Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

Matthias uploaded his photos from the last trip to Sweden on our yahoo photo site. This time the temperature only sunk to -30 Celsius! There are some beautiful landscapes of the snowy paradise. Enjoy.

I started phase 3 of the digestive experiment yesterday. I reintroduced bread back into my diet, assuming that there is no digestive issue with bread. Funny thing happened. I slept terribly!

In the past few years, I have often had nights where I wake up several times in the middle of the night. I never knew why; it wasn’t correlated to stress or anything else I could think of. Last night, as I lie in bed in the middle of the night, I realized that in the past week, I had slept really soundly and without disruption. My morning energy was pretty high. Could it be that something in my bread for dinner causes my sleep disturbances? Not bread!!! I love bread!! Eventually, I’ll have to experiment further with bread. Living in the land of bread and chocolate, it would be tough to cut it out of my coffee shop visits.

On another note, I experienced “Frauen Weiberfasching,” which is ‘women’s Carnival.’ On Thursday, all the places in town have a big ladies night. Everyone dressed in crazy costumes. A bunch of the girls (Natasha, Sarah, Vita, Lucia, Svetlana, and 3 other friends of Natasha) and I went out to a big restaurant by the big cathedral in town. It was cool. The dancing was so much fun. I think we all really needed to dance, and we danced like crazy! The dancing was interrupted by a male stripper performance that went on way too long and was, well, let’s say, was not so high class. Fortunately, it ended at some point and the dance floor opened back up! I learned that Sarah loves to sing along to anything she knows the words to too (that may annoy friends, but I can’t help myself!). There are a few photos of us below. We were very creative in the costume area. I, for one, didn’t realize it would be a full-out costume party. Next time I’ll be better prepared.

More about the interview: I was invited to D.C. for an Interview with the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. It’s one of the bigger fellowships in the field that I am eligible for, and I think I am pretty luck to have gotten this far. I suspect having a letter of recommendation from Ralph Cicerone (current president of the National Academies of Science and former UCI Chancellor) helped my application a lot. I am really glad I got to know him better when I was at the Academies. I am actually competing with a couple of people I worked with in D.C. in the fall. I have to prepare a 5 minute presentation for the interview, so it sounds like it will be eventful.

I also just learned that at least a few friends from Irvine will be in Baltimore the weekend after the interview for an conference with the American Physical Society! I already contacted Adrain (now working for Microsoft, lucky bastard), and he said he, Mary (his wife), and Lucas (their son, the little Argentinean wonder who I have yet to meet) will all be there! I am waiting to find out who else might be there.

In the mean time, I am trying to stay focused on things here as well. I am working on the revisions of the first paper from my dissertation and starting to put together the second. Matthias is back from Sweden and has some extra over-time hours that he can take to come home earlier this week. He had a good time up there. My new German class is tough, probably too advanced for my German, but it keeps me engaged. I am finding that I am a major slacker when it comes to homework though.

The digestive experiment is tough this week! For the first two days, I felt unsatisfied (not exactly hungry, just not satiated). I have become creative in the process of trying to figure out what to eat. I rediscovered rice cakes; I actually like them, which Matthias can’t understand.

Here’s a new snack idea for the adventurous. Get some rice cakes, flavored with sea salts and sesame if possible, and top them with smoked salmon. It is surprisingly good! I think I’ll keep that recipe even when I reintroduce normal foods back into my diet. Aside from my new snack, I have been easting a lot of salad (and I am starting to develop a flavor for it) and variations of vegetable soup, rice and cooked veggies…… needless to say, I am feeling a bit bored with the food. I had a very strong urge to end the whole stupid thing today. I have noticed that, without so many carbs in my diet, once I am hungry, I am really hungry.

Now that I have done a drastic change in my diet, the process is becoming a mental game. My yoga teacher, Gary, always used a great example of the power of food. When have our training session in Austin, every meal is a buffet. The first session, almost everyone gained some weight! When we would talk about the mind and how the senses can control it, he would ask “Who’s in control, you or the peach pie?” This was referring to the fact that most of us couldn’t resist the dessert offered EVERY night with dinner. My weakness was apple, more than peach pie…..mmmmm, pie (as Homer would say)!

