Despite my mounting level of work, the last couple of days have been especially joy-filled. One of our friends defended her PhD today (and is leaving next week), and two others are leaving soon, so it has been a couple of days full of celebrating and saying goodbye. I have been spending lots of time in the office across the hall with our Spaniard, Fuxing the Chinese guy, Madeleine the francaise, and Jeronimo, whom I call "Jeronimooooooooooooooooooooooo!" They hired me in the beginning to write a card in fancy calligraphy, and when that worked out they hired me to write all of their names on post-it notes in fancy letters so that they could label their computers with them, and when that worked out they hired me to draw a stapler on a T-shirt for our Italian friend. They wanted to give her a t-shirt with a stapler on it as a parting gift because the only time she ever came into their office was to borrow a stapler. I had picked up some cool free stuff at my conference in San Francisco so I gave Fuxing a mug that says "Google" and our Spaniard a snow globe with the business card of a random Alaskan research station inside. It was a pretty crappy gift, but it turned out that you could take the business card out and put in your own photo, which turned it from a crappy joke gift into a really awesome real gift. She started out by putting her lab access card into the snow globe. We've all recently been learning Spanish and Chinese, so everyone has been saying "Xièxiè" to thank each other, with the appropriate response being "de nada". We've also been practicing calling each other beautiful and good and interesting in Chinese, with Fuxing as our guide. Fuxing taught us that Chinese people often say "Nakanaka" if they are conversing or especially talking on the phone, kind of like "uhn-huhn" or 'k". So we started saying nakanaka all the time. Since we were working on secret presents for other people in the lab, we closed the door and only people cracking the door and saying, "nakanaka" would be allowed to enter. This worked especially well since it sounds like a hilarious Chinese version of "knock-knock". When Jeronimo showed up he didn't know the game, but when we asked for a password in order to enter he shouted, "NAKANAKA!" And we all laughed a lot instead of doing our work.
My friend's defense went great and we all went to the Argentinian House where she lives to celebrate afterwards with a nice Argentinian bbq. We ate hamburgers and hotdogs and listened to Fuxing tell us about all of the interesting traditions that they have for Chinese New Year. One of my Argentinian friend's goodbye presents was a recipe book that Madeleine had compiled for her by asking everyone in the entire lab for their favorite recipe. She made it look really nice and bound it all beautifully. Now everyone in the lab wants one. I contributed the recipe popovers which they erroneously filed under "desserts".

At long last we had to say good-bye to everyone, and I gave Victor the Siberian one last giant hug. He's leaving tomorrow to live in Siberia forever. When the hug ended I pantomimed wiping away my tears.

"You need to come to Siberia," he said. "Because in Siberia all of your tears will freeze."

Frozen tears sound painful.
» randomjunk on 2013-12-20 11:33:37

Awe... Well, I hope you do go to Siberia. These guys sound like a lot of fun.
» jinyu on 2013-12-21 01:12:27

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