November Catch up

    This month has been so busy it has just flown by, so here is my update on the past two weeks. I got sick for the first time over here in England, so I got to experience the NHS for the first time. It wasn't as bad as I was expecting, but it did take all day to get diagnosed with tonsillitis and get my meds. That pretty much wiped me out for an entire week. I just spent the week being miserable and laying in bed when I wasn't going to class or doing homework. 

     I did recover, and got to do some cool things with my friends over these past few weekends. My favorite one was we went over to the neighboring town and walked around their art trail. The Wivenhoe art trail was a collection of local artists who opened up their homes and studios to people to come in and look at their artwork. I was blown away by some of the art displayed on the trail. I did pick up some very cute christmas presents, and some goodies for myself. My friends and I wandered around, and eventually got some lunch from a Norwegian bakery. The bakery comes to campus every Thursday, and I loved getting to see their actually shop. We grabbed a bench along the waterfront and ate our lunch while watching the boats go by. Overall it was a great morning filled with art and friends. 

Here was the view from the bench where we ate our lunch!

Here is my cork board with some of the new artwork I got from the art trail. The sheet music and the little poem under the plant are just some of the art I picked up.

    The past couple of weeks have also been filled with lots of class and school work. I had a paper review/critic due, and I got to do my first lab of graduate school. We spent all day in the lab doing a whole bunch of experiments with DMS. The next day we got to use Gas Chromatography to visualize how much of the gaseous DMS had been produced from our experiments. It was super cool, but now I have to do a very big lab write up that I am not looking forward to. 

This is the gas chromatography! The machine itself is kind of hard to see as its being blocked by the elbow in the picture, and I have no clue what the other machine in the foreground is.