Pinnacles Day Hike part Dux

MMM

edacious \i-DAY-shus\, adjective:
Given to eating; voracious; devouring

The Power of Prayer

I just had to post this!

Prayer Healing

Haha!

Also I'll be posting some caving we did at Pinnacles.

Pinnacles Day Hike

Lisa, Mark, and I went for a day hike down to Pinnacles this last weekend. My first exteneded amount of exercise. I checked out my bike for the first time the other day, and the rims are totally fucked. No way can I fix them, gotta get new ones. Now I've got to decide whether I want to go though the pain of "weaving" my own, or just paying the man.


Pinnacles is a total freak of nature-I love freaks. It is one half of an ancient volcano that got split by the San Andreas fault line. The other half is like 150 miles or so south!


Look at these sexy kids!


The wildflowers are starting to bloom. This a primarily dry region, in the rainshadow of the Santa Cruz range.


All of the rocks are covered in all sorts of different lichen. It looks really neat close up.


My ancestor- Bob.

Trouble...Where?

Ok so Jesse's been MIA in the blogging world. Sorry guys! Basically, had finals and a beam run back to back. So was like one week of prep for exams, one week of exams, half a week of getting ready for beam time (like 9am-9pm days), and now I've got the night shift for beamtime over the next four days. And then the next quarter starts again! Yay!

Good news is that the project I've been working on over the past year has finally come to fruition. I designed and built a two dimension oscillator, which rotates our sample by plus-minus 2-6 deg. This is to "smooth" out some otherwise noisy data when we do single crystal spectroscopy. If you want to know more than that, let me know. Its been a very complicated project because I had to fit the above constraints into a hole which is about 1 1/4 " in diameter...not easy. BUT, it works! So now I've got data, and the beginnings of a thesis. Now, if I can just learn enough about biological crystalography to get some interesting single crystal samples to look at with this, and then write a proposal, and then be self employed, and then have bio experience, and then do cutting edge research, and then get a job at Berkeley or Stanford...I'd be set.

Hail, what?

So, we've been having some wicked weather lately. Really violent rain and such. It's been great since the weather here is always pretty mellow. Today it actually hailed. You really don't see this sort of behavior out here, and it was really cool! Also, this was in the local section of the paper today... check out the little blurb on the right. Coming from Michigan this makes me laugh!

Two Down; Three to go

I passed my EM qual! This totally rules! This means one less test to study for this summer. Whew! Man this is like winning the lottery. They still have yet to decide on the classical appeal, but I felt that was my stronger of the two...so here's to hoping. So I thought I'd give myself a flower.

Calvin and Hobbes