Kate wanted to go out for dinner last night but I insisted on making a specialty of mine, wood smoked pizza on the grill. Somewhere in there I froze three beers, and what I thought was spinach was arugula (photo). This evil weed did not make it onto the pizza, but I was crabby and mean to Kate and spoiled the evening. The pizza was incredible, though.
Later on, at about 4:30am local, the frozen beers were rattled by a 5.2 magnitude earthquake. Kate and I slept through it, but the rest of LRRD had a nice awakening.
At work, machining things for the Em4, I managed to burn four fingers, two on each hand, the ones you'd burn if you stupidly picked up a hot piece of metal like it was a tasty little sandwich, and my desktop computer melted, though I was not the cause of it. My iPod died.
Then a fun thing happened--Cara and I were meeting with Andrew Podoll, a graduate student in geology at SIUC under Dr. Pinter, when, very appropriately, a 4.6 magnitude aftershock occurred. Andrew and I'd just complained about not ever feeling an earthquake, but we felt this one. Our rafters made quite a bit of noise. We were grinning and not at all thinking of personal safety, being brave scientists.
Some much anticipated plastic media samples arrived. We we able to assemble our designs using yellow and orange media in the flesh. We have to use white to keep the overall brightness of the media high, and there are other restrictions.
What we hoped would be appealing looked kind of like candy corn. 
Not pretty, but it fit in with earthquakes and the spinach being arugula instead.
We wired and built things for the Em4, mostly a new metering system and manifold for the water input, and also met with a machine control engineer.
Labels: Andrew Podoll, color-coded media, earthquake, em4, geology, modeling media, nicholas pinter, plastic media, siuc
