Commuting, week 2

When I got up at 4 this morning to get ready to go rowing, I felt so groggy that I decided to throw in the towel on that plan.

Research has been keeping me very busy this week. When my final dissertation experiment wrapped up at the end of April, I had to immediately launch into post-experiment data processing and sample analysis. I did as much as I could up through the end of May, but after a certain point I had to stop and just write. There was barely enough time left to write. Then I spent the middle of the summer revising what I'd written, and turned in my revised dissertation towards the end of July. With that out of the way, I spent the rest of the time prior to the Europe trip working on packing up my belongings.

So, the month of September has been devoted to going back to finish up sample analyses; namely, I am trying to churn through a set of ~200 samples to measure each sample's carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus content. I've been focusing on phosphorus this week, because the method I use to measure phosphorus is more time-consuming and a larger gamble than the method to measure carbon and nitrogen. On Monday, I weighed out 104 samples (2 x 52 samples) and then went home, exhausted. On Tuesday, I added a bit of this, and a little of that, to 120 test tubes, until they all turned various shades of blue, and then S helped me measure the degree of blue-ness of each sample. On Wednesday, I cleaned up, entered in my data, and got ready for the next round. Yesterday, I started to weigh out the next batch of samples, and then quit early to have time to catch up with members of the Scrabble Society. All of which brings me back to today; I finished weighing out samples, but I have a feeling I'm going to have to stop midway through this run. It's either quit while I'm ahead or risk screwing up the whole process, which would mean having to do the whole thing over again.

Overall, the week's work has meant that the bike ride back up to Phoenix has generally happened after dark. I always feel stronger and ride faster on the evening ride home. I don't know if I'm actually getting faster, but I'm finding that it's hard to just ride at a mellow pace when commuting. The section along the canal becomes my private raceway on the ride home if it's after dark. I wish I was spending more time rowing, but it's really hard to do that, commute, get labwork done, and get ready to move to Texas all at once.

Other than all that, the weather has been cooling down below a hundred, which is glorious.

Reading Material

I finished reading The Fatal Shore. The Epic of Australia's Founding (by Robert Hughes) some time last week. It's a fantastic book, and it only took me a year-plus to finish it (what can I say, I read nonfiction very slowly). I'd recommend it to anyone who gets bored by most history books - this one has seafaring adventurers, torture, all kinds of gruesomeness, and excellent vignettes about some of the key players in Australian penal history. Hughes sets a wonderful standard for historians; the book is clearly well-researched, and engaging.

I'll point out just one figure who was ahead of his time: Alexander Maconochie. He thought that using prisons as a punishment system to deter criminals was a stupid idea (though it was an idea that would persist for at least another hundred years after his time). Instead, he established a merit system that would allow prisoners to earn their way out of prison. Given the nature of English society and laws at the time (extreme punishment for modest crimes), I can only imagine that Maconochie's system gave a lot of hope to those who got to experience it. It was quickly put to an end.

Anyway. That said and done, my list of books to read is currently packed up in a box somewhere, along with all of my books. scrottie has loaned me one book (Neuromancer), but I am feeling hungry for recommendations. Fiction or nonfiction, I just look for literary works that illuminate life. A number of you know me well enough by now to make some apt suggestions. So please, suggest.