Can someone make the exams stop?

Since Ev works from home and finding study space on campus around exams is impossible, I've been setting up shop in a couple coffee shops. Amazing, it works pretty well. I have definitely inherited the family trait of expanding on to all available counter space.

I think I took a lot of notes for this class... and study notes, and practice exams... I'm going to be so pissed if I don't pass this class.

So far I am done with 2 out of 3 exams. The first (Climate Change Science and Ethics) was nice and easy. Those are always good for the ego and confidence.


Grad School Revelations #1

Read the exam questions. Seriously. Read them. You might get a gift, like the one on this old exam:

Unfortunately, the actual exam had no gift and it kicked my ass. Which was sad.


To soothe my pain at studying really hard for an exam and doing really badly, Ev and I wandered into Rotterdam Centraal Station on Saturday, looked at each other, and went "want to get out of Rotterdam?" We then got on the next train out and ended up in Eindhoven.

There are some cool buildings near Eindhoven Central Station.

Anyways, I think we'll be buying tickets home for the summer tomorrow.

Maybe I'll do some of that exam studying stuff, too.

Skiing is going to be really awesome.

Mondays.... about that

It's Monday.

Not like I'd know. I haven't taken a day off school/studying since January 2nd. As I may have mentioned earlier, having exams after the holiday break is evil and cruel.

On the plus side, apparently I write good reports.

On the negative side, I have to memorize three derivations for the Modified Cam Clay soil model that I won't have sufficient time to actually derive so basically (and I quote the professor) I just have to do them a few times and memorize them. Don't try to derive all of it, because some of the relationships that need to be substituted in are experimentally derived, which makes it all but impossible.

I am really bad at memorizing stuff.

Ack!

So obviously, exams are kicking my butt and I haven't even taken one yet.



On a completely and wonderfully unrelated note, Ev and I saw The Imitation Game last night and it was pretty great. I really enjoy movies that are a little intellectual and biographic. I think I appreciated the film even more because Alan Turing has been in the news recently (something about his death probably not being a suicide but accidental inhalation of cyanide). Regardless, the guy was a genius and The Imitation Game does a pretty good job of capturing both his brilliance, personality (or at least how you hear about his personality.... apparently he was a bit arrogant and awkward) and the persecution for his sexuality.

It's also possible I have a huge thing for Benedict Cumberbatch. After all, he did play Stephan Hawking in a BBC movie a few years back that was pretty damn good.

Aaaaaaaand I think I just confessed to being a massive nerd. Oh well.



Anyways, there really hasn't been much thrilling or exhilarating stuff in my life right now. I suspect the blog update after spring break will be more along the lines of what you've all come to expect. Or I'm delusional. That's also a possibility.

And because I have no pictures for you, here's one of my sister's cats.

He was NOT pleased about being dressed up...

An Ode (ish) to Adobe

I suppose it's time again for a blog post. And, once again, I'm going into finals, which means my life is pretty far from exciting.

The big news is that Ev's residence permit was approved!

Finally!

Which is kind of awesome, especially since it means he now has no excuse to leave me. Mwahahaha!
Anyway, he did his biometrics (photo and fingerprints) and is now waiting for the physical residence card to show up. Good times.

Now that Ev gets to stay, I need to get us plane tickets to Grenoble, France for spring break (first week of February) to go skiing. My friend Eric (remember Eric from a few posts back?) lives there and we're going to crash at his place and be ski bums for a week. It's going to be magical.


We're also starting to plan out our summer travels. After our amazing experience in Mallorca, we're going to go to Kalymnos, Greece for a couple weeks after my classes finish to do a bunch of climbing and hiking. Naturally, the climbing in Kalymnos has a lot of overhangs, caves, and some slabs. In short, I should probably improve my upper body strength to the point I can do a pull-up. Heh. So we have started "training" for our summer climbing adventures, with way more bouldering than I would like (but then again, I am not a fan of bouldering... because I have crappy upper body strength).

It's nice to have things to look forward to.


The "what will our travel schedule be like when we go back to the States this summer" planning has also started. Kinda. Things are pretty uncertain right now, but we'll firm them up and start getting tickets here soon. Ish.



