The good days just keep rolling in

Man, it's been a really great last couple of days. Things have been a bit more relaxed due to the drill string being switched over to the new size. We've still had plenty of core piled up to work on, so we haven't gotten a break, but everyone seems to have relaxed some. Perhaps it is the prospect of the day off tomorrow that has buoyed everyone's spirits.

It also helps that yesterday we had 3 birthdays on the same day just within the ANDRILL project! And even more amazing 2 of the 3 are night shift folks--Larry and "Il Padrino" himself, Franco. It was also Laura's birthday. Laura is the glue that keeps this project together, and without her, no one would have made it down here. So, given those circumstances, we've given her the coveted title of honorary nightwalker. The birthdays meant a little frivolity was in order.

Vanessa and Leslie got together and made a decadent chocolate cake, which they brought (straight from the oven and still warm) over to the Galley during dinner. Larry and Franco were there since it was their normal lunch time, but as luck would have it, Laura happened to stop by just in time for cake. So we sang "Happy Birthday" to all three and enjoyed the cake:


Deb, Larry's wife, requested though my blog that I do something special, and potentially embarassing, for Larry's birthday. My first instinct was to get some embarassing photos of Larry to show at the morning meeting. Little did I know that being Mr. Cool himself, there were no photos to be found. So in absence of any compromising photos, I resolved to fabricate some. I went on a photoshopping tear and put Larry's head on the body of an old man running out doors in the winter. It was a rather hilarious combination. I also didn't leave out Laura and Franco. I put Laura's head on Wonderwoman's body and Franco became The Godfather. Everyone was a good sport and had a good laugh when I showed it at the morning meeting for everyone.

In unrelated news, PSICAT is performing marvelously. It has proven it's worth many times this week. We've been tweaking the color scheme for lithologies a bit. If they had been doing things the old way, all 600 meters of diagrams would have had to be individually adjusted to update the color. But I just changed one color value and all of the diagrams were updated. The other big thing is summary logs. Being over 600m into the core, it's hard to get a big picture of what is going on since the diagrams that get put up on the wall are only 4m/page. So I took all of the PSICAT data, applied some general rules to combine similar intervals, and voila! generated a summary log for the first 600 meters. It looks pretty impressive to have 600m of log displayed on a single sheet of paper.

Well I should get some more work done so I don't feel guilty tomorrow during our day off. Today it hit 4oF down here. Much nicer than back home, from what people tell me. Hopefully the weather holds for tomorrow.