Ja és novembre

November has started with intense lab work. I started analyzing the initial soils (not incubated) for organic carbon and nitrogen and nitrate and ammonia. In the past, I did the soil extractions and then handed the extractions to our lab technician to run it in the auto-analyzer and then she would email me the numbers. Easy. Now I’m learning all the steps the auto-analyzer does and, boy, does it take much longer! One thing I can say is that I definitely feel more lab trained. Knowing what I know now in preparing samples, standards, and making dilutions, I feel I could go back to a certain analysis I tried to do in Brazil and could do it a lot better. I’m pretty sure all that data is crap and if I went back now with what I learned, I could probably get some better results. It really makes a difference having someone walk you through the steps, follow-up on what you’re doing, and of course, know a ton of chemistry! Joan is an excellent teacher and will always explain to me why we are doing what, as in why we are adding this reagent and what happens when you add it to the other, etc. I may not follow everything, but you can tell he thinks it’s important to explain and make sure that I’m learning.

Anyway, theses analyses required lots of pipetting, diluting, preparing standards and reagents, and running samples on the spectrophotometer. After 5 days of pipetting, my right forearm was hurting so now I’m trying to balance with my left hand. Gotta keep those pipetting muscles even. Some of the extra pipetting had to do with high readings not fitting in the standard curve, so I had to repeat some samples, diluting a few times until getting better readings. All in all, it’s been a tiring few days, but I’m learning a ton. And now I have data!

Thank goodness for the weekends. Friday nights I usually accompany Luis to the local indoor bouldering gym, Deu Dits. I first started bouldering in Vancouver when some IRES colleagues invited me to try it and since it seemed it was the thing to do on Vancouver rainy days, I did. I really enjoyed it and climbed (indoors) quite a bit for a year, but stopped once I went to Brazil. Now that I’m here I still don’t go as much as Luis does, but once a week it’s fun to climb up walls until my arms get sore, then sit back and watch the pros train.

On Sunday we left Barcelona for a bit to visit the nearby town of Sitges. This town has visitors year-round, more even during its film festival. On our afternoon there, we walked along the waterfront boardwalk and checked out a few shops. Its a really nice little town, great for a short trip out of Barcelona.