Hey!

This is a shout out to all my Parlett house boys. Yo--next semester is going to be off the hizzle!!

I hope that you guys are all having a good summer so far. I'm in Ithaca doing research at Cornell with Dr. Hoffman (Physics Prof. at Houghton). I'm working with a machine that's worth a half-mil and hoping just about every day that I don't break anything. It's really not that bad, but it is concerning when something isn't working right, or smells like it's burning and I don't really have any experience to draw on. I'm glad the Dr. Hoffman is working with me, because he will take the a lot of the responsibility if something does go wrong.

I'm working with UHV (Ultra High Vacuum), which is about 10^-10 to 10^-9 Torr. It's fun trying to type exponents on a blog. Atmospheric pressure is about 760 Torr. The pressure that we are capable of reaching in our vacuum chamber is lower than the pressure in deep space! Now that's a vacuum!

This also means that we have to be VERY clean and careful about touching things. Rubber gloves most of the time, and a lot of alcohol cleaning. If there's a finger print in a vacuum like ours, it will ruin the vacuum for months.

We will eventually get to use this expensive machine to make samples (thin metal films) that we will do research on, but for now, we're trying to get everything working well.

I've been running around Ithaca a lot, and there are a bunch of cool places to run. There's a creek just a block from my apartment here and there are at least 6 miles of trails. There are also skinny dippers (welcome to Ithaca), or so I hear (from Dr. Hoffman and his wife...and the book on waterfall hikes that they bought). He he. How would you feel about naked people regularly dipping into your town's water supply? It's filtered and purified I'm sure.

I leave on Wednesday this week to go visit Susanna in Italy =).

I'm SO excited to see her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And in Italy.

I'll be meeting a lot of her mom's side of the family over there, and I'm sure they are all wonderful people. I know that Susanna's family on here mom's side are not Christians, and I am praying that Susanna and I will be a clear witness to the love and goodness of Christ.

Zan tells me that we're going to travel up to the Alps in southern France and do some hiking, which I'm sure is going to be AMAZING! I just bought a digital camera, so hopefully I will come back with some beautiful pictures to put on the blog (or maybe facebook...or both).

That's all for now.

In Christ,
Dan