Meteorwrongs

In case any of you are wondering... if you find a rock on the ground that you think is a meteorite I can tell you right now with 99.9% certainty that it is not a meteorite. My adviser calls them "meteorwrongs" and they get 3 a week on average. People are convinced that the black rock they found is a meteorite. Given, some of them are actually strange looking... but strange looking does not equal meteorite.

Good day.

A few things of interest

What's that in the large metal container, you say?

That, my friends, is a giant squid.



Observe the label on the tub. I really hope you can read the size specifications on the bottom of the sticker. But in case you can't, the squid is 25 feet long.

Sorry to report I haven't got a picture of what's inside the squid box as I'm told it's the worst smell you've ever smelled to crack that thing open. So, hopefully another day...

Many good finds were found this week in museum land. We found the paleontology sections....



And yes, that is a dinosaur. While wandering around this wing we bumped into a friendly scientist. We asked her, "Is there are room where they keep... big bones?" and she smiled politely and said "Yes. It's called The Big Bone Room. Only two people in the museum have access to this room. But one of which is a very pleasant fellow who loves to give people tours." And we now have a tour date set to see the Big dinosaur bone room an July 9th.



We were also taken up to a really amazing old fashioned library in the ceiling of the fifth floor. It's all that's left of the old library that used to span the entire ceiling of the fifth floor. It has glass tiles that you can see through as floor tiles.



We were led to an old iron staircase by the batty librarian who shepards what's left of the wayward old library. You'll never guess what one keeps in the ceiling of an old library in the ceiling of a museum...



Why, they keep elephant skulls up there, of course! Silly. What else would they possibly keep in the ceiling of a rickety library in a museum aside from elephant skulls??







That's about it. Thought you all would enjoy that...

love
Chelsea

PS
If you click on a picture it will enlarge in a new window. So you should have no problem reading the squid label. =)

primarily posting pretty peaceful park pictures

just a bunch of pictures from a beautiful lazy Sunday afternoon spend lounging about in the park in the center of the city.




























love
chelsea

Current Theme Song:
I was born (a unicorn) by the Unicorns

I &hearts New York.

My friend AJ and I swapped almost 3 gb of music each. It is a very good thing to have new music!

Tonight I am going to see my favorite artist, Souther Salazar, at the John Levine gallery downtown. It's going to be lots of fun. After dinner and the gallery show we're heading over to the International House tonight for a get together there. It's been a very good weekend.

Last night my friends and I went dancing and it was so much fun! I'm glad there are really nice people here to hang out with.

I hope all of your summers are going wonderfully as well. Missing everyone back home.

Love,
Chelsea



--------------------
EDIT

Just got back from the Souther Salazar exhibit and it was so much fun! The entire room was like being in another world. His art is so whimsical and dream like. I loved it. Here are some of the pictures that I illegally took inside of the gallery. Woopsy.

Pictures and such

So I'm kind of disappointed right now because I had these beautiful plans of taking a big blanket to Central Park after work and laying around and reading all evening with my friends. But I am disappointed in that it was an absolutely gorgeous day all day until about fifteen minutes ago. It was so beautiful and not too hot but not too cold when I walked home from work. But no. The sky is suddenly grey and I am hearing thunder. In a matter of minutes my plans have been ruined.

But that's ok, because that means an update for you. =)

I have tons of pictures to post. So here's a little recap (with pictures) of what I've been up to lately...


Tuesday night was a very fun night. In the evenings during the summer the Lincoln Center hosts outdoor dancing with various clever names. The one on tuesday was called A Midsummer's Night Swing. There were swing dancing lessons and swing dancing all around. My friend Kelly was particularly into it, which was fun for everyone to watch because she is generally pretty quiet. Everyone was dancing on the sidewalks and in the plaza. Just everywhere there were people swing dancing. Young and old, good and bad. It was a wonderful night.

This is all of the girls when we arrived.

Here is Kelly dancing with her gentleman friend.

Experimenting with a color filter on my camera.

Everybody dancing!

Lincoln Center at night.

My friends Elysa and Stephanie dancing and being goofy.

Last night the gang wondered down to the new intern's dorm a few blocks away. He lives in the international house, and sadly I did not take pictures of the beautiful buildings lining the streets near by... you'll just have to take my word for that.



Today I did a little bit more exploring to make up for my recent lack there of. My friend and I stumbled into the entomology wing where we found lots of amazing arachnids just lounging about in plexi glass cubes lining the hallway. They were just out there for everyone to see.

Here's a cool picture of the Apex preditor I took on my way into the museum this morning. Notice how nobody is in there??? That's because it's empty. Because I am allowed in the museum when nobody else is. Because I work there. Because it's the best job ever. Hehe.


Ok... that's it for now.


Love
Chelsea

update

It's been a hectic week.

This weekend was lots of fun. Went to several markets around the city, met a new intern, and saw some more sights.
Yesterday was my birthday! I am now officially twenty years old and the gang took me out to Indus Valley which is a terrific Indian food joint within walking distance of where I live. I got a delicious masala veggies dish with lots of chick pease and various other yummy things including cake and the whole works, so it was tons of fun.

