Ah, Bravery . . . and hair

Living in a country where everyone else speaks French and I don't has made me reevaluate what bravery is. I currently have a new contender for bravest thing attempted in France: I got my hair cut.

I find it hard enough to communicate with a hair stylist about what I want done with my hair when we both speak the same language, so attempting that communication in French was intimidating. This is why I had put off getting my hair cut for about . . . oh . . . eight months.

What's a femtobarn?

In case you didn't know, sometimes physicists use some . . . rather odd units. Particle physics can be really odd that way, where we even go so far as to say that the constants h-bar and c equal one, let normal units like meters and kilograms get rearranged accordingly, and therefore mass, momentum, and energy can all be described by the same units. From such lines of thought, we get the unit the barn. Unlike the slug, the outhouse, and the shed, the barn is a common unit despite its name.

Yes, those are real units.

Easter: The Ugly

Contrary to popular belief, most of my cakes don't go according to plan. It is not uncommon for them to dramatically not go according to plan. In fact, from my success rate I don't know how the belief that my cake escapades normally go according to plan got accepted as a popular belief. It could only be held by those who have never, ever, ever joined me in my kitchen while I bake. Nothing goes according to plan. This is why I would never attempt a wedding cake without some serious training first.

Instead, I remain evasive about my plans beforehand and get creative about salvaging things that go wrong. So when my intended cake roll refused to roll nicely, I attempted a layer cake instead. Less fancy, but still decent and tasty, right?

Easter: The Bad

Yea, so this post is late. I spent the month of May working a lot. I do that sometimes. And then I left CERN for a week to do (almost) nothing physics-related for a week. It was awesome.

I could also argue that this baking episode kind of, sort of deserves to be forgotten, and I can't even find the picture I wanted to top this post with. But I will shoulder on anyway. Despite the insanity, I still found a little time to cook.

Way back in Easter-time, I decided I wanted to make myself a special cake. I had the year previously bought a nid de Pacques and quite enjoyed it, and I wanted to make something a little fancier. My intention was to make a small jelly roll cake, and then decorate sections with chocolate frosting and candy to look like eggs. The cake was to be a genoise sponge, and the frosting was to be chocolate ganache.

It's May!

Ah, the first day of May. Apparently, it's a holiday around here, too, though a less formal one than perhaps Easter. Since it fell on a Sunday this year, it seemed to be marked only by people selling little posies of spring flowers.

I approve of this holiday. Of course, I am particularly fond of the month of May. It was also a beautiful Sunday today, and the roses bushes around CERN have started blooming, and I finally got my balcony garden assembled, so celebrating spring has my vote.

Easter: The Good

Happy Easter, everyone!

Easter is pretty big holiday around here. Most businesses and banks take both Friday and Monday off, making it a four-day weekend. Even CERN closes for the holiday, though by "closes" I mean that the restaurants and post office and UBS branch and bureaucratic stuff is all shut down and no official meetings are held. The experiments still run, and they took a huge amount of data over the weekend.

I worked--that's part of being a grad student, after all. But it was Easter, and so I also indulged in a few treats. For myself, I got the classic Lindt chocolate Easter bunny shown above. For everyone else, I baked.

Some of it even turned out.

J'aime la France , mais . . .

images from www.harvestwizard.com

I love France.

One day I hope to learn how to live there.

Invariably when living in a foreign country, things fail to work as I would expect. For me, this seems to happen with a depressing frequency in buying produce. I mean from the grocery store, not from a farmers' market. I can handle buying bread or pastries, even fish from the poissonerie, but somehow I have had a depressing amount of trouble figuring out how to buy things like fresh apples.

For comparison's sake, first remind yourself how produce-buying works in the US. You find a plastic bag provided by the store, and fill it with the desired amount of fruits or vegetables of one kind. You then take that bag with you to the register, where the cashier weighs the produce and calculates the cost. In France, the first part of this process, selecting and bagging your produce, works exactly the same. Here, however, customers must find the scales located somewhere in the produce section and weigh their bunches of bananas and bags of tomatoes themselves, by selecting the correct pictogram from the list. A little sticker is printed out to adhere to the bag with the final price.

Well, except for things that aren't sold by weight, anyway. Bundles or things sold by number don't need to be weighed.