President's day

I remember when a three day weekend was a sacred thing. A not to be missed chance to go on an adventure. This year, as I'm frantically getting ready to graduate my President's day three day weekend was a little less glorious.

It featured many hours of mad scientist fume hood scribbling (most of this is Roger's actually).

 Several batches of this.

WAY too much grinding up powders in this (my hands are a blister covered ruin).

Sintering samples in this. (SPS, spark plasma sintering chamber. Don't be fooled, there's no spark or plasma, just a huge electrical current and sintering)

And after spending my entire weekend I only end up with this

as you can see, I'll be lucky if two or three of those sixteen meet the criteria of correct composition, >95% dense, pure single phase and crack free necessary for thermoelectric measurements in my final experiments.

Here's to graduating in a few months!