crazy busy fun long weekend!

(Note: the hyperlinks (except one for the map of the hike) take you to my picture sets on flickr.)

Last Friday and Saturday was the annual Lemanic Neuroscience meeting in les Diablerets. This year I was a student organizer and got to go up a night early to help set up for the meeting. It was a lot of hard work, but also a lot of fun to do. I even got to hang out with the two women guest speakers and talk to them about their careers and how they balance science and a normal life. Even though they're both very successful, it's nice to see that you don't have to be a superwoman (like my & Joe's advisors) to be a good scientist.

-organizing committee & the 2 guest speakers Thursday night at dinner

As a student organizer, I organized a trip up to the newly opened Alpine Coaster at the top of Glacier 3000. It was really fun! I took five guys from EPFL and the University of Geneva up to the top and we had an absolutely beautiful day. After riding the coaster, we then took a chairlift down to the glacier and walked around for about half an hour. It sucks that it's so expensive to get up to the glacier or I'd like to go again with Joe before it closes for the season.

-Johannes & Christian in their sleds

-the coaster and station from the bottom

-Ullrich, Johannes, Ruthger, Christian, me, Gijs on the glacier

-Here's a movie of the coaster. It's a bit bumpy because I was sitting in the sled waiting to go down the coaster myself.

Living in Switzerland we don't get to celebrate Labor Day, but we do get a random Monday off in September for the Jeûne Fédéral holiday. It's some holiday that has to do with fasting for a religious reason and most people eat prune tarts. To take advantage of this holiday, we went for a 6 hour hike in Ovronnaz, which is in the Valais. Jan suggested the hike to Adrian as a 'nice hike', which it was, but it was more agressive than we expected, especially since this was the first hike for Stephan in his new hiking boots. Once we saw the 500m assent, we remembered that Jan is Swiss-german and of course, he considers that 'nice'. Even with all of the climbing, we managed to finish the hike in 5 hours instead of 6. A lot of the signposts didn't have times listed, so we weren't sure if we were on time or not, and since the chairlift stopped running at 5pm, we hurried to get back in time. It also started raining quite hard about half hour before the end, so we were all soaking wet... nothing like hair product leaching out and running down your neck.... ewwww.... If you want to see where we hiked on a map, we started at Jorasse, walked up to Fenestral, around the mountain past the lakes to l'Erié, to Lui D'Août and back to Jorasse.

-Joe, Adrian, Stephan & me about 2 hours into the hike (I learned how to use the self timer on the new camera!)

-back at the chairlift, soaking wet, and surprisingly smiley

Jacqui's hen night & Sai's birthday

What fun we had last night! We started at the caveau in Lutry for some wine, cheese, sausage and 'manly cake'. The managers of the caveau thought the penis bottle cork and balloons were funny...but it was still a good thing we were hidden in the back room. Once we got kicked out of the caveau, we headed into town, sans Melody, to meet the boys at Kerrigan's for a few drinks for Sai's birthday. I think the guys enjoyed playing with the penis balloons more than we did....hmmm. No comment. We also covered them in 'male rating' stickers, some of them weren't happy with the ones they got, but tough.

-Melody, Rikki, me, Jacqui, Kristen & Mayumi at the caveau
-Jacqui & her penis balloons-Sai, enough said.

The rest of the pictures are posted on flikr here. Check them out, they're really funny.

teaching Stéphanie to bake chocolate chip cookies

Last Saturday night, I finally taught Stéphanie how to bake chocolate chip cookies at her apartment. For her birthday in June, I gave her an american cookbook with american measuring cups and spoons, and proper american brown sugar and vanilla extract...everything she needs to make proper cookies. The cookies turned out great! As you can see below, Manu, Stéphanie's boyfriend, loved both the cookie dough and cookies. Joe and Manu were forbidden to come into the kitchen at one point because they kept stealing warm cookies. After cookie baking, Stéphanie then made us curry chicken and mushrooms for dinner... very yummy.

