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Sam and Dan sat me down tonight and gave me a “suck it up and start studying” talk. It takes some VERY skillful diplomacy work to make such a conversation motivtional, but they did an excellent job. They covered everything: “Yes this will totally suck.” “You’ll be a couch potato and gain weight, but you’ll lose it again.” “Yes, studying all the time made my back hurt — get a massage.” “Work in the library, not at home, you’ll get more done.” “Yes it’s a crappy way to spend your first year of marriage, but you can go on a second honeymoon after you’re done.” “Eighty hours is week is physically possible if you only do it for four months.” “We can drive you to school so you have to be there by nine every morning and you won’t have to ride your bike home late at night.” Concrete advice is very helpful.

Can I really work that hard and not go completely nuts and get horribly depressed??? I don’t know.

So I spent several hours tonight compiling a list of all the stuff I have to study. It’s really long. I tried to write out a schedule with due dates for everything. Sam and I are going to go to lunch on Fridays and talk about what I’ve read. Hopefully, that’ll both keep me accountable for it and help me remember it; Sam and I both have sieves for brains. (No offense Sam.)

Four months. Here I go.

New Galleries!

I finished my Ditch Day and Figure Skating galleries. These are both quite photojournalistic. What do you think?

Today is Craig’s 24th birthday! To celebrate, we ate at Gaucho Grill, ate cake, and played spoons.

Stuck in line at the parking garage, Ben and Craig try to act like gangsters, but Ben accidentally makes the “I Love You” sign instead:

Craig extinguishes his candles:

I had grand plans to finish my tectonics lab and write a paper about facies changes in the metamorphic rocks in the Lake Isabella area, but instead I worked out and watched “The Fast and the Furious”. The dialogue leaves a little to be desired, but overall I give it two thumbs up. It was just the right intellectual level for me. Oh, and guess what — I’ve *eaten* at the shrimp place where Brian asks the dude in charge how he makes his extra money. How cool is that?!

Well, it’s been a rough week…but I expected that, since it’s my third consecutive week of work in a row (double field trips – blecch). BUT, this weekend is a three day weekend (never mind that a certain professor saw that we’d miss class on Monday and asked that we stay for an extra hour this afternoon to make up for it — grrr, holidays are not supposed to work that way!), AND yesterday I found out that I won’t have to go to New Mexico for two weeks, only a couple days. I like New Mexico, but I am glad to stay put for a while.

Last night Ben and I went to the Caltech ice skating team’s exhibition and open skate night. I shot photos of the skaters (which didn’t come out that well), met up with some old friends, got schooled on the ice by Rich the Yalie, and got free chocolate chip cookies. Can you believe our ice skating team came in 9th at Nationals? That is, like, unheard of for Caltech.

I HATE GRADUATE SCHOOL!

I spent the weekend in Death Valley digging a trench to cosmogenically date an offset alluvial fan. This very nice prof from Cal State Fullerton, Jeff Knott, came out to help and it went pretty well. We talked a lot about what I was working on and I learned a lot from him.

And then today Brian brought his Ge106 class to our trench as we were finishing up, and he asked me to explain what I was working on. I said I was taking sample for Al-26 cosmogenic dating and Brian said, “Huh? I think it’s Cl-36.” I had the wrong isotope the WHOLE WEEKEND, the whole time I was talking to Jeff, and then I messed it up in front of Brian and his entire structural geology class. It doesn’t affect the samples we took or our methodology this weekend, but I feel REALLY stupid.

To top it off, when I came home I found out that Ben spent the day playing poker, lost money, joked about it, and then complained he hasn’t been able to get enough sleep.

Do you know what time I get up to go work in the field? 6:30 am. After working in the pit all day, I drove six hours back to Tech along with the rest of Los Angeles, which apparantly took a simultaneous trip to Las Vegas this weekend and stopped in Baker, home of the world’s tallest thermometer, for dinner. I think I have a right to be the tired one.

I’ve blown my nose five times already, but I can’t get the dust out. It’s really dusty inside our trench.

On the plus side, the temperature at our pit, elevation 1000′, never exceeded the low 90s this weekend. That’s a miracle.

Yesterday was Ditch Day! So I sort of got a day off. Yay! Ben and I spent the morning taking pictures. Below, going clockwise starting from the upper left: Ben and Chris Brennen get rides to the Ath on the Professor Shuttle, student run around with PVC Hoberman spheres, and the Gene Pool with drum of shampoo in it.

I leave for Death Valley at noon today. I’ll be there until Sunday, digging a pit to sample for Cl-36 (see protected entry 5/23) dating on the Red Wall Fan. Then…no more field trips for almost a month, and *that* one is to Mono Lake, which won’t be so hot. Fortunately, southern California is experiencing an unusually cool week, so the highs in Death Valley are only around 100. Yay :)