So many things have been happening recently, it's hard to keep up. The important point is that many events are conspiring to keep Kelly and I from going to North Dakota next week. From my potential trip to Australia, to Kelly's tiny fender bender, to unnamed family issues, to thinking about home buying, and many more, it's definitely been stressfull. And the main issue is being able to afford it. With the high price of gas, food, and hotels, a road trip to ND and back will run somewhere around $1000. But we'll figure it out somehow.

I had a great weekend with Kelly. We went up to Strawberry and hiked down to Fossil Springs with the fam. Ed was so sore afterwards. He looks like such a tough doggy, but he's so pitiful and wimpy sometimes it's funny. The rest of the family tried out the new tent trailer nearby. We found a great camping spot among the junipers just off the forest road to Fossil Springs. Kelly and I got to stay at the awsome Windmill Inn in Strawberry. One of the best things about this weekend was that the weather was awesome, but there was still nobody around because it's not "the season" yet.

In other news, I think I'll try submitting my paper one last time (after revision, of course). Tom thinks American Mineralogist letters may be a good bet. I hope so.

So Geology decided not to publish my paper. What the fuck? It's really discouraging that I can't get anything published, and yet I'm being invited to a special workshop in Australia? So is my research worth anything or not?

I'm back and I'm tired. I'm incapable of laughter right now. If I see or hear something funny, my throat makes a strange noise that is somewhere between a cough and a laugh, which then devolves into a paroxysm of coughing. So when I say I was coughing all the way through the last weeks episode of The Office, you can't tell whether I was really sick or it was totally hilarious.

Brookhaven Report #3:
Man, I'm exhausted. I've been working long days, and I've been sick, and it's finally over. I used up all my beamtime, and hopefully my data will be useful. Today I spent on the FTIR beamline looking at some of my samples, and realized that one of them was actually a piece of skin (or something like that)! I actually think I embedded it in sulfur with my sample because there are a number of equally-sized pieces of the same material all over that particular sample. Fortunately, I did get one spectrum of real sample, so it wasn't a complete waste of time, but it's very disconcerting when you fuck up something like that. (No wonder the spectrum of it looked so weird!). Today was also the first day when I didn't feel sick, which pisses me off because for the past three days when I was breaking my back collecting important data I was forcing myself to work when all I wanted to do was crawl in bed because I couldn't replace the lost beamtime. And today all I had to do was watch George collect infrared spectra of my samples.

But the important thing is that I'm done, and now tomorrow I can go home and see Kelly, who I love and miss so much. And eat Jamba Juice for a week (Long Island food is horrible!).

Brookhaven Report #2:

Things are busy here, and pretty exhausting. Not in the sense of lugging heavy weights around all day, but in the sense of staring at a computer screen for 16 hrs a day.

I got my ID badge alright, so everything is good on the security end. My laptop even connects to the internet right when I plug it in (which doesn't normally happen here--I'll have to enable some proxy server or script or something). Unfortunately, I feel a little under the weather. It's just a runny nose and a cough (the dry eyes are from staring at computer monitors all day). It could turn out just to be allergies, but I won't know that until I come back to AZ, and I've never had an allergic reaction like this before. Anyway, it's a bit miserable physically, and I have to get research accomplished even though all I want to do is crawl up in bed and rest.

Everybody should be thinking happy thoughts about Kelly, too. She's working nights all week, which is very commendable for a morning person like her.

I'm here, reporting live from Brookhaven. Man, it's been a crazy couple of days.

I thought I was screwed Sunday night because I spent alot of time playing with Kelly out in the sun, but by the evening I was shivering even though my body temp was high. I didn't think I was sick, because I didn't feel sick. I just had a fever. It was probably just heat stroke or something like that, but it passed sometime in the night and I woke up Monday totally dehydrated. My biggest fear, of course, was getting sick the day before I had to leave for New York, so I was glad I didn't have the flu or West Nile or anything like that. I just made sure to drink lots of water on Monday and not stress myself.

Things were going well after that. I finished all my preparations at ASU and then went home to do laundry. I had a nice evening with Kelly, and I even finished Out so I could discuss the weird ending with Kelly. I was relaxed and slept well, so I wasn't really all that tired at 4AM. My flights went smoothly (very unusual).

But then, as I was first heading out to Long Island from La Guardia in my rental car, I realized what was wrong (there's always something, isn't there?). I had forgotten my ID badge. I can't get onsite without one, and even if I got a temporary one, I wouldn't be able to get into the synchrotron (it doubles as a keycard). So I stressed out a bit as I slowly made my way east through the traffic until I realized that this probably happens alot, so there must be concessions. I did get a temporary pass, and I can probably get access to the NSLS tomorrow morning. Worst case scenario, I have to wait until my real badge arrives via FedEx tomorrow (thank you so very much, Mike Kraft).

Now, since I'm exhausted from a full day of travelling, I'm going to try to relax and get some sleep.

Sample prep is going well. From my initial ten samples, five managed to make it through the microtomy process. From those five I made 19 TEM sections which are on the dryer right now. Tomorrow I'll look at them to see which of them contain actual tiny rock fragments.

I watched Pamela Anderson's new show "Stacked" on the DVR this morning. It pretty much sucked, which was expected. But I'm a sucker for her for some reason. I admit, I watched VIP when it was on. But that show was all about hot girls in cool, cute outfits kicking ass, and I'm a fan of that. It wasn't about acting or plot at all. But Stacked has a plot, and not a very good one at that. It's probably destined for the cancelled bin, but I may watch another episode or two just for Pam.

I forgot to mention that Tegan and Sara played a short set at the MU yesterday. I think they had a show last night. Anyway, their new single "Walking with a Ghost" is one of the catchiest songs I've heard all year. Y'all need to download it if you can. By the way, the second catchiest song this year is "The Suggestion Box" by Aqueduct.

