Down the Rabbit Hole

For the past few days, strong winds have been stoking the Camp and Woolsey Fires in California. The smoke from the Camp Fire was blown towards the Bay Area, blocking the sky and giving people a view of fiery sunsets. Although it's a pretty sight, it makes me think just how bad the fire up north really is... and how many lives have been lost or displaced. An hour before I took this photo, a classmate of mine was musing that this must be like what a nuclear winter probably looks and feels like. I responded that I don't know but the closest to it probably was the winter after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is probably a disproved hypothesis because the technology to make weapons powerful enough to start a nuclear winter probably wasn't available in the 1940s). My classmate further mused that this might be what the aftermath of a volcanic eruption looks like. Because my family's house in the Philippines got covered in ash after the Mount Pinatubo erupti...

At the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco, one of the ice cream stops had a guide asking visitors what their favourite ice cream memories were in exchange for a cone of soft-serve ice cream. Some visitors talked about ice cream melting because of the summer heat or about ice cream scoops accidentally falling onto the ground. And then there were others who mentioned spending time at Fentons, an ice cream parlour famous for its invention of the rocky road ice cream flavour. Anna, Joycelyn, Biboy, and I had a chance to eat at Fentons' second branch (in Vacaville) after we failed to find Sherlock Holmes and his companion .  Though we were so full because the serving portions of our dinner were huge, we couldn't leave without eating its handcrafted ice cream. I think we got a classic combination: one scoop each of chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry topped with a generous pile of whipped cream and chocolate fudge. I found the ice cream rich and sweet. It was definitely...

Biboy and Barbara welcomed a healthy baby boy and they named him after our paternal grandfather, Gabriel (aka Lolo Bats ). 

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Rochie Cuevas (@rochiecuevas) on Nov 9, 2018 at 8:44pm PST Sherlock Holmes is the world's most renowned fictional "consulting detective". He is normally chasing after the bad guys with Dr Watson. But because Watson's already married, if we follow the track of the Sherlock series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman , he gave up his spot as Sherlock's assistant. Hence, the detective is on the look out for his new assistant. At the moment, Sherlock is missing; people aspiring to become his assistants must find where he is and who he's with. This is the premise of the latest escape room I played with Anna, Biboy, and Joycelyn. We went to Beat The Room in Vacaville (yes, near the outlet stores). We were guided into "221B Baker Street", where the clues to Sherlock's current location and companion were hidden. We had 50 min...

One of the projects I spent a lot of time on in my final year at the International Rice Research Institute (as a scientist) was contributing to seven chapters in a book of grain quality methods. After many months in the making, the book has finally been released.  Writing the different chapters was like reflecting on the past years that I've been in the laboratory (I started off as a researcher; then I became a scholar, a post-doctoral fellow, and then a scientist). The chapters I contributed to described protocols in characterising rice grain quality using the usual protocols and non-routine methodologies. In some of the chapters, I wrote content that provided context to possible applications and data interpretation coming from the results of assays I haven't performed yet (e.g., inductively coupled plasma - optical emission spectrometry and near infrared spectroscopy). People come and go; the lab is in constant flux. The group I started out with has largely moved ...

I've gone on a bus tour of San Francisco before. But that bus tour was designed for visitors to the city. We drove by some of San Francisco's famous landmarks: the Golden Gate Bridge , the City Hall, the Asian Art Museum , the Transamerica Pyramid , Union Square , and the giant dangling legs in Haight Ashbury. It's certainly a good primer on the lay of the land because I got a glimpse about some of the neighbourhoods in the city. Golden Gate Bridge Haight-Ashbury's Dangling Legs San Francisco Symphony San Francisco City Hall Asian Art Museum Transamerica Pyramid (right in front of the bus) Union Square Aside from seeing landmarks, we were treated to a view of a city of visual artists. Murals peppered buildings in the city. Some were monochromatic or minimally coloured while others had strong splashes of colour that it was difficult to dismiss them. But the bus tour couldn't give an experience of what it's like to live ...