it's out of controooool

Remember the tomato plant that had to be tied to a string from the upper balcony? Now it is almost touching the upper balcony. It's taking over! Here I am, worried.

fluores-scents

Too bad I don't have a picture at home... now my fluorescence experiment works! Remember how I was writing about the project, and I said that when a molecule absorbs energy, it would rather spit it out? And it does that by throwing off a photon? Well I collected the light using a camera and so we can tell exactly where the molecule was sitting in the 50 nanoseconds or so that it takes to emit. It's pretty accurate too--in that 50 ns time the molecule flies about the width of a hair.

Tomorrow we are getting a washing machine! This is very exciting. It's coming at 6:30. That leaves time for several loads before bed.

One last bit of news. At the moment there is a documentary about prostitutes on TV. We can't understand the words. That's probably good.

tomatens

Look at the enormous tomato that Triffid grew! It's almost 6 feet tall and it has about 20 green tomatoes on it. We have some mozzarella and basil in reserve for when they are all ripe and we have to eat caprese salads for a week solid.

The kitty says to tell you all, "purr."

It is starting to be fall here because we are at 52 degrees north. I had no idea we were so far north. That's like Edmonton Alberta! I am going out tomorrow to buy a coat.

I finally got a bike! I ride to work now when it doesn't rain. The train takes 30 minutes but if I try I can get there in 20 minutes with the bike. If I don't get lost. Then it's more like an hour. Here is a picture from when I was riding around the other day:

Berlin is full of cranes. There was tonnes (metric, of course) of money pouring in to the east after reunification. It still hasn't totally worked its way through. They are still building like crazy, and knocking down some old buildings. This is an old brewery that used to make beer in the city. Now the operation moved out of the city and the building is in the process of being turned into condos.

rolls

Sometimes things I see in English make me laugh out loud. I think that perhaps the Germans don't fully understand America. But they sure think we're cool. The other day I was buying socks and there were some on the rack with the English word "JEANS" knitted in. They were cool because they were English. Next to those, there was another pair with the words "DENIM CLUP." Not denim club, mind you, but denim clup.

Here is another example of someone's slightly warped understanding of America. I will make it extra big so you can appreciate all the details:

First off, they are buns. And who in America puts big fat slices of cucumber on their hot dog? Triffid said when she saw these in the store she knew she had to have them. We are going to bring them to our post softball game grill party tomorrow.

what does it mean?

Today there was a double rainbow over the chemistry building. Here is a picture of it reflecting in the windows.

grunewald

The Grunewald is enormous! It is a forest on the edge of Berlin with lots of really tall trees and hardly any undergrowth. I think this is the way with forests here, not like in Oregon where there is so much undergrowth that you get stuck trying to just walk through.

Lots of neat things live in the forest. There are woodpeckers, deer, and wild boars! We saw some boars when we were out hiking hte other day but Triffid was too slow with the camera. There was a dad, mom, and a baby. Actually it was probably a teenager in boar years. It was all walking behind, not wanting to be seen with its embarrassing parents.

There were also tons of mushrooms. We were on the lookout for morels or pfifferlinge, but we didn't find any. Too bad. Pfifferlinge are the local mushroom specialty. Every cafe advertises them on their daily menus and we wanted some on the cheap.