Since My Last Post Was In August . . .

I eventually wandered back this way to clean up my last entry of spam comments and realized I last posted in August right before school started. I don't know if anyone even comes by here anymore, but that's okay.

Since my last post:
-Discovered I don't connect with many civil engineers well.
-Got the worst sinus infection of my life, and it knocked me flat for 3 solid weeks. Teaching through that was rough.
-Started getting over said sinus infection and promptly broke the 5th metacarpal of my right hand and tore some tissue. No doctor believes the torn tissue part, but given I still can't do a few things with my right hand, I most definitely do. I miss the rock wall like crazy, but I won't even risk that right now.
-Somehow pulled a straight-A semester. 3.5 cumulative. VERY happy about this!
-Went to Curaçao and dove on the reefs there no less than 7 times. Total blast.
-Got TA evaluation forms back from my students. My first lab of the week hated me. I'm not surprised, but it was still hard not to let that get to me at first.
-Started teaching Petrology, my specialty subject. It's tough, but I love it. Knew all of the students already, so that made things easy. What's tough is making sure they understand WHY things are done certain ways. I'm still learning how to explain that on a fundamental level and the prof (same one I worked for last semester) is borderline incompetent in the classroom. I'm trying my best to counter that.
-Have a full set of detailed SEM maps and low-res reference maps of all of my samples. Still have to standardize them this week so I can get bulk compositions, from which we can better estimate levels of iron, magnesium, and some other potentially important stable isotope-bearing elements.
-Gearing up for a mass spec run, where I get to measure stable iron isotopes. The work is still new to me and I LOVE what I do here. Consider myself very lucky because not everyone is as happy in grad school as I've been. My unhappiest was when I was essentially sidelined from my sample processing last semester because, well, you sort of need two functional hands to run a rock saw.

Yesterday there was a substantial amount of smoke in the hallway outside of my office. Smelled like house fire with an edge of butane. I had been smelling something vaguely like candle smoke on that side of the building earlier in the day, so I was more than a bit concerned. We couldn't find the source and were starting to wonder if there was a fire in the walls somewhere. Ran down to the basement (1st floor). No smoke whatsoever. Ran back to second floor, made sure again we couldn't see smoke coming from somewhere, then ran over to the secretary's office to let her know. She went into emergency mode, called the fire department, and made sure they knew what was up. While I was thinking of where else we could check, as none of us had been up on the 3rd and 4th floors yet, the secretary passed along to us the recommendations from the dispatcher: evacuate and pull the fire alarm.

Surprised that the building fire alarm hadn't been automatically triggered by the sheer amount of smoke, I suddenly had a hunch we needed to check the third floor. I jogged for the nearest staircase with one of the other geochemists. We head up the stairs in the southeast corner of the building and were definitely seeing large amounts of smoke up there. The butane smell was much stronger up there than downstairs. Turns out a biology lab literally ten feet from the stairway landing using Bunsen burners, so I talked to the TAs there.

Turns out someone managed to set both some ethanol AND their lab book on fire. They managed to safely extinguish it and that was that, but it produced a large amount of smoke that vented to the floor directly beneath them, which was where my office was located. We ran back downstairs and were promptly greeted by the secretary, who was seconds away from pulling the fire alarm and calling for an evacuation. We did a quick evaluation of the situation and I ultimately decided to recommend NOT pulling the alarm. One might argue that evacuation was the ONLY safe thing to do, but we'd discovered the likeliest source of smoke and application of Occam's Razor stated it was highly unlikely that another lab was burning something that smelled like burning house plus ethanol at the same time.

(I was also trusting the word of the TAs in the bio lab.)

After we assessed and decided not to evacuate, we heard radios from the other side of the building, then looked over and saw two firefighters checking out an empty lab on the other side of the hallway. We ran over and let them know we found out where the fire was, so they went up with us to check things out for their report. The looks on the bio lab students' faces were utterly priceless. Some shock, a lot of surprise, and major WTF. One of my officemates and another extended groupmate were with me, and we all crowded into the door of the lab like little kids so we could watch. At that point, the danger was gone and we were just letting curiosity take over.

One of my other officemates returned a while later after having been out of the building. The hallway still smelled of burning, and the three of us who'd followed the firefighters up were still standing in the doorway of my office, talking about random things. My extended groupmate spotted my other officemate walking down the hall and called her confusion perfectly, as she walked up to us and promptly asked, "What happened?"

So that was yesterday's fire scare.

Let's see if I can update this thing more often. Trends say no.