Long Days and Pleasant Nights

Post written by Charlie:

This morning started out rather nicely. I awoke around time for supper and after eating retired for a few hours to the science lounge and worked on my final presentation that I have to give in August after I get back from the cruise. It's not pleasant but it must be done, otherwise something bad will happen to me, I'm sure of it. Anyway, some of the guys put on a movie so I joined them. It's kind of nice getting into a little schedule where you find that you don't have to spend every waking hour down in the lab. Eventually you have to though so one might as well make the best of it. The situation is roughly the same as yesterday, with our HPLC still down so no krill work.

I did get some activity this evening though. I was able to process some of the data that we get from our big lab ISIS machine. Again with the acronyms, and like so many others, I don't know what this means, or even if it is one. Regardless, this machine, among other things, is mainly used to measure nitrates in the water and takes constant measurements all day long for days on end. It was my job to go through all this data and sift out the garbage and retain all the good stuff. Cal, you guys remember Calvin, right? He showed me all these cool little tricks on Excel to help me do all this. Without his assistance and guidance, it would have taken a stupid crazy amount of time to look over all these lines of data. Perhaps I can do some Excel magic tricks when I get back to land. "Hey everybody, watch me split all this data in this one column into several different columns!" Not too interesting, is it? I suppose not; it doesn't have that same charm and allure as the old rabbit in the hat schtick. Oh well, I thought it was pretty neat.

Well, I spent a few hours at this job and keeping myself busy learning new things was satisfying for a time. Unfortunately I finished my work and went back into the wet lab to help out with a little sea water filtration. Nothing like I described in some of those first blogs, but just regular filtrating where we don't care about the water, just the stuff in it. We filtered several liters onto a round piece of filter paper and collected all those little phytoplanktons that were swimming around in it. It wasn't too bad to learn how to do so it went fairly quickly. There wasn't much to do the rest of the night so I went up a couple of decks and looked through the ship's library, just for fun. That kind of signified the end of the night for me, so I went to eat my supper of breakfast, wrote this thing and then hit the hay. I'm going to try a greeting/farewell I heard in a really good series of books, so if you don't like it, blame someone else. Take it easy everyone. Long days and pleasant nights.