Ramping Up

Spoils of the hunt!

One of the things that's a little tough about living in Green Bank is that to get really good produce, you have to go quite aways. Generally, most things -- be they shops, restaurants, grocery stores, or whatever -- are at least 40 minutes away. However, if you DO find fresh produce around here, it has the potential to be very, VERY fresh.

A bit over a week ago, one of the locals took a group of us out ramp hunting. If you are not familiar with these little delights, they are a type of wild onion, basically. They have a bit more of a garlicy flavor than some, and you can use them how you would use green onions, scallions, or things of that nature. Prior to this, the last time I'd picked them was when I was hiking the A.T.; we happened across a patch and just picked a few to add to our cooking pots that night. I would occasionally see them at the farmers market in NYC, but they have a fairly short limited growing season and tended to be expensive -- you really do have to trek out somewhere in the wilds to get them! But now I'm living in (or at least, near) the wilds, which means, RAMP HUNTING.


It was a fun experience, the person who took us out clearly knew exactly where they tended to grow, so the group of us were digging up and down and all around a creek that was simply swamped with the things. There were half a dozen of us, digging for at least 45 minutes, and we barely made a dent on them. We washed them up a bit in the creek, then brought them home. I brought home two big bags, one of which I gave away to a friend who'd not been able to join, and I still haven't finished cooking all of them up. So far I've made buttermilk ramp biscuits (with bacon!), fried fish with ramp aioli, ramp-and-lettuce soup (mixing two separate recipes), and I've generally just thrown them into several other dishes I've made (squash with ramps, chicken with ramps, BLTs with ramps etc). It's been fun cooking with them! They're very inspiring.


Yeah, this is a short post, I know, but hey. I've been busy. And look! I'm trying to update regularly again! Go me!

Life at the GBT

The Green Bank Telescope -- my new workplace!

Hey all! I'm now about a month into my new postdoc at the Green Bank Telescope, and so far, so good! A lot of my time so far has just been getting familiar with everything -- attending meetings (whether I know what they're talking about or not), reading the various guides to observing and proposing for time on the telescope, and meeting lots and lots of new people. I've taken a tour of the telescope, and I'm going to be starting my formal training on dealing with the telescope and doing support work next week, which will be roughly half of what I do here (the other half, of course, being SCIENCE!).

For the past couple of weeks, I've also started getting back into my own science work. A project I'm on got some observations recently on the VLA, so I was going through data for that for a bit, and I'm starting to work my way through the referee report of a paper I wrote last fall. The paper in question came back to me right at the peak of my "Gah! Gotta finish my thesis!" push, so even though I've had the report for a while now, I only recently started to make corrections on it. So it feels pretty good to be thinking about science again.

My new house!

Green Bank itself is quite different from New York City, as you can imagine.  It's a very small town and is literally situated in a National Forest, and the entire area is beautiful. There is a lot of good hiking -- a couple folks from NRAO took me out hiking one Sunday for a hike up one of the nearby mountains, stopping for lunch at the top, and we saw a trio of bears on the way back down! (Momma and two cubs, so we kept our distance.) There are also regularly large numbers of deer in the field in front of my house, so that's rather neat, as well. Springtime is (hopefully) here, but we  can apparently get snow into May, according the the people here! For a while it seemed like the weather couldn't make up it's mind, it snowed one day and was gorgeous the next.

View from my back door a few weeks ago,
when there was still snow!

We *are* in the middle of the Radio Quiet Zone. This was established back in the 50's to keep the radio noise around the telescope as low as possible. This means there is NO cell phone reception or radio reception or wifi ANYWHERE in the surrounding area. I cannot have a microwave, wifi, or even a wireless phone in my house. It takes some adjustment -- honestly the thing that's throwing me the most is the lack of microwave and not being able to reheat leftovers in 5 minutes. That and the fact that, while there are a couple convenience stores in town, to do a *thorough* grocery store run I have to go at least an hour away. This past weekend I went to Lewisburg (1.5 hrs away) to go grocery shopping and go to the movies (I saw Zootopia -- fun movie!).


