Siliceous and Delicious

Started the day on an upswing after the last week of downward spiraling. Took a trip to the VWR store to pick up the tools needed to fashion my own little desiccator—some Drierite and a couple of little screw-top plastic tubs—and made some more samples for this afternoon’s rescheduled pre-FIB SEM session. The Drierite didn’t end up doing much, but I found that placing the stubs directly under a lamp helped things tremendously. Ah, the simple pleasures in life.

That done, I found myself with nothing left to do on the FIB front (the day’s scheduled project) until the afternoon. I decided to get cracking on the now months-old ‘1-pager-for-Charles’ task. Finally replotted the diversity plot I had marred with my mistyping of the Cenozoic stage boundaries, but didn’t get much else done, mired in the bugs of my R code. Crap. Stopped for lunch to read the lab meeting paper for tomorrow.

In the afternoon, checked those FIB samples. A few of them (the finer grained fraction) looked like hell, don’t know how I’m going to prep those samples to make it work. The coarser ones were OK and I was able to rank them in order of promisingness for tomorrow’s overnight session (19C looked best, then 27C, then 25C).