Twenty years of classes: check.

Greetings from Lucid Lynx. In my first act of celebration of the temporary reprieve of grad student Lent, I decided to upgrade my operating system. I was a little bit terrified that things weren't going to work with ooimpress or ssh or something else that would mean that I would fail both my class and my second year defense. Fortunately, the only thing that seems to be awry is Java, which is sort of a tricky beast.

Grad student Lent has been put on hiatus until Monday when more deprivation is slated to occur. On Wednesday I gave my talk, Hobby-Eberly Telescope Chemical Abundances of Stars in the Halo (CASH) Project: Spectroscopic Analyses of the First ~80 Stars. (You can take a look at the talk here, if you're so inclined.) I think that my committee mostly liked my talk. About 10 minutes after I finished the talk, I had class and right after that was over, I was handed a 27.5 hour take home exam. It wasn't so bad, but it was noteworthy as it was the most interesting exam I've ever had. Oh, and also, it's the last written exam that I'll ever take. I'm done with classes for the rest of my life. At least, I'm done with classes that count for credit.

So I decided that I was going to take tonight off and not do anything related to school and now... I'm bored. How crazy am I? I just don't know what to do with myself when I'm not studying/making a talk/measuring abundances in the atmospheres of the oldest stars of the Milky Way galaxy thereby unraveling the mysteries of the early universe.

So as boredom set in, I went to the fridge to see what was there and found a pint of strawberries that were on the precipice of being trash... I mean, they were really ripe and I had intended to let them ripen. It had nothing to do with forgetting them in the bottom of the fruit bin. Nope. So I decided that I was going to make a strawberry-lemon agua fresca... and then I noticed that I had vodka in my freezer.

strawberry lemon vodka fresca (see what I did there?) (Adapted from the agua fresca recipe in Gourmet)

1 pint ripe strawberries, washed and hulled
2 c cold water
1 c ice
juice from 1/2 large lemon
1-4 Tbs sugar (this is to taste)
vodka

Blend strawberries, water, ice, and lemon juice in a blender til it's super liquid-y. Taste and see if you think you need sugar. (I started with 1/4 cup and it was wayy too much.) Blend briefly to incorporate the sugar. Pass through a fine mesh strainer and squeeze the juice of the solid bits. Take six ounces of the juice + 1 shot vodka, add ice, a lemon slice and resist the urge to crack open Stellar Photospheres out of boredom because Grad Student Lent starts again on Monday.