Marta, the iron lady

First, Marta, the butcher.  Now, Marta, the iron lady???  Have I gone insane or what?  Haha.  Is that my Halloween outfit?  No, I'm not insane.  No, I'm not gonna dress as the Iron Lady for Halloween.  I've just spent more than one hour ironing all the clothes that I haven't been wearing in the past few weeks because they looked messy and I decided to try to make a joke out of it.  I was not very successful, I knowwwww.  I'm too tired to care about it!  :)

Actually, ironing my clothes was not the topic of today's post.  Let's move on to interesting stuff!  There were to major events in my weekend and I wanted you to be aware of them.  First, I finally started working on my research.  Second, I had a really nice trip to Santa Cruz on Saturday.

Do you wanna know some more about it?

Have I already mentioned what I'm going to work on?  In 2010, two buildings were built to be tested simultaneously on the biggest seismic table in the world: NIED EDefense shake table.  One of them is a conventional reinforced concrete building; the other has the same structural systems but with post-tensioned members.  I'm going to model and study the reinforced concrete one and compare the results  I get to the experimental data documented after the tests on the seismic table.  How cool and interesting is that?  Probably not interesting at all for most of you but I am very excited anyway.  A Berkeley's PhD student is doing exactly the same with the post-tensioned building and he's going to help me a lot.  Moreover, the fact that the building was purposely built to be tested means that I'll have access to all the information I need.  

In what concerns to the trip to Santa Cruz, it felt very good to leave Berkeley for a while and get some fresh air.  I went with 20 more people who live in i-House and we had lot's of fun.  Check out the photos below for more details on what we experienced.

It's time to go to bed.  Talk to you soon!