I've come quite a ways at work as well. Yesterday took the better part of the day to put in my first slab of Allende into the microprobe. The unfortunate thing is that I kind of lack the self sufficiency needed to run the machine without assistance from my advisor. Again this is even more unfortunate because he's not very good at teaching things.. at least not the way that I like to learn them. I'll just have to deal with that, though. He's going out of town on Wednesday for the rest of the week so I'll have some time to fiddle around with it on my own. Hopefully. And I haven't been exploring much in the past week, so I must remedy that.

Kind of Kentuckysick today, missing everybody back home. At first I thought I would love to live here, but lately I am thinking two months is good and I'd like be able to see some horses again.
Well that's about it, just updating before I head into work in twenty minutes.


love
chelsea

Life in the butterfly case

So now I've got slightly more of an idea as to what's going on in the research end of things. I will be making maps of a 5cm x 5cm slab of Allende. Seeing as how these maps are on the micron scale, this will be potentially very tedious work. Howevere there is a piece of software that could make my life on EVO much easier. It is the automated mapping software that has yet to come into existence at AMNH. The little tab is there on the menu and everything, the software just hasn't quite been born yet. There is a big rush to get it here in time while I'm still here... but the best estimate I heard for it's arrival was "about one month". I suppose I should ellaborate... If the mapping is not automated then I will tweaking a stage around all day long refocusing and generating tiny little mapped sections of the meteorite. I will stitch them together later to make one big picture. Example.

There's not really too much of a reason why I'm doing this aside from it's not been done before and the more information available the merrier. I'll also be counting the calcium-aluminum inclusions inside and identifying various minerals. Woohoo.

So here's the sweet butterfly storage cabinet that was stumbled upon today.


Life is good and I'm going to go read a book now. Goodnight =)


Chels

I think a bagel with cream cheese and lox is my new favorite food.

Lots o' pictures

This is an odd store we ran across while shopping in Soho this afternoon.















Some pretty buildings and shops along the way..















These are my good friends Steph, Megan, and Kelly. Kelly will be my roommate next schoolyear and is conveniently living in NYC on an internship for the summer as well! Stephanie is a fellow AMNH intern and Megan is her long time friend who lives in Jersey and takes the train up to hang out with us on weekends. We've just been exploring the city all weekend, playing cards, and having a good time.

So the next few pictures are a bit of a tour through the dino halls I walk through every morning to get to my area of the museum.















that is my friend Julie with a big dead fish.





























I work just though that door at the end of the hallway and to the right.















This dinosaur is particularly frightening because they gave him fake eyeballs. None of the others have eyeballs.



































So I was walking to the bathroom on Friday when I stumbled upon a door labeled "Roof". So naturally Mike and I went up and investigated and the following pictures are a little of what we found...















veiw from the roof of the museum
looking over central park/skyline
















That's about it. Just lots of pictures and not much of substance. Sorry, I'm pretty sleepy. A little bit sick of the city. Actually just the really over crowded downtown parts where I've been the last two days. I'm fine in my yuppy uptown sanctuary. I'm just going to take it easy this week and maybe I'll get up the gusto to go downtown and battle the crowds again this weekend.

It's not that people are rude here, per se. It's just a very different culture. What I interperet as rude the majority of people here would veiw as normal. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm still having a blast. Just kind of worn out.


Night,
Chelsea

Museumery

A very appropriate quote from my friend Mike, "A museum like this is a very bad place for a curious person to work."

I can't remember if I've already explained this... but there are several floors at the museum which are staff only. Space is a very valuable commodity here so they are lined with storage cabinets as far as you can see with all sorts of wonderful things which are not on display. This is a picture with Mike unkowingly in it showcasing the cabinets.



Here is an example of some of the super cool things lining the walls of this place in storage.. I believe this was the Mexican artifact portion of the anthropology wing.



We happened to stumble upon a very peculiar cabinet on our way back to the microscopy lab. Written on an index card and taped to the front was this inviting message...



Fleeing the scene



Knowing the things we've seen in this place I would not be surprised if HOBO was not an acronym and they were actually storing a human specimen.

We also stumbled into the hall of mammalogy and were gawking at all of the skeletons in glass display cabinets being stored up there... there was a taxidermied thylacine in one of the cases. And in case you didn't know, they have been extinct since the early 1900s. The cabinets slowly got stranger until at the end of the hallway human skeletons started to appear in them.. and then at the very end there was a fetal skeleton in a box. At this point we immediatly left the hall of mammology.

We have resolved to find a mummy somewhere in the labarynth of storage.

But I am actually working on research, mind you. I've been training on the Evo SEM. I tried to load a picture onto my flash drive that I took with Evo today but I failed. It was some kind of very tiny bug with lots of little antinae like apendages protruding from all kinds of places. He was aptly dubbed Theodor. He had a last name that slips my mind at the moment, but there are no bounds on his awesomeness. And it was a lovely picture, if I do say so myself. I'm getting the hang of this SEM thing and I'm really enjoying using it! I would like to get really good at it. (And I should mention the bug was practice, I've yet to start with the Allende).

Well, that's about it!

-Chelsea




-edit-

Ahaha! Theodore Moshelheim has arrived! He is the strange bug thing I found on a random stub in the lab today! I love him so.