Big Long Update on Everything

Well, it's been a while, so I suppose I should update, eh? Let's see, what have I been up to in this little city? Not much, to be honest. Last Saturday night, about a week ago, the state park just down the road, Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park, had a "Full Moon Walk", as they do every month the night of the full moon, or the Saturday night closest to it. There's a paved trail that leads you around the park, and there's rangers stationed along the way, one at each group of pens and one at each fork in the path, so that you always know where to go. In the daytime, I assume, visitors are free to wander around in whatever direction they like, but at night, they probably want a one-way trail so that no one gets lost and people are easily shooed out as closing time approaches. The trail seems to alternate between "gardens" and "zoo" parts. You start off wandering through desert plants for a while before coming to the first set of pens, which are mostly birds. Then desert plants for another while, then more animals, and so on. At one point you come out at the edge of a hill overlooking the city - which looks amazing at night. I tried to get some pictures, but they kinda sucked. Once on the hill, you do a giant loop around a pond, passing pens for various antlered things, then on the other side of the loop after a bit more walking you find the predators, bobcats and wolves and mountain lions. After that the self-guided tour was basically done, except for more plants and finally a fish pond.

I have to say, it was quite interesting, enough to make me want to go back at some point in the daytime so that I can actually see the park properly. I'd also like to go again on that moon walk on a night that's not so overcast. Unfortunately there were so many clouds that the moon was covered and so it was difficult to see many of the animals hiding in the back of their pen. I didn't think to bring a flashlight, but luckily I have good enough night vision to find my way along trails that were basically unlit, making my way from ranger to ranger (who had flashlights, making them easy to spot in the dark).

Although several of the animals were either asleep or hiding, I did manage to see a burrowing owl, a peccary (kind of a desert hog), a black bear named Maggie who apparently likes to paint, some eagles, a mountain lion up close, some tortoises, some snakes, a lizard, a badger who liked to show off for visitors, and a giant bug called a vinegaroon. The vinegaroon was actually wild and wandering around the path near the mountain lion pen, and the ranger pointed it out with his flashlight. Apparently there were wolves but somehow I missed them sadly. I didn't see the bobcats, either - the rangers were warning people to stay away from those pens since one of the males was trying to pee on people.

In the lab, we interns have basically been doing the same stuff over and over. Taking samples from various solubility experiments and making several different dilutions for different machines to analyze for different chemical components. Running one of these machines, the coulometer, every day to analyze some samples we took the first week in the lab for carbonate. The coulometer is very finicky, but I think now we are almost done with that set. Setting up more solubility experiments. Making solutions to set up said solubility experiments. Making standards each week for the coulometer. Doing dishes - most of which is washing out 10 mL volumetric flasks, which we are constantly using for the dilutions, and 100 mL volumetric flasks, which we often use for making the standards as well as measuring out solutions to set up the solubility experiments, and also several beakers, which are used for pretty much everything.

The past couple of days we terminated this experiment that has apparently sitting in a cupboard for YEARS, and we don't even really know what's in the bottles, which is kind of scary. There were maybe 50 bottles total. Each bottle had some powder in the bottom, some plastic things with metal or powder in them, and liquid on top. A lot of the bottles also had some nasty-looking gel formation. For each bottle, we needed to measure the pH, take 3 10-mL samples of the liquid and put them in these other little bottles, then take out the plastic things, filter out the solid in the bottom, and let EVERYTHING dry. The next step is (for each bottle) grind everything that's grindable for (I'm assuming) XRD analysis. erm...X-ray diffraction...it's, um, a machine that tells us what materials are present and in what phases.