-Manu neck-deep in the bowl trying to lick off the remaining cookie dough

-Manu the cookie monster trying to steal another cookie off Stéphanie's plate

PS. These pictures were taken with our new Panasonic camera! After 4 years, and thousands of photos, our old Canon is now RIP. Hopefully the new one lasts just as long!

Pictures from Kristen!

yeah! I got the pictures of me on the wall at Pierre du Moëllé from Kristen yesterday. Years of dancing truly helps a lot with climbing... thank goodness for an insane amount of flexibility... now I just have to work on getting stronger and getting rid on my chicken arms!


In other news, Stéphanie, my maid-of-honor, just finished her first week of her new job. Congratulations! Also, Jacqui's 'hen night' (AKA bachelorette party) will be next Tuesday night at the Caveau in Lutry. Tuesday is also Sai's birthday, so who knows where we'll end up. Watch for pictures next week... hopefully they'll be fit to print!

I love/hate photoshop!

So for almost 3 years now I've been hand merging all of my microscope pictures into one large picture of my tissue, and for almost 3 years now it takes anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to do. Joe had mentioned that Jan had found a function in the newest version of Photoshop that autostitches all the pictures together. Today I found it. It assembled 25 images in about 4 minutes. I'm still sitting here staring at the screen in complete bewilderment of how much time I wasted assembling these images!

Kristen's birthday, UFOs & climbing

What an adventurous weekend! Friday night was Kristen's 25th birthday party at the Great Escape, of course, and then some of us went out dancing afterward. Around midnight, Joe & Adrian left to walk home and shortly after they left I got a call to go outside and see these strange lights over lake Geneva. After clearing everybody in our party out from the bar, we all stood in the courtyard completely freaked out watching the UFOs hover and then fade away one by one slowly over ~20 minutes. Then we left to go dancing, but of course, Arnie was still freaked hours later when we were in the nightclub dancing. Saturday, Joe submitted a UFO report on some website where he found an extremely similar sighting from 2006. Who knows, maybe they were aliens, maybe they were just flares.

-Joe, Arnie, Kristen & I at Great Escape (why do the girls always look better than the guys?)

-aliens or flares?-Arnie, Nathan & Stephan dancing at Buzz

Sunday, I went climbing with a group of people for the day at Pierre de Moëllé high up in the mountains. We had a beautiful view over toward Diablerets and perfect climbing weather. I did some really cool climbs and Kristen has a bunch of cool pictures of me. Once I get them from her I'll post them here or on flickr. I also did a lead-climb for the first time yesterday! Even though it was rated fairly easy, I was still super nervous. In the end I did it- didn't fall and made it back down all in one piece completely full of adrenalin! It's a totally different feeling than just top-roping. Can't wait to try it again! I have a feeling that I'm completely addicted to climbing... how strange....

-Kristen starting up the wall

-Super hardcore Kristen!

Slow week & more climbing

This past week was very quiet, especially since Joe wasn't around to instigate going out. He was in the states all week at his 10-year high school reunion and then to a conference in Milwaukee. He even squeezed in a couple days in Chicago with Jacqui and Amine before they headed to the conference. They even went to Gibson's Steakhouse...I'm so jealous!! Especially since I only got to eat out for fondue this week. Adrian's friends from college were visiting, so we went out for fondue Monday night and then to Lutry Tuesday night. The rest of the week was very tame... stayed home most of the time and watched 3 movies and cleaned up the apartment.

On Saturday, Stephan, Rikki (a PhD student in Joe's lab) and I went climbing in Collombey. It wasn't the prettiest of places, with tons of rock dumped on the site and a view of a power plant, but it was in the shade all day long... very nice to know about in the future if it's ever super hot. It wasn't too easy to get to either (train & 2 buses) and the climbs aren't used often, as seen with the plants everywhere and lots of spiders. On one of the runs, there was a huge nest-like thing of orange-bodied daddy long legs... just hanging there bouncing in the wind. Super creepy, but I managed not to freak out too much, only came off the wall for a minute or so to get over the initial shock before climbing around them. Stephan even warned us since he climbed first, but I wasn't expecting that many of them. And on another run, I had to swat one off the wall because it kept trying to get into the handhold I wanted to use. After the spider runs, we moved to a different part of the wall and met these really nice english-speaking climbers. Turns out that they run a treking/climbing/alpine excursion company, explains why they were so good at climbing! They were so nice, they even drove us back to the train station, which saved us so much time with the buses.

