A crazy week

Sorry I dropped off the face of the world this week, folks.
It has been a crazy week, with some very bad lows and some big highs. So I will update you on the news.

Earlier this week, after 92 years of living, my grandmother passed away peacefully. I spent good chunks of my childhood summers on the farm as her small shadow and I am very grateful for these memories. I will miss her dearly but I am thankful for the many years we did have together. My family is currently scattered to the four corners of the world making our grief even more difficult. We have decided to hold off and have a memorial service for her in the spring- likely around Easter when we can gather everyone together. In a way, I am glad for the delay. The edge will be taken off the grief and then the service will be what it should for a such a long, well-lived life: a celebration.

Because of this news, I basically spent a couple of work days just hoping for them to be over. I have also put in a couple of late evenings this week trying to figure out just what the heck these cool looking particles I made are. This will take all of my chemistry tricks-of-the-trade to figure this one out.

Today was my first training session on the High Resolution Transmission Electron Microscope (HR-TEM). I have been wanting to learn this technique for years. To put it in non-nanoist terms, it is similar to getting to drive my father- in-law’s prized 1967 Lotus convertible. I have put in my years of driving my mom’s Plymouth Acclaim (i.e. the low res TEM) and now I have been given the keys to the sports car. YIPPIE!

Last but definitely not least, The Chicken got some very exciting news this week. He has had a paper accepted for publication in a Very Big Journal (but I am not allowed to say which one). We went for beer and kosher pizza to celebrate. The pizza joint was a real mom-and-pop gem with the English version of the menu being a highlight. We could have ordered pizza with brokoly or even eggplanet. We decided on pineapple, green peppers and, of course, lots of mushrooms in recognition of the chemical achievement that got the paper: total synthesis of a fungal metabolite, or as I like to describe it: he made fungus poo.

If you are wondering what kosher pizza entails, you can say goodbye to pork products such as pepperoni, ham, and since there is cheese, any meat at all for that matter. Despite this, the pizza pie was still damn tasty.