Really not good

Ok, I don't understand people.

First of all: I'm moving tomorrow. I'm not shouting it from the rooftops but I do tell people about it, people in my department that I see and work with every day. Not a single person has offered to help. How can it be that people who I consider my friends, who I've known for years, who know that I live alone, don't offer any assistance? Is it me? Is it them? My adviser gave me a ride to pick up the moving truck today and Shan is helping me tomorrow, so I'll be fine. I'm just a little bumfuzzled over this all.

Second, and that's the part that's making me feel so crappy about the first part: The woman who lived in my new apartment before me promised to leave her furniture behind. That included a dining table, some bookcases, a couch and a sofa table and, most definitely, a bed. Most definitely, I say, because when she called me to ask what of her stuff I wanted, she explicitly asked if I had my own bed and when she heard that I didn't, she said she'd then not sell hers, as she had intended to do, but leave it behind for me. I asked her how much I could pay her for the bed but she insisted on giving it to me. She wanted, in this manner, to repay the kindness strangers had shown her when she first moved to Ithaca. Well, I don't know what those strangers did to her back then but when I went to the apartment today it was totally empty, except for the couch and the sofa table. No dining table, no bookcases, no bed. There goes the kindness of strangers, let me tell you.

So, I guess I'll sit here for a while feeling abjectly sorry for myself. Then, I should probably start packing.

Repetitive strain injury

I can't get my workspace to fit me right. The keyboard tray is too low compared to the desk. If I lower the seat to make it compatible with the keyboard tray, the mouse is way out of whack. And no matter what I do, the armrests on my office chair (which I bought myself, since my department doesn't think that good ergonomics are part of a healthy work environment) bump into everything. I love the armrests for, hmmm, resting my arms? but when they get into the way all the time, some love gets lost.

This all leads to pain in my shoulders, neck and right hand. Right now I have such an uncomfortable feeling in my hand, it feels like it will cramp up any moment. All this makes working at the computer, which I need to do 8 hours a day now a days, such a pain. Any suggestions from my valued reader(-s)?

Long before blog time

I stayed for a week at the famous Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris. Now I can visit them on the web, although the smell of musty books is conspicuously absent.

I wanna go to Paris.

"It's the best I can do"

There's nothing like ABBA to keep oneself going through a long evening at work :)

This week has been incredibly productive. My adviser is on vacation and while he's gone, his two undergrad research assistants are mine! I'm putting them to good use, trust me! Last week I speed-trained them on all the procedures in the clean lab (I think I mentioned this briefly last week), and this week they've been fantastic keeping the lab running. They come in in the morning and start processing the day's samples and go through the protocol as the day wears on, in addition to doing all the "support activities", such as washing labware, making acid, preparing tomorrow's samples, neutralizing acid etc. When they leave work I continue the sample protocol, seeing the samples to a finish which results in them being reduced to ~ half a milligram of a metal called Strontium. That half a milligram is later analyzed in a mass spectrometer, to give us the isotopic composition of the material (i.e. a very very very very precise weighing of the atoms of the metal). Lots of fun, sem sagt!

Back to the Stone Age

Some of the email servers at Cornell are down. I personally haven't been able to send or receive Cornell email for two days now. I feel like I've gone back to the Stone Age (which I guess is only appropriate for a geologist *hahahahhahaa* ROFL) (ok, pardon my sense of humour...)...

Las llaves

My keys are back with their rightful owner, me. Yay!!

I can't wait to move out of here!!

There are four (these days, three) of us in this apartment where I live. We share one bathroom (gasp!). Every single time I attempt a visit to the water closet, no matter what time of day or what day of the week, it's busy. This is beyond bizarre.

A normal person (not that any of us is normal but for the sake of argument we'll pretend we are) sleeps 8 hours a day. That leaves 16 hours for other activities, such as going to the loo. I do know for a fact that I don't spend more than ~0.5 hours in that ghastly chamber pr. day, which leaves 15.5 hours for my three room mates. By my calculations that means that the rest of them spend on average over 5 hours pr. day on the pot. WTF?!?!!?