For my Behavior of Soils and Rocks class, we're using a geotechnical modeling program called Plaxis for the final assignment. It's a really nifty program and pretty much all the processes are coupled, which means you can build the models and use multiple variables rather than having to plug in variables separately and do multiple simulation runs. The graphs generated can be customized and plotted to, well, whatever.

I am a fan.

A large part of the assignment is annotating the graphs to show how different parameters are derived and basically prove that you understand how to interpret them. I plot everything to a pdf and annotate it directly in Adobe, since it can look pretty and is really easy to change. Last night (yes, I was doing schoolwork on a Friday night. Surprise surprise) I showed a bunch of my classmates how to annotate in Adobe. Because it's waaaaaaay faster than drawing in the lines in Excel. Seriously. Screw Excel.

Did I mention it comes out pretty?


I felt kind of smart. Ish.

Or at least like I got to apply some of the magical skills I acquired working. I love Adobe.


On that note, my laptop is at 9% battery life and I'm running a Plaxis simulation remotely through a VPN (modern technology is the best). Which means everything is probably going to die soon.


So that's it for this week. Thrilling, I know. Such is the life of a grad student.

European Holidays (a really picture-heavy post)

I suppose I should post that blog update I promised last week... it's been a wonderful break from school and reality, and I'm not sure I'm ready to go back. After all, I have one more week of classes, then exams. It really is cruel and inhumane. Rose and Pete left yesterday (Friday) morning, so I started back on the school stuff. Gotta ease my way back into it, I guess. Or something.

So, as was probably made obvious by my totally half-assed post last week, we went to Mallorca over Christmas with a set of Ev's parents. We were both getting really homesick, especially since we kept getting asked if we were going home for Christmas and hearing everyone talk about getting to see their families, so it was incredibly nice to see Rose and Pete. There really is no substitute for family.

Our first day (Christmas Eve) we set out to find a beach. To be fair, there is no shortage of beaches in Mallorca. We found ourselves in the northern part of the island in a town called Alcuida. It should be noted that the beautiful, sunny weather in the photos is deceiving: it was actually a bit chilly. But once again, my theory that the best time to go places is during the off-season was confirmed; we had the entire beach (and most of the town) to ourselves (although this was probably partially due to the whole holidays thing).

There was a pretty sweet church near the center of Alcuida that we wandered around. It was very pretty and there are some silly photos of us pretending to shoot things out of the narrow window slits in the walls (the church was obviously a fortress at one point), but I've decided to attempt to limit the length of this post. Although that's probably not going to turn out that well...

To celebrate Christmas day, Ev and I decided to check out the climbing on the island. The grades on Mallorca are famously hard and we spent hours before (and during) the trip trying to pick out crags within our abilities. For our first forey onto the beautiful Mallorcan limestone, we chose Puig St. Marti, a small wall with only a few routes (but all within our abilities). 

As is the case with many, many crags, the view was spectacular. While Ev and I put up all but 1 route on the wall, Rose and Pete hiked along the ridge and took a couple pictures. 

Climbing at Puig St. Marti was an amazing experience (at least for me) for several reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had no trouble with any of the routes. Well, except my last lead. That was a 6a (5.10a/b) line that went up next to a bees nest. In the defense of the climbing guide, the bees nest was indicated on the crag with an arrow, but I figured there was probably a decent amount of space between the holds and the nest, plus it was chilly and winter and the bees were probably dormant.

I'm an idiot.

Right about the time my shoulders were level with the bees nest (and my hand was about 1.5 ft away) I heard the buzzing. And saw a couple bees start coming out.

I should probably mention that the crux of the route is over a bulge by the bees nest.

And my darling belayer has a pathological terror of bees.

I'm proud (?) to say that I pulled the crux, finished the last 3m of the route and bailed the hell off it. I'm mildly disgusted to admit that that was not my first climb adjacent/through a bees nest. There is now an annotation in our guidebook on that route: BEES!!!

Ev decided to channel his artsy side when we wandered around to the back of the wall to check out the view (and some climbs out of caves). Obviously, the view was amazing, as is the picture.

To celebrate a wonderful day of climbing, the beautiful view, and the joy of having family around (and an actual vacation), we took another traditional backpack picture.

