Piece By Tiny Little Piece

A quick update before heading off to a meeting: the old lab refrigerator - the one with the Natural Light in it - has been hauled out of the lab by the LU Facilities guys. That freed up a lot of space in the laboratory and got rid of a pretty wretched eyesore. Unfortunately, the old calorimeter is still there. They weren't able to take it along with the fridge because it is still connected to the water supply. This means we'll have to wait for the plumber to come disconnect the instrument, then we'll have to wait for the Facilities guys to come back to pick it up. So it may be there for a while longer.

We're also waiting to have an old non-functional floor centrifuge picked up. The centrifuge is in a lab in the basement. Once they've hauled it away, we're going to move the functional centrifuge that's currently in our lab down to take the old one's place. Then we'll be putting the new refrigerator in the space left by the centrifuge.

After all this is done, it's going to look pretty awesome in the new lab. Everything will be arranged very efficiently and we'll have lots of extra space on the bench top for all of the equipment that has been ordered or will be ordered in the near future.

Speaking of equipment, I also moved our spectrofluorometer up into the lab from downstairs. This is a pretty big deal since it's the instrument that we use most often for fluorescence measurements. It wasn't easy, since the fluorometer is a pretty big unit - taking up most of the bench that it now sits on. I had to break the instrument itself in half and carry it up into the lab on a cart. Then I had to bring up all of the drivers and amplifiers and other peripheral equipment that runs the machine. It's a fairly delicate and complicated instrument, so it took me some time to get it put back together and hooked up properly, but it's going to be nice to have it in our lab where it will be easily accessible. It was starting to become a real pain in the ass to prepare the samples in the new lab, then carry them downstairs to the old lab to take the measurements.