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.

Not much new

So, there's not much new going on right now that's worth writing about.  I'm doing lots of calculations and making lots of spreadsheets to figure out my data.  It's looking excellent and there's some exciting stuff showing up, but I want to get things finalized and figured out before I let the world know what we've found.

Posts might be a little spread out over the next few days while I work on this stuff or until something exciting happens.  Stay tuned, leave comments, something big is coming in the next couple of months!

The wedding was great!

It's true...the wedding was great.  We had pretty bad weather on Thursday when we arrived.  We had massive waves and rain blowing sideways.  It was a tropical storm passing through that actually became a hurricane a few days later when it was further north.It was mostly sunny on Friday for a pre-wedding bbq, then was a little drizzly in the evening during the rehearsal dinner.  But by Saturday, when the wedding was, the weather was beautiful.  It was 80 degrees, sunny, perfect weather.  The wedding itself was really nice, the church was very pretty.  The reception was held at the yacht club on the island with cocktails by the pool, then dinner inside.  Very very nice.  Annette looked absolutely beautiful and they are one of the best couples I've seen.

Good luck Annette and Bobby!!

Yeah, it really is that good

I finished collecting data on my garnet today.  I have amassed a fantastic compilation now.  I called my advisor to tell him about it and so I could hear his reaction on the phone when he saw the figure I had sent.  Here's a few things he said about it while we were talking:"historic data set" "incredible proof of concept" "best argument ever that shows that garnet Sm/Nd works"

So, yeah...I'm pretty excited about that.  Now I can get to the real work of figuring out what it all means.  Oh dear.

New barrel!!

Well, I finished all the neodymium samples today. Everything is looking great!  I've been able to calculate a few ages so far and they are awesome.  I can't tell you quite how awesome they are just yet in case someone steals my data before I publish it........just kidding, they're outstandingly awesome; to our knowledge they are the best garnet ages from sample sizes this small.  Some of them are only 2 nanograms, and all are less than 12 nanograms of Nd.

So, I changed the barrel today.  The cold trap was still full of liquid nitrogen so we had to take that off and put the other one on.  When you have a cold trap in a machine under vacuum nothing condenses on the outside, but when you bring that machine up to atmospheric pressure, water from the air freezes to the cold trap almost immediately.  The outside of the trap gets really really cold and we have to use special gloves to hold it.  I didn't get any pictures of removing the trap, but here's a picture of it just afterwards.

You can see ice is already forming on it just a few minutes after coming to atmospheric pressure.  Check out all that nitrogen venting out!  That's also the gloves I use...they look kind of like incredible hulk hands.

Here's a photo of the trap after a few more minutes.

It's got a few millimeters of frost on it at this point.  You can see a bit of nitrogen still steaming near the bottom and out of the top.

Early night home tonight....leaving at 9pm!  woo hoo!!!  Although, this early night is also the end of 60 hours in the lab.....sooooo.....not that early.

That's all for now.  See you tomorrow, hopefully with all my new ages collected!