On holidays


This year was in many ways unique and special. So the same stays true for my Christmas holidays. I usually end my lab work on 20ish of December and plan to return to the lab no sooner than New Year’s day. 

Well, this year I accumulated bunch of vacation days, that I had to completely use up before the end of 2019, as I am moving to Vienna to work as a synthetic chemist at BOKU. With this excitement of taking my skills and passion to Austria, I had to quickly close the projects I was involved at the Institute of Microbiology, Czech Academy of Sciences. Long-long hours, sleepovers at work, moving to Bratislava, finalizing lab reports and paper to publish, passing my know-how to my substitute, long-distance relationship with my wife and daughter. Uneasy, but we made it and are alive!

Baking-my other synthetic passion

Well, some of the work did not terminate as I left the work with bags of stuff my last day (Dec. 12th, 2019). I continued to finalize our about-to-be submitted paper from home, but it was rather a pleasure, as I got plenty of sleep and I could slowly move to my other passion – baking! Making “medovníčky”, type of gingerbread,brownies and “oblátky”, thin wafers spreading vanilla, cinnamon, honey , chocolate smelling fumes can be certainly seen as a valuable replacement of all the vapors found in a hood of organic chemist. Taking my nephew Samko to play with fluorescent dies found in highlight markers was also one of the things, I will remember.

Family matters

Over the Christmas, I spent very precious time with my family. I value this, as I do not see them more than once in 6-8 weeks. Certainly, this Christmas are never to be forgotten as we welcomed our baby-girl Anetka to the world this fall. Our 3-month old was absolutely adorable and everyone loved her presence. She was truly the best gift, we as parent could ask for last Christmas.
Enjoy the rest of the year and see you in 2020! It will surely be a great one.

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