ruts, projects, and water samples

Wow, I haven't blogged since the 8th. Occasionally I think about it, but I didn't really have anything to say. I do have cute things about Kevin/Heidi posts that I update occasionally, but I haven't been ready to post them yet. Oh, and Ryan's parents came and visited, but I haven't gotten around to uploading the pictures yet.

I have been in a rut when it comes to reading books. I'm not really sure how many books I have started without finishing in the past couple of months. Wives and Daughters, Silent Spring, Out of the Silent Planet, The Dark Is Rising, probably several more. I've tried rereading favorites, starting ones I've always wanted to read, reading books that others recommended, and most books just haven't done it for me. The only one I actually finished was Flowers for Algernon. I read it several years ago and liked it pretty well, but this time I couldn't put it down. I started it in the evening, read until 2 a.m. and couldn't sleep even then, and finished it the next day. It has a lot more meaning now than it did when I was younger because I've had more life experiences (relationships, marriage, children, college, etc.). In the end I cried. But after that I still haven't been able to get out of the rut. I've started Isaac Asimov's Foundation, and it seems promising, so we'll see. I think a lot of my problem is that I have a lot of other things that need to get done and I feel bad reading when I really ought to be finishing homework or a project.

It looks like we're going to have a rather handmade Christmas. I keep thinking about what I could get the kids for Christmas and I just don't want any more toys. But I do have a lot of fabric and scraps, and a few pounds of brown rice that (let's face it) we will never eat. So I'm going to use them to make some quiet book pages and little bean bags.

I also made some more bias tape for another project. I have several baskets that we got when we bought peaches at the farmer's market, and I've decided I'm going to put ruffles around them and put them on top of my cupboards to hold food so that my food storage won't look ugly up there anymore. The bias tape is to make the top edge of the ruffle look finished. Ryan and watched Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy while I was working on the bias tape. I'm intrigued and hoping that the library also has the next movie in the series.

Yesterday I spent the entire day getting my water samples ready to go in the mass spectrometer. It's quite a process. You use these tiny funnels called columns that have a very narrow neck with a little sponge in it. First you put resin and water in the column, and you have to let all the water drain out so that there is just resin in the column. Then you put more water and also nitric acid in the column and have to let it drain out, and you do that several times. Finally, you put the sample through the column. I'm studying the strontium, and the strontium sticks to the resin in the column while everything else goes through. After I put the sample through, I had to put 12 drops of nitric acid in and let it drain out--and then do it again six times. Then I put the column over a new beaker and put water in it, which had to drain out, and then more water, which also had to drain out. The water gets the strontium out of the resin and into the beaker. Altogether it took twelve hours, because it takes a while for the liquid to drain through the resin every time, probably at least half an hour. Usually it takes around eight hours, but for some reason the columns were draining really slowly yesterday. So it was a matter of putting liquid in, waiting, checking to see if it had drained, waiting some more, adding more liquid, waiting, checking, on and on. I knew there would be a lot of waiting, so I came prepared with homework. I ended up getting two pages of a paper done and making some headway on a final lab project. Oh, and the building was really cold, and the lab was even colder. There are a couple more steps and then the sample will go into a mass spectrometer.

Meanwhile, Ryan got to take the kids to Kindermusik and spend the entire day with them. Here's a google chat we exchanged late at night when I was still watching water drip:

Earlier today I was thinking about making mini quiches (which I have never done before), but I didn't really feel up to making pie crust. Dinner time came and it still hadn't happened. I told Ryan I was having a hard time figuring out what to make for dinner because there wasn't time to do the quiches. So he opened up the Tanner family cookbook to a random page and pointed at a recipe: Chicken Pot Pie. "I don't feel like making pie crust," I repeated. He tried again: Beef Pot Pie. I think he might have done it again and landed on Beef Pot Pie a second time. "Okay, apparently I'm supposed to make pie crusts tonight," I decided. But we had macaroni and cheese for dinner and I mixed the pie crust to use later. So I guess tomorrow is quiche and then I have two more pie crusts left for pie. And it just so happens that we're eating pie on Thursday with Jared and Kristi and family, so I guess I did some work ahead of time. We are very excited to get to have Thanksgiving with family.