More sampling monkey-business

I seem to have a bad habit these days of flying whilst storms brew. Instead of the airline reminder email, I need only wait for Paul Fortino's mass-campus email warning of a winter storm that may or may not close down campus. Anyway, this weekend it was a quick trip to Pasadena for the "last samples" for a project that has been underway for ~2 years. Things I've learned in that time:

1: Never say "these are the last samples" because then you go through the dataset, you find the, umm, not-so-good data that needs culling and realize the complete set of replicates is not-so-complete anymore.

2: Never volunteer to run your samples overnight while others take the day shift. Just not worth it on so many levels and fortunately(?) I learned that early, but the hard way.

3: It sometimes rains in southern California. That is why I have no photo log like I promised Grandma. Since there is no immediate end to my southward trips, this will happen at some point. I promise.

4: There are some interesting things to fill the weird ~2 hour gaps between sample processing. Like foreign films on the outdoor, grassy ampitheater. Best enjoyed with a therm-a-rest. Or the bellydancing show I saw Saturday night by the "Bellydancing Superstars." Apparently, they've been touted as the next "Stomp."

5: The old geochemistry axiom "more data is not always good. Quit while you still have a story" is slightly true.

6: If you tell people on the airplane/supershuttle that you are a geologist, you'll get lots of interesting questions. The supershuttle driver today told me geology is "his favorite thing to watch, after the news." I'm not sure I followed that logic, except maybe he watches a lot of the discovery channel?

7: I know now exactly how long it takes certain specific, trivial tasks as I keep a timer going on my samples in the interest of mulit-tasking. It takes 10 seconds to walk between one science machine room to the other science machine room, and ~4 minutes to get to and from the oven room and about 30 seconds for a pee break. Just in case you were wondering.

Overall, it was a productive weekend and that much closer to finishing, dunt-dunt-dunnn.... Chapter 1!

(On top of Anderson Peak)

A general cheers to holidays in honor of hardworking souls that give us all more time to play. Spent the weekend before working up a proposal and will spend next weekend in Pasadena, so I took the whole thing, guilt-free. Yay! My friend Paul, of Colorado hutness-fame, came down and we joined Kena, Hwakong, Mike and Robert for a long weekend in Benson hut in the North Lake Tahoe region. We had excessive amounts of sunshine and got in lots of turns. And of course ate a lot of food. Even some extreme sledding. Fortunately my tailbone weathered this round a little better than last year's round of extreme sledding. It helps that the snow was pretty slushy (see the comment about sunshine). And Paul, being of public policy ilk, admirably put up with the rest of us engineering/sciency types.

Gearing up for the first turns of the day

Check out our handiwork!

Bagging the peak

Paul "saving face"

We've decided that he has a future in male modeling. The instinct on his impending face plant was to "save face," resulting in a turtle-style stomach slide instead. Way to look out for your career, Paul! Anyway, while my arms may lack the strength to pull myself up the ladder to bed, I feel rejuvenated and set for the week (and coming weekend).

Super Dooper Political Departure

(image shamelessly stolen from another blog, but I laughed at the warning sign they added to the original image......)

I love every part of voting. None of this mail-in ballot stuff. I like the idiocyncrasies; for instance, two precincts report to the church in the middle of The Circles (my neighborhood). Both precincts vote in the same room, but the room is set up as two mirror-image stations. If you go to the wrong one, they make you leave and enter through the OTHER door 50 feet away, into your proper precinct. I like that they give you a sticker to wear around all day proclaiming to the world that you voted. The only thing that could make it better is if they brought back the old voting machines that have the switches and the big lever to pull at the end. Or stickers like the ones they give out at the blood bank: “Kiss me, I voted.”

The other fun part is that this will be the 3rd state in which I’ve voted for president, and each state has an entirely different approach to the primary. Minnesota does it Caucus-style, Washington has both a caucus AND a presidential primary (woah!), and California is all primary.

And of course, for each of these states, there are small differences in how each party approaches the primary. For WA, the parties weight the portion of delegates picked from each event differently: dems delegates are based entirely on the caucus results, while the repubs distribute the delegate votes between the caucus and the primary. And WA residents are pretty feisty about being able to vote for which ever party they want to, regardless of their official affiliation. Needless to say, the parties are not fans, and this issue is currently under debate. In Cali, folks with Independent, Democratic or no party affiliation can vote in either the Independent or Democratic primary but to vote for the Republican primary, you have to be a registered Republican. There was an interesting snippet on NPR the other evening about the rationales behind these stances.

