Dreary week, and having problems finding my motivation. I thought I left it in the top left drawer of my desk, but no luck.

What kind of week am I having? On Tuesday I had to make a batch of conductive adhesive (adhesive with metal powder dispersed into it). The mixer I was using shook a screw loose. The screw dropped into the pot while it was mixing and it got knocked around in there for a couple of hours. By the way the pot is Teflon-coated. Er, was Teflon-coated. Oh and by the way, all that Teflon had to go somewhere – into the adhesive. Teflon is not a good conductor. Into the trash goes that batch – a full day’s work wasted. With any luck it’ll be up and running tomorrow, but I’m not holding my breath.

Yesterday I was trying to assemble the machinery I need to start testing some UV-curable coatings. Pretty simple – air-powered mixer, mixing shaft, dispersion impeller. Easy, right? First it appears that all the mixers are in use. I find one squirreled away in one of the labs and grab it. Then all of the chucks are either in use or don’t fit the available mixers. I go to Home Depot – none of the chucks they stock will work. I come back and take the one chuck I can find to the model shop and have them drill it out so it will fit on the mixer shaft. Now I need to go hunting for a suitable mixing shaft and dispersion blade. Part of the problem is that the six or eight technicians we have all guard their equipment jealously, and stuff gets hidden away so no one can find it…and then they forget where they put it. Or they won’t tell anyone where the stuff is. It’s like working with a bunch of third-graders, I swear.

OK, rant over. The good news is that I found out that a bunch of my old SCA friends are keeping online diaries, just not on LiveJournal. They’re all over at DiaryLand, where they’ve created a nice little network of folks. Keeping up with friends seems a bit more difficult using DiaryLand’s system – you have to load each page individually, rather than have everything dumped into a Friends page like on LiveJournal. But now I can see what’s going on with Jen, Jason, Wendy, Mel, and Genie. Fortunately, Genie has seen the light and also has a LiveJournal (geniealisa, to be specific)- hi Genie! Why am I so happy to have found these folks’ diaries? Because they post wonderfully cracked entries like this.