Since the beginning of my college career (almost exactly 7 years ago), I've moved 17 times.  Crazy right?!

At first glance, I know it sounds like I'm highly overestimating...  But having to move in every Fall, out every Spring, sometimes being home for 2 random weeks on either end of Summer internships, and then throw in a study abroad?  Yeah... DEFINITELY adds up...

Although, Number 17 has already had a few perks!  :)

First off?  I'm staying in the same building - I just moved from the first floor to the second floor!  1. This means that I'm out of the basement (the first floor has the ground level at the very bottom of the windows) - WAY more natural light and WAY less damp!  2. I didn't really have to "pack" very much - moving was a breeze!   Hmm... lies.  BUT!  I didn't have to load and unload a car or moving truck, which was definitely handy.  Just a million or so trips up and down stairs :)

Secondly, and perhaps most exciting, I'm now in a 2 bedroom apartment!  Krista's moving in and it will be OUR apartment!!!  :)  I'm super excited about being able to live with Little #4 for the next year - she's in Ohio for the summer for her internship but she'll be here by the end of August!!!  Can't. Wait.  :D

The final bonus about this apartment?  Because it's the same building, the apartment is basically the same layout!  The extra bedroom is just on the other side of the bathroom where the coat closet used to be...  (If you're really interested in comparing, see the original single here and here.)

Here are a few photos I took before we moved anything in:

Maybe at some point I'll draw up a formal layout like I did with the last apartment, but that day is not today.  Just not up for it... You get the gist without it, right? :-/

Those were all taken at the verrrrry end of June and I (plus family and friends) moved everything for the weekend of July 1st!  Matt and I moved some of the lighter furniture earlier in the week and then Mom, Dad, Rob, and his brother Tony, helped with the big move that Sunday.  And Dad even helped get some of my pictures up on the walls, so it felt like home right away! :)

I can't even tell you how grateful I am that Tony and Rob came to help.  For those of you who have not been up-close and personal with my furniture, trust me when I say it's beastly.  Especially the couch... It was a lot like this:

Only my couch is also 1000 lbs.  It's solid wood, which makes it very, very heavy and very, very not flexible.  The only difference from this scene from Friends?  I was in the background going "I'm sorry I have terrible furniture!" and "Thank you so so so much... I'll make cookies..."  Oh!  And we actually made it up the stairs just fine :)

Krista and her brothers visited and brought a few of her things a few weeks later.  

(Can't WAIT for her to move in for real!!)

Anyways!  Here's where we're at now:  :)

Not too bad, huh?

Remember my CDO post?  Where I explained in my disclaimer that I have plenty of clutter but it's alphabetized and color-coded?

Enter Exhibit A:

Yup... lots of drawers and bins...  It's not perfect, but until I can have a big house with a craft room and a basement?  It'll have to do!  (I realized I didn't take a photo of my closet... you would have been impressed with the volume of clothes and shoes I managed to get in there...)

And that's pretty much it! :)  Still some rearranging to do (hint: don't look in the closet by the front door yet), but we're well on our way. 

T-minus 19 days until Krista's back!  Yay!!!

Rob and I took advantage of the beautiful (and significantly cooler) summer evening we had tonight by heading over to a Valley Cats baseball game!  They're our local minor league team and tonight a whole group from RPI (both students and alumni) had a section of tickets.

All in all, the game actually went pretty quickly!  Well, faster than we expected anyway - the last few innings were each 10 minutes or less!  But the Valley Cats beat Lowell 9-2!

And of course the obligatory couple photo... :)

Ok, so maybe I'm not quite that bad.... well... at least not about EVERYTHING.  (Mom!!! Stop laughing!!!)

For those of you who didn’t have the privilege of watching me grow up, I was perhaps a little particular about a few things...  For example, colored pencils, crayons, and markers and purchased in a certain order in their box - is it really SO difficult to understand that they NEED to go back in the box in that same order?!  

(Insert: whispering from the sidelines...)

Hmm... Well... I've just been informed that is actually quite unusual and that it is in fact quite a treat just to be able to get said coloring devices back in a (probably mangled) box at all... hmm... 

(awkward silence...)

But come on people!  Do YOU switch seats at the dinner table every night?  Or change up what bed you sleep in?  EXACTLY!  

Although, I probably did overreact a few times when someone (gasp!) didn't replace they're crayon in the exact same place they took it from.  And yes, I'm talking that big 'ole box of 96 crayons with the built in sharpener in the back...

Did people sometimes switch a few, just to see if I'd notice?  Yes.

