48 hours later. Part 2

In order to prepare myself for the actual arrival in Pennsylvania I had set my expectation levels REALLY low. I have been expecting flight delays. Did not happen and I even got a beautiful last view of Detroit as the airplane turned

I expected not getting my luggage - everything went smooth. And I sort of prepared myself for not making it to the leasing office in time to get the keys before they closed, which again turned out to be totally wrong. What I have been right about though is spending a shitton of money on uber. Luckily I did not exceed my expectations on uber money, but my stubborn attitude towards whether I might need a car or not is somewhat crumbling after trying to walk around the neighborhood. There are no sidewalks, narrow roads, the train stations are not super close by, and I haven’t seen a single bus stop although they do exist according to google. But I have too much other stuff to deal with right now than to make an educated decision about getting a car this weekend.

So..... I got the keys to the apartment, where I had super low expectations after reading some fairly nasty reviews online (after signing the lease if course🤦‍♀️). And it is nicer than I anticipated. It is clean and the neighbors are quiet (that says a lot about my anticipation level, right). Check! But would I want to live here with the rest of the family? Nope. Just nope.

Because things went smooth I squeezed in a trip to the local goodwill store. Well.... I had heard that there were good second hand stores here but I don’t think goodwill is one of them. All the household items were sorted by color! WTF? But I got some pots and pans (in the black section), some plates (in the blue section), glasses (in the glass colored section), and a nice rattan storage thing (in the brown section).

Next stop was hunting down an air mattress. I checked Targets website but it kept telling me that all items were online only, so I got cold feet and went to Home Depot, where they were should have them (according to the internet....). They didn’t! So I tried bed bath and beyond. Anything else but air mattresses. And by then I was very tired and felt very sorry for myself.Luckily there was a big target nearby and I finally tracked down that stupid air mattress. And blankets. And some towels. And a rug for the front door. And shampoo etc.

Last but not least I expected not to sleep much the first night........ I don’t think it is necessary to go into details about whether my expectations were met!, but I really do hope that I will get some decent sleep tonight as I don’t want to meet up for my first day of work looking like something the cat dragged in.

But since I don’t want to end this blogpost with everyone thinking “gosh. What a whiny ungrateful asshole filled with nothing but feeling sorry for herself” it actually seems nice here! There is a Trader Joe’s right behind me, people I run into seems happy and content (my guess is that not having to deal with Michigan winters is a big factor - LOL), and all my uber drivers yesterday only had good things to say about this corner of the state - well except the idiot trumpist driver, who claimed that the car industry must have been doing SO much better with all the new regulations (oh yes. They already had massive layoff rounds. How’s that for an improvement) and that he loved Denmark (without ever setting foot in any European country BTW). But he since he was from Pittsburgh, I am not surprised (she said without ever having set foot in Pittsburgh herself.........).

48 hours later. Part 1

A lot of things have happened in the past 48 hours and I will split it into two parts. First the goodbye part and then the hello part.

Because of how life sometimes work out Kristian and the kids are actually gone this weekend to Spring Hill. An amazing retreat for kids and teens in Lutheran churches were everyone has loved to go over the past years. So I said my goodbyes Friday morning which went fairly OK (the only one crying - and only a little bit - was me at the school bus stop after Luca had entered). Then I had a phone meeting with some industry collaborators I have been working closely with over the past 4 years. Goodbye! And I had lunch with good friends who happen to work across the street from me who had gifts for me❤️ including this little badge💪🏻😂😍

I may not be a hunter but it is no secret that there quite a few little rodents who have not survived a close encounter with me. Ahem.

I then emptied out my computer, which is super intimidating to do BTW, but everything is now safely tucked away on a harddrive. While I did that, I watched the very beginning of one of my Spring favorite events: the return of “the battle of the courtyard”. A marvelous wildlife soap opera starring angry geese:

I turned in my badge and my computer and then it was time for my goodbye party. Yay. My colleagues threw me a good one with death cocktails 💀 resembling the color of our euthanasia solution (it is almost fluorescent pink) and of course there were brain ice cubes in there!

