Junk in the air

Couch potatoe

On days where I feel like nothing is worth it, days when the negative snark inside my head wins over control of all thoughts, days during which self-destructive thoughts are the norm, on days when I am convinced that I'm pretty much a fuck-up in every aspect of life, this is the only thing that keeps me holding on.  It's nice to be needed.

Schedule for Asia 2012

I think, finally, my plans for SE Asia in January/February are firm.  Amazingly enough!  So, loyal blog readers, here is my schedule. 

January 5th, 2012:  depart Ottawa with Glenn and Ralph, meet up with Andy in the Toronto airport, fly to Bangkok via Hong Kong

January 6th, 2012:  arrive in Bangkok, Thailand

January 7th - 10th, 2012:  tour Bangkok and area with mineralogy friends

January 10th - 14th, 2012:  Burapha University near ThaMai (Chanthaburi area) to visit with friends and colleagues, visit gem mines, gem market, fruit market, and eat copious seafood

January 15th, 2012:  travel by train from Bangkok to Aryan Prathet and walk across the Thailand-Cambodia border to Poipet, Cambodia.  Take taxi from Poipet to Siem Reap, Cambodia

January 16th - 17th, 2012:  visit Angkor Wat

January 18th, 2012:  travel by boat down the Tonle Sap to Phnom Penh

January 19th - 20th, 2012:  meetings with staff at Hanuman Travel to organize trip to Ratanakiri

January 21st - 30th, 2012:  visit zircon mines in Ratanakiri province, visit Kratie river dolphins as a side-trip, visit topaz mine near Phnom Penh

January 31st - February 4th, 2012:  Put Andy on a plane back to Toronto; Rockin4Tabitha House Build in Koh Kong province (stay in Sihanoukville)

February 6th, 2012:  back to Bangkok

February 7th - 16th, 2012:  Put Glenn and Ralph on a plane back to Ottawa; Hua Hin, Thailand for some beach time and Muay Thai at Por Promin Muay Thai

February 18th, 2012:  fly back to Canada

I think that's it so far.  And accommodations are pretty much organized and booked.  With only a month and a bit to go, I think we are on our way!  All my boys have their shots (or are booked to get them) and know what they need to pack (or NOT pack!).  With the amount of overland travel we're going to do, they have been advised to travel lightly!  It's way too difficult to walk across borders and chuck bags into the back of a bus/train/boat/car/tuk-tuk when you have a massive suitcase.  Much easier with a 45 L backpack or the like. 

My bag of choice is my trusty, well-worn and well-loved 45 L Millet pack that I bought when I lived in Paris.  It's my pride and joy, has been everywhere with me and has survived, even when being used as a rock bag and flung down a hillside.  It's been to northern Ontario to a fly-in camp to haul fenites, syenites and carbonatites around for a week through the bush and in a fishing boat, been up and down the French Alps for hiking and skiing, been to Scotland to collect various rocks during an IMA field trip to the Isle of Skye, been to Thailand many times, and all across Canada including Nunavut.  It's logged many miles!! 

It's been a long week.  It's the end of the semester and that means preparation of final exams, lab exams, take-home assignments, marking, etc.  On top of it, my plan is to submit two manuscripts before leaving for Asia (fingers crossed).  I also want to get all the "maintenance" stuff out of the way - stocking up on dogfood, dentist appointment, doctor's appointment, optometrist appointment, truck in for its regular maintenance.  All pre-trip planning that needs to happen.  Christmas?  Ya, that's in there somewhere, but it's easier to handle since I'm not heading north.

Snow?? WTF?!?

Today, winter officially began.  I woke up to a winter wonderland with 2-3 inches of wet white snow on the ground.  Shock was the first reaction.  "Oh that's pretty" the second reaction.  Which was quickly followed by "Shit, where are my scraper and shovel?".  After walking to CycleLogik to get a coffee with the dog (who is totally enthralled with snow, by the way), I decided to tackle the shoveling and cleaning of the truck.  That accomplished, and realizing that the temperature is going to rise to +11 on the weekend so any shoveling is futile as it will melt in the next 48 hours anyway, I decided that driving was pointless so am spending the day working at home.  I have enough to keep me busy for the next 6 months so not an issue!!

