Exhaustion

It was a fun weekend out in Searcy. The tournament consisted of 7 teams, 3 of which were comprised of Harding people. There was also a girls round-robin tournament played on Saturday. The team that I played on along with Whit came in second to the Harding A team on Sunday, which isn't too bad considering that most of them don't play together more than maybe once a week for a few hours. It turned out to be pretty fun, although I only subbed for about 4 points all day Sunday, and I'm completely sore and tired today. I wouldn't have it any other way though. It was also cool playing with some fellow "Fighting Crackers" in Luke and Will Dockery, even though Will is my well-known arch-nemesis. Still, it was good times.

Tomorrow is the last day of class here at UT. 9:45 tomorrow morning I will be turning in my last homework assignment for a good long while. I'm looking forward to it, although I've only answered maybe 1/4 of the questions on it since we never talked about any of it in class and it's not anywhere in the text that I can find.

I got my first experience in setting up a sample and preparing the machine to take a reading today at the lab. It's kinda hard and tedious, because everything is so incredibly small. I don't think that it helped me any that I was running on caffeine from the Mountain Dew's I have been drinking. The superconductor samples are about 4000 microns by 200 microns in terms of dimensions (I think those are the numbers). You then have to cut a piece of Indium metal and place it on to the two sides of the superconductor. Once those are attached (done simply by pressure since the metal sticks to the silver surface on the superconductor), you then place it on the plate that is put inside the machine. This alone took me about 3 tries to get it to not flip over on me. Once it's on the plate, you have two silver dots on this tiny piece of metal that you must line up with two equally small metal connectors that carry current. If those do not line up correctly, you will have problems in the measurements and possibly destroy the sample since there will be a large resistance building up. All in all, it took about 30 minutes to put a piece of superconducting metal onto a plate to be measured. That doesn't include any of the stuff for playing with the helium gas, air pumps, and always fun liquid nitrogen. I'll just have to get my hands to be a little steadier in the future.

At any rate, I'm off to collapse in a heap in the hopes of being able to make it through tomorrow morning without needing a sugar injection directly in to my blood stream.