In which I'm in a love-hate relationship with software. VOTE!

It’s been brought to my attention that nowhere on my blog have I actually explained what my job is—or, because “differential settling and recruitment between barnacle species due to intra- and interspecific competition” sounds obscure and specific, but it’s a broader topic than you might think, which tells you a lot about marine biologists—nowhere and never have I explained what I actually do all day. So with that, I give you—task-of-the-day highlights from this week.

Monday:

In preparation for starting some area analysis using ImageJ, go through all of the photo files and make sure that 1) they’re all accurately named; 2) there are clean copies of all of them in a separate folder, that I haven’t scribbled all over in Paint yet; 3) they’re accurately named in a way that will still make sense to me a month from now. You’d be amazed how much labeling is involved in science, seriously. I have labeled slides, beakers, test tubes, photos, foil tins, plastic bags, live samples, definitely my own hand a few times by mistake, and I’m only stopping this list because it’s starting to stress me out. I have developed my own opinions on labeling strategies (use abbreviations for months, not numerical values; dashes are superior to underscores; avoid grease pencils at all costs, because I am a messy person). While I was interning at the Marine Science Center this past summer, I once turned around on the van ride home to see another intern very intently using a label-maker machine in the backseat. I think I came into science believing that packing and cleaning and labeling and feeding the experiment were grunt-work tasks that you grew out of. This is not the case.

Tuesday:

Spent a while sitting in the Garda Naturalization and Immigration Bureau. Being a researcher instead of a student means I get a special authorization to work in the country, rather than a student Visa—so I get to jump through all the fun hoops that people permanently immigrating here do. I also experienced a minor heart attack while getting fingerprinted, when the machine let out a really ominous noise of the “fingerprint of an internationally wanted criminal detected” variety. Turns out that my fingerprint was just too small for the machine to read; I have ridiculously small hands.

Tuesday was also the last date to request an absentee ballot for the upcoming election in several states! I’ve posted about this on my other social media channels, but you absolutely can still vote if you’re studying abroad or co-oping internationally. If you haven’t requested your ballot yet, check your state’s requirements, because there still may be time to do it. And if you requested it but it hasn’t arrived, you can use the Federal Write-in Absentee Ballot! The Overseas Vote Foundation has some really helpful links and explanations to guide you through the process.

Scoured the ImageJ software manual and played with the program tools for a few hours, trying to remember how to do a certain calculation on some photos. I figured out how to do this calculation a couple of weeks ago, and thought “oh, this was so much simpler than I thought it would be. I’ll totally remember how to do it—no need to write it down.”

Whoops.

Wednesday:

It’s the two-month anniversary of my arrival in Ireland! My body celebrated by bringing back the virus I’ve been fighting for approximately one month and twenty-one days. I worked from home doing some tinkering with ImageJ before I slept for about ten hours.

Thursday:

Were you expecting excitement and variety? That’s hilarious. Continuing to pound away at ImageJ.

Friday:

See above, but this time with more sleepiness. I stayed up last night to watch the live stream of a lecture on GMOs given by a Nobel Laureate at Northeastern. It was awesome. It also ended at 1 in the morning my time.

So after this week, have I fully figured out and feel totally competent with the software? Absolutely not. I have a new problem: I have to hold down the Shift key in order to do a certain very important part of the image analysis process, but every time I hold it down for more than four seconds, a little box pops up asking whether I want to turn on a keyboard shortcut. And, because I am the queen technophobe of technophobes, I’ll probably spend a good part of next week figuring that one out.

A thousand sheep and absolutely no lettuce

It’s officially fall in Galway—as evidenced by the crunchy leaves, the lab being on a horrible hot/cold/hot/cold cycle as the radiator gets too excited and you crack open a window only to let in a torrent of cold, rain, and sadness, and the fact that as I write this in my room, I keep making typos because my fingers are so cold. (Sleeping in a blanket burrito and a wool hat is actually kind of nice, though—up until you have to roll out of bed in the morning.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about getting sick—the first common fear that people talked about at my Dialogue orientation session. The second fear was food. Specifically, these worries came from people who were traveling with food restrictions, everything from not eating meat to gluten intolerance to life-threatening allergies.

I’ve wondered if I subconsciously chose Ireland just for the food. I’ve been vegetarian since I was eight, which makes a few regions pretty implausible; my face swells up about 20% of the times I eat tomato sauce (I still haven’t figured this one out), so the Mediterranean area seems ill-advised; and I’ve always been interested in the Middle East, but the slightest trace of chickpeas sends my body into apocalypse mode, and spending a semester in the Middle East avoiding hummus and falafel just seems unrealistic. Ireland, on the other hand, heavily features potatoes, carrots, and cows. This is good. Root vegetables and dairy, I can work with.

I actually know several people who’ve come to Ireland with multiple food allergies and survived. When people think about eating in a foreign country, I think what comes to mind is food carts and restaurants—when the reality is that if you’re staying for an extended period of time, you’ll be spending less time ordering off a menu where you can’t pronounce anything and more time wandering the aisles of the grocery store, trying to find the flour and figure out whether green vegetables exist. (Spoiler alert: they don’t. Ireland is an island filled with sheep. There is no room to grow lettuce here.) My diet here is pretty much the same as it is in Boston. It’s called muesli and not granola; I eat less fruit because it’s crazy expensive (see: this isle is full of sheep—shoutout to anyone who gets the literary reference); I eat carrots every day instead of broccoli every day, because they cost next to nothing. But on an extended trip like study-abroad or co-op, you have a lot of control over what you eat. The only thing I can’t accept here is the baked beans. They come canned in tomato sauce. What is that?

