Monday, November 7, 2016
Friday, June 7, 2013
I'm back!
After a long absence, during which I finished and defended my Masters thesis, I am back to blogging. However, I'm still playing the overworked grad student card, so I'm just going to start by sharing with you my weekly farm share, and we'll see if I get motivated to add anything else (like finishing the post that I started almost 2 years ago entitled "Zircon: A geologic fairy tale").
In case you don't know, I'm a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I'm enrolled in a farm share from Enterprise Farms (http://www.enterprisefarmcsa.com/).
Here's the first week's share:
It's all greens. There is some kale, rainbow collard greens, and bok choy for cooking, as well as an impressive collection of lettuces (red and green curly leaf lettuce, Romaine lettuce, and Boston lettuce). The most pleasant surprise of this week's share is the Boston lettuce (bottom right in the picture). The leaves have a really nice texture and it has an interesting taste. Unfortunately, the leaves have very deep furrows, which serve as an efficient sediment trap, but a little dirt never killed anyone, right?
Here's a picture (taken from the internet; http://www.ipt.us.com/produce-inspection-resources/inspectors-blog/produce-defects-and-grade-standard-changes/lettuce-standards/attachment/boston-lettuce) of Boston lettuce:
In case you don't know, I'm a student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I'm enrolled in a farm share from Enterprise Farms (http://www.enterprisefarmcsa.com/).
Here's the first week's share:
Here's a picture (taken from the internet; http://www.ipt.us.com/produce-inspection-resources/inspectors-blog/produce-defects-and-grade-standard-changes/lettuce-standards/attachment/boston-lettuce) of Boston lettuce:
Sunday, July 3, 2011
All that glitters...
Some of you may know that my master's research is sponsored by a gold mine. I was up there ~1 month ago doing field work, and I got a photo taken with a gold bar and an award the mine won for safety. They are very safe up there.
Here's me holding $1.5 million in gold!
Here's me holding $1.5 million in gold!
Sunday, January 9, 2011
Christmas and back to Ottawa!
First of all...
Happy MMXI!
(I'm really looking forward to some more interesting years, like MMLXXXVIII, but I'll never get to see anything in my lifetime cooler than MCMLXXXVIII, and I completely missed out on the priceless MDCCCLXXXVIII, because everyone knows that 8's are by far the best numbers to write as Roman numerals, although MDCLXVI does have its merits)
My winter break was pretty enjoyable, but far too short. My only real complaint is that it got too warm, and all of the snow melted before I got a chance to go skiing, and I even brought my ski boots home. It was nice to be home with everyone, despite having a cold (grr...airplanes) the entire time. On the upside, because I was sick, I got to drink the leftover communion grape juice at church on Christmas Eve.
I was worried that the warm weather would delay the opening of the canal, but one section (only ~2 km) opened yesterday! The Rideau Canal is the world's longest ice-skating rink, and I can't wait for the section that goes past my office (Rideau St. to Pretoria Bridge) to open. I'm thinking about using my lunch to skate. My original plan was to do a lap, but the canal is 7.8 km long, which is 15.6 km or 9.7 miles if I do a lap, so I might have to work up to that. For more on the Rideau Canal, check out: http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/bins/ncc_web_content_page.asp?cid=16297-16299-10080&lang=1
Things at school are going well too. This week, I'm going to make a heavy mineral concentrate out of my buckets of rock sand, and then I can start picking out the zircons, which I'll use to date my rocks. I can also use them to figure out the temperature the rock crystallized at, and how the magma evolved over time. Once I have my zircons, I'll make an appointment to go to UCLA to analyze them, and that should happen in February. I'm also working on grinding my rocks into a very fine powder so I can figure out what elements are in them. I don't think I'll be taking any classes this semester, but I'll be busy with research and TA-ing, and skating on the canal, of course.
I hope you all enjoyed your holidays too.
Happy MMXI!
(I'm really looking forward to some more interesting years, like MMLXXXVIII, but I'll never get to see anything in my lifetime cooler than MCMLXXXVIII, and I completely missed out on the priceless MDCCCLXXXVIII, because everyone knows that 8's are by far the best numbers to write as Roman numerals, although MDCLXVI does have its merits)
My winter break was pretty enjoyable, but far too short. My only real complaint is that it got too warm, and all of the snow melted before I got a chance to go skiing, and I even brought my ski boots home. It was nice to be home with everyone, despite having a cold (grr...airplanes) the entire time. On the upside, because I was sick, I got to drink the leftover communion grape juice at church on Christmas Eve.
