Spring is upon us!

Our blog’s activity has been pathetic at best over the last little while. We’ve settled in to life here and so we keep having less and less things to share! However, since I last wrote quite alot has happened so I thought it would be time for an update!

Work for both of us has been crazy busy.. The days go by so fast it’s hard to keep track. Joonas is still super happy with his now not so new job, and is getting more freedom and respsonsibility within their company. I’m also finally in the groove of things and have been able to contribute to two major projects and have spent quite alot of time superivising students. We have a new addition to the group, a Chinese girl who is staying for a year and so I’ve been showing her the ropes and helping her out in the lab quite alot. We also had a visiting student from France who was working on some of the techniques that I’m familiar with and so with a couple of other people we took him under our wing and helped him out. I’m especially excited for the end of May when another French student will be coming to work with me on some ellipsometry experiments.. we will work together for a month and hopefully get a paper out of any of the resuts she is able to get while at Mac. We’re also getting a master’s student from Switzerland coming to do his master’s thesis starting in September, which I will have the privilige of supervising almost completely.. this will be my first official supervisory role ever so I am super stoked about it! Other than that, we’ve now landed on conference season and we just spent a week in San Francisco and will be spending a week in Montreal at the end of May.

San Francisco was an interesting city. As a  city it was really nice, geographically it’s really diverse and the weather was great! The sun was shining almost all week with highs of about 25 degrees and a light breeze. Apparently it doesnt get much hotter than that every, so temperature wise it would be agreat place to live. The city is super busy, everyone seems to be in a continuous hurry, running around in business attire or then sports clothes. It came across as a really young place as well, which makes sense as it’s in the IT hub of the US. The food there was also crazy good, we had some really good seafood and familiarized ourselves with Sushirittos! The only drawback though is that it is a super expensive city.. Our Airbnb accommodation for a week cost almost 3000euro and the food was really expensive as well. The city also seems to have huge problem with homelessness, unfortunately the scene in the streets is tainted with a homeless person every 150m or so – some of them are obviously just down on their luck but there was also a considerable number of people who had very evident drug addictions. Other than that, the conference itself was really good, my talk went well and it was so nice to see everyone!

Earlier in the spring we had a house full of guests! Joonas’ brother, his wife and their baby along with my sister-in-law’s sister stayed with us over a long weekend. It was so nice to see them all and even nicer to meet their little one who was born after we left for Canada so hadn’t had the chance to meet yet. We spent the weekend exploring Toronto, taking the dogs to the dogpark and vising the Mac campus and Hamilton.

This week we have a new guest coming to visit in the form of my little brother! So far we dont have anything planned so will probably play it by ear once he gets here. We’ve been very fortunate to have people come and visit us, it really helps aleviate our homesickness and Bugi is always excited to see people she recognizes!

Last week was also Bugi’s 8th birthday! I cant believe she’s been a part of our family for so long already, it feels like we just picked her up! I feel like she gets sweeter and cuter every day, but I might be biased :DOther than that, everything is pretty much the same here! Molli is growing fast and every day Bugi seems to be getting more and more tolerant of her. I stayed home today to catch up on emails and get some odd jobs finished that had to be put on the shelf the week before we left to San Francisco. It’s been a really nice day, so I ate lunch on the balcony with the pets and enjoyed the warm weather!

Well that’s all for now, it’s time to get back to work! Hopefully everyone is doing well! :)
​-Elli