One is the Loneliest Number

Good thing I have Pi and Hobbes here to keep me company. I'm using one of Darren's laptops and the wireless connection from next door to write to you tonight...hello! Darren and Kim left early (really really early) this morning so they could make their flight out of Savannah. They will be gone for the next ten days, spending some quality time in the Dominican Republic. I looked at their itinerary and at all the things they get to do...they're going to have a blast!

Last night I made some really good curry (if I do say so myself) that all three of us virtually wolfed down, but two minutes after finishing dinner, Kim was sick to her stomach. Darren said that they thought that she might be allergic to curry, and judging by her reaction last night, they're pretty sure Kim is. Poor Kim! I hope her stomach gives her (and everyone around her) some peace on her plane flights today!

I had a pretty busy day at work today. On Friday, I put several batches through columns and then filtered them and weighed the filters, and I got really really low recovery amounts for the Strontium. I spoke with two team leaders and they said to go ahead and turn in the batches to the count room, and that they'd look into it. Today, the same thing happened, and we finally pinpointed it to a batch of resin. A week or so ago, we were completely out of resin with which to run our columns. That's a problem, because we couldn't run any batches. Whoever makes the resin put a rush on it and got it to us ASAP, but they didn't mark the weight and the density and all that stuff (I don't make the columns, I just use them, so forgive me my lack of resin-know-how). The result was that all of the columns we'd been using were low on resin (it's sort of like affinity chromatography: the beads in your column bind to something that you filter through them, and then you wash the beads, and then you elute the bound particles into a new container. If you don't have enough beads, you're going to lose some of your target molecules. That's what's been happening). The point is, we found the problem today and have now remedied it. The only problem that remains is if we're going to have to do the batches that were run through the low columns over again. We don't have enough time or enough sample to do six or more batches over again!

This weekend, I'm probably heading up to North Carolina. Susan is going up to NC at about 4AM on Saturday so she can be there early for TJ's birthday, and she's invited me to come along. I do want to visit home and see my family and the dogs and Leo and get some more of my things, but that weekend was the weekend I'd set aside to do some painting in Darren and Kim's house, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to start working 4AM to Noon next week, and I don't want to get in really late on Sunday night and throw my whole week off. We will see. Mom and Dad really want to see me, as much as I want to see them, so I'll probably go. Maybe.

Right now, I'm going to finish my beer, maybe do some cleaning, maybe not, heat up some leftovers for dinner, and settle down to watch There Will Be Blood, the movie for which Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor Oscar for this past year.