A room of his own

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JenniferI wrote a whole post about Joe's new office and then Google for some reason alphabetized the text of the whole post, word by word, which was neither useful nor informative. And why the picture is on the right, when the HTML clearly indicates it should be on the left, is anyone's guess.

So here's a placeholder until I get up the energy to re-write the consarned thing. Go see a slideshow of all the pics if you like in the meanwhile...

Nerd jul party

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Jennifer A lot of social stuff has been happening in the last couple weeks, along with the usual frantic increase in work as everybody tries to get projects completed before the holiday break and the new year. I was as busy as everyone else, but did manage to turn two manuscripts over to two completely different sets of co-authors on the day before Christmas eve. So here's some catching-up.

Can't Get Enough Of Your Fika

JenniferAs Joe mentions, Valentine's Day isn't pushed here as much as it is in the States, but nevertheless, it provided an excuse for another excessive fika, which was held in the Floor 1/2 break room, and spilled out into the hallway, where extra tables were set up with plates of yummy custard-filled tarts and gummy raspberry-flavored candy hearts. Even better, the social committee (the good souls in charge of this sort of thing) had put out vacuum pump carafes of good coffee (that is, brewed coffee, not the stuff from the big black machine). Red paper tablecloths covered the tables, each of which had three or four tealights burning in the ubiquitous glass holders. The lights were turned down low, and a boom box in the hallway blared Barry White and Frank Sinatra love tunes. Posters in the hallway encouraged us to "Take the opportunity to talk to someone new!" (Which I did.) Oo la la!

Really? All this, at 9:30am? Maybe it's just me, but I'm not at my most romantic at 9:30am. It was fun, if a little surreal. Especially when the talk turned to crayfish, and the horrible things that can happen to you if they are not properly purged before you eat them.

Working Conditions Part I

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JenniferIn some ways, the working conditions here are a little different than I'm used to. In Part I of this discussion, I'll cover Creature Comforts.

First, the the coffee break, or fika. Every day, at roughly 10am and roughly 3pm, is fika. Fika may or may not involve snacks. The time of starting and ending is not exact; by some mysterious process, people suddenly emerge from their offices all at once and converge on a common room. This is a time for socializing, and although I have overheard some work-related topics discussed, most talk (at least in my presence) has so far involved odd Swedish customs and foods, the execrable accent of Danes, and the curiosities and absurdities of the US primary elections. By a process probably analogous to the start of fika, there comes a moment roughly half an hour later when everyone suddenly stands up and goes back to work. 

I survive a Disputationsfest

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Jennifer The older universities in Sweden have some interesting centuries-old customs; one of them peculiar to Uppsala, the firing of the cannons at commencement, I have already covered. Another is that the defense of a doctoral dissertation (or disputation), if it is successful, is celebrated with a Disputationsfest.

Work so far

Jennifer So far work has consisted of:

1. Having lunch with the Boss and two other students joining the lab this term, a Swedish post-doc and a Mexican undergraduate student. The Evolutionary Biology Centre cafeteria lunch is a decent deal: 63 SEK for a large plate of hot food, a salad buffet, and tea or coffee. It was a very pleasant lunch and I like everyone so far.  The "Swedish sausage special" consists of a brick-sized chunk of bologna floating in a cream sauce. 
2. Getting my office space and meeting my officemate, who is a doctoral student working with computer modeling of biological systems, and who is a killer Othello player. 
3. Attending a journal club meeting, in which a recent paper in Science was trashed for extolling exciting results that turn out to be based on poor phylogenetic methods (among other things). This sort of thing was de rigueur back at UM, so I consider it a good sign.

Today we applied for our national ID numbers. The funny thing is that you need to have a permanent non-work address to get an ID number, which we haven't been able to get because we don't have an ID number. Similarly, tomorrow I hope to get my key to the building... and to get to the person who does the keys, one must go through at least three interior keyed doors, even after one has somehow managed to get into the building from the outside. My plan right now is to throw pebbles at the windows to get someone to notice me hopping up and down outside, and hope they let me in.

These sorts of experiences are exactly what my international student friends have been telling me to expect. Fortunately, so far the bureaucrats have been kind to us and it hasn't been too bad.