I was worried that the warm weather would delay the opening of the canal, but one section (only ~2 km) opened yesterday! The Rideau Canal is the world's longest ice-skating rink, and I can't wait for the section that goes past my office (Rideau St. to Pretoria Bridge) to open. I'm thinking about using my lunch to skate. My original plan was to do a lap, but the canal is 7.8 km long, which is 15.6 km or 9.7 miles if I do a lap, so I might have to work up to that. For more on the Rideau Canal, check out: http://www.canadascapital.gc.ca/bins/ncc_web_content_page.asp?cid=16297-16299-10080&lang=1
Things at school are going well too. This week, I'm going to make a heavy mineral concentrate out of my buckets of rock sand, and then I can start picking out the zircons, which I'll use to date my rocks. I can also use them to figure out the temperature the rock crystallized at, and how the magma evolved over time. Once I have my zircons, I'll make an appointment to go to UCLA to analyze them, and that should happen in February. I'm also working on grinding my rocks into a very fine powder so I can figure out what elements are in them. I don't think I'll be taking any classes this semester, but I'll be busy with research and TA-ing, and skating on the canal, of course.
I hope you all enjoyed your holidays too.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Pictures
Gatineau Park
'Canada' geese (aka ducks if you're Cori)
D. C. Look at the fantastic ductile structures in the fountain!
My room and the view from my room. These are about a month old, so the trees are much barer now.Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Catching up!
I might be the world's worst blogger, since I haven't posted anything for 2 months, so here's a quick summary of the past 2 months:
The first weekend in October, I went to Appleton for my grandparent's 50th anniversary, and I visited LU. My flight out of Appleton was over-booked, so I got to spend an extra day there (fun stuff) and missed class, learning how to crush rock, and the due date for a scholarship application. Luckily, my advisor submitted most of my application, so I was still eligible to apply.
The next weekend was a metamorphic petrology field trip. I'm not taking or TA-ing the class, but my advisor teaches it, and he needed people to drive. It was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that driving in Ottawa is really not as scary as it looks. Plus, there are some really fantastically deformed Grenville rocks basically in my backyard, and I saw some crazy high-grade mineral assemblages (olivine spinel marble, silliminite amphibolite, amphibolites with garnets as big as your head, and a skarn with megacrysts of calcite, hornblende and cpx. There may have also been a charnokite (opx-bearing granite)).
That weekend was also Canadian Thanksgiving. One of my roommates loves to cook, so she prepared an elaborated feast with ~10 dishes. It was extravagant, but delicious, and the turkey turned out beautifully. She also had a bunch of friends over, and we watched American football, so it was much like Thanksgiving back home.
The following weekend, I wrote a paper and made a presentation for class and went on a hike in Gatineau Park with the international student office. I fooled everyone into thinking I was Canadian with my superior mastery of Canadian English. Gantineau Park is a national park just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa. It's technically in Quebec, but it is only a few miles outside of Ottawa.
That week, I went to see the National Ballet of Canada performing a collection of short, modern ballets, and it was very good. I got an incredible seat (10 rows from the orchestra and dead centre) through the student rush program, which was very good.
The following week (Oct. 25-29) was reading week, essentially a bigger, beefier version of reading period. It was really nice to have the week off, and I got a lot of research-related work done since I didn't have class or TA duties.
On Friday of reading week, I left for Washington, D.C., because I decided to go the the Daily Show/ Colbert Report's Rally to Restore Fear and/ or Sanity. I was planning on meeting up with some people from LU, but my Canadian cell phone had horrible reception, and it didn't work out. It was also really difficult to see or hear the speakers because there were so many people there. The rally was still fun though, mostly because of the signs that people made, but I also met some people who had connections to LU and WI, so I talked to them for a bit. Going to D.C. made me a bit homesick, because things were similar (US money and speed limit signs), but still not quite the same. It was beautiful, though. I went to all of the important monuments on and around the mall, and I spent several hours in the Natural History Museum. They had some very impressive rocks, including some huge slices of Jasper Knob, Ediacarin fossils and fist-sized zircons (I have zircons on the brain). I was disappointed in their eclogites, though. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the fantastic Holsnøy eclogites at LU, but I have to believe the the Smithsonian has some prettier eclogites. I was quite impressed that there were a lot of rocks that visitors were encouraged to touch, since I firmly believe that you can't really appreciate rocks behind glass.
