I can talk about culture, religion, and cats all I want, but I know that the question burning you up inside is really, “How's work coming along, Laurie?”
Well, funny you should ask. Truth be told, my forward progress has been halted by the fact that the Carbon-Nitrogen measuring machine is broken. I need this machine to measure the organic contents of my samples so that I know whether I need to kill the organic contents with Hydrogen Peroxide before preparing my samples for grain size measurements. Try as she might, the lab manager Ute can't fix the “C-N” machine. The local, free repair guy can't seem to ever make an appearance, and it would cost about 700 Euro to get a real repair guy to come! Ute is looking into how much it would cost to just get a new part for what seems to be broken and install it herself, if she can.
And, in the meantime, I am spending time in the geology library educating myself on soil science, since I never did actually take a soil course at Calvin College. There was a soil course offered when I was a beginner geology student, but I was only just beginning to learn what the realm of geology even meant and did not appreciate that soils fell under the category of something I should care about. The geology library here is pretty cool because there are just as many books in English as there are in German. I've been noting other possibly helpful articles from the books' bibliographies, so perhaps I will try to seek those materials out some day.
I'm thinking that once I have skimmed/read all the relevant geology books, then I will seek out the library which contains books on Jordanian history. I have never studied much Middle Eastern history outside of my Ancient History class at Calvin College, so we'll see if I can find any suitable books to skim. I learned a ton from Professor de Vries' articles on Umm el-Jimal, Jordan and Bernhard Lucke's dissertation on the Decapolis Region, but I want to review the region's history for myself. As part of a comprehensive understanding of the environmental history of Umm el-Jimal, the soils need to be interpreted in the context of the civilizations which were interacting with the land.
Even though I wish the Carbon-Nitrogen machine would get repaired so that I could move forward with the lab work, it is kind of nice to have time for reading unassigned educational books.
Afterword: Once you write something down, it becomes history within minutes. Internet news is only current if you can post your news immediately. I can't, so I have to write things like “Afterwords” to correct the old news.
I arrived in the lab today (Wednesday) and found out that the C-N machine has been working since yesterday afternoon! Ute and Professor Baumler cleaned every possible piece of the machine that they could take apart and wahla! It seems to have done the trick to get the machine working! So, Ute showed me how to operate the machine and I will begin analyzing my samples tomorrow morning.
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Good thing too. Time's a wasting. You need to get more done in the next 6 weeks to feel you've accomplished a fair amount while you've been there, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteHoly cow. Does it cost 700 Euro to fix EVERYTHING in Germany??
ReplyDeleteSadly for our American reputations, this particular machine is an American product.
ReplyDeleteso what? that just means it weighs alot more than it should, pollutes the environment, Works alot harder than all the other machines in the lab and makes them look bad, and then rubs it in that it is the best machine EVER, and declares war on the innocent coffee pot in the corner. At least thats how the Europeans see it.
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