Pieces of Anna

I wrote this post a while back as part of an application for the APW intern position. Some other lucky lady got the job, so I figured I might as well post what I wrote here on the blog. Yup, that's my engagement ring! I have a confession to make: I didn’t really want to have this wedding. A year ago, my then-boyfriend (now fiancé) and I were in the pre-engaged state, and we were working hard to earn the status of an engaged couple. We bought marriage books and spent many evenings discussing the hard questions: do we want to have children, how will we support each other and balance our careers when the babies enter our lives, how will we combine our vegetarian and bacon-loving food habits to create healthy lifestyles, how will we incorporate our different family traditions into our own baby family. We self-counseled ourselves into a place where we were comfortable and confident with our coupledom. We were ready to take the next step. I did not want a surprise proposal, ...

If you read this article about fungi discovered in the Amazon that can eat plastic, you might get the idea that the happy science accident happened yet again, and all our pollution problems will soon be resolved. Just like penicillin was accidentally discovered in a moldy Petri dish, you may form an image of clueless undergraduates poking around the Amazon rainforest, collecting random plant samples, and fortuitously stumbling upon an all-important discovery. Perhaps, when the samples make their way back to the lab, a student notices that the Ziploc bag in which one of the samples was transported seems to have developed some holes, as if it was eaten from the inside. Oh happy day! The undergrads discovered a fungus that eats plastic - an answer to our pollution problem ! From here . Originally adapted from here . That's not exactly what happened. The truth behind this somewhat misleading article was uncovered in the originally published research paper . Research into biode...

While D was away for a conference, I decided to do a little furniture rearranging in the house. The truth is, I've been wanting to do this for a while now, but never made time for it. With D gone, I suddenly had all this free time on my hands. The living room was first on my redecorating list. Here is what it looked like before: The living room, before. This was the view from the kitchen/hallway. It really wasn't a bad arrangement (although this photo makes it look better than it was in real life!). But I wanted to experiment, and figured the risk is quite low - I could always put the furniture back the way it was! One of my biggest complaints was that when I was reading a book on the couch, by the white floor lamp, there was nowhere for me to put my tea mug. There was no end table on the other side of the sofa, and the coffee tables ended up being too far away to reach comfortably. And the empty corner behind the couch became a dumping ground for all our wedding-rel...