25 December 2014

Merry Christmas from Mallorca!

Merry Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivus from Mallorca! 

We are enjoying our first holiday longer than a weekend sunce moving to Europe with Ev's mom and stepdad. Its awesome. Lots of hiking around yesterday, and we celebrated Christmas with some amazing rock climbing followed by a home cooked dinner. Most excellent. 

A real blog update will be posted after the new year. 

Happy Holidays!! 

15 December 2014

Almost the Holidays

It's always hard staying focused on school as the holiday break approaches. When you're on the semester system, you just have to maintain focus through finals then enjoy the couple weeks off. Over here, however, we don't have finals until the end of January, so we get two weeks off, followed by two weeks of class then exams.

It's not the greatest system for maximum holiday break enjoyment.

But the lights are going up everywhere, and it's really quite pretty to wander around downtown Rotterdam.


The best part of the massive trees is that they build concrete stands to keep them from blowing over in the (constant) wind. 

We spent most of this weekend wandering around Rotterdam and Den Haag. We didn't have any plans and didn't want to sit in the house all weekend. It's kind of fun aimlessly meandering around a city, although we determined that we're actually getting pretty familiar with Rotterdam. Also, this magical piece of art.



Last week I had a little bit of a "wtf am I doing here, this is stupid" episode during a (required) class when one of the teachers decided to explain in detail the concept of mass balance. And what it means. And how it applies to melting ice. And what it means. And what mass loss is. And what mass gain entails.



For the "I've never taken physics" people in my life, having a professor explain in excruciating detail a very, very, very elementary physics concept in a graduate level class is kind of infuriating.

Unfortunately, my life isn't terribly exciting at the moment. I was putting off writing this week's blog in the hope that we would get a letter from the IND (immigration department) with a decision of Ev's residence permit application, but that joyous news has not arrived in the mailbox yet. (Last week was kind of a charlie fox after we heard back from the IND after 2.5 months of waiting saying we didn't submit a declaration of unmarried status (we did, and it was the original. They had a scan of it in their system, but it was in a separate pdf than the rest of the application) and with a question about the bank statements we submitted. When I finally managed to get ahold of the woman reviewing Ev's application, we got everything squared away and I confirmed that she had everything she needed. I was told she'd make a decision by the end of the week, so we've been anxiously checking the mail a couple times a day. There's some deadline stuff coming up that's going to make life hell if we don't get a yes or no response on the resident permit by next Monday)

On that uplifting note, I'm going to continue doing some research/messing around with a climate model so I can use the outputs to develop a model to evaluate the effects of climate change on soil slope stability.

It's actually really cool. I swear.

07 December 2014

Thanksgiving and Homework

It sure seems like time is flying by and I have no idea where it's going...

Last week, my friend Eric was in Amsterdam for a meeting. Since the Netherlands is super small and thus everything is really close, we caught the train and met him on Wednesday for some climbing. Saturday morning he came down to Rotterdam and we hung out, got some food, and caught up before he had to go back to France.


It turns out that Eric lives in the mountains and is close to several ski resorts. Ev and I officially have plans for my spring break.

On Sunday we had Thanksgiving with some fellow Americans. Lots of delicious food, wine, and good company. It was awesome.


I made lemon sweet potatoes (because they're kind of my favourite food ever), an apple pie, and a raspberry pie. I was super stoked that the raspberry pie managed to hold its shape (ish) after cutting. And of course I can't find the picture of this magic, so you'll just have to take my word on it.


Christmas lights are going up everywhere, and downtown Rotterdam (and Delft, although I've seen less of those) has some impressive arrays of lights all over, especially in the center of town. On December 5, Sinterklaas comes to the Netherlands with his helpers, Black Pete. It's probably worth noting that the Black Pete thing involves a bunch of people in blackface and is just a tiny bit racist. There is no way I can properly explain this, so feel free to learn things about other cultures! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinterklaas

I'm just gonna leave this here...


This last week has been kind of crazy. We did all our Christmas shopping and got it in the mail. I've been working on an assignment for my Behavior of Soils and Rocks class, which is essentially an advanced mechanics of materials class, which is an awesome class. The catch is I'm incredibly out of practice with this whole doing actual math thing (I think I did actual math with something that wasn't FlowMaster or Civil 3D like, three times while working), so the going has been slow. I'm spending waaaaaaaay too much time on something that I'm pretty sure isn't as complicated as I think it is. I officially have the questions coded in both Excel and Matlab. Brushing up my programming skills! I'm gonna call that a silver lining, I guess...


On that note, I'm going to go back to attempting to finish this stuff.