Brookhaven, Part 23,497
We made it to Brookhaven in one piece, as I am certain you will be pleased to know. We didn't even hit much traffic, despite leaving rather later than we intended, because I had to slice standards on the morning.
BNL is actually a lot of fun; I'm feeling pretty relaxed and not particularly worried about not having enough time. We've had some problems with the beam, but nothing major (for example, it was optimised for XANES when we got here, and we really wanted to do µSXRF mapping).
The weather is good, too. It's sunny and warm, but with a nice breeze - great beach weather! I hope it stays like this the whole time; when we got here is was cold and rainy and not a little depressing.
We ran standards first, to get them out of the way, and oh my lord. They were depressing, they were just an incoherent nightmare. The slide must have been contaminated, because the background values were higher than some of the standards! And then potassium was just everywhere, which I kind of expected, because we did a 1000ppm sample and it's hard enough to get 500ppm to come out nicely. But the zinc curve, which has always been fairly linear in the past, was just ugly. And the counts for 50ppm Cu were almost twice as high as the counts for 100ppm Cu! Jesus Christ on a pogo-stick.
I'm running plaques now. It's so boring! Everyone else has gone to the Starbucks to get coffee. I say "the" Starbucks, because as far as I can tell, there's only one on this entire damn island. We're going to dinner with our beamline rep later. And then at some point, we're going to dinner with Tony - who has grown a beard! OMG! He looks way distinguished, it's lolarious. And he ttly rewrote the widget scan and supposedly fixed the scan list bug we'd been having, and he may or may not have written a scan list for MCAs. I suppose I'll find out in a bit.
My daddy is coming to visit me this afternoon, and it'll be really cool and I haven't seen him in ages. My stepmom and sister and little cousing are coming, too; I don't think I've seen Anthony since he was, like, seven? If he was born when I was nine . . . he's what, 13 now? OMG.
Gotta get back to the beam now. Toodle-pip, and all that.
BNL is actually a lot of fun; I'm feeling pretty relaxed and not particularly worried about not having enough time. We've had some problems with the beam, but nothing major (for example, it was optimised for XANES when we got here, and we really wanted to do µSXRF mapping).
The weather is good, too. It's sunny and warm, but with a nice breeze - great beach weather! I hope it stays like this the whole time; when we got here is was cold and rainy and not a little depressing.
We ran standards first, to get them out of the way, and oh my lord. They were depressing, they were just an incoherent nightmare. The slide must have been contaminated, because the background values were higher than some of the standards! And then potassium was just everywhere, which I kind of expected, because we did a 1000ppm sample and it's hard enough to get 500ppm to come out nicely. But the zinc curve, which has always been fairly linear in the past, was just ugly. And the counts for 50ppm Cu were almost twice as high as the counts for 100ppm Cu! Jesus Christ on a pogo-stick.
I'm running plaques now. It's so boring! Everyone else has gone to the Starbucks to get coffee. I say "the" Starbucks, because as far as I can tell, there's only one on this entire damn island. We're going to dinner with our beamline rep later. And then at some point, we're going to dinner with Tony - who has grown a beard! OMG! He looks way distinguished, it's lolarious. And he ttly rewrote the widget scan and supposedly fixed the scan list bug we'd been having, and he may or may not have written a scan list for MCAs. I suppose I'll find out in a bit.
My daddy is coming to visit me this afternoon, and it'll be really cool and I haven't seen him in ages. My stepmom and sister and little cousing are coming, too; I don't think I've seen Anthony since he was, like, seven? If he was born when I was nine . . . he's what, 13 now? OMG.
Gotta get back to the beam now. Toodle-pip, and all that.