Since the D.C. trip, things have been quieter. I've been doing a lot of school work (mostly research-related, since I only have one class), and soon I'll have some more substantial quantitative data. I've crushed 8 samples, run them though the disk mill, and sieved them to find zircons, and all I have to do with them yet is sink them in heavy liquids (the dense minerals will fall to the bottom, and zircons are dense, so they should fall out) and then pick out good zircons, plus pray that I get 20 good zircons from each sample, or I will have wasted ~8 hours per sample. I'm starting to get samples prepped for doing XRF (this is less time-consuming, because I just need to cut off the weathered bits of the rock, crush it, and grind some pieces into powder, but it is more sensitive to contamination). This Friday, I'm going to Carleton to use their microprobe to measure the Al in hornblende, which will tell me the depths that my magmas were intruded at, which will help constrain their interaction with the rest of the greenstone belt. It's very busy, but it's exciting that all of my work is finally about to get me some data.
The last bit of news is that I love TA-ing. We are done with field trips now, so the students are doing indoor labs, like reading maps and learning rocks and minerals. The indoor exercises are ok, but they're a lot more tiring and a lot less fun than field trips. TA's in Canada do a lot less than those in the US. We are only allowed to work 10 hours a week, maximum 130 hours a semester, and we're not allowed to teach, only assist (after all, that's what the A stands for...). On field trips, for example, I might work with a small group of students doing something like learning to use a compass or explaining some features in the field, but the lab instructor is always there, even though he might be some place else explaining something else. When we come back as a group, he usually goes over what we saw, but in a very cursory way. I did some grading (actually, the Canadians call it marking, and I only had to mark 2 labs (150 reports per lab), and now I'm done), but I am not doing much more than I did lab assisting at LU, and I make nearly 5x's as much per hour. There are some TA's who just mark and some who basically have a ton of office hours (like my office mate). At first, I felt like I didn't have anything to do, because I was only taking one class and working only 10 hours a week, but now that I have more research-related things to do, I've been a bit busier, but it's nothing like last year at LU.
Ok. That's it for text, the next post (tomorrow, since I have to get my pictures off my camera yet) will be pictures.
The first weekend in October, I went to Appleton for my grandparent's 50th anniversary, and I visited LU. My flight out of Appleton was over-booked, so I got to spend an extra day there (fun stuff) and missed class, learning how to crush rock, and the due date for a scholarship application. Luckily, my advisor submitted most of my application, so I was still eligible to apply.
The next weekend was a metamorphic petrology field trip. I'm not taking or TA-ing the class, but my advisor teaches it, and he needed people to drive. It was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that driving in Ottawa is really not as scary as it looks. Plus, there are some really fantastically deformed Grenville rocks basically in my backyard, and I saw some crazy high-grade mineral assemblages (olivine spinel marble, silliminite amphibolite, amphibolites with garnets as big as your head, and a skarn with megacrysts of calcite, hornblende and cpx. There may have also been a charnokite (opx-bearing granite)).
That weekend was also Canadian Thanksgiving. One of my roommates loves to cook, so she prepared an elaborated feast with ~10 dishes. It was extravagant, but delicious, and the turkey turned out beautifully. She also had a bunch of friends over, and we watched American football, so it was much like Thanksgiving back home.
The following weekend, I wrote a paper and made a presentation for class and went on a hike in Gatineau Park with the international student office. I fooled everyone into thinking I was Canadian with my superior mastery of Canadian English. Gantineau Park is a national park just across the Ottawa River from Ottawa. It's technically in Quebec, but it is only a few miles outside of Ottawa.
That week, I went to see the National Ballet of Canada performing a collection of short, modern ballets, and it was very good. I got an incredible seat (10 rows from the orchestra and dead centre) through the student rush program, which was very good.
The following week (Oct. 25-29) was reading week, essentially a bigger, beefier version of reading period. It was really nice to have the week off, and I got a lot of research-related work done since I didn't have class or TA duties.
