kareina

I spent more than two hours after work today just doing admin sorts of tasks as a new PhD student at Durham. The department secretary sent me the "Post Graduate Research Handbook", and I have gone through there, took care of the quick and easy tasks that it assigned (like putting my "annual progress review" on the calendar for September), and starting on more complicated tasks (like filling in my profile for the department web page). That last task turns out to be harder than I would have expected, since one can only log in and access that server from an on-campus computer. Therefore I checked the Durham IT page to find what VPN they recommend, and found out that, unlike LTU, where any staff or post grad student may download and install a VPN connection to permit them to work remotely, at Durham one must fill in a form explaining to IT exactly why you need VPN, and one must supply the name of a "sponsor". So I sent my supervisor a note warning her I would list her as a sponsor, and explained to IT that as a long distance student who is required to access the department server to create and maintain my profile, and as a research student who needs access to library databases and publications, that I actually do need that VPN connection. I further explained that I have used them before, that I have spent eight years in academia between my first PhD and enrolling for this one.

Now, I just need to put in the hours doing the research, too. I often find it easier to focus on these sorts of admin tasks, as they tend to be smaller, easier to define, and often kinda fun.

I met Ellinor after work today for acroyoga. First we discussed a dream we have to find more people to do acroyoga with. We are going to approach the uni gym about getting regular sessions going there, with us as the leaders. Perhaps every other Thursday evening. If all goes well we will find plenty more people who want to play, and we won't always be dependent on the other having free time and energy and good health at the same time as we have. Then we went to the gym to do "20 or 30 minutes" of acroyoga. 53 very enjoyable minutes later she went off to Phire training, and I went home to get some dinner and empty my Durham in-box. I had been half expecting today's acroyoga to be difficult, since I did no exercise all weekend (other than very short yoga sessions each day), since I had come home from Umeå with a runny nose. But by Monday evening I was feeling good enough that I did a quick 15 minute workout before yoga, and today our session just felt easy.

I love how solid of a base she has become. When I am in that airplane pose, supported only by her feet under my hips I feel as comfortable as if I were laying on the floor. These days the "spiny thingie" (as we call it), where I go from hanging upside from her feet like a bat, to being balanced in a backwards airplane, with my hips on her feet and my feet in the air over her head, then back around to hanging like a bat again, feels easy. I remember how difficult it was when first we tried it, and now I never feel like she could drop me.

Work today was doing sphalerite analyses with one of our PhD students. She will be in the lab again tomorrow, but I have that doc appointment at 08:30, so am not certain what time I will make it. Therefore she will try turning on the machine on her own (I let her drive today). With luck the written instructions I have prepared (long since), plus having seen me do it both yesterday and a few times since Christmas will be enough. I think I may be more nervous about someone else using my lab when I am not there than I am what the doc will say. That said, I did ask Ellinor to come with me to the appointment, for moral support, and on the off chance that it would be useful to have a native Swedish speaker along. Of course, it will be fine, there will be no problems, and I will be able to head off to Durham on Friday with no complications.

I am home from a delightful evening at Frostheim. There were six of us this week. Both of my apprentices, the husband of my senior apprentice, two of the other students, and myself. While there I managed to help one of the boys cut a rectangle of lovely blue wool into a fantasy pirate cloak with collar, taught one of my apprentices to do nålbinding with the beautiful stone needle lord_kjar made for her (she is also a geologist), made a wool rim for the Lucia crown that she will be wearing for our choir Lucia performance next week, and had a delightful time visiting with people.

After the meeting I did some grocery shopping and after I got home participated in an unexpected defrosting of one of the downstairs freezers when we discovered that its door no longer shut properly due to one of the drawers not having been put back properly last time it was opened, which caused huge amounts of ice to build up between the drawers and the door. oops. Luckily the contents all fit into the other freezers (well, except for the 3 plastic bottles of ice, which we don't actually need till the next time we want to take food along in an ice chest.

Work this week has been good, but long. This was the week that one of the guys from the company that sold us the ICP-MS was here to do training and troubleshooting of the issues we had been having with the system. We discovered several things that, together, seem to explain why we were getting such low signal. There were some small leaks in the tubing connecting the Laser to the ICP-MS. Fixing those, however, didn't bring the signal back up to where it should be. Then we noticed that the laser isn't actually firing at full strength anymore. It used to be that when we asked for 7 J/cm^2 we actually got that much energy reported. However, these days that setting gives only just over 4 J/cm^2. So we tried putting the request in terms of % laser energy, and discovered that to get 7 J/cm^2 out of it we need to ask it for about 60% power. Doing this, AND all of the minor changes to default settings that he made while he was here, and now the laser and ICP-MS are playing nicely together again--the signal strength is as good as it was some months ago before we first started having issues.

We even switched back and forth between solutions mode and laser ablation mode, and each time we got the signal back to where it should be straight away. I am hopeful that it will still have good signal on Monday when the service/training guy isn't here anymore. Wish me luck.