At this point, I am only slightly in control (Matthias is cooking himself fried rice at the moment, and it smells so flavorful!). I’ll see if I can keep up this bland, low-carb thing until Sunday, when I can start to introduce some stuff back. The big question is, should it be bread or dairy first????

So, I am just starting the 3rd week of my little experiment. The second week was more journaling and observing. Nothing terribly interesting happened except that I noticed myself craving sweets and coffee knowing that I won’t be eating them this week.

So, the third week should be the toughest. I need to avoid all of the foods that typically cause digestive problems. Sugars, dairy, yeast, caffeine, alcohol, peppers, beans (the musical fruit!), and a few other things are out of my diet for the week. Basically, I can eat a lot of green leafy vegetables, some rice and a little bit of fruit. Plus I can drink lots of water.

Matthias and I were shopping around for food on Saturday, and I checked out some labels on some tofu alternatives, but all of them had sugar. In fact, almost everything that was packaged has sugar, even toothpaste! I could not find one toothpaste without sugar. That kind of surprised me. That was in the regular grocery store though. I’ll check out the ‘bioladen’ (organic store) tomorrow and see if I can find some interesting things to try.

On an aside, I am heading to D.C. in a few weeks for an interview for a policy fellowship for next year…..more on that later.

When I was a little girl, I used to play house. Now that I am all grown up, I play scientist. Playing scientist is what a young women with 11 years of higher education in physics does when no one will pay her for working in physics. I spent my day down in Garching at the Max Plank Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and worked on revisions of a paper I submitted in November. The referee was a bit confused (in my opinion) about the work, so I need to clarify some things. I am grateful to be able to go down and work there, but I feel like a bit of a freak going down there without a job.

Matthias is back on Friday night, and tonight, I am watching “Germany’s Next Top Model.” It the only reality show I have liked. Heidi Klum runs the show, and they do some fabulous things with Makeup sometimes.

The big news of the week, though, is Mark (my brother, that is) and Merri Jo! They are engaged! I don’t exactly know when he proposed, but he sent me an e-mail on Sunday night. Mark hasn’t figured out how to dial to Germany yet, so the e-mail was his way of keeping me updated I suspect it will be a cowboy wedding, so I can’t wait.

I have been keeping a journal of what I have been eating since last Sunday. I can see a couple of patterns in my digestion. Having a late lunch and no dinner left me with a relaxed feeling stomach the next morning. I also was able to figure out that it takes about 44 hours for my body to process food! That was longer than I realized.

An interesting food related dream came up with week. Natasha invited me over for a great dinner party with lots of really good Paella. We ate lots of fish and talked until late. That was on Saturday. That night and last night, I dreamt of saving fish from different disasters. The dreams were really vivd, and I had so much compassion for the fish that I don’t feel like eating fish at the moment and maybe never. My brain is so weird!

This week of the experiment is jsut journaling, observing and cutting back on sweets, alcohol and coffee (I haven’t been very good at that part yet). I need to plan for next week when I’ll have a huge list of things I can’t eat.

Generally, I complain a lot about learning German, as the women here who commiserate with me can attest to. But once in a while, the language makes me smile. Here’s a great sentence from the second Harry Potter book.

Er hat “grosse, fledermausauhnliche Ohren und hervorquellende gruene Augaupfel, so gross wie Tennisbaelle.” (As some of you may have guessed, Harry just met Dobby)

I think this means, “He had bat-like ears and sticky-outy green apple-eyes as big as tennis balls.” I think the funniest word here is Fledermaus = bat. I can’t figure out what fleder means, but Maus = mouse. So, in my mind, Fledermaus means flying or flapping or leathery mouse. What a great description of a bat! Granted, that may not be the right translation, but half of my German is made up anyway. I sometimes have conversations with strangers, and I only understand the general idea of what was said; the rest is created with a little imagination and wishful thinking. I find I enjoy life as an illiterate forgeiner better that way.

