Semana

It’s been one week since you looked at me; Cocked your head to the side and said I’m angry…and the song goes on. Yup one week in the rain forest, and I survived. So I was about to sign up for mlb.tv so I can watch my Yankees once and a while down here, but then realized they calculate the blackouts through the billing address, and that just won’t fly. Oh well, right now we’re down to the last out with the Mets, and Matsui who’s not been Mr. Clutch lately is batting…we’ll have a final soon.

Infield single, Giambi pinch hitting. That aside, today was pretty good. Got a good start switched showering with breakfasting. A note about showers at La Selva, one pro is really high shower heads for 6’4”-ers like me, the con is the lack of a central hot water heater. Yea I know it’s the rainforest and it’s 80 degrees and 90% humidity 24/7, but a hot shower still comes in handy. To compensate for this the showerhead has all sorts of exposed electrical wiring coming out of it, which really freaked me out the first time (water+electricity=bad). After a short while I realized the thing had three settings, ‘hot’, ‘off’ and ‘warm.’ So I figure hot would be good, but nothing really happens when I switch to it. After more fiddling, if you put the water on really low power it actually gets warm, and I am now enjoying a warm dripping every morning. Enough of that, Yanks lost by the way, take more ‘roids Giambi.

I was already to shoot off into the forest today after my shower, but was confronted with an early morning thunderstorm so waited it out for about 30 minutes until it passed. Got in a solid three hours of really good practice. My confidence boosted through accurate replications, I headed back for lunch. Did some emailing and such, and then it was laundry time. Cleaned up the room really nice too, there’s a shelf for field stuff, bathroom stuff, computer stuff, books, and on and on. If and when I get a roommate, he’ll be impressed.

The sky opened up at 3:00, most intense rain I’ve seen in a long time.

Spent some time in the lab cleaning the equipment and checking my field measurements from the morning. Had a few political humor giggles on the porch and headed over the river for dinner. Good pasta tonight; everybody gets really excited when we DON’T have rice & beans. The station is really filling up, not many empty tables at dinner. A few courses here from Auburn, Ole Miss and UGA. Really odd bunches of folks. How about some northeastern schools? Time for a really short play:

Eddie (post-doc from Harvard): I want to know where they’re from, must be from somewhere in Europe.

Ben: We associate abnormal with European? (at a table with three German students)

I’ll try to include plays more often. So I’m surfing the net last night and I get one of those banner ads. It reads in all its flashy-ness, “Live and Work in the USA; 50,000 Winners; American Green Card.” One of those things when you know you’re in Latin America. As far as a picture for today, there’s a rufous motmot (I learned at least one bird) I caught grabbing a scrumptious bug out of the air a few days ago. It was so cool, other people asked me for a copy, enjoy.

Grad student Amanda took off to San José for the weekend with some friend who’s driving from Panama to the States (I really like calling them “the States”). Kind of odd, but cool, except for the fact that Andrea from Kansas U. wants the keys to the project car, which are in the office whose key left with Amanda. Hopefully that’ll figure itself out. Talked with a few people about cool places to go in the area; excited to have a few days in early August to explore before flying out.

Found computers with Microsoft Access (my new favorite software) today so I plan on starting tomorrow with some intensive practice and then doing some calculations in the afternoon. Pretty excited about my data and my project in general. That’s all for now.

BP