Current mood:

exhausted

Fishtank part 1
I am really tired, but not because it is late. I did so much today that I feel like a week has passed since this morning.
I haven't collected any data this week because I was preparing for a presentation that I gave today for the Undergraduate Research Symposium (URS....you pronounce the acronym as if someone just punched you in the stomach and you feel like vomiting). My talk was ok, but not great. I explained correlation functions better than I did in all of the practice sessions, but I started too early. Most people missed the explanation, so they had no clue what my graphs represented. Some random guy asked my how I knew that one of the samples had equilibrated, which I thought was odd because at that point I had already explained that we took equilibration to be a lack of change in the data.
The vertical refresh on my monitor it really irritating right now.....my monitors are interfering very badly today.
After the symposium (and free lunch and free breakfast), RB, Rob, Mel, and I decided to move the fishtank (so that Toby would not take it as explained in a previous post). We started at about 3:30 in the afternoon and finished at about 10:00pm.
The statement "we moved the fishtank" is a greatly simplified version of what actually happened. Before we could actually do anything with the tank, we had to remove everything in it. With this goal in mind, we spent half an hour arguing with various "official persons" about using the coolers in the HOGS lounge. Housing Ops, the buracracy, that has the keys to all the buildings lived up to its reputation as the most inefficient group of "people" in the known universe.
I want to get a job at Housing Ops. As far as I can tell, the only requirement for job applicants is that they have a pulse (and some don't even have that). The redundancy rate of jobs at Housing Ops is greater than most medium sized bacterial colonies. Every employee does one thing: They ask you how they can help you, and then ask you to take a seat in the waiting area. The only reason that eighty year-old men and women do not fill the waiting area is that most victims of Housing Ops get bored of waiting after a few days. On the plus side, the waiting area has the best air-conditioning system on campus.
Around 5 o'clock, an employee was tricked by his boss (I think they were playing a practical joke on this new guy)into opening the door of HOGS for us so that we could get the coolers. I say tricked, because of the unusually short waiting time.
After we got the coolers back up to my room, we began siphoning the water out of the tank. It took two coolers to empty about half of the tank, so we dumped a cooler of distilled water down the drain and refilled it with gravel and water from the tank.
About this point we realized that our hose was not long enough to siphon as much water as we wanted from the tank. The purpose of removing water from the tank is that when the tank is operating nominally, it weight about 300lbs. To get more water out, we used various scooping methods that do not merit description. Eventually, we had only a few inches of water and gravel and a bunch of fish in the tank.
Next, we had to catch the fish. Fish do not like to be caught. We did not have a net. Rob, RB, Mel and I are all brilliant physics majors, and it did not take long for someone to hit upon the idea of using a tupperware container as a net (the disposable kind). Contrary to what one might believe, it is not easy to catch semi-tropical fish, even when they (the fish) are relegated to a (relatively) two-dimensional environment. Two tupperware containers were used on a rotating basis and the fish (excepting the algae-eater) were caught in less than half an hour.
The algae-eater is different from the other fish. First, it is big: it doesn't quite fit in our biggest tupperware. Second, it is really really fast (though you wouldn't think so after watching it lay motionless for a couple of hours). Third, it has sharp, pointy, needle-like things that are attached to it's fins. The needles can be deployed on very short notice (so short that they may be a threat to national security). These sharp, pointy, needle-like things are really sharp. I know this to be a fact.
In any case, Mel and I coaxed (for very non-coaxing values of coaxed) the algae-eater into a container and let it out in the cooler, with the rest of the fish.
At this point, the fish were in a cooler full of water, the gravel and rocks were in another cooler, the tank still had about an inch of water and gravel in it, and the fish supplies were under the table that the fishtank was on.
Continued in part 2.....