Me wants

one (or two, or many) of these. They're just gorgeous!

OH, and I retrieved my keys. Turns out I left them in one of the common spaces in the building that I work in and someone saw them and kept them safe over the weekend, leaving a note with his telephone number. I'm infinitely relieved.

Not without incidence

My evening was not without incidence. I left work relatively early and walked home only to find that I had forgotten my keys at work. After taking a few deep breaths and cursing myself silently I called my office mate to borrow her keys. Then I walked to her place and accepted her offer for a ride up to campus (it takes a superhuman effort on my behalf to ask for help so of course I couldn't ask for that ride, see?). Once we were in the office I realized I had left the keys in the LAB, not the office, and my friend doesn't have the keys to the lab. So, we drove back and I called my landlord, whose answering machine directed me to the maintenance guy, who thought about this long and hard and finally asked: "Do you have 20 bucks?". Twenty minutes later the guy arrives to open the door to my room, only to find that he had brought the wrong set of keys (hysterical laughter may start here). I guess he really wanted those 20 bucks pretty badly b/c next thing I know, the guy is on the roof, making his way to the window of my room. So I finally got in; a stinking old guy with long fingernails opened the door for me FROM WITHIN!

After this horrendously hysterical evening, I'm finally getting ready to dissolve into my lovely IKEA reclining chair and (hopefully) laugh my pants off with Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Brain fried

Work is going like a speed train these days. Two undergrads are helping me in the lab and practically overnight a massive sample processing and lab maintenance campaign has been kicked off. Yesterday moi and her adviser had a meeting with a hydrologist on campus about watershed modeling and I left the meeting (well, they left the meeting and I was left sitting on my office chair) with my head full of ideas that I'm really hopeful about. So, today I've been working for 14 hours and I am absolutely fried. In a good way, though, since lots of work is getting done.

Well, I'm probably exaggerating about those 14 hours. Today I neflilega met my friend Leticia for lunch and we took almost one and a half hours to catch up (and we were by no means done!). That leaves just 12 hours at work. Oh well, worse things have happened ;)

Severe thunderstorms, tornados and 50 degrees!!

Sheesh, the weather does keep you excited around here! Right now there are severe thunderstorm warnings in effect for Ithaca, as well as a tornado watch. Yep, that's right, a TORNADO watch! Mind you, tornadoes are most definitely not supposed to happen in these parts.

And the forecast says that tonight's temperatures will be in the 50s. That's ~ 10 centigrades, for the unit-challenged out there. Wow!

Something funny to brighten your day

I had no idea about this site, until I read the Iceland Weather Report this morning. This one had me in stitches:


moar funny pictures

Thanks, AK, for sharing! And now, enjoy the day, all y'all!

It's HOT and HUMID!

Gee whiz, Ithaca weather changes fast! It was pretty nice all week, you know, you could wear a t-shirt and shorts and be quite comfortable. Yesterday town got transformed into a gigantic sauna, with over 70% humidity and temps shooting up to 37 centigrades. Thirty-friggin'-seven-degrees!!!! And it's still like that!

To cool myself down I'm putting in a picture from last February:

Still here,

...just not posting very often.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Erna graduated with a distinguished Ph.D. from Columbia. I made the trip to NYC to hang out and admire the outfit:



Cornell's graduation was the following weekend and there were some costumes involved there as well. Here's my former field assistant Tim, with the yellow ribbon signifying the award he got for being the best student in the department this year:



The weather here in Ithaca over graduation weekend was supremely superb, as this photo I took of Beebe lake proves:



There was a party at a professor's house for our dear Pete Nester, who got his Ph.D. that day, and his family. They all live in Houston now, taking care of the future's energy needs, and we miss them a lot. They kept running around so I couldn't get a decent picture of them. Art and Terry were much more cooperative:



and so was my friend and office mate Tiffany:



Next year, I'll get to show you all pics of her in the red Cornell Ph.D. gown :) !!