We were in Mallorca for a week and went hiking/climbing/wandering every day. It was lovely. Adventures included a trip to Cap de Formentor, a beautiful outlook by a bay. The access catch was the long drive to the lookout, which involved long, sharp switchbacks up a steep mountain. The drive kind of freaked Rose and Pete out a bit, so our intended destination of a beach cove was modified to the Cap de Formentor.

Since apparently Ev and I are unable to not go to the highest point around, we cut straight up the remaining side of the mountain to check out the ruins at the top. There were some what appeared to be WWII bunkers, a lookout tower, and on our way back down (via the road this time) we discovered a long tunnel into the mountain that led to a big cavern. Unfortunately, we didn't have headlamps so our exploration into that was brief.

View from the top of the lookout tower. I am a master of the flattering selfie. Kinda.

Did I mention that the tunnel we found was loooooooong? It was really cool.

Apparently Rose and Pete enjoy wandering around crags and mountains and strongly encouraged us to have another day of climbing. Obviously, we didn't require much convincing. Because of how comfortable we were on the 5.8's and 5.9's on Christmas, we decided to check out one of the main areas in Mallorca: Puig de Garrafa. We never actually made it to the wall we were planning to. Instead, we picked random routes as we walked towards the wall and climbed those.

We have definitely gotten much better at climbing since moving to Europe. Every route we climbed at Puig de Garrafa was a 6a or higher (5.10a/b) (with one 6b slab. Which rocked. Hard.)

Povleron (6a). Like all routes that make me want to cry, the crux was the first move. Seriously, that is kind of terrifying. I actually took a fall on it (I failed to stand up on top of the minuscule ledge above the crux). That was first and only lead fall I've taken where I was fully prepared to deck. Ev managed an amazing catch and I swung under the adjacent overhang. My boyfriend kind of rocks. (I did it clean my second attempt)

The second crux on Povleron

Shaking it out, baby.

The weather wasn't particularly good the last couple days of our trip, so we spent a day checking out some of the caves on the island. We went to two: Drach and Campanet, but only have pics from Drach. Which came out way better than I thought they would.

The day before we left (Dec. 29) we decided to hike up to Castillo de Alaro. The hike took us along the main wall of the Alaro climbing area, which made Ev and I start drooling. The desire to get on that rock is going to serve as a primary motivator to come back to Mallorca to climb. F'real. 

The Alaro main wall. We are so coming back to climb this. Seriously. Tufa city.

Mission "Become a Boss at Climbing Tufas" has now commenced.

The approach to the castle ruins was spectacular, especially after it stopped raining on us.

And obviously, the view from the top was worth the hike.

After returning to the Netherlands, we took Rose and Pete to Den Haag on New Years Eve to check out the beach, then enjoyed a short run, medium-length walk, and the amazing Dutch-version of fireworks from our balcony.

It gets dark about 5:30pm. Fireworks started going off around 5:31pm. 

And continued non-stop until 11:59pm (most of the fireworks were privately launched).

As the clock flipped over to 2015, downtown Rotterdam lit up with a, frankly, spectacular fireworks display. Not to be outdone, the entire skyline basically blew up with an insane amount of fireworks and pyrotechnics that continued unabated until about 2am. 

Seriously. 

Non-stop fireworks from 5:30pm to 2am.

It was absolutely incredible, and I seriously doubt I'll ever see anything quite like it again. We stood on the balcony and watched the displays for hours. 

After taking Rose and Pete to Amsterdam on New Years Day and mildly traumatizing them by taking a quick walk through the red light district, we put them on a plane back to Alaska on Jan. 2. It was hard to see them go. I know I had a hard time coming up to the holiday season with some home-sickness and missing my family. This was the first year where I missed a Christmas (or early-Christmas,  since I tend to travel on Christmas day for money reasons) with my family, made even harder by the fact that for the first time in years both sisters were home for the holidays. 

I suppose this is part of growing up?

I dunno.... but having pseudo-family (and Ev) around helped immensely. 

Anyway, Happy New Year, everyone. I hope it is amazing and full of adventures, whatever kind they may be.