Road trip

We went to Harrison hot springs yesterday. It's an indoor chlorinated pool Not exactly natural, but the roads to the other more natural springs aren't quite thawed out enough for our little car.

hypertufa day -never

Well the first hypertufa experiment was a complete failure. We tried to demold the first two Monday afternoon -and they broke. So waited till today to get the other one off the mold...and it crumbled too. Maybe not enough Portland cement? Stay tune for round two

Who needs sleep? Tell me what's that for

So apparently my insomnia didn't go away with the dissertation. This time I didn't drink coffee late in the afternoon, however did eat lots of really tasty and probably MGS laden Chinese for dinner. At least there's a Harrison Ford marathon on. Yeah Indiana Jones.

During the daylight hours we played with hypertufa which I'll plant with new lithops once I get the seeds. Here are day one pictures of the pots

Pretty science envy

Sometimes I wish that I studied something that can be seen. I enjoy what I do and think that I'm exploring the great unknown. But, occasionally, I'd like to display some fundemental basics of my science in a format that would make a pretty little package.
Hence my astronomy envy as I was playing with my new favorite iPhone app.. This one is going with me on my future cruises, hanging out, filtering water and looking at the stars.

border wait

I decided to head down and see the parents since they are temporarily very close. I was planning on going down yesterday but by the time I got my stuff together the wait at the border was over 4 hours. When I heard that, I turned around and went home. And filled out the application for a Nexus card. But now I'm back in line, estimated wait when I got in line-60 min. It's already been an hour and I'm still 1.5 blocks away from the gates.
Next time there's a line this long, I'm going to hit the duty free shop. You can use the nexus (no line up) lane to get to the dutyfree the get spit out a block from the border. And they have beer.

Huge DNA

I'll post a picture tomorrow, but my first attempt at prepping DNA for making fosmid libraries has going very well. Which is good because I was using nearly all of my irreplaceable DNA from the Feb. cruise.