Windy Cookies

The crazy is just getting started RE: exams, but I think I'm finally getting the hang of studying for them. Well, getting the hang of it again. I'm pretty sure I had it figured out during my undergrad. Maybe.

To make things better, my darling sisters decided to remedy a serious failing of Europe: lack of girl scout cookies.

Ev was so excited about the cookies that he replaced my head with them.

We were also amused to discover that Cool Ranch Doritos have a much more badass name in Europe: Cool American Flavor. Because 'Murica.

Thursday morning we picked Jesse up from the airport. Unsurprisingly, he was kind of wiped out from 20-something hours of traveling and managed to stay awake until around 6pm (Ev says there was a nap in there). I get way too much amusement from documenting jetlagged people sleeping on our couch.

 A couple odd sights were seen when we wandered around Amsterdam with Jesse. Like the birds making a nest out of cardboard in the back of a decrepit boat.

Or the street with a slightly questionable (albeit entertaining) name.

We pestered Jesse to pick out something to do during our day in Amsterdam. Eventually, we ended up at the Nemo Science Center. It looked pretty sweet, but I should probably confess that I glanced at the flier and didn't actually read it... for the record, "science center" does not equal science museum. "Science centers" are targeted at kids. Little kids.

We were definitely the oldest people there not hauling around little mini-me's. 

By, like, 20 years.

Seriously, it would have been freaking amazing for me if I was 5.

Granted, it was still pretty cool, and I'm all for teaching kids about science. Plus, there were gems like this one:

"Poop can be very smelly. That's because incomplete digestion of proteins results in rotting in the intestines.
Sometimes you will see a dog eat poo. The more proteins it contains the more the dog likes it!"

 We also forced Jesse to try his first ever coffee. He was... not impressed. Although it's kind of hard to tell, since that's the face he has in every picture ever.

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It's been pretty windy the last couple days, even for the Netherlands. You know, blowing a steady 30mph and gusting 60. It makes it hard to bike. Or walk. Or park your bike. Or scooter.

If these bikes weren't chained to things they would be long gone down the road.
The wind is merciless and cares not for your bike.

I just want to point out the construction workers in the background bracing against the wind. None of them are leaning on anything physical. The wind is just that strong. Sunday we watched a policewoman get knocked back by the wind into a section of ripped up sidewalk and fall down. She had a hard time getting up, what with it being impossible to actually move forward.

In the meantime, we've learned a couple things. First, one of the window flexes when there's a big gust of wind. Quite a bit, actually. It's a little disturbing. Second, our building sways, and it can be a bit nauseating.

The rain is currently falling (with the occasional bout of hail) between a 20 and 45-degree angle to the ground.

Oh, nevermind. It's not raining anymore. It got sunny and is now blinding us through the window.

The weather here changes insanely fast.

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I'll leave you with TU Delft's lovely gift to students for next quarter. It's actually quite clever. Evil, but clever.

Birds and (non)Eclipses

Yeaaaaaah.... it's officially the "chronically tardy blog update" part of the quarter.

That's right, it's exams time again!

I am sooooooo not ready for this.

Again.

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Lessons of the Netherlands #13:
Don't come here if you're freaked out by Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Or watch it here. Or have ornithophobia.

Seriously.

There are regularly massive swarms of birds that literally darken the sky. And that's just outside our apartment window. I've been trying to document this insanity for a couple days but never manage to be home during daylight hours. Sorry about that. I finally managed to get a picture of this (only in Den Haag, for some reason).

Hitchcock's version

Netherlands version (newly uploaded!)

To make it up to you, allow me to introduce you to some of the ridiculously urbanized birds in the Netherlands. Seriously, they do not give a crap about people. At all.

This heron was standing in line for a stroopwaffle with 15 people. No craps were given by the bird. The tourists (you can recognize the tourists. They get excited about the birds), however, were pretty psyched.

The row of sleeping geese ('wild'). 100ft from Den Haag Centraal Station.

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Lesson of the Netherlands #14:

You know how sometimes you go to your car and someone stuck fliers on the windshield? Kind of annoying, mildly inconvenient. That's not a thing in the Netherlands. Instead, people will go to the bike racks (and believe me, there are a lot of bike racks. And they're always full) and staple fliers around the handlebars. Or, if you're Google Glass, put seat covers on every bike on campus.

Every. Bike.

Google (probably) paid someone to walk around TU Delft with an insane amount of bike seat covers and put them on thousands of bikes. Thousands. And that's a conservative estimate.

This was taken around 6:30pm, so the racks were pretty empty. 

