Hmm, I haven't posted for a few days.

It's kind of hard to type because I had to stick a plaster on my right index finger. I cut it on the Ravioli tin. Drat. I only ate the stuff because Ali ate half the tin earlier. It didn't even really go with my food. Not as well as baked beans would have. Although Ali says I eat too many baked beans. She thinks I'd die if I couldn't eat them for a week.

They're just so versatile!

Anyway, the reason I haven't blogged, or indeed done anything much online for a while, is that I've been writing that Stargate fanfic. I think it's pretty much finished. I'll have to reread it before I let anyone else see it, just in case there are any glaring inconsistencies. I did spot that I'd made someone get shot near the beginning and then completely failed to mention it again. (Oops!)

I'm not saying it's a great story, but it's been in and out of my head for over a year. And now it's all there, over 30 pages in Word. (That's Verdana point size 10, people!) 13,105 words. That's almost the length of a dissertation. And I know I was skimping on description in places and just putting in speech. But if I don't have to write it any more, my brain can think about other things! Excellent.

I really went a bit over the top with the research. I kept finding interesting mythological points, and stuff about genetics and cybernetics, and visiting tons of webites and printing loads of stuff out. And then I had to try to fit it into the story. Otherwise it would have been pointless researching it.

If you know what I mean. :)

Anyway, I bet you want to know what I did in my Ceramics practical yesterday! Yes, the second part of "how to make pottery thin sections". You may recall that we'd cut off our bits of pot and ground them, and impregnated them with resin. Well, yesterday was mostly grinding.

We took the sheet of glass and the silicon carbide powder, and rubbed our resin covered bits of pot on it until we'd ground through the resiny layer. (Grinding the smooth side that was ground before.) What you want to get down to is the layer underneath the pure resin - the layer that has the resin in the voids and nothing else. It took ages. It made my arm tired! I'm sure most people don't use their pottery grinding muscles very often!

Once the pottery was ground down to the impregnated layer, we switched to a finer grade of silicon carbide. After that smooth grind the pottery was ready to go onto the slide. You have to grind the side of the slide you'll be sticking the pot to with the fine grade silicon carbide, and then you cover the slide with more resin (which you've put through a vacuum, as before). You drop the pottery onto the slide, smooth side down, and move it around. Then you pick the slide up and see if there are any obvious bubbles. And then you're done!

Oh, labelling is important, too. You have to clearly label the stuff otherwise it'd be hard to analyse.

That was it for yesterday. It took a lot longer than you'd guess from the shortish description...

What else can I say? Hmm. Well, I'm over the shock of the Stargate announcement. I'm even considering a new sort of Stargate thing... I won't say any more for the moment. I'm getting the opinion of the Jonasarians. :)

I'm off to check eBay, see if I can buy any Christmas presents.

For other people, obviously. :p

posted by Fiery Fred @ 9:48 PM