The monkey upstairs is still at it with the hammer. Oh wait, no, that's not what I was going to tell you.

I finally brought myself to buy a Flickr Pro account. So now all my photos will be here, or you can find me with the Flickr username elliepratt (original, that's me). Or you can just click on the flash box in the left-hand menu. Whatever floats your boat.

I'm in the process of merging my other account into this new one, so until I do, things like photos from my trip around Scandinavia with JM will be missing (although they're still on my other Flickr site..but I'm sure you won't really be that desperate eh). It might take me a while, but I'll get them all on there eventually.

In the meantime go and have a look because I've put quite a few photos up that weren't there before. You might find something interesting in there. Well, I doubt it, but you can always try.

I'm not a patient person. There are things that annoy me, for example, Robert's tendency to download the entire Doors back-catalogue on to my computer and then make me listen to it. Or wasting 6 hours in a lab making bacterial growth cultures only to do all the measurements and discover that the spectro isn't working, and no, there isn't another one somewhere in the building that we can use. Or perhaps getting my locked bike stolen over Easter by a thieving Swede. Forgetting to buy eggs when I go grocery shopping. Accidentally putting a red sock in a white load of washing. Always putting my wet washing in the broken dryer (they all look the same, ok) and coming back an hour later to still-wet clothes. Really, I could continue all day.

But tonight I understand what annoying really means. The tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap of the person in the room upstairs, I assume, trying to put furniture together. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. It cannot be taking this person 2 hours to assemble something, and how can a person with a university level education not know that you're supposed to hit the NAIL, not the FLOOR with the hammer? There's a reason IKEA invented the Allen Key!!

I swear to god, I'm about to go up there with a hammer myself.

I was googling myself today; I'm continuously surprised just how common Ellie is for a dog's name.

But that's a digression. I googled Mike as well (procrastination is a wonderful thing nej?), and in doing so remembered that I meant to post this ages ago... The research project he collaborated/did vacation work on got published in Dalton Transactions (Royal Soc. of Chemistry), and he got acknowledged as an author on the paper.

Do (pentaarylcyclopentadienyl)molybdenum(VI) dioxo species catalyse alkene epoxidations? Insights from kinetics data.

Erm, not actually sure what that means, even tried to read the abstract/intro, but yah, couldn't really work it out. However, it's apparently a good journal so .. good job scientists.




Dalton Trans., 2007, 2746 - 2748, DOI: 10.1039/b705571d

Michael Pratt, Jason B. Harper and Stephen B. Colbran

My friend Matt, who organised the trip to Åland, took this, and his photos are really amazing. You should check out the rest on his Flickr or blog!

Robin and Ellie do the Baltic.

I found these hidden in my photos today. You can tell I took them around the time I was getting ready to come to Sweden because the walls of my room are almost bare. I don't look at myself very often without makeup on, and don't tend to like what I see when I do. But, there's something about these two photos that I really love; I was so sick of packing, tired from work, and the weather was so drizzly and miserable. I think the idea that I was leaving for a year was just beginning to soak in.

If there's one thing you can generalise about Scandinavia, it would have to be alcohol and a general love of drinking it. And, more specifically, tax free alcohol: allow me to introduce the booze cruise.

The Swedes go to Finland, the Finns to Estonia, the Norwegians to Denmark, and the Danes to Germany. It's a cultural thing.

But don't be fooled into thinking that by 'cultural' I mean they go to soak up some culture in these other places. No. I mean that the ongoing search for cheap alcohol is so ingrained in the collective psyche of Scandinavians that on Saturday morning I found myself waking up at 6.30am to cycle to a bus stop somewhere near the station, which would take us to a ferry terminal somewhere near Stockholm, to get on a ferry with 300 Swedes (young and old alike) which would go to an island somewhere in the Baltic Sea that is technically part of Finland, but actually exempt from the alcohol-tax restrictions placed on the rest of the EU.

And just so you know, there's nothing quite like seeing 3 full buses arrive back in Uppsala and begin unloading luggage when that luggage consists of 1 litre of liquor, 2 litres of wine, and 16 litres/14 cartons of beer for every person on each of those 3 buses.

The ferry itself, along with the 1.5 hour transfer bus was 60 crowns, about 12 AUD, return. These ferry companies make their money off the duty free and the restaurants on board. We went as a group of 6 and all of us had the breakfast buffet (although, since we went in there knowing we had to eat ourselves stupid to get our money's worth it's probably fair to say they didn't make a profit on us), while around us more than 100 Swedes ate and drank copious amounts of tax free beer and liquor for two hours, and probably did the same on the return leg as well.


The B Team.

Oh, my kingdom for a breakfast buffet.

Quick, look now, we're in Finland..quickly, before we have to get back on the boat.



And before you know it, we're back in international waters, enjoying what turned out to be an absolutely beautiful day of trans-Baltic sunshine.


After a fairly random day at sea, I have to tell you that I wasn't really surprised to see, as we cycled back to Flogsta, many Swedes dressed in suits and other general cocktail attire, festooned with paper hats and pictures of crayfish. At one point in my life that would have made me look twice, but I merely glanced and said to myself, "Oh Sweden".
It follows then that I wasn't really surprised either when later that night I found myself at a Kräftskivafest...a crayfish party. Apparently it's quite the massive summertime Swedish tradition, and to be honest, things should have started to fall into place last week when I noticed massive boxes of prepared crayfish filling up the freezer section of ICA.
While the party Robin and I were invited to didn't involve paper crayfish hats or lanterns, it did involve massive amounts of alcohol, paper bibs, and singing (followed by more drinking of hard liquor) in true Swedish crayfishfest style... But with so much work involved in getting to meat out of one crayfish, the most amusing thing ended up being the look on Robin's face (a vegetariam) as she tried to dodge the juice flying across the table every time Anders whacked his fist on a claw to break it open. Ah, the memories.