-here I am at the top of the spider run. I'm so tiny up there!

-here's Stephan climbing his first 6a. (6a is the difficulty grade, I've only climbed 4s and some 5s)

The rest of the pictures are on flickr if you want to see more action shots of our bums.

My first day rock climbing!

On Sunday, I went climbing for the first time with Stephan, Kristen & Arnie. We went to an old rock quarry on the outskirts of Aigle, in St. Triphon. It was so much fun! We did a bunch of different climbs around the quarry, I think about five. Surprising to me, the quarry was full of people. We had a beautiful day, you'll see in the pictures, which made it a lot more rewarding to check out the view once you got to the top. Unfortunately, I didn't have any pockets in my pants, so I couldn't take any pictures from the top of the wall. Next time! Of course now, my butt, arms and torso are sore, but it's not as bad as the day after Parc Aventure, and thankfully I'm not covered in bruises. I did slip and fall a bit once, but it wasn't that bad, especially since I was wearing pants.

-Kristen at the top of the wall

-Arnie nursing his hangover, Stephan belaying Kristen

-Me looking totally confused about where to go next

For more pictures from climbing, here's the link to my flickr site.

Back in Switzerland & exhausted....

Yes, I'm alive and I survived sleeping in a dorm room and eating dining commons food for a week. The conference was a lot of fun, but it was also an extremely intensive learning experience. I met a lot of really nice people who taught me a lot about electrophysiology, something I know next to nil about. But, there were a couple of talks that were extremely interesting and comprehensible. Maybe people to work with, maybe not, depending on whether I'm going to stay in academia or not. The last night of the conference, we had a lobster bake, which was really cool! I ate my first lobster out of a shell... I must admit that the lobster, while dead, did scare me once when I caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye... yes, how pathetic!

-me and the lobster -the chef & the lobsters

After the conference, it was a whirl-wind trip home and then right back here. Being at home, rushing around, was no vacation at all, so I'm now exhausted and wishing I could sleep all day! But in other cool news, while I was gone, Joe booked us on a cruise in the western Mediterranean! how cool! The first week of October can not come soon enough!

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....

Stoli had puppies!

Allison's golden retriever, Stoli, had puppies over the weekend! She had 4 girls and a boy....aren't they cute!

busy busy week!

What a crazy week! Monday-Wednesday I was in an all-day class.... quite intense, but really interesting. The professor is from Harvard and was an excellent teacher, well worth giving up 3 days of sitting at my computer...... Tuesday night was Adrian's birthday celebration dinner at a tapas restaurantin town, his real birthday was the same day as Mark's defense last week so we had to delay things for a bit. The food was good, but for some reason, the waiter decided that he'd only speak to Joe's summer student in broken/bad spanish instead of speaking french with one of the many fluent frenchies at the table.... very bizarre. Last night Joe made mini-burgers for me and 'the boys.' They were mini because I came home with the wrong sized buns.... they were out of the normal sized ones by the time I got to the store!! But they turned out great and we got to hear all about Stephan's trip to Texas/Mexico. Of course, here are some pics from this past week....

-Full bellies at the tapas place....Sai what are you doing?

-A rainbow over Lausanne from our kitchen balcony on Monday night....

Dr. Mark's thesis defense

Yesterday was Mark's Thesis defense. He is officially a doctor, how exciting! Joe, Mark and Sai all moved over here together from Northwestern in January 2004 and Mark's the first of Melody's students to graduate from EPFL. Of course the lab couldn't let Mark defend his thesis without a little fanfare, so they all dressed up in labcoats and presented a 'mortar board' to him and put together a hysterical slideshow of pictures from the past 3 years. Our camera is in it's death throws, so only a couple pictures came out from last night....
-The first time the entire Swartz lab has ever worn labcoats....
-Melody introducing Mark to the audience, as well as some little known facts about Kansas...

