First post

The first day back at work after coming back from a holiday, regardless of the length of the break, is a challenging one. The stamina built up before the holiday to cope with the demands of concentrating for longer than 15 minutes on a given task, not to mention the ability to resist eating a snack every five seconds, has been lost and needs to be rebuilt entirely. The mountain of e-mails that must be sorted through and dealt with is overwhelming enough to take up a significant portion of the day, and good intentions of continuing with data analysis as before are hampered by a lack of recollection of what it was that one was supposed to actually be doing. 

I was relieved that this time, while I was away, nothing had been destroyed on the experimental setup that I am in charge of maintaining (this seems to occur with relative regularity as soon as I leave the department for longer than a day). However, the data analysis that I had been doing was still exactly where I left it - no magic data fairies had gone through the rest of it for me. 

I had just been to Poland visiting my family, for what must have been three days of the worst weather seen in June in living memory. Despite consuming indecent quantities of 'pierogi' (dumplings filled with many different fillings, ranging from sauerkraut and mushrooms to wild blueberries - see picture), and having a generally nice time catching up with everyone, I unfortunately still returned to Germany with a persistent cough and an inability to run for longer than a few seconds without getting out of breath. 

Anyway, the upshot of having a break from work was that I had time to think about what I want to focus on. As going into science communication is one of my priorities, I decided it was about time that I started writing some sort of blog. I'm still not sure exactly what form it will take, but I hope that it will serve to show what the everyday life of an experimental scientist can look like, give some insights into any exciting scientific developments that I come across, and probably have some other bits and pieces such as recipes, some mention of my progress in climbing and bouldering, and descriptions of places I visit.