Not much has been going on lately. I've been busy with sample prep for the synchrotron next week. It's pretty repetitive. I started with ten samples and I'm down to six, a few of which should be done tomorrow. There's a lot of fine handiwork that must be done with special tiny tools, so it's easy to destroy the sample. I start out with more than I need, because I only need to end up with 2-3 TEM-ready sections.

To anyone who'll be in Tucson next week. My brother's film "Live In" is showing at the Arizona International Film Festival. I plan on going to the screening this Saturday afternoon.

I had a great weekend with Kelly. She's back from Ajo now, so it was nice and relaxing. It's really nice to have her back.

I got my GSRP grant renewal today. I get paid for another year now.

I found out why my office is so friggin' cold. The lab next door has the temperature sensor for the A/C. Unfortunately, it is right next to a broken fume hood that is blowing in air from outside constantly. That causes the temperature sensor to think it's hot all the time, so the A/C is on non-stop. There was a guy working on it late this afternoon, so maybe it will be fixed by tomorrow, but who knows.

Hitachi makes hard drives (among other things), and they've recently announced a new idea for storing more data on the same size disks. They've also created a Schoolhouse Rocks-type animation to explain the concept. Bliss!

It's so fucking cold in my office right now. I can't stand it. I'm all tense and curled up in front of my laptop right now, and I can't concentrate on anything. The building is supposed to have wireless right now, so maybe I should go get a wireless card so I can get some work done.

Ajo Update #2
Kelly is doing well. They are on the final stages of the well installation. Actually, I think they finished yesterday. Unfortunately Kelly has to stick around for the pump installation and final testing. So it will be at least another week, but it shouldn't be more than two. It was great seeing Kelly again. Last weekend we had some arguments but this weekend it was all disgusting lovey-dovey stuff. I'll spare you-all the gory details. By the way, Kelly strongly recommends a book called "Out" by Natsuo Kirino. I drove around Ajo mostly on Saturday while Kelly was working. I even snuck into the mine site an collected from the tailings pile (There are plenty of places to do this because the mine is so huge). I also drove around the nearby backcountry and found some placer mines. Also, I practiced drifting a little bit. There was a very wide stretch of straight, level, gravel road, so I lined up along on side, accelerated to about 25 mph or so, and then pulled the hand brake while turning the wheel. I was actually able to spin the car 180 degrees!

I was actually gonna post all this yesterday, but there was a big power outage at ASU yesterday afternoon. All of physical sciences was out of power, and maybe most of ASU. Then when the power came on, weird things started happening. The H-wing fire alarm went off, cancelling the chemistry seminar I was going to attend. And some people got stuck in the elevator in F-wing. The internet seemed to work, but I couldn't check email or connect to blogger.com.

Ever since the ASU physics department installed a pendulum wave set in F-wing, I've had a small part of my brain devoted to figuring out how it worked. The critical piece of information that eluded me was the function that determined the length of each pendulum. I could model the motion of a set of pendulums in a Java applet rather easily, but I couldn't get them to create the patters that the physical pendulum set could. I finally looked up a paper on the phenomenon and found the formula to tune the lengths, and I completed my applet.

I should also mention that I first found out about letterboxing and geocaching Friday morning, the day I was supposed to drive down to Ajo, from Wil Wheaton's website.

I just got back from Ajo visiting Kelly this weekend. I drove down Friday afternoon. It's actually quite a nice drive. The mountain ranges are really beautiful. We stayed in a little cabin at the motel. On Saturday, Kelly had to work, so I drove 30 miles south to Organ Pipe Cactus NM. That place is really cool. The Ajo mountains there are tilted fault blocks of a rhyolite and tuff sequence, kind of like the hills along the Vulture Mine Road west of Wickenburg (for those of you who were in Steve Reynold's Advanced Field Geology class). I hiked up the Bull Pasture/Estes Wash loop, and I swear when I reached the Bull Pasture, I just wanted to take off into the mountains. They're really cool. I wish I didn't forget my camera, but I'm sure I'll be back. There were a lot of wildflowers in bloom because of all the rain we had this winter. There were other plants that were just getting ready to bloom, so April will be a beautiful month. I even saw a stubby little cactus with a huge purple flower on top!

I also found the mystery letterbox. Letterboxing and Geocaching are two nationwide treasure-hunting games that are slowely gaining popularity. Geocaching is the more popular of the two, probably due to it's use of GPS to locate the cache. A geocache is simply a (hopefully) airtight plastic or metal canister filled with a logbook and a few trinkets. The GPS coordinates of the location of the cache are then posted to the website. People use their GPS to find the hidden cache, take one of the trinkets, and leave one of their own. It's kind of a fun group activity, and it gives people a reason to go out and appreciate the outdoors. Letterboxing is a more British approach to treasure-hunting. A letterbox contains a logbook and a rubber stamp, sometimes hand carved from an eraser. The finder of the letterbox has their own stamp to put into the logbook, and usually records the letterbox stamp in their own notebook. The main difference between letterboxing and geocaching is that only clues are given to the location of the letterbox, not GPS coordinates. This adds a bit of sleuthing to the fun, and it's a good feeling when you confirm that you've figured out the puzzle. The letterbox in Organ Pipe is a mystery letterbox in the sense that the nearest city is not given, but I guess that secret's out in the open now. Not that it was really hard to figure that part out anyway. It was still fun poring over the park map trying to figure out where it was. I'm not interesting in the stamping part of the hobby. I just liked figuring out the clues. Kelly thinks both letterboxing and geocaching are totally gay, but I can't help it when there's a fun puzzle to solve.