McCrone, Day 3...Fibers can be fun!

After three days (well, 2 1/2) of stuff, we finally got to doing some stuff that I'm a little familiar with: fibers. After all, that is what I'm supposed to be training in at the lab. We covered birefringence, sign of elongation, extinction and how to find all that stuff. They do it a bit different that what I was used to, but I made adjustments. I think I might have learned something today, even! A few things were reinforced, however. Natural fibers, with the exception of cotton, are tough to do on the PLM. Cotton looks like cotton, pretty characteristic in it's structure and how it looks under magnification. Fibers that are really high birefringence are hard to characterize. Especially when they are white under crossed polars. And when you push the analyzer in and can't tell if they changed color. Like aramids. I think I'll need more practice when I get back to the lab at home. I'll just add it to the list of things I have to do. At the end of the day today, I was moving pretty good through the list of fibers I had to characterize. I was having trouble with the natural fibers, but I think if I take my time and wish really hard upon that single shooting star, I'll be able to do it!

Got dinner tonight at America's Hot Dog. This place had a list of different cities and how the folks there like their hot dogs. For example, the Charleston dog had chili, coleslaw and mustard on it. The Houston dog had just chili. The Philadelphia dog said, "Let freedom ring, build it any way you want!". What a cop out. They just don't want someone coming in and putting shredded beef and cheese on a hot dog! The really good thing about this place was that they had Wild Cherry Pepsi....my favorite. I decided against walking all over creation for fun tonight, and got back to my hotel before it even got dark. Now I'm sitting here checking out reruns of every forensic scientist's favorite show, CSI. At least it's the Las Vegas one, and not Miami. I'm thinking of wearing my safety glasses around the lab and every time I say something dramatic, taking them off. Then every time I say something ironic, I'll put them back on. I even have a pair of yellow ones that I wear when I shoot at night...those would be sweet.
(takes glasses off) "Who's used up all the paper in the copier?"
(really hot blonde) "Oh, that's me!"
(puts glasses on) "Well, that's ironic, since you didn't take the copier safety course!"

See, it could really work! Maybe I'll talk to the crime scene girls and see if they'd be interested in wearing a white pant suit to a crime scene. Or maybe they can do their walk-through and when they notice a piece of evidence, they can pick it up without documenting where it was or putting down a placard and then documenting it. And maybe I can get my boss to start making vague references to random movies and songs while we're working on cases. Oh wait, I'm the one doing that. Just one more step in the CSI-ing of our lab. Remember, small steps.

I know that I said I'd put some photos of the city up with this post. I will. Tomorrow.