Metric Chunch Spanner

I like to think of gynecologists as vagina-mechanics.

They put you up high, climb under the hood and tinker around with their own special set of tools (chunch-spanners) and jargon.  Seriously, they could make up anything, how would you know?  "Oh, you need a new ovary drop tray, yours is rusted out."  I figure that in North America, they need both Metric and Imperial chunch-spanners, and that every so often, women have to go in to get topped up with fluids and have their filters changed.

Fascinating, mysterious and beautiful creatures, you ladies. 

Why is there plaster in this?

The wall across from me has a grouping of new bricks, roughly the size and shape of a certain large, friendly, anthropomorphized jug of fruit punch.  Makes you wonder, doesn't it?  OH YEAH!!

I will be the best dad.

In class, on Monday, my professor was telling us about her perceived lack of time management skills (this was by way of an example, about how one stray negative comment can colour our perceptions more than years of positive reinforcement).  She went on to tell us about a friend of hers with amazing scheduling abilities - a woman with a spreadsheet for her life - and how when this woman had a baby, she tried and failed to add that baby to the flowchart of her life (in an orderly and predictable fashion).

I thought to myself, "Pfft.  I could flowchart a baby."  So I did.  Enjoy!

note:  due to old scanner being old, some minor 'shopping of the pixels has occurred.

Weekday Update, with Kev-Inn Kneel-On

I am sitting in the basement of the D wing of the engineering building at the University of Saskatchewan, trying to make a laser-driven scanning particle size analyzer stop being a useless piece of crap.  Oh, don't get me wrong, when it works, it's a wonderful piece of mid-nineties technology, in all of its retro, "install my software with twenty floppy disks," glory.  At least it's not beige.  Remember when everything that plugged into a computer was beige?  Imagine a beige iPod.  A beige flat-screen monitor.  A beige printer/fax/scanner (that one shouldn't actually be too hard, they actually used to be beige, and enormous).  God, now I'm picturing modern Apple products with a beige finish.  A beige iMac. Ew.

Align, you art deco, science artifact, oblong hunk of ostrich feces!

Grr.

I could be done testing these samples by now.  Instead, the Mastersizer (actual product name) is hemming and hawing, and will, perhaps, deign to function after some unspecified time interval.  When it's DAMN WELL GOOD AND READY AND YOU'RE JUST GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT.  

Le sigh.

Not a bad way to spend my first day back after taking some time off to attend my Grandmother's funeral.  She was 85, fiercely independent, and a tiny, little, perma-tanned, old-lady-raisin.  The tan was from years and years farming and gardening, not from a fondness for tanning beds.  The funeral service was Ukranian Catholic, of the Byzantine bent.  What that means is that the priest was from the Old Country, everything was lavish and ornate, there was a butt-ass load of incense, and the prayers were long, mumbly, tonal, repetitive and had very little to do with the person who had actually passed away, and a lot more to do with praising the Lord.  That has always seemed odd to me, and really self-centered of the church.   The priest was ever-so-slightly derp, as well.  Derp, in this context, referring to the pupils of the eyes having a slight tendency to skew outwards from centre.  I shall Google you up an image:

Religion, hooray! 

The important things, though, are that we buried Granny in accordance with her beliefs, and that loads of family and friends were there to say goodbye.  It wasn't all bad.

While I was away from the lab, sexual harassment happened!  Well, technically, it crossed the border into assault, because there was a solid and distinct boob honk.  I hope it was the best boob honk ever, because the culprit was a post-doctoral researcher, and a professor back in India, and he just flushed his career down la toilette.  That's French, for, "the toilet."  Just in case you weren't sure.  Also, note the emphasis on, "was,"  as he no longer is.  Can you say, "fired"?  I thought you could.

[Update:  I finally got the thing to align properly, and have written a new operational procedure, accordingly.  All who follow in my footsteps to use this machine shall find that I have eased their burdens significantly.  Mooching pricks.  Also, it takes a while to scan things, and I have used this time to regain my mastery of Freecell.]

