College. I'll be living in a dorm room for 5 days... yes, that means showering in a dorm bathroom.... argh, anybody still have their shower caddy that I can borrow? Colby College is also in the middle of Maine, so I'm basically stuck there with strangers. Hopefully they're not as dorky as most scientists and I can find somebody to pal around with. After the conference I'll be heading home for a few days and then back here to keep working!

super-fun weekend!

So after a long week at home every night being sick, we finally went out Friday night to Lutry and then up to the Fête de la Cité in the Old Town part of Lausanne. Lutry was fun as usual while I listened to 'the council' debate current events in both world and local EPFL politics.... of course this is only tolerable after we've opened the 2nd bottle of wine. Usually we take a bottle to go and sit out by the lake to watch the sun set, but we forgot disposable cups and so we just bought ice cream instead. Then we went up to Old Town and got to check out Sai's new apartment. As you can see, the view from his old apartment and the new apartment aren't quite equal, but the new place, while a glorified dorm room, is in a great part of town and doesn't have a bad view either.

-the council

-ice cream by the lake

-Sai's old apartment view

-Sai's new apartment view with the festival in full swing...he also has a view of the mountains off to the left

On Sunday, Joe and I headed out to Parc Aventure and had a lot of fun on the ropes course there. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check it out here. Watch out for the 'Presentation' page... it has a commercial (of course in french) that you can't turn off. We did 3 courses (green, red & blue) and I jumped off a rope swing, did zip lines, and a bunch of other crazy challenging stuff. I totally got rope burned and bruised up, but it was well worth it... next time i'll be wearing long sleeves. I got a couple of pictures, but by then end when we did the cool stuff, I was too tired to deal with not dropping the camera off the platforms.

-me on the tight rope

-Joe in the wooden tubes to start the red course

-Joe the monkey

Being sick sucks....

Joe & I are both sick...boo hoo. We were supposed to go hiking on Sunday, something that I would have given me a nice story to post about, but when we woke up on Sunday, Joe was severely ill and I was just starting to have some tightness in my chest. Luckily he got sick first this time, sparing me from hearing how I got him sick, thank goodness for that. Instead, he's about 1-2 days ahead of me in the illness so now I know what to expect. I've been sick plenty of times in this country, so we have a nice stock of Dayquil and Nyquil. It's so strange because there are so many drug companies here, but they do not sell equivalent cocktail cold medications in Switzerland. People here either just ride it out or they take lots of herbal remedies. I am definitely a poster child for how Americans like to take pills to treat everything!

Jacqui & Dan are engaged!

Congratulations you guys! Dan proposed via Mac (the monstrous german shepard) on Monday... how cute!

In other news, I've been adding more pictures to my flickr site, finally. Here's a guest pass to Joe's Bday pics, and I think that you can click on 'Sets' near the top of the page to look at my other sets of pictures... if not, let me know and I'll add more links.....

Jay's going away weekend!

So Jay is moving on to bigger and better things, namely the next 8 years to do his MD-PhD in Seattle. But before he left this morning, we had fun at the caveau in Lutry on Friday and grilling by the lake on Sunday.

-folks at the caveau

-tasting the special chinese wine that Lirong bought for him.... so nasty!
-hanging out by the lake....
-Sai, like usual, passes out after eating....