Rebel must have had a premonition of the winter-to-come as last night he decided to build an igloo out of his dog beds.  Sometimes I worry about him!!  Now if only I could teach him how to use a shovel...

Mineral art

You don't have to be a mineralogist, or even a scientist, to appreciate the art of Nature.  Nature isn't random - if you ever think it is, have a look at a snowflake, a flower, leaves on a tree, the way that crabs on a beach will pile balls of sand in concentric patterns.  The symmetry of Nature is everywhere, and it doesn't take a science degree to find it intriguing. 

I got interested in minerals at the beginning for the simple reason that they were beautiful and cool.  Nothing more than that.  In particular, in highschool I developed a distinct fondness for 'fuzzy' or acicular minerals - aegirine, elpidite, okenite, etc.  My interest in Mont Saint-Hilaire was fueled by a collector from Montreal who sold me my very first 2 inch ball of acicular, secondary aegirine.  From that point on, I was hooked, both on alkaline rocks, and on strange and wonderful habits and textures of minerals.

Sometimes you need expensive, high-powered equipment to gain a better understanding of habits and textures.  A simple dissecting binocular microscope can be enough.  If you have the facilities and the money, thin sections under a polarizing microscope will tell you so much about the mineral and rock that you can't see in hand sample.  And if you really want to get technical, a scanning electron microscope is the way to go.  Especially if you have access to a brand new JEOL which takes amazing images!

I spent the entire day taking back-scattered electron images (BSEI for you geek-types) of pyrochlore grains from the Larvik plutonic complex in Norway.  You don't need to know what a pyrochlore is (a group of oxide minerals), or even why I was imaging them (for use later when we do electron microprobe analyses), but you can appreciate the beauty of the BSEI that resulted.  All you really have to know is that the grey scale of the images is directly correlated with atomic weight of the dominant element in that area - bright areas have heavy elements like uranium, dark areas have lighter elements like silicon or sodium. 

I don't necessarily understand what some of the textures mean.  There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg approach to understanding mineral textures and, as the old saying goes - if you want 5 opinions on something, ask 5 geologists.  Everyone tends to interpret textures a bit differently. 

That said, regardless of what they mean, I think they are beautiful and want to share them.  Pyrochlore art.  Enjoy.

Aegirine, diopside and hedenbergite, oh my!

 Today I feel like a grad student.  Not sure why, except that dealing with this quantity of data and such a large project reminds me more of doing a thesis than simply writing a paper!  Taking on this massive mineralogy/geochemistry project involving the Larvik Plutonic Complex is a thesis unto itself.  It would be a great PhD but with everything else at work that gets in the way, it's taken quite a bit longer than my own PhD took to finish!

Primary brown and secondary green biotite.

Mafic mineral chaos.

Pyrochlore and fluorite in altered perthite.

But I'm getting to the end.  By Christmas, I plan to have the mafic mineral manuscript done and submitted.  Pyroxenes and amphiboles are on the menu.  And what a confused lot they are!!!  Ternary pyroxenes with every composition from hedenbergite to diopside to aegirine and everything in between.  Which is kind of cool to see how primitive in compositions they are.  The amphiboles are the same - calcic through to calcic-sodic all the way to late-stage sodic phases.  With trace element profiles which are just as schizophrenic!

 

Primary amphibole and secondary green biotite.

Zoned pyrochlore.