Jason & Jen's visit!

they came, they went and they left a wake of disaster in their path....just kidding. We had a great time hanging out with Jason and Jen. It's the first time that the 4 of us have really gotten a chance to hang out and get to know each other more than just a couple hours at family events and it was great! Saturday we introduced them to the caveau in Lutry, of course. Pascal gave us a wonderful selection of red wines to taste and add to our list of wines tasted there. Then we took a bottle out to the lake to enjoy the sunset.

Sunday we went up to Interlaken, the Schilthorn, and Bern.
-on one of the 4 cable cars to get to the top of the Schilthorn.

-On top of the Schilthorn with the Jungfraujoch behind us.
-Relaxing on the train on the way home.

Monday Jason and Jen walked around the city in the morning while Joe and I were at work. I met them for lunch and then the 4 of us took a boat trip down the the Chateau de Chillon in Montreaux. It was such a beautiful day to be out on the water.
And then Joe introduced them to Satellite before we went home and I made fondue for dinner. Then they were off to Italy to continue their 2 week European excursions. Hopefully I'll find time to post pictures from the past 2 months soon....

I'm so sick of the microscope!

So this morning I spent 2 1/2 hours on the microscope taking pictures, which doesn't seem too long until you realize that you back is all scrunched funny from it and you've taken 208 pictures. So, in an effort to procrastinate assembling my 208 images, I thought I would update here and let everyone know that I feel like a hunchback.

This weekend was Stéphanie's birthday barbeque by the lake and we had wonderfully warm weather... the best in the 3 years that I've been going to her Bday barbeque. Joe joined me after a while, he had another Bday party to attend, so I was forced to speak french until he arrived. That's not entirely true, but I did speak quite a bit of french with some dude named Pierre who loved the States but refused to speak English- go figure. Sunday I had a nice and relaxing day doing laundry and vacuuming, like usual. And after dinner, Joe and I went on an exploratory walk in a neighborhood near ours and I found an Italian ice cream shop attached to a pizza parlor. I was so excited! I even got a waffle cone! It wasn't freshly made, but considering I found ice cream that wasn't Movenpick and actually tasted like ice cream, I was ecstatic! So, soon, when the weather is not threatening a downpour, as it has for the past 2 weeks straight, we'll head over there with the gang, and get some pizza and ice cream on the terrace.

This weekend, Joe's cousin, Jason, and his wife, Jen, are coming to visit! We have no idea what we're going to do while they're here, but I'm sure we'll figure something out once they arrive Saturday afternoon. I'll let you know how it goes!

French class is over!

So yesterday was my last day of french class for the year, which ended with an exam. I didn't study for the exam this time, so we'll see how well I could conjugate the subjunctive verbs when I pick up my test next week. In other news, this week was quite busy with work stuff. I finally met with my advisor after not seeing her for a couple of weeks. And now, of course I have lots of things to accomplish by the end of the month. Hopefully I can get it all done!

In regards to fun things we did this past week....The Beer festival was a lot of fun this past weekend. Thankfully the weather cooperated better than last year and we had a great time down by the lake. Monday night we finally watched the Robin Williams stand-up DVD that Stephan was always talking about... it was very, very funny and not for the easily offended. My sides hurt from laughing so much. Dance class was fun this week, but I found out that there are no organized classes in July and August! And I was just getting all limber again.... well, I guess I will have to drag Joe out to go hiking more this summer so that I can stay in shape until classes start again in September. And last night we had a little girl's night at the caveau in Lutry. We were quite boring last night since we all went home after the caveau closed, but we're looking forward to Stéphanie's birthday party this Saturday night by the lake. It's always a good time with the Swiss girls... and boys, too. Not much planned for next week, but Joe's cousin, Jason, and his wife, Jen, come on Saturday to stay with us for a couple of days before they go to Italy. It'll be great fun having them around!