I am renting a house(!) about a mile from where I work -- this is the first time I've lived without a roommate, and I now I have a 3 bedroom 2 bath house all to myself. This is quite a change from my shared NYC apartment. I've set up one of the bedrooms into a guest room, and the other I am making into an office for myself. Well, that's the goal, anyway -- it's still kind of full of the boxes I haven't unpacked yet. I've unpacked all the *critical* stuff -- clothes, stuff for the kitchen, books, CD's and DVDs -- but I admit I'm being rather slow on the unpacking of things that I don't need on a daily basis.

That's all for now, just a short update. So many new things in my life right now!

A New Start!

Post-defence celebrations!

Many important things have happened since the last time I wrote here, the most important of which is: I successfully defended my thesis!  The defence itself went well, as did turning in the thesis, but the week prior to each was rather stressful, trying to get everything done. Not only that, the week prior to my defence I was feeling rather under the weather, and to top it off, on Wednesday night my computer DIED. And I hadn't backed up my slides and notes sufficiently. So I basically had to redo the majority of the slides for my defence which was NOT NOT NOT fun at all. As you can imagine, I was in a bit of a state. But as I said, the defence itself went well. The morning of, I actually found that a friend of mine had left "before" and "after" gifts for me on my desk -- the before was a stuffed snake toy (in reference to this amazing essay), and the after was a flask of whiskey. Both were very much appreciated and helped calm my nerves.

Not only did I defend, but I have also been hired as a post-doc at NRAO's Green Bank Telescope, in West Virginia, where I will be starting in late March! I'm really looking forwards to the new position, and I expect to learn a lot.  I've been joking that this will make me a "real astronomer" since I'll actually be working at a telescope and taking actual observations.  While I am an observationalist (as opposed to a theorist), all my data for my thesis has been from radio observations. So, while I wrote numerous proposals, got approved for telescope time, and had to figure out the details of the runs, I didn't actually do the observations myself --- I sent off  the relevant info to the VLA, and they scheduled the observations and sent me the data back. Even though I've been out to various telescopes, the only time I actually controlled a 'scope and took my own data on was on a class trip to MDM observatory in Arizona, and was for a class project, not my research (though it was a great experience). I am also not counting the observations I've done teaching labs or doing outreach, since those experiences aren't taking data for research so much as showing people the stars and explaining the awesome stuff that exists in the sky.

Anyway, I turned in my thesis on January 15th, and defended on January 29th. Since then, I've moved out of my apartment in NYC and shipped a bunch of stuff down to WV, where it is in storage. I stayed with my parents in Baltimore for a week, and now am in Cambridge in the UK visiting Benson. I'll be here for about a month, then going back to Baltimore until I move to Green Bank. I haven't bought a new computer yet -- I kind of want to wait until I've gotten to my new job, to see what kind of set up I will have there and what kind of computational needs I'll have. For now, Benson has kindly given me his old computer (very similar to the one I had that died) that he is no longer using, having upgraded about a year or so ago. So I can just use this one until I've decided exactly what I want/need to replace my old one. Happily, I did back up *that* computer regularly, even if I hadn't backed it up sufficiently close to the crash to save my slides, so I have all my work. The only thing I lost was the slides and notes. Which, well, was enough.

I've been having a lovely time in the UK. It is always good to see Benson and spend time with him, and it's been lovely to just relax and not worry about work, to take a real vacation. This past weekend, some good friends of ours -- Dahlia and Paul -- were in London for *their* vacation, so we met up with them twice! They came into Cambridge one day, and we went into London another. When in London, we went to a great restaurant -- Dinner by Heston Blumenthal -- which we all REALLY enjoyed a LOT. They take historical British recipes and modernize them somewhat to make an absolutely fantastic menu. We all got different things so we could try as much as possible, and split several of the appetizers and desserts. It's hard to chose favorites, since everything we got was fantastic, but I'd particularly recommend the roast marrowbone and meat fruit appetizers and the tipsy cake for dessert. The mains it's harder to chose one thing -- the duck breast was amazing, the ribeye was an extremely flavorful steak, and the halibut was a really well made dish.

Anyway, again, I've been having a great vacation. And I am both really happy and kind of sad about finishing my thesis -- it was so much work, it's very strange to be done with it. Even if research goes on and ever on, and I will be continuing my work on parts of it, having one big written work describing everything I have worked on is an odd experience. Here is 6 years of my life in 231 pages, right?? But for now, I'll relax a bit longer and then start on my next big experience!