So, endless hours of crunching data, manipulating data, looking for trends, fucking up spreadsheets, etc.  At least I have an intuitive, instinctual feeling for these minerals, unlike the zircons which I just finished writing about.  Those were a bit of a stretch in terms of my mineralogical-comfort zone, but I guess that's the one way you grow as a scientist.  However, as much as sometimes I despise amphiboles, I like mafic minerals.  I like the fact that they can tell you so much about the environment in which they formed.  Unlike many other later-stage, 'interesting' phases.  These are the meat and potatoes of the alkaline pegmatite world and if you can't understand them, you're lost. 

I think I need more coffee though...

The next two weeks are frantic.  The semester has disappeared without me noticing and in the next week I have to prepare my final exam and lab exam for GEO 2163.  As well as give the last 2 lectures and prep a take-home assignment so that they can redeem themselves and get a few extra marks.  However, on the bright side, once my final exam has been written, I have only 2.5 weeks to do all the marking, etc. and then leave for Thailand!!  I don't plan on going to Sudbury over the holidays so my time will be spent here marking.  

Squash, revisited

This September, I started playing squash again.  I haven't played for the last 4 years as I was finding it difficult to train Muay Thai and play squash at the same time.  The two activities are actually extremely compatible - both require excellent footwork, hand-eye coordination, speed, power, timing, and patience.  Although a different muscle set is utilized between the two, I find that if I could train both of them at 100%, I would be a fantastic athlete. 

However, training for two separate sports in a dedicated way is, well, pretty much impossible.  In order to improve and grow as a squash player, you have to play a minimum of 4 days per week.  5 days per week is ideal.  And the same goes for Muay Thai.  And then throw in cardio (running) on top of things, and there just aren't enough days in the week to do both.  So 4 years ago, Muay Thai won out.  I thought that I'd try to see if I could re-incorporate squash into my life this year.  So far, it's not working out so well playing only once a week.

I started playing squash when I was 13 with my father.  It's about the only sport that he actually did and his game was simply to dominate the T and smash the ball with all of his force.  In hindsight, his interest in playing at the Exhibition Centre in Sudbury was more likely related to the woman who ran the bar at the courts than the actual game! 

However!  It is from him where I picked up the addiction to the sport.  And it wasn't pretty when I was that age.  I was an angry teenager.  It made me an angry squash player, and very impatient.  Playing with my father, and then later, only men, I learned to play a very 'male' game - hard, fast, low kill shots.  I played throughout highschool and my undergrad degree.  During highschool, I cannot even count how many racquets I broke due to simple temper.  It's not something I'm proud of - it just is.  It happened.  As I said, I was a very angry teenager!  Put a blunt weapon in my hand, and bad things happened!!  However I must say that, unless I was playing with my father, which only lasted about a year before I became way too good to play with him, my anger on the court was always aimed at myself, never at my opponent.  I had played in the squash league against older, better players (again, mostly male) and then also had two main partners.  One of which I was madly in love with so getting on the court was more flirting than anything!!  But we had fun!!

When I moved to Ottawa and started playing with the CMN boys, and the group at the Nepean Sportsplex, I had to rethink my game.  I could no longer over-power my opponents.  Well, some of the women, yes, but not the upper-level women nor the men.  And when I joined the Women's City League, I certainly got schooled.  I had to learn a completely different style - to play strategically, smart, ease up on the power and play a longer game.  It took me a few years, but by the time 2006 rolled around, my game was outstanding and I was playing 5 days per week. 

Then I discovered Muay Thai and combining the two sports was only possible the first year.  It's not something I regret - I needed something different in my life at the time and certainly stepping into the gym was the best move I had made in years! 

This year I really missed squash, so decided to sign up for the women's city league again.  But I'm only playing that one match per week so am certainly not playing up to my potential. 

The big difference between now and even 10 years ago is that my patience has greatly increased.  I've had the same racquet for many years now without it breaking!  And I don't get mad on the court any more.  It's just not worth it.  So I've learned how to be patient and I've learned to focus and keep my emotions in check while on the court.  It's similar to being patient, focusing and keeping emotions out of the picture while in the ring.  Same same but different.  Except you can't kick your opponent if they get in your way...