Day 6: DI...E!

The "adventure" story of the day, something that reflects what must be done when doing research in the north, or at least in Churchill where northern researchers are spoiled: I had to make de-ionized (DI) water.

It's a pretty easy process in general, pour normal water into a container that then gets filtered by an ion exchange resin to remove the anions and cations from the water. This purifies the water because a lot of the undesirable stuff in water are the dissolved metals and salts, which the process of de-ionization removes. It does not remove the organic stuff such as bacteria or viruses, but it's pretty effective for what I need, which is cleaning the filtering apparatus between water samples.

So all good, except one essential thing. There is no running water in the lab. The CNSC just built a new building for research, which is absolutely gorgeous and will be my home for the rest of the summer in about a week. However, in it's building, the main water main to the lab was broken. (There will be water in the new lab - promise!) So I had to get water from the kitchen, the closest to the best water we have at the Centre. And to get water from the kitchen, I entered into some politics between research staff and kitchen staff. Maybe that's a bit too dramatic. In reality, I tried to steal it. And was caught. And pressed into dish washing service. And now require a really good hand cream. Thanks to Krista's town run, that is obtained, as is my new identity as a thief by Rob and Ross, the chefs.

I also stole cardboard to make a photography scale from the trash behind the kitchen. And was caught. I'm a bad thief. I'm going to be doing dishes for the rest of my life!

Otherwise, the day was slow. Yoga at 6 (I'm making this a habit!) joined by Krista and Carly who introduced me to a new style that uses props and blocks which I will try! Then cleaning the lab, DI adventure, reading some articles about pigments and DOC, checking out the ITEX sites (I need to do some data entry still... tomorrow morning, promise!), making my photo scale, watching Doctor Horrible's sing-along-blog after my pop culture references received blank stares, and now watching the hockey game. There was some food in there somewhere and some skyping. I'm missing home a bit right now!