12/16/06
Categories: General, 257 wordsAs nice as the weather is in Mississippi during the winter months, sometimes I wish it were just a little more stable. Our average temperature from November to February is around 50 degrees, but I've found that it almost never actually is 50 degrees, but that each week alternates between being exceptionally cold or exceptionally warm. One weened, the temperature drops to 18 degrees and people start talking about setting a new record; the following week, people are walking around in t-shirts.
This has been one of the warm weeks- nearly every day's highs have topped out in the upper 60's, but the temperature isn't the only thing that's strange about our weather. The other day, it rained all morning. Okay, so that's not so unusual for this area, but after clearing out in the afternoon, a dense fog settled in over Starkville right after sunset. I had stayed to work in the lab until about 6, and after seeing the clearing skies a few hours previously, I was taken aback at the sight of the fog when I exited the building to go home. The fog stayed around until late the next morning, then came back the following day before finally burning off around noon. We don't get as much fog here as we did in Tennessee, when I lived near the river, so it's rare to see several foggy days in a row. Things have finally dried up and we haven't had any foggy mornings for a few days now, and this weekend is actually supposed to be beautiful...
Posted 03:23:18 am by DavidPermalink/Comments
12/11/06
Categories: General, 547 wordsSince not long after I started geocaching, I made it my goal to eventually find a cache in all 50 states (and 13 provinces, too). In May, after four years, I finally achieved this feat (except for the Canada part- I'm still working on it). This weekend served as an epilogue to the journey. A cacher in California hid a compilation cache, Found 50 States, I'm Going to Disneyland!, and since I'd never been to southern California (outside of the airport), I knew the cache was the perfect excuse to plan a trip.
I set out on Friday evening, making my way to Memphis where I boarded a flight bound for the west coast. I landed just before 9 PM, and had about 24 hours to explore the region before catching a flight back home. The day was uneventful, but I did manage to top 100,000 miles on my personal travel bug. Saturday started out with a few urban caches, then after facing a little freeway traffic, I made my way to Disney, where I scored the 50 States find. Why people are so crazy about that place is beyond me; I'd personally prefer to skip the artificial tourist traps in favor of the wilderness. So that's just what I did. After leaving the themed shops, fake castles, and loud spunky Christmas music behind, I made my way out beyond Palm Springs to the Salton Sea and the Anza-Borrego Desert. I'd never been that far below sea level without actually being below the sea (either in tunnels or on diving trips), and I at first thought that my altimeter was out of calibration when I crested a hill and saw that it showed my elevation as being 13 feet. Turns out it was off... after calibrating, it correctly read as -7. I would drop over 200 more feet before reaching the barren shore of the salty lake, then it was time to climb as the road twisted it's way up into the rugged mountains of San Diego County.
I finished the day off by crashing a geocaching event on the way back to the airport. After taking a few hours to meet with the local cachers and swap stories, I knew that my time was up and that I'd need to start driving if I wanted to catch my flight, just on the other side of town 90 miles away. Even after having braved the freeways of such cities as Atlanta, New York, and even Dallas, I still wasn't prepared for the city that defined urban sprawl. I've never seen a city where one can drive for over 100 miles and never leave an urban area. It wasn't that traffic was bad- things actually moved along a the perfect pace- but that much urban driving can be unceasingly relentless after so long. Toward the end of the journey, when I only had 30 miles to go, I couldn't help but realize that 30 miles is the distance across most cities. Regardless, I survived, and even made it to the airport with about 2 hours to spare despite a drenching storm that caused flash flood warnings throughout the region. I would be exhausted the next day from a near sleepless night of flying, but after I had retuened home and had time to get rested, I decided the trip was well worth it.
Posted 03:11:31 am by David
12/02/06
Categories: General, 108 wordsIt's been cold here.
Until last night, we were enjoying some unseasonably warm weather, but overnight a massive front blew through. They got lots of snow farther north, and heavy winds farther east, but we just got heavy rains that blew out after several hours. It didn't quite get down to freezing last night, but today's high was 35 degrees colder than yesterdays, and it's supposed to get down to 20 tonight. I'd better bring the plants in...
In the meantime, I haven't decided what to do for the weekend. I may go toward Tennessee for a little caching, though I'll have to decide if it's warm enough to camp.
Posted 11:45:54 am by David
11/03/06
Categories: General, 230 wordsNovember is finally here. Not that I've really had time to notice; I've been busy in the lab trying to isolate viruses from the fungal samples I spent all summer collecting. It's a long process involving fun chemicals such as chloroform and 2-mercaptoethanol (a compound with an odor so foul, one carelessly spilled drop would be enough to stink up half of the building). Hopefully, I'll find out sometime tomorrow if my efforts turn up anything. I hope so, since it's the basis of my entire Master's project.