You also have the option of finding at least one thing you can eat that’s easily available where you are, and eating exclusively that—functional, if not ideal. During the week we lived in a hostel on my Dialogue before moving into our dorm apartments, we ate most of our meals at restaurants, and I pretty much ate potatoes, bread, and soup three times a day. (If you’re looking to crash-diet, this would be an awesome approach, because I lost five pounds that week; otherwise, you might want to diversify.)

tl;dr (I don’t blame you—I really never shut up)? If you’re letting concerns about food hold you back from going abroad, don’t.

Except for the baked beans. I will never understand the baked beans.

#WrongWayRenner

I wrote previously about finding a way to do things that feel familiar in a new place—not in order to stay within your comfort zone, but as a way of grounding yourself and making sure your life still feels like, well, your life. To that end, I’ll be running the Croi Galway Night Run this Friday. The route goes up and down the beautiful Galway Bay in Salthill from Mutton Island to Blackrock, and all the proceeds go to the Croi Heart and Stroke Center.

My old running injuries never seem to want me to race, and tend to flare up right before a race, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one. The bigger concern is that it’s a night run. I know there are people reading this who’ve traveled with me and who know that my sense of direction is slightly inferior to that of a golden retriever puppy. I once got lost on a completely straight route on which, as one of my friends pointed out, if you sent a potato rolling with enough strength, the potato would successfully navigate that route. I was defeated by a root vegetable. So, as I’m trying to make it through the dark, I’m hoping there’s not a repeat of #WrongWayRenner2k11. (I’m openly offering myself up for mocking with this article, but it deserves better than languishing in the OregonLive archieves). Cross your fingers for me.

Fears about abroad life: 1.0

Throughout college, I've been to so many orientation sessions that at this point I'm not sure what direction I'm oriented in. One I went to during my sophomore year, though, stands out, in part because it was a predeparture orientation session for my Dialogue of Civilizations. It was actually more memorable for the fact that a minor incident in the lab earlier that day had led to my hoodie, hair, and ears getting full of live ants, so I had to leave partway through to stick my ear under a bathroom faucet. (Hey, if you're reading a research blog, you need to be prepared to hear it all.)

At one point during the session, we had to write down what we were most excited about and most worried about for our trips, and the Post-Its we wrote on were stuck up on the wall. By far the most common worry was getting sick, which is a more than understandable concern--and it's also what most of my co-op has been like so far.

My first semester of college, I got sick every other weekend like clockwork--I'd wake up on Saturday morning with a fever, cough, raging headache, and general inability to move, and be more or less functional by Monday. This time, though, it's been more like every weekend, and I regain functionality around Wednesday if I do at all. I've spent more time without a voice than with one, and spent so much time violently coughing that there's now a muscle or something in my chest that makes a vaguely worrying cracking sound whenever I stretch. And every time I stay up late, get soaked in the rain, or get through a hard workout, I wake up sick again the next morning.

All of this has made it pretty difficult to blog--not because I'm incapable of typing from my bed, but because I've felt like I have nothing to write about. I've cancelled more than a couple of weekend trips, spent more time sleeping than adventuring, and substituted trying new foods for eating the same three things I can stomach when I'm sick. It's frustrating on a lot of levels. It's also a reality of life abroad--the life part comes with you, and sometimes parts of that are not fun. I've had to reexamine some of my expectations about what a successful trip abroad entails. It's not always getting as many Instagram photos of old buildings as you can--it's about making sure you're experiencing life, even when that doesn't mean as much as you hoped it would.

(As for the title--there'll be a post at a later date about what the next-most common worry about abroad life was! It's not ants, but it probably should be.)

*aggressive sneezing*

This week I did my first workout with the university’s triathlon club. While I’ve been racing 5 and 10Ks regularly throughout college, triathlons always fell under the category of “I should try that sometime, I swim a lot and bike a lot and run a lot, but it sounds like it takes a lot of equipment I definitely don’t own.” (I have not one but two wetsuits, and neither of them are triathlon-appropriate.) But the NUI team’s racing season is in the spring, I have an unprecedented amount of free time (during my last co-op I was working two jobs on the side—why do you have to sell your firstborn to afford rent in Boston?), and the pool at the university gym is really nice. So on Wednesday night I jogged over to the gym, where the team met up and ran through a seriously Lord of the Rings-esque forest to a nearby track to do speedwork. 

As a former cross-country kid, any distance shorter than 3K makes dungeon sound effects start playing in my head, so the phrase “ten by 400-meter sprints” is never one I’m thrilled to hear. Add that to a determination to establish an athletic reputation, and I haven’t had a workout pound me into the ground that hard since my first day running stairs at the Harvard Stadium. The freezing rain, driving wind, and truly epic mud puddles were pretty reminiscent of high school track and field in Oregon. Running with a pack of Irish boys, not quite as reminiscent of my all-girls school. It was the most fun I’ve had so far in Ireland, and I paid for it with 24 hours of sneezing and the most painful stretching session I’ve had in months. But when the tours and the nights out are done, it’s nice to find something that feels like home.

I have no pictures of this, a little bit because my phone would’ve fried after ten seconds in that rain, and a lot because by the end of the tenth lap I looked like a drowned raccoon. It’s nothing you’d want to see.