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.