I wanna be like you-oo-oo

I had lunch with my friend @SmaleChange today, during which time, and among other things, we talked about what one might do in the city of Calgary.  I mentioned the zoo, and he replied that that might be a poor choice of venue, given that his lady is a vet student, and that the Calgary Zoo has an iffy sort of track record with their animals.  He listed a few examples including my favourite:  A gorilla that got ahold of a box-cutter.

I now have a very vivid mental image of a standoff between five or six zoo employees and a gorilla brandishing a box-cutter.

"Easy, easy!" Says one of the tan-pants wearing men.

"Ooh, AAAH!" Says the gorilla, swinging the box cutter back and forth and making cutting motions.

As an aside, pertaining to yesterday's post:  the adding of the viscous binding agent did NOT make things sticky and difficult to clean up after.  Go figure.

Densified Biomass! A.K.A. Pellets! A.K.A. Oh wee oh wee oh! A.K.A. International Waters of Love

After approximately two months of jerking around with a complicated apparatus that I cobbled together from old bits of science paraphernalia, I am finally sitting and working with a different complicated apparatus that was cobbled together from bits of new science paraphernalia.  It is computer controlled, by this very computer, and it is wonderful.  It produces reproducible results, and it makes force-time graphs all by itself.  I am in love with its science bits.  None shall stand in the way of our love, except possibly laws against mechaphilia.  On an unrelated note, I will be taking a short vacation to international waters with a varied selection of clergy and an Intel Core Duo 2 desktop computer. 

I am certain that our love will stand the tests of time, although I am uncertain it will stand the portion of the testing where I have to add the viscous binding agent.  That is not a euphemism.  An euphemism.  That seems grammatically untenable, somehow.  Anyway, the binding agent.  It will make the process sticky and hard to clean up after.  Oh, quiet you.  Dirty, dirty mind. 

I'm just going to stop talking to you while I'm ahead.

Drama Llama

I hate drama. 

Now, when I say this, I am not hating on theatrical productions.  I love those.  Well, except for Mama Mia, that ended terribly.  My mom suckered me into seeing Mama Mia, once upon a time. 

"Hey Tim, your father was supposed to join me at a play, but he's going to be in Ottawa on business, would you like to take his place?"  Said my mother.

"Sure, I like plays."  Said I, the unsuspecting.

So I drove down for the weekend.  The unnamed play was on Saturday, and on Friday night I was hanging out with my sister (who was also coming to the play) and watching a little television.  A commercial for Mama Mia came on, and I mocked it casually, as one might expect of a twenty-something male when confronted with a production aimed at the sensibilities of forty, fifty and sixty-something women.  To this, my sister replied, "...you know that's the play we're going to see, right?"

"Mooooooommmm!"  Says I. 

The abridged is that I ended up seeing the play, being mildly amused by the first two acts, mildly aroused by some of the female cast, and then profoundly disappointed by the third act.  And, then, really, I'm not much of an ABBA fan.  Except for that one song about Fernando.  That one's alright with me.

This, however is not the point of this little number.

The point is that this weekend, while visiting friends that I had not seen for some time (one that I hadn't seen in person for six years), there was no shortage of what the kids these days refer to as 'drama.'  As in, relationship drama.  Histrionics and over-embellishments of events and casual comments into grand, tragic, personal insults and hurt feelings, with little to no actual justification for said hurts on the 'injured' parties.

The worst part, for me, is that given the relative frequency with which this has been happening for the last couple of solar orbits, clearly some of it must be my fault.  Either I've been coddling fragile people for a long time, or I myself am a fragile people.  I'm not sure which prospect annoys me more. 

I'm almost thirty.  When does this crap stop happening?  How do I opt out of this little shitty game?  Is there a form I can fill out?  A legal request?  Some sort of waiver, perhaps?