Also, random thing for any materials people that are reading this: I found a copy of Callister in the hydrology lab! (next to the geochem lab, the lab I usually work in) It's the 3rd edition but it looks EXACTLY the same as the 7th on the inside, lol. Made me happy. (For those of you who are confused, "Callister" refers to the introductory MSE book written by a dude named Callister. It is the book required by U-M's Intro to MSE class, and it is THE book on MSE that pros always go back to for reference. I had heard that it was THE book and that people have it everywhere, but it made my day to actually see it stuffed on a bookshelf in a lab next to a bunch of other MSE and MechEng textbooks.) And I am now convinced that the motto of the U-M Alumni Association should be something like "Resistance is futile. We are everywhere." Middle of nowhere, small city, remote site, and yet of course there's a truck in the parking lot with a Mathematica sticker like I see on some of U-M professor office doors on one side of the back window and a battered U-M Alumni Association sticker on the other. No idea who it is, though. When I first got here, someone mentioned "oh, you should talk to so-and-so, they're from Michigan" but I think I was slightly fried from reading and corporate training at the time so I don't recall the name.

As to the weather, some people were slightly alarmed when I posted on facebook about my car negotiating the flooding streets of Carlsbad. Well, I did mention in one of my previous posts on here that the main street has no drainage system and that resulted in some fairly large puddles. That was after a light rain. The past 2-3 days have been pretty much just wet, from light spitting to complete deluges. And when I say deluge, we're talking Ann Arbor in October, knock out the satellite TV in the boonies, soak you to the bone if you were caught in it, despite wearing a coat, having an umbrella, and wearing waterproof shoes - that's how heavy we're talking. On the way to work Wednesday, I was driving along under a gloomy cloud when I spotted what looked to be a random patch of fog. It wasn't fog - it was the rebound and splashes of the water drops hitting the road because that was where the downpour was. It was on the way back to my apartment that the effects of downpours all day were truly evident, as several small ponds had sprung up all along my route. I just took my time and slowed down for each one, ever so glad that my parents had bought me a good car with all-wheel drive from a company currently encouraging its customers to not be afraid of the dirt. HOORAY SUBARUS!

What else? Oh, so Thursday was Canada Day, and with all of the flooding (again, but not quite so bad, though there was a traffic jam due to construction people randomly closing a lane during rush hour without advanced warning on the road) I forgot about going on a hunt for Aero bars in WalMart, though I did play "Canadian, Please" on repeat the entire way to work and part of the way home. For those of you who are unfamiliar with "Canadian, Please", I shall post the video made 1 year ago that now has over a million views:



Awesome, eh? Anyway, later that day I wandered around what I thought would be a local patriotic festival - it was, after all, called Uncle Sam's Spectacular Downtown Event - but it was really just a few tables, some live music that wasn't that great, and some girls selling ice cream. Really quite disappointing. But, it's not all bad. Tomorrow, if I can get myself out of bed at all, I'm going to drive up to Roswell, which is a little over an hour away. Why? Well, I just discovered that they are currently having their Annual UFO Festival. Which at the minimum will be entertaining just for seeing all the goofy weirdos and nerds and all that crazy stuff. I might even enjoy myself. Then Sunday there's the fireworks, which most people go down to the "beach" for (the locals call the waterfront and park on the Pecos River the beach), but I think I might take the advice of a coworker and go up on C hill. C hill, something else I have to figure out, is a big hill that Living Desert is on. From the top of it you can see the fireworks quite well without having them rain down on you and deafen you. It is called C hill because (a) it is a hill in Carlsbad, and (b) the high school is up there, and there is apparently a big "C" on the hill for the Carlsbad Cavemen, their mascots.

Also, I've been using Google Chrome recently, after having issues with Firefox and Flash and the internet...basically Firefox kept freezing up completely every time I tried to watch a video or play a game. I think it's fixed now, but Chrome seems faster and it's certainly behaving more, so I'll probably use Chrome for a while until something goes wrong with it.

One question - do people want me to post pictures in with this blog text? One of my oSTEM (formerly SAGE) peeps is doing that in his blog posts about his study abroad in France, so I know it can be done, if my readers would prefer that. At the moment, I just have the facebook album public links in a box off to the side so people can peruse the pics at their leisure. Let me know in comments!

For now, that's all. I will try to update more often, two weeks of updates in one go is ridiculous, especially when I'm going to start doing stuff on the weekends now.