Dos

It’s officially my two-month-iversary at La Selva. Early morning today, up at 6:10am and hitting the trail an hour after that. Got to the plot 40 or 50 minutes before Tinny so I began to flag the subset of trees we were doing as a recheck. This proved to be an effective strategy and after finishing the first half we did the same for the second half in preparation for tomorrow.

With the dream of finishing the whole thing today, we soon realized that not enough time in our day remained to finish so we called it kind of early to leave 2-2.5 hours of work for tomorrow. Spent the last half hour of our field day solving the mystery of the giant tree-fall. Tinny wasn’t as into the clue-searching and mystery-solving as you might expect.

My Scooby-dooing cut a list of five “¿muerto?” trees to a list of four “muerto” trees and a half-dead one. Quite successful in that respect. Got to wear my new boots (really miss my boots) today, just about the most uncomfortable things going. Added about ten minutes to my commute back.

Among other ponderings in the field today I had the strangest craving for Dunkin Donuts (not that it’s strange to crave Dunkin). I think it was at a point where I was getting kind of thirsty and it really felt like I was getting in the car (ah, the car) and driving on down there. Hard to describe, but a weird feeling nonetheless.

Coffee-breaked at 4:30pm. Did some solid reading after entering data and realizing the internet bit the dust at some point in the afternoon. Chops (the big DF) & Debra (the big Nic) leave on Saturday for weeklong trips away from La Selva. Hopefully this old project will be summing up upon their return, but that’s contingent on a million or so things.

After dinner I sat their slurping an iced coffee and munching on a filled cookie thing, maybe my DD dream came Tico-true… Little bit of work tomorrow that I’m officially two thirds done with data collection and have 8-10 field days remaining with 3.5 weeks to squeeze them in to. Summer is whipping by, wow.

BP