And did I notice?  HELL YES!

Not that I'm holding a grudge or anything...

So now that we've had a HUGE tangent on (how I'm insane) crayons, you're probably wondering where this is going.  (And why the hell it's tagged in the "Research" category!?!  What can I say, slow day in lab today...) 

Well, it can all be summed up with a single picture:

Still not sure?

Ok, how about now:

.... I just don't understand why you're so confused....

Ok, so what you're looking at is a little flow cell (the whole thing is slightly smaller than my palm) and in the center is a two-tiered well.  The first one (i.e. the indented silver ring) is where and o-ring on the top half fits to seal off the whole thing into a hollow chamber (you can see the screw holes where the halves attach).  

The second tier of the well (i.e. the black circle) is actually indented farther and has been filled with powdered activated carbon.  PAC - think, black flour that doesn't rub out, and oh, by the way is statically charged so it will unpredictable FLEE to every surface possible and does very exciting things when you try to get it wet...  

This may seem terribly unexciting to all of you, but this is an absolutely BEAUTIFUL carbon cake - ergo, I'm PSYCHED about it!  We were originally trying to build the carbon cake by sealing the two halves of the flow cell and then using a syringe to inject a carbon slurry (yummy) into the hollow.  The problem with this was, we had no idea what the cake actually looked like - when we opened it after the experiment, it was often irregular - and the carbon may have been all stirred up during the experiment.

PAUSE

So the experiment involves flowing a contaminated solution through the flow cell and the contaminant compound would adsorb to the activated carbon so that clean water would be on the output side of the flow cell.  The idea was to created a model of a fixed-bed reactor, which meant that the carbon cake needed to stay a little compacted cylinder in order to be able to apply the mathematical theories to model the data.  Kinda sorta?  Having the carbon un-cake and float all around willy-nilly would kind of screw everything up...

UN-PAUSE

So yeah!  By making the cake this way, we have a better chance of keeping our fixed-bed.  Much more exciting now, right?!  

Huh... still just me?  (FYI?  I sent one of these photos to my undergrad research assistant, who's away for the summer, and he said that it's amazing and that he "didn't even realize why [I] sent [him] a photo of the empty piece.. then [he] realized the cake was so perfectly formed that [he] didn't see it" - HA!)

It really is perfectly formed though...  One more look from another angle... :)

Stunning.  And our results are coming out much more consistently, too.

Having worked in a few different labs, with a lot of different people, I'm realizing that I'm a little more meticulous than a lot of them.  Part of it may be the fact that my first research job was working with tuberculous bacterium (and the second with human blood samples), so it was really important that everything be sterile, cleaned, sealed, etc.  Matter of life or death, really...

While my current research is a little less sensitive, I'm still very, very careful about everything.  Lab techniques and etiquette that seem to be common sense to me, I find that I actually have to say out loud and teach others who are new to the lab.  

Maybe this is what made me PhD-ready?  Or, as ready as anyone could be when they sign their life away...  

Weighing chemicals to the accuracy of 0.0001 g and an EXTREMELY detailed experimental procedure write-up is all rooted in my early need to keep my crayons in order.  Go figure!

Disclaimer:  I am in no way a "neat freak" - I have the same clutter that everyone else does.  Mine's just alphabetized and color coordinated.

This year, my Fourth of July festivities were drawn out for most of last week - the benefit of having the big day fall on a Wednesday, I suppose!

Tuesday night (the 3rd for those of you playing the home game), Rob and I went over to  John and Katie's (new!!) house for a BBQ.  Lots of good food and good friends :)  (And of course... I forgot to take any photos... ugh.)

For the actual 4th, Rob and I got up early to head up to Saratoga for the Firecracker 4 (i.e. a 4 mile road race).  He ran, but this time I decided to sit out and just be a supportive spectator.  They had 3,000 racers, though!

Here he is at the (slightly slow) start:

And then here he is coming down the stretch at the finish!

I'm not sure what his exact time was but it was somewhere around 27 minutes for the 4 miles - pretty good if you ask me!  Especially considering how hot it was that morning.

We spent most of the rest of the day just relaxing and enjoying the day off... :)


To finish out the week, we headed to one of our Professor's house for a BBQ on Friday night!  We both had Jack as our capstone professor and Rob also took a few other classes with him.  He and his wife invited most of the grad students and some other local students, as well as all of the professors and staff from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department - so much fun!

There was tons of food, great company, and their backyard was just perfect for such a beautiful evening (pool included!) :)

It was so nice of them to invite us all over...  We had a great time!