Hello everyone. This post may be a little obvious to many, but I have returned to New Zealand. The flight back was an adventure of its own when it felt like our plane was going to drop out of the sky shortly after leaving DIA. After a rather long and turbulent flight to California, we arrived in LA, navigated the maze that is LAX and found our international flight. The trip across the Pacific was much less eventful. I watched Juno. I'm not sure how to feel about that movie. I think I enjoyed it, but I may have been too far gone from the Nytol as well. I'll try to catch it again whenever it comes out to video so that I can form a real opinion about it.
Arrival in NZ was standard except that we came from the opposite side of the airport that I am used to. Every time that I have arrived in NZ so far, the plane has parked at a gate on one side of the terminal. This time, they were on the complete opposite side, which meant that going through customs and immigration felt somewhat backwards compared to normal. We purchased some duty free and were picked up by a friend. My birthday ended up with just going to Mexicali for some tasty food. I can't really complain. I got gifts from everyone before I left the US. I do feel like I was missing some cake though.
This week I have been in the lab. If you've been following my Twitter posts, which are conveniently located just to the right of the main blog, you would have an idea of this dilemma. To summarize: I'm trying to calibrate a data logger and everything possible is going wrong. Today (Thursday) things are finally looking up. I have a sample in the triaxial testing apparatus. It's sitting in the water and saturating so that I can have undrained conditions at failure. Especially because I don't want the sample to be unsaturated, cause that makes the geomechanics much more complicated.
I'm pretty sure that Crystal will have a raise. The operations manager, her boss, is going to talk to the owner about giving her a raise. Both of these guys like her, so I think we should see a slightly higher income from now on. This on top of my funding means that we can upgrade our life style slightly. Going out to eat is an option again. Before, we were really splurging if we didn't cook a meal. Now, things are going to be alright.
As I mentioned earlier, I've got Twitter now. The feed updates on this page or you can go direct to my Twitter page and add me or whatever.
