Us and Charlotte

Hello friends 🙋 'tis I, Emily.

This week has been kind of slow regarding adventures, but very exciting regarding domestic duties.

Mainly, WE BOUGHT A CAR!! She is a lovely little blue Honda Fit Sport (apparently this is a Honda Jazz in the UK). She was previously owned by another international post doc who's moving away and had to sell. They named her Charlotte (or Charlie when she goes to the beach) and while we wouldn't normally name a car, it's kinda stuck and now we call her that too. Her seats go down so there's loads of space to pick people up from the airport (hint hint 👀). We can park her in the garage under the apartment block as we have an assigned spot so she is nice and safe.

She's so pretty!

Lots of room for adventures

The people we bought her from were very nice and when we picked up the car, they took us on a tour of their house and let us pick out almost anything we wanted to take too. So, we ended up with a bookcase, an armchair (which is super comfortable), some coat hangers, an iron, tennis rackets and more! However we weren't interested in the rowing machine which they really wanted us to take. They were very nice and had freshly baked cookies when we arrived and even drove back with their other car to help us move everything and take it up to our apartment! 

Bookcase, clock and board games from new friends

It's been pretty hot this week, so I'm very greatful that we have a pool. It got to 40c on Tuesday, but has thankfully cooled down to a more manageable 32c this weekend. Our apartment has a good cross breeze, but unfortunately our air conditioning isn't working! We thought we might just not be using it properly, but the maintenance man came round to check and has reported it as officially not working to the main office so hopefully this will be fixed before the summer starts in earnest!

It was too hot too cook dinner so we went out for milkshakes instead

On Thursday it was our six months wedding anniversary 💖 We dressed up, and went out for a nice dinner at one of the local restaurants. We chose the Mexican and after translating all the dishes from Spanish to work out what was vegetarian (chilli verde is not vegetables, but chilli relleno is), we had some tasty burritos and giant tequila filled margaritas. It was a lovely evening and there was even a beautiful sunset as we walked home. 

A Mitchell and a margarita

Happy for 6 months

And a lovely sunset

Now that we had the car it was time for another trip to target! This time round we stocked up on big lamps and nightstands, as well as some smaller bits and pieces like a front door mat and a baking tray. Now our apartment looks pretty well furnished and lived in (although decorated in a rather minimalist style).

Bedroom complete!

A quirk of our apartment is that there are no ceiling lights in the living room or bedroom so we had to buy big lamps (oh and the sofa arrived too!)

In another car adventure (I'm still doing all the driving while we wait for Mitchell's license to arrive) we went to go and get our second Covid vaccine! We are now, or will be in two weeks, fully vaccinated and safe to go and breathe on people 😷 They've also relaxed the mask mandate in a lot of places in California, so that if you are fully vaccinated you can go to shops and indoor locations unmasked. 

Exotic fruits in the grocery store

After our jab and some grocery shopping we got home and decided to take advantage of the tennis court and our new rackets. It was getting pretty warm by this point, but we played for about half an hour before calling it a draw (Mitchell's note: this was very generous on Emily's part) and going inside for some cold drinks. In hindsight, maybe playing a spirited game of tennis right after a jab in our arm wasn't the best idea, but they do say to keep it moving so I guess we'll let you know.

We do sports

Quick Mitchell update:

I wanted to let you know that I went to take the vaccine plaster off after playing tennis and found out they'd missed the spot where the needle had gone in so it's a good thing I don't bleed much.

The small red dot above the plaster mark is where I was actually jabbed

This week I've been pretty busy at work actually getting started which I think is a busier time as I'm both doing things and having to come up with protocols to do things. I managed to help the PhD students with some genotyping PCR (their extension time was too short) and have managed to find some things that I needed in the lab without needing to ask anyone! Emily's started doing a thing where when she makes her lunch she makes another and stores it in the fridge for me to take to work the next day ##heart emoji##. This was probably just in time as I think the Americans thought sandwiches for lunch was pretty odd/childish. Maybe British people think that too but I never cared what they thought.

I've been catching up on American differences with people from my lab so in no specific order here are a few things:

1. Yes they have Quorn but they haven't all heard of it, and if you don't specify what you're talking about they will obviously hear 'corn' as they can't pick up on the difference between the two in an English accent. Basically they mentioned you could get it on a cob when I asked about Quorn and I pictured replacement meat on a cob before we got it sorted out. Emily quite fairly considered me an idiot when I told her that.

2. University is 'University' or more commonly 'School', while they probably understand 'Uni' they don't use it which I think explains some of my early weird looks when I told people I worked at the Uni.

3. Chips are crisps. I knew this but still got it wrong.

4. Some of the lab got Korean corn dogs for lunch. As this was two steps away from the closest English thing being hot dogs I basically gave up on trying to comprehend them for now.

5. 100°F is very hot. I don't know what cold is but I don't think I need to worry about that. Oh in case anyone was worrying they still use Celsius for science work so I'm fine there.

6. We should wait to go to LA until we've been driving for a bit or go with someone who's been before the first time. Driving is apparently unpleasant there.

7. Litre is written with a capital L so you don't misread it as an I (is that even a unit of anything?). So mL and nL etc. for my lab notes. They speculated the reason is because they don't use litres outside of the lab.

I have also this week submitted my thesis edits so I should hopefully get the final admin sign off from Nottingham soon which will then mean I can get paid the postdoc salary! (I forget if I talked about this before, until the PhD is FULLY done I'm here as a "Junior Specialist", this is still paid pretty well and gets all the benefits but once everything is sorted I'll change to a proper postdoc with a slightly higher salary).

American cells! Identical to English cells so far

That's it for now, thanks for reading!

Love, 

Emily and Mitchell

P.S now we have a car and Mitchell has finished with his PhD, the real adventures can start!