The bat reminds me of the word for slug which translates to NAKED SNAIL (Sarah tipped me off to that one). That’s another awesome one. It seems that only these useless, funny words and sentences stick in my head.

Here’s another keeper from the same chapter: “Boeser Dobby!” It means ‘Bad Dobby,’ and I already new that boese = bad. The thing I learned from this little gem is that boese becomes boeser when you call someone bad. It’s one of the many German grammatical things I don’t ever expect to understand (as I never actually learned English grammer properly), but at least when Matthias annoys me now, I can say “Boeser Matthias!” and be grammatically correct. He seems to enjoy it when I find stupid little German sentences like that and use them appropriately.

Natasha, Sarah and I decided that we needed to get out of Regensburg for a day, so we headed down to Munich with the plan of shopping, drinking coffee, and perhaps seeing a movie. We didn’t plan particularly well, but we had a few ideas of goals for the day. I wanted to get a new gold lipstick, Natasha didn’t want to buy anything (and specifically asked us to stop her from trying) and Sarah wanted to see a movie at the English original language theater - we accomplished none of these objectives. It was a very successful day

We checked out the Mac makeup counter (a brand of Makeup about which Sarah obsesses - for good reason) in Hertie. I found a lips gloss that I wanted, but the lady said they didn’t have it up front, but if I came back in a few hours, they will get a new shipment in. So we headed out into the wet city; it was snowing big, wet snowflakes all day and the streets were covered in slushy puddles.

Sarah recommended a “Kartoffelhaus” for lunch. This was a cute little place (see photos) that had a menu of dishes that all contained potatoes (Kartoffeln). The food was yummy, and the company was silly. Our goal after lunch was to find a Starbucks. Natasha had a craving, so we went on a search. After about an hour and a few metro rides, we gave up and went to a fabulous little Conditerei on Marienplatz next to the old city hall. I almost fell asleep on the search, but the long walk in the wet weather brought me out of my Kartoffel-coma. Sarah and I ordered something chocolatey, and Natasha got the apple strudel. We leanred the respect Natasha’s expertise in Conditerei cuisine because her strudel was AMAZING while our chocolate cakes were of average quality. Luckily, all of the coffee/tea was great.

After some caffine to clear our heads of the carbohydrate drain which followed the Kartoffelhaus, we had the brilliant idea of going to the information center to see if they had maps that could help us find thing such as Starbucks. Out of curiousity, we asked the lady at the info counter where the nearest Starbucks was. Apparently, there were three of them within a few hundred meters of Marienplatz; we thought that was funny.

Somewhere around this time, we could see we didn’t have time to achieve Sarah’s objective of seeing movie. So, we checked out a cute little store which sold some fabluous tableclothes; one of which, Natasha bought, and blew away her objective of not buying anything. Luckily, were were flexible with the day’s goals. I still thought that I would be getting my lipstick by the end of the day as we headed to the train station. We went back to the Mac counter. Apparently, the new shippment didn’t contain the lipstick I wanted - so objective number three was free to fly away.

As it was warm in the last store, we wandered a bit at we had an hour until the next train back. We discovered a sale rack for scarved and hats. I found a fabulous colorful scarf, and decided that if Matthias had been there, he would have bought it for me, since it was on sale and was, what he would call, a ‘Tammy scarf.’ And since I saved some money on the scarf that Matthias would have bought, I got a matching orange hat, on sale!

My theory of Matthias buying my scarf made Natasha laugh hysterically when I explained it to her on the train; I am still not sure why it was so funny, but Sarah and I caught the giggles from her too, and none of us could talk for laughing for a few minutes. Let’s just say we have been known to attract a little attention when we go out together. I think the food service guy on the train may have even developed a little crush on Sarah with her beautiful smile!

So, those were the main points of out girls day out. My body still feels exhausted, but it was great to have such a day.

I got home late last night after an exhausting day running around Munich (more descirpion of this adventure in the next post). Usually when I am so tired, new ideas pop out of my head, and last night, I had one.

