I was looking through some old pictures on my hard drive and found this picture of my sister, mom, and myself running down the huge sand dunes in North Carolina. I must have been only 8 or 9 at the time. The whole time we were at the giant sand dunes in Northland, it reminded me of that day! 
Now that we're back from our field excursion, it's really crunch time. We have a pretty tight writing schedule as we piece together the final report for our projects. Although we worked together as a team in the field, we each write our own papers. It's actually really cool because this is the first semi-professional scientific paper that I've ever written, and hopefully it'll be the first of many. It's something that I'm already proud of and I can't wait to talk about my project with anyone that is interested when I get back to UNH.
The past few days have consisted of lots of editing of our Introduction and Methods sections. Yesterday looked at our data and started crunching numbers. Excel time! As much as I hated ESCI 654 (Fate and Transport in the Environment) last semester, I'm glad that it helped me become proficient with that program, and now I know all the tricks of the trade and am able to help my teammates. The results section of my paper already has 7 graphs! We probably came up with over 25 total, but be obviously can't use them all for the paper. Sometimes it's fun just to generate graphs, just in case they actually generate something useful you can use for your report. /end geek
After dinner last night we played a pick up game of soccer on the lawn which was so fun!! We ran around barefoot like goons and played til the sun started to set. I love the fact that it was after 8:00 and it still wasn't dark. Summer is a'coming. Afterwards me, Tash, Chris, Paul, Emily, and Beck played some disc til we couldn't even see the damn thing anymore. It was such a nice change from all the sitting I've been doing on the computer the last couple of days. I've been running a bit in the afternoons, but it's more of a stress release than fun.
On Sunday we're celebrating Thanksgiving! There will be a lot of guests, since lots of the field leaders and staff are inviting their partners and children. Past field leaders and EQ researchers are also invited, so we might be outnumbered by people that we don't necessarily know. It should be really cool, I've definitely never had a Thanksgiving celebration with more than 10 people, never mind more than 40. Me, Tash, Emily, and Sam are all on the T-Day Committee so we're organizing a cooking schedule for our relatively small kitchen. We're going to do all the baking on Friday and keep it in the chiller, then do food prep on Saturday, and finish up the rest of the cooking on Sunday morning/early afternoon, with a goal of serving by 4:00. As you could probably guess, I'm in charge of most of the baking stuff :) Sadly there will not be any turkey this year, but we are going to roast chickens and eat LAMB mmmm.
On a totally unrelated note, the Education Team lost their 8 inch long centipede yesterday in Granny's, and it's still on the loose. Apparently it chewed a hole through the cloth cover they put on top of the bucket in which it was caged. No big deal, just the only poisonous invertebrate in New Zealand roaming around our hang-out spot...
No comments:
Post a Comment