SOP Public Service Announcement

Hi there, all you lovely sewists! I've missed you so, I can't even describe.

Sadly, I have some (minor) bad news: I'm calling a distressingly brief hiatus.

Our adventure started at an abandoned silver mine in the Canadian North. Well, actually, it started with our stupid hero stupidly deciding to go on to stupid Grad School, but they say hindsight is 20/20. I say hindsight is a actually some epic pair of awesomely cool night-vision x-ray super tracking binocular goggles, but what can you do.

The final draft of my entire Masters thesis has to be submitted in, oh gosh, two weeks from Friday, on May 20th. I've still got a long ways to go before then, so sadly I have no time for blogging about sewing.

The elusive aqueous geochemist, in her natural environment, a natural wetland in the Northwest Territories. Here she is, up to her thighs and elbows installing sampling equipment in 5 degree Celsius water, a process that can take upwards of 20 minutes. Note the bright colours and hard helmet, just in case a plane tries to land on her head. Also note the frozen extremities.

Now, if you were interested in arsenic mobility and retention in a natural northern wetland, well, I might have a thing or two to say about that. Although honestly, at this point, I don't think I want to babble on the topic in my spare time (what spare time oh my gosh!), so maybe not right away.

When our intrepid aqueous geochemist went back to do sampling a second time, some of her equipment used to draw ground water from a well failed to arrive. But that's alright, she just built her own bloody suction pump.

This thing needs to be submitted on May 20th for a thesis defense date in the first week of June - there is a 2 week gap between submission and defense - because my Supervisor (I call her super Super, because she's, well, super) is leaving for field work in the Northwest Territories in mid-June, and then on sabbatical right afterward. So uh, if I want to finish sometime before January, it needs to be now.

And here she is, using the RTW (ready-to-work) pump to sample a well in the first month of sampling. She preferred her self-made equipment better.

So I'm just going to be sitting in the corner, weeping quietly and frantically typing. Wish me luck, lovelies, I need all the help I can get!

Happy sewing, all. Lucky bugs.