Café

Time for shorter blog entries, getting into the swing of things like whoa so these days will be repetitive. Got a roommate yesterday as opposed to the old date of June 18, but no big. His name is Joel, which in Spanish is pronounced like “hoy-el.” Almost as cool as Ben-ha-meen.

Tinny volunteered to walk out to LEP early since bike lessons are still in progress. We had all the crappy project bikes sent over to the shop to get fixed last week, leading us to rent bikes for two bucks a day over the weekend. The bikes came back yesterday and today with all sorts of new gizmos. I first hopped on one of the green ones and that went to shit real quick and has ugly chain issues to be dealt with tomorrow.

With that soldier out of commission I grabbed the Trek. A couple km down the trail, realized that the shop replaced a couple of Shimano shifters with some Tico pieces. The cables were all off, and everything sounded crappy the whole way to LEP. Kicked off with some solid tree measuring. Got about 25-30 done before Tinny ran into a big ole bullet ant nest, got bit once and we called it a day from there.

Biked back to the lab in a respectful 11 minutes, and dropped the soggy backpack in the office where we’re developing a nice wet, moldy fragrance. Quick shower, quick dry. Had fun lunch conversation about piper and bat’s on tape. Frantic hypothesis digging after lunch, made wicked cool graphs. My favorite graph showed that trees that died over a two-year period either became more shaded or stayed the same, and never became less shaded.

Then came the highlight of my day. Joined Debra on the porch to read, which turned into Debra snoozing away in the hammock and hence being really untalkative. She also wanted to swing on the hammock that made a really annoying sound, not fit for learning about how to cut the world’s poverty in half.

Frisbee rumors shot through the lab, but turned into a circle of people throwing in the rain. Debra suggested iced coffee, and I’m always game for that. The Tico umbrella from Pague Menos lost its virginity and Debra broke hers, luckily I saved it. Dinner.

So our table went from 3 to way over capacity in no time, when fun conversations took off. (Bad sentence). Soon enough we dwindled back to four and Susan, as conversation petered out, brought up some crazy scientific untestable hypothesis that groups have lulls every twenty minutes or so as a leftover evolutionary tactic to check for predators. Only at La Selva…

Back to lab. Showed a lot of pictures of a lot a things to a lot of people for a long time. Watched some South Park, got my gigglies going. The picture we just took (Debra & I) And that’s that. Before you leave, a play from dinner:

Karen (super friendly Harvard junior): What’s this? (to Katie) (pointing at a stringy white mass)

Katie (certified yoga instructor): Oh that’s yucca. When it grows it looks like marijuana.

Steve (exotic meats man): Yea, but it’s a totally different green, you can probably tell from the air.

Susan: Yea, yucca from the Agavaceae family…(another La Selva-ism)

BP