Sarah gave me a book called “Julie & Julia,” and I opened it for the first time last night. It is a book about a woman (Julie - someone I suspect Sarah migth relate to, just a bit!) going through a tough time in her life, and she decides that she is going to prepare every recipe in Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” and write a blog about it. So far, it’s a funny story.

So, as I am not used to this whole blog thing, I don’t think of posting on the meaningless little advantures in my life. However, upon reflection and inspirtation from Julie, I realized that the things I sometimes see as ‘meaningless adventures’ in life are often the events that later seem important. So I should take the time to report upon another little life project that I am taking on.

Two days ago, I finished reading the first Harry Potter book auf Deutsch (in German). As some of you might know, I have read all of the books in English, let’s say, more than once. I figured the first book would be a good lesson in German as I know the story line so well.

Upon completing the book, I realize that not much of the German has stuck in my head, though I was able to follow the story with limited excursions to the dictionary. I am not sure exactly how my brain did that, but now I am convinced that if I can read all of the Harry Potter books in German, my brain will figure out the language or at least I will learn a few new phrases.

I had hoped that upon reading the first book, I would have learned a ton of new words. However, if you were to ask me to tell you what I learned without looking in the book for reference, this is what I would tell you.

• dei Narbe = the scar
• merkwuerdig = odd
• bemerkt = noticed
• zucken = twitch
• Mut = courage
• Du hast nicht genug Tassen in deinen Schrank. = You don’t have enough cups in your cuboard (A German iddium - my new phrase)
• Ich werde nicht mit ihr Kirschen essen = I wouldn’t eat cherries with her (another great iddium)

After an entire book, that’s about all that stuck in my head - not very impressive. Seven is a lucky number, so I’ll take it as a positive indicator. I did take the approach of not looking up words unless I really can’t figure them out. As a result, there were entire scenes in the book that I didn’t figure out until they were over. I hope the rest of the new words are just sitting in my brain rippening. Sometimes my brain works that way, but it seems to have gotten me this far, so I am not complaining.

I’ll keep you updated on the progress of book II which I plan to buy today.

So, it’s official; I miss Matthias. My dreams this morning made sure that I knew I missed him.

I am starting a digestive experiment today. I got an interesting book called “Seven Weeks to a settled Stomach” by Ronald L. Hoffman. It is really educational about how the digestive system works and how different things affect it. He offers a 7 - 10 week guide on how to systematically explore what kinds of foods bother your digestion. I call it the “yoga of Digestion” book because the seven weeks is just a systematic exploration of a system of the body. The results will vary for everyone.

One of his big ideas (except for the obvious digestion killers like alcohol, smoking, coffee, and sugar) is antacids. He explained the problems that can result from long term use of anacids. He basically points out that if you have hyperacidity everyday, there is something in your diet that needs to change. He doesn’t suggest any kind of quick fix, but has some good ideas that you can apply to your own situation.

He has a few Eastern ideas as well, such as conscious living. For example, when you are eating, eat! In other words, don’t drive, talk on the phone, or write your blog posts (for example) while you are eating. When you do nothing but eat while you are eating, you tend to take more time and actually enjoy the food. This helps you relax and also eat more slowly; both help you digest better.

Maybe I can add that into my life. Make every meal like a dinner party where you enjoy the food and the company.

Speaking of company, I had a really great time with Sarah and Cliff this weekend. Sarah, Cliff and I went bowling on Friday night. It was the first time I went bowling in Europe! Every time I go bowling, I start wishing for my own ball. The lane balls annoy me. But anyway, we had a lot of laughs and a few beers. neither one seemed to help improve our scores. Sarah was amazing. I showed her how to approach the lane because she was just standing and throwing the ball, then I told her how to use the arrows to aim, and she rolled 2 strikes and a spare the next three frames! I like to think that was due to my incredible teaching abilities, but I suspect i t had more to do with her ability to learn.

Cliff and I got a little silly after a few beers, and we all decided that McDonalds was a great way to finish off the evening! Something about bowling alleys makes me crave french fries. In the end, it was a good idea. I think the grease absorbed the beer.

I put a link to some bowling photos below, I think. Still figuring out the blog thing.