Comienzo

Well, it’s the beginning of a new phase here at La Selva. High season, and high quality data collection. Place is filling up like crazy, the dining hall had the hustle and bustle of South this evening. Not to mention, this blog is becoming a hefty chore, but still enjoyable, of course.

After batting it was good to feel back into the swing of things. Breakfast was great, great to be back here with everybody and looking forward to so much. Internet has gone south which contributes to my focus and annoyances. After breakfast went over my finances for the weekend.

Looks like a spent less than I thought I did, which is reassuring. Hopefully I dodge some 2% fees this time. Moved on to some data entry and actually got a couple hypotheses down with some back up graphs. That went really well until I accidentally forgot to save the spreadsheet I was working in. Luckily I had most of the numbers in my notebook and resurrection went smoothly.

Around 10:00am the Wellesley interns arrived. Got to meet Debra and Tinny, both of who are pretty cool cats. The four of us, Amanda included, chatted on the porch for a while, and then went to lunch. Here the density of people on station really started to sink in; it used to be such a manageable size.

After lunch, and lots of iced coffee (very hot day indeed), Amanda shot into town to run some errands. The three of us then went back to the lab to start Cycling 101, so we could get Tinny on the fast track to competitive biking, or maybe just 3.8km down the STR every day. Either or…

Big ole t-storm thundered in around 1:20 so we hopped inside. Introduced the girls to my project the best I could (=not awesome). They went to have a little orientation of sorts while I continued on my quest for hypotheses. Dr. Chazdon gets in Thursday morning, so I need to have lots of good questions.

Later on around 3:00pm Pablo (grad student from our lab) got in for a 10 day stay at La Selva. He’s leading a workshop on forest management later this week. We did some more bike training later which went pretty well. Improvement is obvious, and she’ll be biking along in no time. Great to have a student with a positive attitude, unlike some little brothers (coughsamuelcough).

All was good, watched a couple inning of Yanks/Chisox before dinner and caught the rest afterwards. Had great dinner conversation about Wanchope, the expatriate (love him or hate him) (Barry Bonds, anybody?) Selección Nacional player here in CR. Debra and Tinny stopped by for the end of another great Yankees loss. Dragged myself back to the lab for blogging of course.

Oh, and we got an office today for the four of us. Pretty solid little place, great for leaving stuff to dry, leaving stuff in general. My cabina room has turned into any room I’ve ever had after a successful trip, ¡un disastre! Tomorrow Tinny & I will hike out to LEP and do some work, Debra & Amanda will be doing seedlings.

Some special movie production tomorrow, psyched for that, might not be as good as Piratas del Caribe though. Picture from Bagelmen’s in San Pedro of Amanda, Danielle & I. Enough for now…¡hasta mañana!

BP