Well, looks like everything is done here, I spent the day packing, tidying and cleaning up. The stack of dishes and stuff from Tuesday night's dinner finally disappeared, along with the big pile of laundry. My suitcase is slowly filling up, mainly with gifts rather than clothes though. I've uncovered a small horde of Australian coins and notes which is nice since I don't think that my bank accounts back home have much of anything in them.
Tuesday was a small dinner party, Tiffany came over a little after 5 pm and we cooked a lasagne together, or rather she cooked and I did the cleaning and stirring. I managed to obtain a large amount of “day old” bakery products which was nice as that took care of the bread and dessert. Doug and Katie came around about 7 pm which is the time we had originally scheduled, however Judy (for whom we were having this little soiree) didn't show up until almost 8 pm, by which time we had already started eating. She has been in the process of rewriting a lost final paper, so that was understandable. About 9 pm Judy went home and the rest of us headed down to one of the bars. Unfortunately the horror that is “Country Karaoke” was being inflicted upon us, and since I was the only non-smoker there, I was suffering doubly. Katie went home about midnight and the rest of us were on our way home when Bonnie rang. We'd hoped to get Katie and Bonnie together at dinner, but Bonnie had been really busy. So the four of us hung out at my place until about 1 pm before we split up and went our separate ways.
Wednesday we finally received the new instrument, which we had been waiting on for almost 2 months. It was exciting and almost straight away we were able to start getting good data. I had promised Doug I would bring some left over lasagne over for his dinner, but I fell asleep after getting home and so I wasn't able to bring him his dinner until almost 8 pm. We hung out in Tiffany's room doing very little for most of the night and I think I left around midnight.
Thursday was another busy day also. In the morning I fired up my little moped, which had been sitting out in the freezing cold for the last few weeks. It was very grumpy to be woken up and I think there may have been ice in the exhaust system. After running the engine for about 30 minutes it was a lot better, and I headed off to *-Mart. My new lenses had come in and I need to have them fitted. I spent an hour wandered through the store looking at all the Xmas junk (didn't get in the way of the $30 DVD players thankfully) and then headed to work. I brought my moped into the lab where it could warm up and around 3 pm Doug showed up to start on some samples. They were working really well