No Berlin, no gay parade.

Friday night, just as I finished packing my bag, I sprawled out on my bed and grabbed my cell phone. Set the alarm: 3:13 am. Just as I put the phone down and closed my eyes to get what would have been 2.5 hours of sleep I had a second thought, rolled over, and just to be safe set my analog alarm to 3:15 am. Armed with 2 alarms, 2.5 hours of sleep, and my bag already packed I figured I'd be in pretty good condition to make it to the airport on time without too much trouble.
Yea, think again. Next thing I knew I woke up, greeted by a light blue-pinkish sky and recognized that something was wrong. I hadn't heard any alarm, and glancing over at the clock on my nightstand saw that it read 5:45 am. You know those moments in time where everything stops and you realize that you've done something completely idiotic that can't be amended? Yes, this was one of those moments. With my flight for Berlin taking off at 6:25 am from Bergamo, there was no way I was making this one. It was a sad morning in the life of this jet-setter.

Berlin

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Berlin where I'll go check out the gay parade, among other things! The forecast says rain... let's hope it not too bad and that I can frolick about the town regardless!
I'll post some pictures and stories when I get back on Monday!

Have a lovely weekend!

Milan from the back of Swann's bike

Here's a video that I took on Saturday night (6/20) while catching a ride on the back of Swann's bike. We had just finished dinner at the Mongolian Barbeque and were making our way home through the streets of Milan on our bikes as it started raining. The bike squad here is made up of Swann (my ex-roommate), Maria (my current roomie), and Swann's boyfriend Yannick. We point out the location of the neighborhood marketplace and the local sex shop, so stay tuned!

Gold-plated microwaved yeast

Hi and welcome to my blog, "quo vadis?". As I'm writing I'm kind of wondering who in the world will be reading this, but I guess that's a question I can't answer at the moment! Since I'm really new at this and I don't even know what kind of information is really "blogworthy" anyway I suppose I can start off by telling everyone why I decided to start this blog.

It was yesterday. I was at work, listening to a salesman make a presentation about a super-spiffy maskless lithography machine that our research group is considering buying. This salesman was classic. About 50 or so, nice suit, leather shoes (all Italian people wear is leather shoes), well-prepared with a box of jellied fruit candies and a presentation full of micrographs that would tickle the imagination of any nanotechnologist. (Don't ask me why but I found that my attention kept drifting away from the micrographs and towards those sugary jelly candies..) Another detail about this guy that I couldn't avoid noticing: he was bald, like totally bald, and freshly shaven, with carefully-trimmed eyebrows, but with the hairiest earlobes I've ever seen. It's mind-boggling to me how someone who clearly pays attention to their appearance, and especially their facial hair, can skip over trimming those windy, wirey, 1-inch long earlobe hairs. Some things are beyond my comprehension, I suppose this is just one of them. Signore Lobehair presents this instrument to us using a PowerPoint presentation and flipping through the slides of micrographs while briefly giving examples of different potential applications. He pauses at a slide with an image of a microstructure that has an application he thinks we'll be particularly interested in, remembering that our group is involved in nanoBIOtech, biosensors, and so on. The application here? Attempted genocide of yeast cells, ie. saccharomyces cerevisiae, through the use of a microwave, was evaluated by coating the seemingly-dead cells in gold and measuring any movement of the cells with the electrode sensor. If you've ever asked yourself if yeast can survive being microwaved, just slap some gold on those puppies and measure their movement with an electrode. Huh?! Anyway, as I was listening to this I was just thinking that it sounded like a terrible science fiction flick or even a future episode of "Look Around You", or maybe just the greatest idea ever that I need to share with the world through my new blog..!

My life in the past year has flip-flopped between comedic, distressing, confusing, desultory, random, and tranquil, but always interesting. I hope you'll all enjoy these entries from my young-adulthood, whether they're about work, friends, fun, love, family, travels.. or anything else in between.

Ciao ciao!