Rehashing old ideas, or maybe exploring new ones.
This week, we took part in the IUPAC Empowering Women in Chemistry Global Breakfast event. It happened during a time when I’m swamped in grading (which reproducibly happens from week 2 to week 15 of each semester). Nevertheless, I thought it would be worthwhile to record some thoughts about the event. Plus, I want to learn how to embed tweets in a blog post.
Continue readingCertainly, I am not the only person who makes resolutions in the new year, only to break them in the bleak cold winter and have them pop up periodically throughout throughout spring, possibly summer, only to be completely forgotten in the fall. It is a trend that I have repeated for many years. This year will be no different, and yet it will be quite different. There will be trends, and periodicity in this year’s resolutions, but all of them will be intentional. (Ok, have I drained this ridiculous chemistry pun of what little humor it once had?)
This year, I’m making New Year’s resolutions in honor of 2019 being the International Year of the Periodic Table. I’ve been thinking about this event since it was announced early last year and have come up with a number of projects and activities that I’d like to complete. Usually, I keep my resolutions private, so that if (uhhh when) I break them, I can pretend they never existed. (If a resolution falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear my thoughts….) However, this year’s resolutions are more important than my fruitless desires to lose weight or kill off bad habits. I plan to better myself through chemistry (periodically). Ok, I’m done with that. Here’s my list of resolutions for 2019:
Continue readingHappy New year. I’m sitting here in the early first hours of 2019 fretting over the 50+ MPH gusts of wind travelling through my village. I’ve always been bothered by windy days; however, I am a bit more attuned to the potentially damaging effects of nature on my belongings. You see, last year I became a home owner for the first time.
The wind has me thinking about how quickly 2018 flew by. It was one of those years where I didn’t have much time to think about what I was doing or accomplishing. Therefore, I thought it would be prudent to record some of the more memorable achievements of mine from 2019. It beats checking the status of some aging tree limbs in my front yard every five minutes.
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I could turn this post into a commentary about the importance of doing a thorough literature search, and despite how thorough you think your literature search is, it is not thorough enough. Alternatively, I can make some Star Wars references; let’s go with that.
Soon, my wife and I will buy our first home. My wife and I just bought our first home. I have been looking at videos on how to paint rooms and found myself looking at periodic-table wall-art. I came upon this website which was coincidentally published one year ago today. Until now, I had not seen an RGB blinky-light periodic table besides Mandy, and it appears as if Mandy was coming to life just as apaf1 (send me your real name and I’ll edit, if you wish) was completing his project. What does that mean for Mandy?
I just recently completed my move from Chicago to Brockport, NY. Happily, all of our belongings survived the move more-or-less undamaged, and we are close to having everything unpacked and in its new location. One problem we had during the unpacking was the box spring for our bed; there was no way that a queen-size box spring was going to make it through the small space occupied by our stairway. The box spring is ancient and we had intended to leave it in Chicago, so purchasing a new one was in the plans. I didn’t realize what a pain it would be.