i'm sad that I have to use the native blogger interface or Hello to post pictures on my blog. I would like to have batch file uploading capabilities.. It's extremely time consuming to post 100 or more pictures individually. My picture blog has over 600 pictures now. There are a lot more to come although it seems like the pace of taking pictures since the first few weeks at Oak Ridge has diminished. I haven't done as much recently. Hopefully that will change.

I have a lot of busy work like doing homework for the class, and studying for the GRE. I'm taking the GRE sometime around the end of October. I think Rachel might doing it sometime there too.

So far we don't have much planned for this weekend except for a bbq in honor of one of the Dans getting run over by a bull. Next weekend should be a ton of fun because my brother is coming to visit.

Today has been a productive day so far. I came in at 8.30 and ran AFM scans of the annealed samples that had been in the furnace overnight. And then I conducted a thin film run by myself without my mentor watching me for the first time! We have to run an X ray diffraction scan to check the quality of the thin film. Taking a early quick lunch, I had enough time to put in another sample that should be ready to taken out in half an hour. This should allow me to put a substrate in and create a vacuum in the chamber for Monday. My mentor will be gone all next week and he gave an outline of what he wishes for me to accomplish. He talked about his perception of the right amount of samples and characterization tests needed to write a decent paper worth publishing and it doesn't look like I'll meet the quota. That makes me sad but I can't do much about it because i lose almost 5 hours a week to stuff that I need to do for ORSS which includes the inorganic chem class and a seminar.

I did something fun today post lunch. I took my hour break at work with Jenn and we went to Baskin Robins to get some ice cream. I got a chocolate fudge single scoop cone for $1.50. It was sooo good. I might do that once a week. It reminds me of gelato from Italy. yummmmmmm..

Listening to: [R.E.M. - Try Not To Breathe]