It has been a busy few days. Working backwards:

[kareina]

Much of today was spent in the lab learning how to assemble the nest in which my little capsules sit during the experiments. We got everything nearly ready to run. The only remaining step is for my boss to make a new metal ring which goes at the top of the piston to keep the bridge from moving around. The old one was damaged, and while he tried assembling everything without the metal ring, there was too much play in the assembly, and it just isn't worth risking further damage to more expensive parts when he can machine a new one in the morning.

This evening did some extra grocery shopping, picking up some staples in clovis_t's diet that I didn't have on hand, and then baked a pound cake in anticipation of his arrival tomorrow. I chose a pound cake because this was my first use of the new cake pan I picked up at the Monday market--it is small enough to fit in my toaster oven, but still large enough to share the resultant cake, and I had no idea how much of a batch would be the correct volume for the pan. Since I do the traditional version of pound cake (pound of butter, pound of sugar, pound of flour, and pound of eggs), I figured that it would be easier to scale it down than a recipie which measures things by volume. However, since my kitchen scales are with the rest of my stuff, somewhere between here and Australia, I couldn't just weigh the ingredients. Therefore I guessed based upon volume--the packet of butter was 250 g, and I chose to use ~150, or 3/5 of the packet. The packet of flour and sugar were both 1 kg, which means that I needed about 1/2 of what was left in the bag for the flour (the sugar I poured into a bowl the same size as that used for the flour in order to estimate that amount). Remembering that when I did it with an actual pound of each I used 8 eggs, I used three this time. The batter was lovely, rich, and delicious, and the cake looks good. I'll find out tomorrow how the baked version tastes, since it came out of the oven after I'd lost interest in food.

While the cake was baking I managed to get the shelf mounts attached to the back of the free-standing closet, which means I now have shelves under the loft. I also replaced the missing screw in the coat hook by the door that was loose. Now I just need to obtain one book shelf and some pantry shelves before my things arrive.

Yesterday was spent working on some new modelling for one of the samples from my PhD work to see if I can get more information for the re-write of a paper draft I'd sent my advisor--he deemed that version unlikely to be accepted as it is still too much in the same format as in the thesis, and we need to do some additional work to get it publishable. I also did Monday market shopping for food, the aforesaid cake pan, and a sheet to fit the futon that came with the house. In the afternoon I finished getting the new shelves for the cupboard sanded down to fit and picked up some of the empty fruit containers left on the side of the street after market (they get taken away by the dump truck very soon after I did my salvage mission). The plastic ones will be useful for organizing fabric, and I intend to take apart the wooden ones and make a small cabinet for my spice jars.

Sunday was a long, long day. When the seneschal of the local shire first told me about the parade and live chess game at a castle and invited me to come along it sounded like an entertaining thing to do, so I said yes, without first getting all of the details. Oops. When he told me that the plan was to meet at his place at 10:00 for an 11:00 departure, get to the village and obtain pizza around 13:00 so that people could get into costume or armour at 15:00 for a 16:00 parade, followed by the chess game and finishing up at 18:00 I hesitated. That is a huge chunk out of the day, and I still had shelves to deal with and uni work I'm behind on. But I decided that since I'd already told him I'd be there, I probably should go. Besides, I hadn't actually met any of the shire folk yet. (Note, while he is listed as the SCA seneschal, the "shire" mostly consists of his metal-weapons fighting students from the school he runs (this is his job) and their girlfriends. He provides all of their costumes etc, and he hasn't attended an SCA event in three years, though he's been to other sorts of re-enactment events.) However, the day didn't precisely go according to plan. I left the house at 09:20 in the morning so as to walk to the train station 30 minutes away by foot (to get exercise) which has the advantage over the two closer stations in that it is the line which goes to his house, while I'd have to transfer at another station if I used another station. I then took the train and the bus and arrived at his place at 10:30 and took a half an hour nap. I took another nap after we got to the village. I sat around and did embroidery most of the day as we waited. I'd brought my own food, and it was a good thing, as the pizza they others ate didn't look interesting at all--the crust was so thin they all had to fold the slices in half lengthwise in order to provide sufficent stability to pick it up so that they could eat it. (I was able to nibble my food a bit at a time all day, while the others only had the one meal that I could see.)

The parade was fun--the town was cute, and the energy provided by the musicians (in costume and playing period instruments) was good. When the chess game commenced I wandered off to explore the castle. My goodness that Viscount had a good location. The castle is on a bend in the river, with water on three sides of it. The river has cut a deep channel in this area, so the castle buts up against steep cliffs. From the top of the remaining tower there is an excellent view of the Alps. The building stone of that tower is mostly large blocks of sedimentary rock (usually conglomerate and sandy conglomerate supplemented by large round river-rocks, which obviously came from the Alps originally--many metamorphic and igneous rocks of the same sorts as I saw on my two Alpine adventures thus far. I got back down from the tower about the same time as the chess game broke up, so we returned to the parade staging area and I continued stitching while people packed up their armour. Eventually we left. To go to the hospital to pick up one of the other passengers, who, apparently, managed to slip while doing the combat during the chess game and broke a couple of his teeth. Since it will be necessary later to have a form filled out by a treating doctor if he wants the insurance to cover the injury, he needed to go in, even though he felt no pain from the accident. It being a non-pain, non vital sort of injury, he had to wait a long time before they could see him. As a result we didn't get back to Milan till 23:30!

Saturday was mostly spent on home improvement projects. The house came with a free standing closet/cupboard thing which had no shelves on the cupboard half, though it had rows of the little round holes into which one inserts pegs to support the shelves. Therefore I measured the space and went to the hardware store and found some plywood of an appropriate thickness. I had them cut it to size, and brought them and the pegs home. Alas, either I measured wrong, or they did, as the shelves were just a bit too large to fit. Did you know that one can use a hacksaw as a file? (There didn't happen to be files in the labortory, but there was a hacksaw. Yes, I could have purchased a file or rasp, but I've got some in the boxes which are on the way, so I didn't see a point in buying another.) It took a while, but I now have them all filed and sanded down to fit the space.

Friday was more uni work and home improvement projects. Thursday was meant to be lots of uni work, but instead I had to go into town to return the key to my old apartment and get back my deposit. I then went shopping for more shelf stuff (upon which I worked on Saturday).

It is now, once again, 02:00. It seems to me I've been up way too late way too often lately. There is just so much to be done...