Summer

I was gone for ultimate or work quite a bit over the summer. Between practices, tournaments, workshops and conferences I was at home for something like four weekends in four months, which provided content for the travel blog, but it is  really strange now to have some free time. I don't really know what to do (I spent this weekend in bed and on the porch with a nasty cold).

I did try to cultivate some hobbies while I was in Zürich. I had two such endeavors over the summer. A balcony tomato vine and my first continental foray into homebrew. While neither turn out perfect, the second way much closer to be considered a success.

I grew up in the garden. I am pretty sure I got into college because I wrote about playing in the compost pile. Growing a potted tomato vine on my balcony couldn't be that difficult, could it? I got three slightly larger than cherry-tomato sized tomatoes from my vine, but at one point I didn't think I would get any. By the time the last tomato was close enough to ripe to pick, there were no leaves left on the vine.

I guess I didn't realize the importance of tomato stakes.
(this was after I untangled it from the rosemary bush) 

So, I built my own, with special levels to accommodate the
existing vine branches. The poor vine had been through enough!

But soon the leaves yellowed and dropped:

A call to my dad diagnosed it with "the blight"
Plucking the bad leaves did not stem the spread.

Not all hope was lost, they continued to ripen:

48 hours difference.

In the end, they were eaten unceremoniously as a trio, with just a little salt and pepper. An afterthought, as I was rushing out the door to catch my flight to Stockholm.

Homebrewing was slightly more successful. It ate up a lot of refrigerator space and had my neighbors ask me to keep the noise down (bottling took much longer than expected), but it was fun + science-ish and now I have just over two Kiste-s of trinkbar beer (a Kiste is a plastic crate that Germans buy beer in, which makes it easier to transport and take back to the store to get your deposit back).

  

Part of the process. Yes that is pantyhose over a strainer.

Measuring the specific gravity (inverse of the density)

All set up to ferment in my room. Quickly moved
to the basement due to noise and temperature.

To keep the temperature down I filled discs with water, which was
pulled up into the towel and due to physics (chemistry?) lowered
the internal temperature by a few degrees Celsius.
Thanks Internet for the idea!

I waited some weeks, monitoring the specific gravity to see when fermentation changed, then bottled, put the bottles in the fridge and waited four more weeks and voila:

Pröschtli!

It is fine to drink and actually pretty tasty, just a little strange, because it isn't filtered, so there is some yeast in the bottles. It is also a little, ummm, unevenly carbonated, so it is best to open a new bottle over the sink :) My bottle caps are lime green - still working on a label. Stop by and test it out yourself!

Stockholm

I just got back from nine days in Stockholm. The first bit was World Water Week, which is the "leading annual global event for concretely addressing the planet’s water issues and related concerns of international development." This year the theme was Water and Energy and there were over two thousand participants, including folks from NGOs, various UN branches, research institutions, multinational corporations, national aid agencies, etc. The weekend was spent with friends from when I had lived there.

World Water Week is intense. Interesting sounding sessions and side events from 9 AM - 6:30 PM, with networking meetings sprinkled throughout, plus social events in the evenings. It is a big enough deal in Stockholm that one of the princesses and the king even made very short appearances (at dinners that I did not attend).  My adviser was part of a panel on business potential of resource recovery in sanitation systems and some other colleagues held a session on Fecal Sludge Management.

Our booth was pretty popular because there were games and prizes,
 including Fecal Sludge Truck card game. Fun for the whole family!

A classmate from my masters course was also there! This was taken at the
Stockholm City hall. The upstairs portion has a magnificent mosaic, which
recounts some of Sweden's history, with mostly golden tiles for quite an effect.

That is ten, count 'em 1-0, men on stage for a panel about how to create the
monitoring system for the upcoming Sustainable Development goals.

My colleagues and I rolling deep at a session with the theme "Water as a Human Right"

I didn't spend much time outside of the conference venue during the day, but I think the conference was worth it. Basically everyone in the water world is there and fairly accessible, so it is easy to get meetings, cement collaborations, and get a sense of where things are flowing. It was even easier to meet with a Swiss professor, who teaches at the same university as my adviser, in Stockholm than in Switzerland because they both travel so often.

People are starting to put a price on water, under the veil of sustainable development, in two ways: selling water futures on commodity markets and selling water benefit certificates (like carbon trading, but with water). I am not sold on either idea just yet, as they seem to be up the green, or in this case blue, -washing alley.

After I got roped into an additional, but beneficial Saturday meeting, I was able to relax sthlm style. This meant joining old friends for homemade dumplings and a rock concert at a bar where I felt old, then waking at a decent hour Sunday to hit the forest to forage for mushrooms. It took three patches of forest before we found any. I was not much help, as I could only identify two safe types (and the species we eventually found wasn't one of them). After picking our fill, we stopped for a late salmon and dill potatoes lunch before heading home to prepare the mushrooms for drying:

Counterclockwise from top right: Fika! Homemade cinnamon bun and coffee for fuel on our search; Frida in the forest; splitting the mushrooms to look for spider eggs; the haul; the dryer filled with mushrooms (didn't smell half as bad as I was promised it would)

Upon my departure Monday morning, I was given a bag of the dried mushrooms, which will make a nice Autumn meal.

On Monday I had a meeting with my thesis adviser about working together on a paper. Some of my work is still hanging around, albeit next to the trashcan...