Another fun AMT session

Today I biked in to the office again, since it hadn't snowed, so the path was still clear, and the temperature was a pleasant -2 C.

Once there I managed to finish up the power point presentation for tomorrow's lab demo, help one of my Master's students with his data reduction, and learned that the argon gas we need for the ICP-MS hasn't been delivered yet. It is hoped that it will arrive in the morning and someone will be able to hook it up on time for the lab demo, or we won't be able to demo much. (The woman who normally does the hookup has tomorrow off)

Then I came home, had a two hour nap, woke up sleepy and disoriented, yet still managed to bake some pizza and bread rolls before it was time to head to the AMT gymnastics session.

There were only 9 students this week, so we broke in to pairs (mostly) taking turns at four different stations. E. and I started with the parallel bar. I am strong enough to "walk" the lenght of it with my legs hanging down and my hands on the bar. I also could manage swinging my body back and forth between the bars, butI didn't dare to try swinging my legs up and over the bar to hop onto the ground.

The second station was the single bar, where I managed to do the flip where one starts with one's hands on the bar, hips also pressed to the bar, then swing one's legs forward, backwards, and then forwards and up and over the bar.

The third station involved running five meters, hopping over a 1.5 meter gap to land with both feet at once on a small, inclined, trampoline, with the goal of hopping high enough from it to do an in the air summersalt and land on a high, soft mat on the far side of the trampoline. For us beginners it was suggested that we start with just trying to hop from the trampoline onto the high mat. This was harder than it sounds. The first few times I tried I didn't even get any bounce at all. The teacher said that the problem was that I was bending my knees too much and thus countering the momentum from the trampoline.

But with practice I eventually managed not only jumping up onto the the mat, but a few times I mannaged to even do a flip in the air :-)

a good lab demo day

This morning I opted to drive in so that I would have good energy for the lab demo day. I first checked the power point presentation, and it still looked fine, so then and M, our PhD student and I chose some areas on one of his samples to analyze for the demo. This took till pretty much noon to get the experiment completely set up and ready to just push go, which left me just time to eat a quick lunch before taking my computer to the conference room to set up for the talk. We had chosen one of the medium-small rooms, and got just enough of an audiance to completely fill the room, which was nice.

I told them about the lab, about what LA-ICP-MS is, some of the advantages and some of the limitations of the technique, then showed them pictures from some of our projects, and from projects other labs have done, then took questions and answers. After that we took a 10 minute break while M and I went down and started his experiment, then I left him there to answer questions from some visitors, while I went upstairs and demonstrated the really powerful data processing package we use and took more questions. Then I brought everyone who was still interested down to the lab, where we watched the experiment finish. Several people said they will be in touch to show me their samples and see what we can do with them. They are all in different divisions or different departments, so some of the samples will be quite different from anything we have run so far.

All in all it was a good day. After I was done O joined me for the drive home and we have a pleasant hour or so resting and snuggling before I had to deal with the laundry that I started when we arrived. Now I need to pack for the trip to Finland for the music and dance SCA event this weekend. Tomorrow I will be running another experiment for one of the Master's students, then in the evening is Frostheim, then I will drive to Kalix, about an hour north of here, where a friend of mine lives, to borrow his guest bed. Then way early Friday morning I will drive another hour or so over to Finland, where I will catch a flight to Helsinki and then train to a friend's house, where I will nap and cook food for the weekend, and when he gets off of work we will head to the event, which I am really looking forward to.