Today's task was fun, but...

[kareina]

I spent the day doing more calculations.Yes, they are meant to be done by now, but both my advisor and I are still disturbed by the fact that the results I'm getting from Perplex for the garnet rims are so much lower than the estimates we get for the same samples using "classic" geothermobarometry. So I tried yet another variation for one of the samples, this time starting with the assumption that 100% of the iron in the sample is FeO, rather than just 90% as is "standard" for my calculations. It did seem to help one of the problems--there is no paragonite predicted for the garnet core compositions, which is good because there isn't any in the sample (but it was predicted to be present for the "standard" run for the core). Having gotten a new estimate for the core, I then did the garnet fractionation calculations. They went quickly and easily for the water saturated version, giving me a result which wasn't all that different from the "standard" run, but, alas, predicting paragonite at rim conditions. So I thought I'd try a fixed-H2O fractionation path, to see if that works any better, and alas, after many different attempts, while I am converging in on a path which seems to predict the right composition of garnet, it is *much* lower temperature than that predicted by the standard technique, so, while I am getting numbers, they aren't doing what we'd hoped they'd do when I started.

As a result, here it is almost 23:00, and while I've done 8.5 hours of uni work today, the thesis is only 204 words longer than it was yesterday, because while I was able to write some stuff after the first step of the calculations, I don't really have the rest of the steps together enough to do any writing from them yet. Sigh.

But now I *must* walk away from the computer, my eyes hurt from that many hours staring at the screen. Yes, I should look away regularly, but, really, it didn't *seem* that long while I was working!