When do I get to say, with style and aplomb, "fuck it.  I'm done with this,"?

So, I got all of my marks back: I pulled off a 78 average in term 2, as a cancer patient.  I do believe that makes me some sort of brain champion.  My brain meats are superior to the brain meats of others. Oh, not you.  Your brain meats are also superior; although perhaps not quite so superior as mine.  Mine are awfully superior, after all.

Gather Your Science Nuts for the Long Winter Ahead, Children.

I am sitting in my lab, waiting for some oil to heat up.  The oil is for science, not for pouring over the battlements while longbowmen whizz shafts past my head.  That whole sentence is two or three adjectives away from some kinky sex, or possibly a scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail.  Coconut.

Technically, it's not my lab, it belongs to the University.  The oil is mine, though.  I called dibs.  You have to call dibs in this lab, or all of the science gear disappears into cupboards, never to be seen again.  Finding things is the primary impediment to my work.  It would be less of an impediment if there was some enforced system of organization, in place of Gather Your Science Nuts for the Long Winter Ahead, Children.

It took me three hours to find the parts I needed to assemble a Soxhlet extraction column, this morning.  Three.  Hours.  That's a round bottom flask, the Soxhlet apparatus, a condensing column, a heater, a stand, two clamps, some boiling chips, ten grams of my sample, and some hexane.  That would have taken twenty minutes, tops, in any other lab where like equipment goes with like equipment in drawers and cupboards labelled things like, "stoppers," and "beakers." Oooh.   Aaaah.  Mysterious.  Exotic.

I've been trying to put my finger on why this keeps happening, exactly.  Even I am forced to stash my tools when no one is looking so that I know they'll be there later.  From what I have observed, there are three primary factors:

1 - Language. 
I work with a collection of people for whom English is a second language, at best.  In some cases I would be willing to put money on English being a third or fourth language, which is actually quite impressive.  Because English is often the only common language, this contributes to caches of science stored in secret for the revolution. You have a group of very intelligent people that often cannot communicate effectively with each other.

2 - Time.
Many of the graduate students and post-doctoral candidates that come here are come only a few months.  They cram a cupboard full of samples and glassware, and then disappear across an ocean without cleaning out their hoard.  As a consequence, there are forgotten trinkets and discarded (potentially hazardous) samples in every occupiable storage space.

3 - Culture.
 For many of these students, science is a competition.  They are fighting for the credibility and funding that comes with being published.  They are fighting for their future careers, and to do that, they have to publish first.  At least before the other people who might be duplicating their work, or making it obsolete or irrelevant.

I wonder how many labs are like this.  Le sigh.  Ah well, I still love my job.

Apple Bottom Jeans. Books to Return.

I was on campus on the 28th, to hand in a term paper and return a library book.  The attempt at handing in the paper was complicated by a number of things, most notably the whole department being closed, so I decided to take the book back to the library.  While walking, I began to notice that every ass in sight was glorious.  Impeccable.  Pristine.

This continued the entire way to the library.  Bam.  Ass.  Booty.  Butt.  Cheeks.  Mmmm.  Dayum.

I walked into the library, and the cavalcade of caboose continued all the way to the checkout/dropoff desk.  Girls coming down the stairs had dat ass.  Girls walking by had dat ass.  Hell, even the girl behind the counter had a respectable portion of posterior.

As I approached the counter, she smiled at me and said, "I can take that for you!"  All chipper and bouncy and friendly.  I checked the book for remnants of bookmarks I had used while perusing it for my paper, and handed it over with a grin.

The act of handing that book over and making as if to leave the library triggered some sort of quantum shift in the nature of the ambient derriere.  From the very first step away from that kiosk, suddenly, the badonk had no adonk.  Meh at best, the entire walk back home.

The lesson here, is that Libraries Reward You With Butts.  And when you leave?   They take it away.  Big sad.

Note to self:  Renew Library Card.