Trapped

So much for New Year's resolutions: Not even a full month into my commitment to post every week and I'm already falling behind! But this is a blog about being a scientist with a serious case of travel lust (and a pole habit), and sometimes being a scientist means spending your weekends trapped inside furiously (not at all half-heartedly ;) ) reading and writing. 

With hardly a moment spent just relaxing, there was little hope for generating new content for this blog. What I lack in the written word, I'll compensate this week with some photography whose inspiration readily crawled across me while planted on the couch with a laptop. As the subjects of my "work" will readily attest, there are much better things to do with a keyboard than a scientific funding proposal.

A cat is never on the right side of a door.

A table (Lunchtime)

A good stretch

A study in feline sophistication

It's tough work being a cat

You're welcome.

A snowy championship weekend

If you know me or you follow this blog, you've probably realized that pole dancing is not just restricted to night clubs, but it also a sport. And, where first comes sport, next comes championships. And that's what happened in Denmark (and not for the first time) this past weekend.

My friends and I ventured down to what the Jutlanders call "Sweden" (a proper Danish insult), and what the rest of us would call Denmark's capital city. And, from our front row vantage point, the competition was way more exciting than YouTube. Still, it's worth a share. The highlight of the night was the guy who literally backflipped off the pole. None of us had ever seen anything like it.

Bjarke Hellden Pole DM 2015

And of course, our own lovely instructor put on quite the performance too! Another girl in our studio took second overall. It's worth checking out if you've never seen a pole choreography before.

By the time the excitement was over, we emerged from the theater to discover that the light dusting that had begun outside had sped past "charming": there would be no getting home that night.

Snowed in at the Danish pole championships

But a snowed in camp-out in Copenhagen with your pole girls isn't the worst way to spend a Saturday night. And after all that fun, I got to come home to this guy discovering the cold white stuff.

An extra weekend highlight: Mars learned about snow.

We always knew he was a smart cat...

Turns out that kitty painting higher up on the shelf was prophetic.

The Little Red Devil

Here is the little guy we've welcomed into our home (to shred it up and play with every piece of it). Introducing Mars, aka the Little Red Devil!

Our new furbaby, Mars