Katie Brinker

Writing a journal article again for the first time in a few years. We are so back.

Asked my metallurgical engineer husband if we could run a temperature uniformity survey on our toaster because I think one half is toasting more than the other and I think he seriously considered it before saying that we could just buy a new toaster

Sometimes you need to pick up beer on the way home from work and sometimes you need to pick up gluten free dinosaur chicken nuggets

Figured out how to do pulsed eddy current simulation in CST. Today is going to be a good day.

ghost writing but it's just matlab code

We had a supplier ghost us in 2022 and I spent the last 4 years trying to get the new supplier in a good place. New supplier didn't email me back for a couple days and I immediately started catastrophizing but everything is actually fine and I just have anxiety

Read a paper yesterday where they referred to nondestructive testing as "defectoscopy" and it's been rattling around in my head ever since

We got 100 year celebration quarter zips from work that are fall apart super cheap looking and ain't that just an encapsulation of corporate america

Our cat Chuck's lore is that he's a wealthy industrialist who owns a bunch of railroads. Today we lined up all his toy mice and asked if they were his employees and he said yes so now we have to make sure he has payroll set up correctly

Got a fluoride treatment at the dentist today which felt kind of cool and defiant after not being allowed to get fluoride at the dentist growing up

My mentor is going to retire this year and then I'll inherit the SME role for my area and I'm not ready. Like I can answer other people's questions about eddy current NDE but who am I going to talk to about eddy current NDE??

Doing an angry cry run on the treadmill because of work means everything is actually going really well right?

Really want to climb the giant snow piles in the work parking lot but apparently that's "unprofessional" and "unsafe"

Deck covered in snow. Snow on railings has drooped

Weird bendy railing snow

Visible patch of yard pre snow storm vs after

Finally found the gluten free cheez-its in the grocery store and had my first cheez-it in 16 years. A transcendent experience.

Now that we have a really big UT tank in the lab, I feel like it's only a matter of time until someone has a breakdown and gets in it.

Today at work someone who has been creating more work for me said "you really have a lot going on I hope things get better soon" and I almost screamed

I got a Garmin watch for Christmas that records stress levels and stuff, and either being unstressed is incompatible with having a job or my watch is a wimp that overestimates stress

Fascism and anti-intellectualism go hand in hand.

Gray and white cat named Fern sitting in a cat tree looking out the window and watching snow fall from winter storm Fern

Fern is hard at work supervising winter storm Fern.

My cat is also named Fern so I keep asking her how much snow she's bringing tomorrow and I don't think she's amused.

Found out that the electrical tape I had been using in the lab without a care in the world is actually specialty aerospace grade electrical tape that costs $57 dollars a roll and the rolls are small

Just read an incredibly cursed LinkedIn post where someone said that they were starting a newsletter where they take their tech ideas and feed them into chatGPT to create essays and then the newsletter is just these AI slop essays.

NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts

I’ve been wondering for the last year when we’d get to the library destruction phase and here we are. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/c...

Watching How It's Made makes you think about how many oddly specific engineers there are. Like it is someone's job to CAD up horse exercise machines

Emissions testing feels like something from another time because you just have to show up at a semi-sketchy place with $20 in cash and no appointment and get your car tested.

I have an ongoing bit where I show my cat Fern pictures of ferns. On this trip I got a picture of a houseplant fern and I can't wait to show her and tell her that this one is an indoor fern like her.

Sometimes I think about how in high school my mom made me go to a Chinese Herbalist and I would have to get acupuncture in the back room of a health food store and take a bunch of sketchy herb supplements, which probably wasn't great but now it's just part of my lore

Grey and white cat laying in hammock that's part of a beige cat tree

Fern finally laid in the cat hammock and it was so so so cute