Monday, December 12, 2005

Sampling Woes

The weather took a turn for the worst last night.  The wind picked up and was howling.  At about five this morning Kerry was abruptly awoken with the sensation of cold water on her face.  A couple seconds later she was fully awake, shocked into consciousness by cold rain pelting her in the face.  The wind was gusting up to 50 knots and rain was filling the sky.  We have a tendency to fall asleep with the window open due to there being only one temperature for the entire floor in the building we sleep in.  So the high velocity rain was forcing its way in through the top of our window and had started to soak our bed.  Kerry jumped up and closed the window.  Shivering, she jumped off the bed and dried off with a towel.  Looking out into the harbor I could see that the water had taken on a whole new personality.  Waves were reaching as high as three feet, a total 180 from most mornings here. The most amazing aspect of this is that the waves were moving in the direction opposite of tidal flow.  It was crazy to watch waves forming away from the shore.

Well the real reason that I told this story was to show the kind of event that would keep us from sampling.  Ya, there was no chance that we were going to head out into this weather to sample today.  This allowed us one more day to try and get caught up with our samples.  True, we have not yet totally excavated ourselves from our built up workload, but we are very close.  Two of our GC’s are now functioning perfectly and we are keeping them working at all hours possible.  We are pulling shifts to keep things running; this is allowing the “off” person to get some much deserved “me-time”.  Things are really great right now, and I even had time today to get back to the RAD VAN.  

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