Today was a little different from the last several I've gone through. Again, we didn't have a MOCNESS or a bongo cast, but when I went down to the science lab I found that Rachel and Karen were packing up lots of our stuff. I thought that we were going to dismember krill tonight and stack up the vials for transport back to Maryland but evidently to do so we should have started a few days ago. We were left with too little time so we're just packing and cleaning. Speaking of cleaning, do you all remember from my first blogs where I described the long special filtering we did with the seawater? Each run filled up a 20 liter container called a carboy and we filled up quite a few, not to mention that we have several extras hanging around the lab. Tonight it was my job to clean them. I washed each of them with dish soap, for starters. Their second rinse involved this little soapy mix of super cleaning solution called RBS. The third and last rinse involved using 5% HCl. Thankfully I accidentally brought my chem lab apron with me on the boat so I donned that, a pair of gloves and some safety glasses. I probably didn't need to worry about much but I like my clothes without blemishes or holes if I can help it. I drew lots of comments about my appearance from my other colleagues. I won't go into all the little jokes and quips I received but some of them were pretty funny. Anyway, I ran out of acid about half way through so I'm waiting for more to be made. I talked to Alexei, my MOCNESS boss, about when we're doing another MOCNESS and he said that we'll probably do three or so this coming night. I've been trying to revert back to a regular awake-during-the-day schedule so I've been awake for several afternoons but this uberlong MOCNESS casting is going to take a toll on my efforts. Hopefully it'll be just a day or two as I'd really hate to do this all the way back to Dutch, but what must be done must be done. So it goes.

So, aside from my carboy cleaning capers, I didn't really do much else, since that took quite a bit of time. Have you ever tried to wash out all the suds from a giant plastic container from concentrated dish soap? No? Well, it takes a while, so it took up the entire night and morning. It did feel good to stay busy for such a long time though.

After I ran out of acid it was roughly an hour till lunch, so I picked up my book for a while to wait it out. We had french dip sandwiches and they were really good. Lots of onions and horseradish. Boy, were they tasty. Well, I don't want to start in with food reviews so I'll just go ahead and sign off for now. Talk to you later.