I don't even know, man. This is something that would only happen in the Netherlands.

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There was a big solar eclipse on Friday (20 March) and Ev and I were pretty excited to see it. Unfortunately, the weather refused to cooperate and instead we were fogged in with heavy cloud cover all morning during the eclipse. That afternoon, the skies cleared for the first time all week and we had a beautiful sunset.

Not an eclipse, but pretty nonetheless. 

Anyways, I'm just going to go ahead and predict that the updates for the next couple weeks will be chronically tardy (and possibly skipped), since Jesse-kins comes in tomorrow morning and I have exams. Again. Seriously, the quarter system is evil.

FEM, Pi Day, and Weekends

Lesson of the Netherlands #12:
The Dutch have the best name for American football. In pretty much everywhere but the US, "football" is soccer, and that game we play is something weird with a nonsense name. So the Dutch call it "hand egg." Afterall, you use your hands and the ball looks kind of like an egg.

Hand egg.

Bloody amazing.

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Last week was a haze of long days and late nights doing school so I didn't have to do any on the weekend. And, for the first time since middle school, I turned in an assignment late. Granted, I got permission from the prof, but still... well, at least it gave me the chance to get distracted by an unequal vertical deflection in the column I was modeling using the finite element method (FEM). It bothered me, so Ev helped me compare it to another FEM program to see if my program was screwed up or if it was a real thing. I must say, it's really nice having a boyfriend who's good with SAP.

My Fortran95 model.
Note the deflection on the top element

The SAP2000 model.
Hey, the deflection is still there!

Apparently this uneven vertical deflection is known as St. Venant's Principle and is a result of the quadratic shape functions used to define the elements in the mesh. (Under pure vertical loading the top element should vertically deflect uniformly, since equal load is being applied at all the nodes). This results in a concentration of horizontal stresses at the node directly below the top center one, and the uneven deflection dampens itself out moving away from the top. It's a numerical inconsistency and not representative of reality, but can be mitigated by using a smaller mesh size.

And that's your FEM lesson for the week. Cuz it's cool and I learned stuff.

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This weekend was magical on two fronts. First, it was Pi Day. The best Pi Day of our lives (but not in Europe because they use the day/month/year syntax, rather than the much superior month/day/year that all the cool kids use. Europe is really missing out on this)!

3/14/15 9:26:53

That's pi to 10 digits, ya'll. 

Naturally, we had a Pi Day brunch to celebrate this momentous occasion. And it was delicious.

Note the date stamp that refused to be awesome with us.

Awesome thing #2 was that it was Ev and my "official" 5 year anniversary. I say "official" because about 3 years ago we decided to just pick an anniversary date we could remember around the time we started dating. We're both nerds, and 3/14 was the obvious choice. 

It turns out that neither of us really wanted anything (or could afford anything) for our anniversary this year. I put in a butt-load of hours on school/work during the week and Ev's "present" (I seem to be using quotes a lot this blog post) was a whole weekend of Amy with no school or work. 

I got delicious chocolates and champagne. And Ev, of course.

I love this guy.

All in all, it was an excellent weekend. The box of chocolates was massive (close to the size of Ev's head, as you can probably see), and it took us three nights to get through them. 

They were delicious.

Chocolate is good.

We also went for a run. And it was magical.

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Sunday we went climbing. Our gym is clearing out 25 years of stuff from their back rooms and storage area and is selling a ton of really nifty, albeit dangerously outdated, stuff for really, really cheap.

Like the ancient semi-technical ice axe for $10.

Or the bowls of carabiners. That included this one.

I want it known that there is no scale trickery with this picture. That beaner is touching my cheek. 

For $2.50, hell yes I bought it. It's the size of my face! 

I have absolutely no idea what we're going to do with this massive, heavy piece of equipment (that I'm pretty sure isn't even rated for climbing), but I'm going to push Nick to take it on his next major mountain attempt to leave at the summit. I get a kick out of imagining the faces of other climbers who see it. "What the... dude, this thing is insane! I wonder how long it's been up here?" "Dude, I can't believe someone carried that thing up here!" ....... 

I'm easily entertained.

Spring Ramblings... kinda

Lesson of the Netherlands #11:
Drivers here look for and yield to cyclists. As a cyclist, you start taking for granted that most of the cars see you and are aware of how big (well, more like small) they are and start becoming accustomed to cars passing you very closely. Like, 6 inches between the mirror and your handlebars.

The busses are really bad about this.