I got to say goodbye to Ziggy the wonderdog

And give Randy his goodbye present which I hope he really liked (Ulrik made it❤️)

And then just spend the night with all my fantastic colleagues that I am going to miss like crazy. They had prepared a Henriette quiz (which got somewhat polluted with Dutch hiphop references - apparently you cannot trust Dutch coworkers😂😉), there was food and drinks (but no drugs - again referring to Lil’ Kleine Drank en drugs), awesome gifts that I can’t wait to use, and before I knew it the night was over and I came home to the first little taste of what the next day would bring:

Limbo

These days are not easy. On Saturday I fly out to Philadelphia where I will start my new job. The rest of the family is staying back in Michigan for now, as we see no need to drag two teenagers across states in the middle of the school year. And in addition we have decided to let them spend the summer there as well, so they can be with their friends (and go to the good summer camps - it has taken us years to figure out which ones to send your kids to and some of them require the parents to be ready by the computer at 6AM on the first registration day!). Luckily there will only be a few states between us this time which will make it a lot easier to visit both ways. But still...... the thought of getting keys to an empty apartment Saturday afternoon and then go to target to get an air mattress to sleep on that first night in said empty apartment is not appealing.

But hopefully this will all be worth it Monday morning when I have my official first day as...... drumroll please........ SENIOR SCIENTIST in obesity! With no end date on the contract! And 6 digits in my yearly salary! And a bunch of new colleagues I have only heard good things about! I am still hardly believing it myself. These positions do not come easy and at times I honestly think that scientists applying for tenure track in academia have better odds.

So here I am. Trying not to panic. Hugging my kids a little more than usual. Pretending not to cry in my coffee in the morning. Everything will be OK!

Right?

Conferencing in Banff

Within my field of science there is a smaller type or conferences called Keystone meetings, and the more I go,the more I like them. They are often super specialized (this last one was “functional neuro-circuitry of feeding and feeding disorders” - rolls of the tongue easily, right?) and they have started to feel a bit like family reunions. In addition there is a lot of networking between academic and industry researchers and I often bump into former Danish colleagues, which is nice. The only thing I don’t like so much is that they are mostly hosted on ski resorts and that’s kind of not really my thing. The rest of the family thinks it is ridiculous that I get to go places like Banff, Snowbird, Keystone, and Santa Fe when I don’t ski, but well..... what can I do?

But this time was truly special as I got live on the Fairmont hotel, which is literally built as a Scottish castle:

Complete with knight armors

And stone carved squirrels looking like they are either from a horror movie or had a very bad night😳

But my favorite place was by far this one:

Outdoor hot pools are THE BEST! And I also got to see some fantastic views just by going downtown to eat lunch

The scientific side of the conference was OK. There weren’t a lot of ground breaking discoveries in the talks but there is more and more interest in the hormone I currently work with (GDF15) and I am personally quite happy that my career has not yet put me in touch with super aggressive vomiting shrews, who play dead in the cage so they can attack you as soon as you take the lid off.

In addition I got to spend time with a few of my new colleagues as I am soon to start a new job. This is something that has been in the making for a long time and we have kept kind of quiet about it. But more about that will slowly start dripping in here as I move to the East Coast. Next week😱

Master chef

We got ourselves a big surprise yesterday. The youngest teen in the family has started reading a bunch of manga books and one of them is this one:

And even though he is not really the most adventurous when it comes to food (this is a VERY mild understatement......) he absolutely loves these books and spends all of his allowance on them. So yesterday he promised to make us omelets for breakfast despite having never ever eaten one himself. He followed the instructions in the book and created the fluffiest nicest omelet I have had in my life😳🤯 and with that success he immediately proceeded to Martha Stewart milk chocolate cookies which where awesome too. Kristian and I are in shock! I can’t wait to see what he decides to learn to cook in the next little while.

Frozen pipes

Well. This crazy winter polar vortex had a little gift up its sleeve - busted water pipes everywhere in our apartment complex! Yikes. A few doors down a foot of water accumulated before the ceiling caved in and flooded everything plus sent a stream down the street so we now have to climb over a thick layer of ice to get the trash out. We also had our share as we returned to about an inch of water in our bedroom and bathroom on Friday afternoon. We didn’t have any damaged pipes, but the neighbor did, and within a little while a carpet company came and sucked the majority of the water out and they promised to stop by shortly with a dehumidifier. Well........ That didn’t happen and I drove (in the cold! And the darkness! All by myself😱) by our friends place to borrow their dehumidifier overnight.

In the meantime we redecorated our living room:

Doesn’t it look lovely?

And by Saturday the big industry sized dehumidifier finally arrived:

It is humming away leaving our bedroom drier by the hour, while try not to stress over the state of our apartment. Honestly I am not too surprised because of they way this sh*t is built. These buildings have next to no insulation and right now I am SO sick of living here and having to deal with this😡

But I will end on a somewhat positive note. We drove my sister to the airport today which is always terribly sad and gives such and empty feeling. Because of this we allowed Luca to buy a bow with arrows (in the grocery store - gotta love Michigan.....), so if any of you have some scary snowmen attacking, just give us a call and we will make sure to take them down