...of a very busy grad student: mountain biking, hiking, writing the outline for my first two scientific papers, and 4th of July, Berkeley style.
Mountain biking was also a first. We rode to Tilden Park, a fantastic regional park nestled into the foothills, and biked a route that the guys (my labmates Alastair and Eli, plus another grad student named Jennifer) insisted would be easy. They were right...except for the wrong turn that got us onto such steep single-track that not only did we all walk our bikes up the last part, but Alastair actually carried mine for me because I was having trouble pushing it. But I had fun anyway, and the views (especially at the top of the super-steep part) were fantastic. Afterwards, half-dead from exhaustion - I'd never biked more than 10 miles before, and we rode about 20 - I rushed home to make ratatouille with a bunch of friends before watching the eponymous movie, which was great. I highly recommend Clothilde's recipe on Chocolate and Zucchini.
For the rest of the week, I worked hard to finish an outline of the two papers that will comprise the bulk of my thesis research, and I'm excited to say that I might be close to writing one of them, my first-ever first author paper. Trust me, this sort of thing is very exciting to a grad student.
However, I took the 4th of July off for entirely different excitement: a lovely day of hiking near Mount Tamalpais in Marin, which we concluded with the best strawberry ice cream I've ever eaten, from a little scoop shop in downtown Fairfax, followed by fireworks at the Berkeley marina. The Berkeley show is only so impressive when you've been to fireworks in, for example, New York, but for a 100,000-person town it was quite nice. Even better, we had the rare clear-and-not-too-chilly evening in Berkeley, so we could see the fireworks from what seemed like half the municipalities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, which puts on a really long, multi-barge show. But in addition to the views, what made the Berkeley celebration truly unique was fact that instead of having a local band play the "Star-Spangled Banner" and other patriotic fare, the city left the musical accompaniment up to its citizens. So we walked away from the marina after the fireworks to the sound of half a dozen people drumming and chanting "Hare Krishna."
Only in Berkeley.
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Posted by: Dissertation writing help | August 01, 2009 at 03:03 AM