On Friday of reading week, I left for Washington, D.C., because I decided to go the the Daily Show/ Colbert Report's Rally to Restore Fear and/ or Sanity. I was planning on meeting up with some people from LU, but my Canadian cell phone had horrible reception, and it didn't work out. It was also really difficult to see or hear the speakers because there were so many people there. The rally was still fun though, mostly because of the signs that people made, but I also met some people who had connections to LU and WI, so I talked to them for a bit. Going to D.C. made me a bit homesick, because things were similar (US money and speed limit signs), but still not quite the same. It was beautiful, though. I went to all of the important monuments on and around the mall, and I spent several hours in the Natural History Museum. They had some very impressive rocks, including some huge slices of Jasper Knob, Ediacarin fossils and fist-sized zircons (I have zircons on the brain). I was disappointed in their eclogites, though. Maybe I've just been spoiled by the fantastic Holsnøy eclogites at LU, but I have to believe the the Smithsonian has some prettier eclogites. I was quite impressed that there were a lot of rocks that visitors were encouraged to touch, since I firmly believe that you can't really appreciate rocks behind glass.
Since the D.C. trip, things have been quieter. I've been doing a lot of school work (mostly research-related, since I only have one class), and soon I'll have some more substantial quantitative data. I've crushed 8 samples, run them though the disk mill, and sieved them to find zircons, and all I have to do with them yet is sink them in heavy liquids (the dense minerals will fall to the bottom, and zircons are dense, so they should fall out) and then pick out good zircons, plus pray that I get 20 good zircons from each sample, or I will have wasted ~8 hours per sample. I'm starting to get samples prepped for doing XRF (this is less time-consuming, because I just need to cut off the weathered bits of the rock, crush it, and grind some pieces into powder, but it is more sensitive to contamination). This Friday, I'm going to Carleton to use their microprobe to measure the Al in hornblende, which will tell me the depths that my magmas were intruded at, which will help constrain their interaction with the rest of the greenstone belt. It's very busy, but it's exciting that all of my work is finally about to get me some data.
The last bit of news is that I love TA-ing. We are done with field trips now, so the students are doing indoor labs, like reading maps and learning rocks and minerals. The indoor exercises are ok, but they're a lot more tiring and a lot less fun than field trips. TA's in Canada do a lot less than those in the US. We are only allowed to work 10 hours a week, maximum 130 hours a semester, and we're not allowed to teach, only assist (after all, that's what the A stands for...). On field trips, for example, I might work with a small group of students doing something like learning to use a compass or explaining some features in the field, but the lab instructor is always there, even though he might be some place else explaining something else. When we come back as a group, he usually goes over what we saw, but in a very cursory way. I did some grading (actually, the Canadians call it marking, and I only had to mark 2 labs (150 reports per lab), and now I'm done), but I am not doing much more than I did lab assisting at LU, and I make nearly 5x's as much per hour. There are some TA's who just mark and some who basically have a ton of office hours (like my office mate). At first, I felt like I didn't have anything to do, because I was only taking one class and working only 10 hours a week, but now that I have more research-related things to do, I've been a bit busier, but it's nothing like last year at LU.
Ok. That's it for text, the next post (tomorrow, since I have to get my pictures off my camera yet) will be pictures.
Monday, September 13, 2010
First week
So far, things have not been too terribly exciting. Classes started last week, but I didn't have any responsibilities until yesterday, so I've been spending a lot of time reading. Mostly about migmatites and granites. As it turns out, granites are way more controversial than I'd ever expected, which I guess is good since that's what I'm studying for the next 2 years, but it's also bothersome, because it's hard to apply uniformitarianism if we don't understand modern processes.
Even though I haven't been especially busy, there's been a lot going on in Ottawa. Last weekend, there was a hot air balloon festival in Gatineau, which is on the other side (Québec) of the Ottawa river, and we could see lots of cool balloons from our apartment.
There was also some organizational stuff, and I now have a desk in an office I share with one other person. It's a pretty nice space--we have a lot of room and a sink-- but it's in the sub-basement, so there's no sun. The room is actually called "The Lair".
I will be putting up some picts of my apartment when I get around to taking them.
Even though I haven't been especially busy, there's been a lot going on in Ottawa. Last weekend, there was a hot air balloon festival in Gatineau, which is on the other side (Québec) of the Ottawa river, and we could see lots of cool balloons from our apartment.
There was also some organizational stuff, and I now have a desk in an office I share with one other person. It's a pretty nice space--we have a lot of room and a sink-- but it's in the sub-basement, so there's no sun. The room is actually called "The Lair".
I will be putting up some picts of my apartment when I get around to taking them.
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