There's a section of my commute to school that passes through a little town called de Zweth that is basically a 1 lane road with two speed bumps and a reaaaaaaaaally narrow bridge. One of the main bus routes between Rotterdam and Delft drives along the road every day, and, somehow, I manage to meet it almost every day.

One of the bus drivers recognizes me and nods as he passes, imprisoning me between bus and retaining wall with pretty much no space on either side.

If I really nail the timing, I get a bus going in both directions (you can't have two cars in there at once, so there's lots of yielding. It's actually way faster to bike through de Zweth during rush hours)!

But anyway, it's surprising how quickly you adjust to cars passing in extremely close proximity when you're biking.




I'm so going to get hit by a car when we move back to the States.


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There are signs of possible movement towards the mythical season known as "spring." Alaska doesn't do "spring" so much as "break up," when the ice and snow melts and the roads turn into slushy, rutted messes of potholes and awfulness. Spring in Alaska is when you're grateful for your 4 wheel drive.

So, like our first experience with fall as a season not a week, it's novel seeing things that are stereotypically "spring" outside of a kids book or the internet.

Like daffodils. And crocus (which I keep not getting off my bike to photograph). And little lambs cavorting around fields and tripping on themselves. And ducklings (with slightly grouchy, protective parents).

Despite the fact that I haven't taken a day off of school/work since this quarter started, yesterday was so very nice that I called it after 5 hours and went for a meandering bike ride with Ev. It was really nice to stop schooling for a few hours and experience this "outside of school" I hear so much about.

Note the 2 functional bikes! A huge step up from last week.

Plus, I'm pretty sure Ev was thrilled to have some real interaction with me.




In the next couple weeks the parade of people who love us will begin. Also exams. Jesse arrives mid-March, then Colin mid-May, then Tae, then exams, then we go to Kalymnos, then home and get to see the guys and families (yes, Chris and Aud, you count as family) and puppys....

Yeah, can it be summer yet? I'm ready for a long dose of free time.

Tostis, Bikes, and Homework

Lesson of the Netherlands #10:
The Dutch appreciate the awesomeness of a grilled cheese sandwich. Or as everyone here calls them, tostis. Pretty much wherever you go you can get a tosti, be it a cafe, coffee house, or restaurant. And none of that "crappy piece of unknown but slightly plastic-y cheese between two pieces of bread" stuff you get in the States. A tosti (1.50 to 2.50 euro) comes with oude kaas (aged cheese, usually gouda) and ham. Often you can add something to it, but generally it's not necessary.


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This has been a bad week for bikes. Someone kicked Ev's bike (my preferred mode of transportation, since it's a modified, super old-school race bike) hard enough to break the front derailer. This was discovered at 7:45am when I was trying to head to school. Not ok. So I went for the mountain bike. Someone had let the air out of both tires. I wish I could say that was uncommon, but apparently people like to steal bike lights off bikes (don't leave them on the bike, they will walk away) and let air out of the tires just for kicks. Luckily, we have a hand pump, so I dashed upstairs and pumped the tires up.

Monday motivated me to finally change out the tube on my road bike (another super old race bike with levers on the frame you use to shift). Unfortunately, my shiny new tube has a slow(ish) leak, as I discovered Tuesday morning. Actually, I assumed that some asshole had let the air out of my tires again (obviously this is not the first time this has happened). Another dash upstairs for the bike pump and I was underway. Imagine my joy to discover that upon trying to leave school that evening my tire was 90% void of air. Lovely. Pump it up. Bike home. It's flat again in the morning.

I took the mountain bike in the rest of the week. The mountain bike is heavy and slow and not particularly pleasant for a long commute.

Now Ev's bike is kind of up and running. He took it into a shop in the hope that they could replace the derailer, but no such luck. Something about it being really freaking old and the parts being hard to find. But they took the broken derailer off, so as long as you don't try to shift the front gears it rides just fine.

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I'm having throwbacks to my bachelors degree. I actually have homework this quarter. Lots of homework. Weekly assignments, massive programming assignments with professional quality reports (we get multiple weeks to work on assignments for a couple classes. What that actually means is they're freaking huge and take up a lot of time).

As I said, undergrad-level homework.

To cap it off, we finally got data for one of the projects I'm working as a research assistant for, which means I actually have lots of stuff to do on that front. Which is really cool, since we get to verify the model (which appears to be pretty accurate, which is kind of impressive). And kind of a pain, since wading through data and figuring out what's actually useful and what to do with the massive gaps in measurements adds some complexity to the task.

There are not enough hours in a week. This is cutting into my exercise time, which is not ok.