It's a Bowl!

Starting on September 29 (according to my contract, although I'm pretty sure there is a week of training beforehand) I will be working for Wattsenglish, Ltd. Here is an excerpt from the 'About Us' section of their website

Wattsenglish is a UK registered limited company and with schools and franchised branches in Central Europe, is one of the leading organizations specialising in young learner language education. ...

In relation to our daily activities we concern ourselves with, the implementation of trained native English speaking teachers into the Czech education system., the outsourcing of our teachers to kindergartens and primary schools, the teaching and managing of our own specialised language kindergartens, after school lessons and clubs, as well as regional events. These are all areas in which Wattsenglish continues to push the boundaries of good teaching practice. It is our constant aim to enthuse young learners with the desire and motivation to communicate in a second language which stays with them for life. ...

Our teachers come from many different places and backgrounds but are all trained native English speaking teachers and hold a Wattsenglish certificate in the teaching of English to young and very young learners. The Wattsenglish teacher training programme (as accredited by the Ministry of Education Youth and Sport) enables our teachers to understand the benefits of building a relaxed and encouraging English speaking environment, to be able to pull on a wealth of ideas and activities as well as to build confidence in working with rich and varied resources and materials for their learners. ...

Here is the video sample I sent them during the interview process:


You're going to have to turn the sound on your computer up really loudly, because I recorded it with my digital camera. I bought the camera in 2005, so in technology years, it's ancient! After watching it, you will get an idea of what their teaching method is like, with the constant repeating in unison of simple sentences. I will see most of you soon, but if the next time I see you after that, I talk to you like a 6 year old learning English for the first time, I apologize in advance.

In der Küche mit Maggie

For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan of eating. However, one of my newly developed hobbies is cooking and baking. My enjoyment is very mercurial though. There will be a period of time where I will bemoan the thought of so much as boiling water, let alone actually creating a whole a meal. This is when I live on bread and cheese. But then, I will get an idea. Or I will have a few odd ingredients left in my cupboard and the challenge of trying to create something substantial/eatable out of them is enough to shake me from my lethargy and get to work. Another important factor in creating a chef out of me is craving something specific. As you can imagine, living on a budget in another country definitely puts some restraints on what you can and cannot purchase at the local grocer. Combine that with the fact that there's nothing open on Sundays here and you find yourself looking up "homemade tortilla chips" in Google search. If you do so, you will find that homemade tortilla chips are made from tortillas, which is not very helpful (not to mention surprising seeing as they're called tortilla chips) but you can also make homemade tortillas. Therefore, I present to me my final product:
It's not very often I get inspired to take a picture of one of my creations. Satisfying and delicious.

For the Visually Impaired

See, there's my name.

das Umweltbundesamt

Here is my first publication as a professional chemist.

I had to take a screen shot because it was done in PowerPoint and wouldn't give me the option to save it as anything but .ppt or .hml. I may have been able to figure something out if this computer were not entirely in German. Not that I can't read the German, it's just I don't know what I'm looking for in English. So the picture is tiny, but you should be able to make out that my name is listed second (maybe if you squint...well just trust me). I photoshopped the diagram of the person and the three pictures of in lab stuff are mine! The data found in the graph are also (mostly) mine, although Anja made the graph. I contributed to the written stuff as well, but most of what I wrote got edited or changed by the head of the Department who did the final editing. He's the one who took the poster to Sweden back in May. I actually haven't seen the actual huge poster version, but I know it exits somewhere.

Currently in lab we have a new column for the GCMS (Gas Chromatograph, Mass Spectrometer) and the power went out which through something off during the calibration process, so we have to start over. So basically I do nothing but watch people move around really small, expensive objects, and type things into computers.

But mentally I'm still on the American college student schedule, so I've been on break for a month now. So doing nothing fits my plans nicely.