It's tropical blue

Officially, we had a two day break over Christmas. It was up to me to decide how much work to do versus just enjoy the holiday. There were many social events to break up the days including the town holiday party on Sunday, the Christmas Eve fancy dinner on Monday, the Christmas morning brunch on Tuesday, the Christmas evening knitting and other social events taking place in the course of two days. Somehow I ended up with a pile of presents to open too. (Thank you everyone.) It takes time to sort the bubble wrap, the tissue paper, the ribbons, the boxes, the plastic packaging, etc. and dispose of them in the proper waste disposal categories. The two days were over before I knew it.
In between opening all those presents and eating Christmas Eve dinner, I manged to take a walk to Hut Point. The sea ice is melting a little more. The melt pools are turning a tropical blue color. I think the color is from algae growing there lending a greenish tinge to the usual "glacial blue". Of course there were seals hauled out into the ice. Another one made an appearance popping up through a hole in the ice. If you use your imagination, you can see the seal swimming in the melt pool. Maybe I will get a better telephoto lens some day, but for now you can just accept that the dark blob in the pool is a Weddel seal. It was a beautiful sunny day, but the winds were howling at Hut Point (as usual), so I did not stay for long. It was so nice during the day, but then later the fog came in and since then it has been windy and overcast. It makes it easier to stay inside and work in the lab. The holiday is over, so it's back to work.
Samples have been coming back from the field and we are making lots of progress on all the lab work and analyses. Here is a picture of my lab bench. This is were I work to set up my samples for the ion chromatography instrument. In this picture, I am setting up a run of lake samples to analyze for cations. I always line up my samples by increasing depth because they get saltier with depth and I prefer to run them in order.