Siliceous and Delicious

Started the day by working on the next EPS 8 lab, which isn’t scheduled until after mid-semester break—but I’ve fenced off time for EPS 8 and I’m going to stick to it. That way I’ll have my sheltered time for research when the lab draws near. The next lab is on Ediacaran and Cambro-Ordovician body fossils and trace fossils. The lab is designed as a straightforward describe-and-interpret exercise and seems to be in pretty good shape, not much work needed at all! I spent the morning checking for spelling mistakes and reformatting the lab to fit with the format of the previous labs, with a view to having a consistent face on the labs next year.

Then, went out for lunch with a visiting student, Justin. Allie and I were the only dissonant voices in the general cooing over how marvelous Harvard graduate student life is. It both cemented my feelings of alienation over the rest of the scientific community, particularly at Harvard, and left me comforted to an extent that my feelings aren’t entirely unique (though I know Allie’s situation to be quite a different one).

Didn’t do much in the way of work in the afternoon, but planned for the week ahead and booked time on both the FIB and the CLSM, to try and regain some momentum on both of those projects. Pottered off to the lab for the last part of the day to take a first look at the radiolarian samples from Dave. Celebrated quite an achievement—my first successfully made epoxy slide, without bubbles. Huzzah! And, the radiolarian sample in it looks beautiful. Being able to pick out C. davisiana is going to be difficult under the picking scope, and will no doubt take practice, but shouldn’t be impossible. Since the picking scope in our microscope room is capable of doing transmitted light picking, that should help things tremendously, as long as there is decent refraction between the rads and the water they’ll be sitting in. We shall see next week. All in all a positive note on which to end the week.