Otherwise, nothing really exciting has gone on this week. We've moved back into the building, and work has continued as usual. I also bought a new thermostat, one of those fancy electronic programable ones. The original, cheap one has become increasingly inaccurate, and while I could have just had the landlord replace it, there's a certain geeky appeal to having a thermostat with an RJ45 plug on the back- even if I can't use it.
I could sit at home all weekend enjoying the new toy, but I've been indoors too much over the last week, and I already spent the last two weekends stuck in the apartment studying and preparing for the GSMCA presentation. So, this weekend, I'm going to Nashville to watch my brother compete in the state Cross Country meet. It'll be a chilly weekend, but worth the trip.
Posted 01:42:57 am by David
10/18/06
Categories: General, 865 wordsLast Thursday, I got a surprise when I showed up to work at Dorman Hall early in the morning- the building had caught fire overnight and would be closed for at least the next week. Thankfully, the fire hadn't spread outside of the basement, although the upper floors suffered smoke damage. Rumors circulated that it was intentional (these rumors were later confirmed), and the mandatory jokes about stressed, overworked grad students ensued. The fire was a alight setback- it would delay many people's research for at least several weeks- but thankfully nobody was injured.
It was Friday afternoon before we had a chance to enter the building. After signing in and waiting outside more than 30 minutes for our turn, an officer escorted us inside and up to our floor, where we had only 10 minutes to grab whatever essentials we could carry out by hand. In the hallways, the walls and floors were a sickening shade of grey, and every footstep tracked up the fine layer of soot that had coated every surface. Masked workers were busy installing air monitors throughout the building, and we wondered just how safe the air really was...
We wouldn't be allowed back in the building until the following Tuesday. Before today, we had no idea what had been lost- although our sample collections, cultures, and research were safe in the labs upstairs, the basement served as our equipment storage area. Much of the downstairs had been divided into storerooms separated by walls composed of plywood and chicken wire; strong enough to deter casual thieves, but not built to withstand a fire. We had known that the fire had been set in one of these storage units, but didn't know the extent of the damage until this afternoon. We were relieved to find out that the fire had been extinguished before reaching our area, but we weren't able to escape widespread smoke and water damage...
The first thing we noticed upon entering the building was that the cleanup crews had made impressive progress- most of the floors and walls had been scrubbed clean, and workers upstairs were busy finding every last repository of soot from the interiors of light fixtures to the signs above the restroom doors. A large dumpster, nearly full of charred debris and getting fuller by the minute, had been placed at the loading dock.
By visiting the storage area, I would get a chance to see ground zero, the spot that had been at the heart of the fire. An area where several wooden storage rooms had once been was now wide open, all debris having been removed by the diligent cleanup crews over the last few days. Much of this central area also served as open storage for furniture and large equipment that nobody wanted to move; by chance, after accumulating for an untold number of years, somebody less than three weeks ago had decided to remove a number of old refrigerators, desks, and incubators that had filled the area. I can imagine that things would have been much more severe had the area not been recently cleaned. The white silhouettes of stored boxes and equipment on the blackened walls marked where shelving had once been, and every overhead pipe and wire in the vicinity had been stripped of it's insulation. A crew on ladders and stools was busy scrubbing one of the far walls, and I could tell from the flurry of activity on the far side of the building that the cleanup was far from over. Although I would have loved to look around, for my safety I decided to head straight to our storage area.
I had expected to find nothing left, so I was surprised to see that our equipment had escaped the flames, and that everything was intact. The bad news was that a thick layer of soot and ash coated everything, except for uneven streaks where water and steam had run down nearly every vertical surface. Most of our supplies and glassware could be cleaned, it was just a matter of sorting through everything and getting it out of the building where it could be cleaned off and stored. I opened a cabinet, and was greeted by a puff of sooty air that had seeped in and coated every bottle, vial, and box. We don't store hazardous or volatile materials downstairs, mostly culturing media, and determined that aside from their exteriors being dirty, the contents of the sealed containers were perfectly fine. We cut open a few boxes, and were relieved to find that most of their contents were never exposed to smoke.
Most of our larger equipment, including everything from a balance to a laminar flow hood, didn't fare so well. I imagine that most of the machinery will have to be taken apart and thoroughly cleaned, if it isn't ruined. That will be a long and interesting process. In the meantime, equipment and supplies are much easier to replace than research and data, and it looks like most of our research has escaped unharmed. I'll know for sure by the end of next week, when we're supposed to be allowed back in the building to resume normal work.
Posted 03:23:03 am by David
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