Of course, all of these options exist because there are so many opinions on what is the fairest, most inclusive, most accurate approach. But, as far as personal enjoyment goes, I have to go with the caucus. If you’ve never participated in one, I highly recommend considering that when you make your next out-of-state move.

So here’s wishing you all happy electing, whatever the flavor. Go get ‘em!

Vitamin D kick in the keister

We’ve had about 2 weeks of gray and rain, and it even made the cat depressed. Though I think cats have a sneaky way of LOOKING depressed and cuddly, just so you’ll pet them more. My housemate Patrik’s suggested solution to the weather was that we should all hogpile the cat on the futon and not move until the sun comes out. And sure enough, by Tuesday night, things felt a little desperate. Apparently, it is taking its toll on everyone else out here as well. But I woke up to blue sky through the skylight the next morning and all I could do was run around the house yelling “Yesyesyesyes!” with a sh**-eating grin on my face. Hallelujah!

Not much to report –

running in the rain (getting muddy is always good). And of course, rain brings out sightings of Bicycle Smurf (all of my rain gear, for some odd reason, is blue...) while the annual cocktail party last weekend livened up life just a little in spite of everyone’s rain-induced funk.

Nicely done, ladies (Calla really stole the show with those glasses)

some of the old grumblies making an appearance....

Soon sleeping the sleep of the just

I'd be asleep already but I ate too much and need to digest first. Back from 4 days in the lab. After spending 3 days in the home lab to be ready. I'm tired. I'm a little behind. Someone said it is only the 2nd week of the quarter. That seems impossible. When I drove home today, there was snow on the side of Hwy 17. Strange. But there is revelry ahead. I'm excited for that. Check back when I have my verbal skills up and running again.

a little steamrollered...

I think Quarters have a tendency to behave like the bookends of March - either lamb-like and midquarter crunch sneaks up before you know it or lion-like. Or, as with this quarter, it's like staring down one of these:

Monday night I found out I can have time on the science machine at Caltech this weekend, which meant a dramatic overhaul of my week to be ready with four days worth of samples by Thursday night. Monday night I also read a piece called "Women in Science," which basically offers up an alternate reason for why there aren't so many women in science. But if you are also a grad student, don't read it before bed. I had trouble sleeping. Anyway, the collision of these two events (trying to rearrange my life for the week with the little nagging doubts of my current path in life brought to the front) made me feel, well, I felt a little sorry for myself. On the bright side, I did see an incredible shooting star that seemed brighter than Venus and took at least 30 seconds to cross the sky [gross exaggeration: it was really only 20] on the midnight ride home. That helped.

Thing is, it doesn't seem like it should feel so taxing, but I think the root is that, while I'm grateful for the time, I have to mentally gear up for these trips. I really don't look forward to 14-hour days in the lab with no human interaction. For four days. The hard part here is the lack of interaction as opposed to the long days. My phone takes a pretty heavy hit on these trips. I never realized how much I need some kind of human interaction in the course of a day until grad school.

Related to this, I want to make a shameless plug for a book I read over break called "The Female Brain." No, it isn't a cheezy pop-psychology book. It frames a lot of the different aspects of women's lives in the various chemical and hormonal concoctions going on in our brains. I was really surprised at how much I liked this book. Thanks Sarah! So, if you're a woman, you should read it. If you're not a woman, but like women, interact with women, can't hide from women, you should read it. I hear walking around with this book is a pretty good chick magnet too.....

Fruits of the storm

Given that the storm dumped 10+ feet of snow in the Sierras, I couldn't turn down a chance to swap my Sunday for Friday, and headed to South Lake Tahoe for some skiing. No sense in letting those hard-earned ski boot calluses go to waste! We spent Friday at the resort practicing our turns (thanks to some free/discounted passes) and successfully found those lost thigh muscles. Saturday, we skied up Waterhouse Peak (or faux Waterhouse peak to be completely honest), and the skies cleared at the top just enough to see beautiful views of the Sierras and Lake Tahoe. And a couple solid face plants at the bottom helped me find rarely-used neck muscles. And I got one more chance to hang out with Kena before she heads to Kenya, then Laramie.

The lake is the flat blue patch...

Happy Skiers (Kena, Mike and Robert).

Lots of mountains. Lots of granodiorite.

Conveniently enough, the trip also helped me with my homework. We're supposed to make up one question for each assignment for my order of magnitude estimation class and then solve it and in the course of conversation, the minimum thickness of ice needed to support human weight came up...Perfect!