Finished!

Phew!!  I just finished printing my masters thesis: A new method for high-precision microsampling and Sm/Nd dating of zoned garnets.  Clocked in at 229 pages all told.  And now I'm sleepy.  Printing this was the final task in completing my degree.  I am now finished with my masters but still need to spend the next few days getting my papers submitted to the journals.

The 6 piles of paper in this photo represent the last 2.5 years of my life.  It's been a long twisty journey, but it's been absolutely worth it.

I feel thrilled.  Grad school has been a life changing experience for me.  I have met some great people including my amazing girlfriend.  I've learned an enormous amount about the particular science I've been working on, but also about research in general, what's important in life, and how to accomplish tasks and not lose sight of the broad goals (most of the time).  I know now that this science gig is what I want to do with my life.  I've been so lucky that my work has actually panned out the way we were hoping it would.  I know that this isn't necessarily the norm in science but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

I couldn't have asked for a better advisor than Ethan.  He has truly been an inspiration and support to me.  He knows when to push me and when to let me figure things out for myself.  We have a fantastic working relationship that I hope will continue to grow in the future.  I'm proud to call him my mentor and my friend.

Passed

Thanks to everyone for the well wishes and for watching my defense last week.

I successfully defended my masters and am now working on the revisions.  Shouldn't be too much longer and then I'm off to Wisconsin next week for about 36 hours before I go to D.C. for Christmas.

That's about it going on right now.  Not too much exciting.  Oh, I bought myself an xbox 360 last week and it's waiting in Wisconsin for me right now.  So that will be fun when I get out there.

Hooray!!

Hooray!!

I turned in my thesis to my committee yesterday.  It turned out to be 210 pages long, all of which is pure gold I'm sure.  I also met with the person in the grad school in charge of theses and she approved the formatting for mine.  So now I'll only have to rewrite stuff, not rewrite and format the whole thing.

My defense is Dec. 1 and now I just have to make my talk and prepare for the defense.  I don't think it will be too hard because I've already made all the figures and I already know what I'm going to say, but I still have to do it.

The most exciting thing that's happened though is that we've figured out how to do a live broadcast.  So, we'll be doing a webcast of my defense live as it's happening.  I'll also probably post a video of the defense onto the blog when it's over.  The webcast comes courtesy of Nora, one of Ethan's grad students.

The defense is happening at 10 am EST (8am mountain, 3pm Greenwich) on Monday Dec. 1.  Tune in right here (video below) for what is sure to be an exciting event.  If the video below isn't working, try going directly to the site here.

Defense

As some of you already know, I've scheduled my masters defense.  It all goes down Dec. 1 at 10 am.  For those of you who haven't already gotten the message, if you're in Boston come on by.  I'll reveal all the world shattering data that I've collected but have been hiding from the general public.  Hope to see you there.  If you're gonna come and you don't know where to go, let me know.

This too shall pass

That's one of my favorite phrases.  It says a lot.  And, it did indeed pass. That is, I passed my kidney stone this afternoon.  My kidney is still a bit sore and I'm not sure if I still have some more chunks in there, but at the very least the big part is gone.

I've learned a bit about kidney stones today.  They're apparently calcium oxalate.  On webmineral there's no  listing of the anhydrous mineral. There are however three hydrous species: whewellite, weddellite and caoxite with 1, 2, and 3 moles water each.  The funniest one is the whewellite because that is described as forming in "low-temperature hydrothermal solutions...releasing methane."  That sounds just like my situation :)

I took some photos of it on the microscope at school today.  It certainly looks like a clump of minerals.  

They told me that it was about 2mm.  You can see it's clearly 3-4mm.  There are two distinct parts.  One is a clump of jagged pointy minerals.  The other part is a concentric part that looks a lot like an ooid.  

Clearly it must have been in me for a while to have formed that kind of deposit.

I'm supposed to take this to a urologist so he can analyze it and tell me what caused it.  But, we can analyze stuff like this in my lab.  We can measure calcium isotopes on the TIMS; we could put it in the XRD to see what minerals are there; as you know where there is calcium, there's usually strontium so we could measure the strontium isotopes on the TIMS. Eric suggested I should measure the strontium isotopes of it and then measure the isotopes of Rockstar (which I was drinking almost every day for a while), beer or chicken Ka Prao.  I wonder what a urologist is going to measure on it.

Ouch!

I woke up at 6am today with excruciating pain in my abdomen.  I didn't know if I drank too much last night and my liver exploded, if I was gassy, if I had slept weird and tweaked a muscle....Whatever it was it hurt a LOT.  I tried everything I could think of for about an hour or so with little effect.  I tried going for a walk, lying in a different bed, took some advil (but mainly for the alcohol headache) etc.  I tried taking a shower, but nothing was working.  Finally I called 911 and got an ambulance to the hospital.

The nurses and doctor in the ER were able to very quickly diagnose that I had a kidney stone.  This, ladies and gentlemen, is one if not the most painful things i've ever felt.  The cause of kidney stones is largely dehydration so they kept me at the hospital with an IV drip on.  I ended up getting three liters of solution.  They told me there's nothing to do for it but have lots of fluid and take medicine for the pain.  While I was there they gave me a shot of medicine I don't remember the name of, 2 shots of morphine and a percocet before I left as well as a prescription for percocet.

It also turns out that I don't have any insurance right now.  I assumed I was going to get my BU insurance because I'm still a student here but I don't have it.  I'm not sure what the bill's going to be but I'm guessing it won't be cheap.  Although, they did give me more drugs than I think I need and this one's got a high street value.  So maybe I'll peddle the extras to pay the hospital.  Ironic.

Wesley, nooooo!!!

They tell me that I'm a bad influence on the boy.  They tell me not to give him any alcohol because they think I'm a drunkard (or druncle since I'm his uncle).  What they don't know is that this boy is already wanted by the FBI for questioning in over a dozen schemes including money laundering, bootlegging and running a speakeasy.

People used to talk about the parties held down at Whiskey Wes'.  They would tell stories of the youngster glad handing with thugs and police chiefs.  One story describes how in the same evening Wesley "the Wombat" Pollington won an arm wrestling competition, outran 20 police cars with a trunk full of moonshine, and had dinner at Judge Tapenny's house.  And all this before he was three feet tall.

We may never know what became of this miniature mogul, this crib-sized Capone, but one thing we do know is that his actions were not influenced by his handsome, red-bearded uncle.  It has been told in multiple biographies of the boy how he left his loving family's home and fell in with a bad crowd.  How he learned to live it tough on the streets and eventually used that pitbull-like tenacity to dominate the underground world of women and booze.

Best of luck Wombat, wherever you are.

please note, all of the statements above are false...except for the fact that his uncle is very handsome.