After all of the last two weeks’ excitement re: LARP, and with a sprained ankle putting limits on how much I was willing to walk around, this week was a quiet one.
On the work front, I spent it fighting for my life to make R packages play nicely together so that I could generate at least one decent-looking figure to submit with my abstract to the BMES conference. My program doesn’t require that we attend the conference or present a poster, but given that I haven’t yet given up all hope of going straight for a PhD after graduating despite the current state of higher education, I wasn’t exactly going to pass up the opportunity.
Thankfully, I did finally get things semi-fixed just in time to submit late Thursday night before I had to board a plane to Amsterdam at an ungodly hour of Friday morning…and then I looked at my phone on Friday to find out that BMES extended the deadline by a week just hours after I’d sent my abstract in. Typical. Still, my submission is in, so now it’s the abstract committee’s problem, not mine!
…I’m getting out of temporal order, though, so rolling it back to the weekend where we begin my personal definition of a week: my Big Exciting Outing consisted of another trip to the cat café, where I met another lovely couple of friends.
I also went grocery shopping on my way home, which was notable for two reasons:
- In the pursuit of my eternal quest to find Stockholm’s best prinsesstårta, I stopped into a bakery that didn’t turn out to have any prinsesstårta, but did sell this amazing olive-gruyere bread that might be the best bread I’ve had this year. Seriously. I would kill a man for this bread, no questions asked. Apparently the bakery only makes it on the weekends, but you can be sure I’ll be going back for more of this bread in the future.
- One thing you need to know about the Swedes is that they like their candy. Every Swedish grocery store I’ve set foot in has had a big bulk candy section on top of a considerable selection of the little plastic bags of candy you’d see in American stores. This is just a standard feature of Swedish shops; even the convenience store chain that’s basically Swedish 7/11 often has a bulk candy area with at least 20–30 different kinds of candy on the wall in big tubs.
The second thing you need to know is that certain person(s) who shall remain unnamed tasked me with bringing back a selection of Swedish candies for them as a souvenir.
The third thing you need to know is that on this particular Saturday afternoon, I was in a buoyant and slightly shenaniganous mood after spending an hour drinking coffee and petting cats, and I was ready to Commit To A Bit.
…I think you can guess where I’m going with this by now. One of each of far too many kinds of Swedish candy. The picture does not do the sheer volume of corn syrup and palm oil justice.
In the name of not leaving Sweden in a month with a bunch of stale leftover candy still lurking in the bottom of my bags, I took the maybe kind of weird but also efficient route and used clean scissors to snip a little bit off the edge of each piece of candy for taste-testing purposes, then left the rest in a bowl in the office lunchroom. Apparently it wasn’t overwhelmingly weird, or maybe everyone else in my office building just doesn’t look very carefully at what they put in their mouth, because everything got eaten over the course of the next two days. Whatever, I’m not complaining.
Anyway, I now have a notes document on my phone with numerical and categorical rankings of over 200 kinds of Swedish candy, because when I commit to a bit, I commit to that bit. If you would like to be added to the group receiving a selection of my top picks (minus the ones that would poison you, of course), let me know.
Behold, the glory of the olive-gruyere bread. Also ft. the cow bowl that’s been floating around my floor’s communal kitchen for the last week.
Anyway, aside from grocery-related shenanigans and being really busy with work, this wasn’t a week with too much to write home about. Thursday pancakes at the hospital restaurant were tasty as ever.
Sadly, the apricots I bought to eat with my lunches weren’t nearly as much of a win as the olive-gruyere bread, so I baked them with a little butter, sugar, vanilla, and rosemary, after which they were—predictably—much improved and delicious with a bit of greek yogurt.
I don’t have a great ending to this week’s events, but there you have it. I’ll be back with an Amsterdam update as soon as I muster up the wherewithal to upload an ungodly number of photos to WordPress again. Hopefully that’ll be sooner rather than later, but no hard promises. I’ll see you then!
Lyra Cromwell 