Do you LOVE IT?

It's so crazy to think that we only have a few more days at the Center! With this major project that we are doing, it feels like we have hardly any time left here... which I guess is fine because I could really go for some A/C every once in a while.

Today was devoted completely to our projects. We still had class/lecture which really bugged me considering we are expected to do so much for this project. In class we did talk about our projects, but I felt like it was a waste of time that we could have been using to get more data or work on our papers. Whatever, I'm over it. There was a toucan outside of our classroom today though which was super cool! It was super loud and kept squawking the entire time haha

We went out and collected data for our project today. We went to 2 different river sites and measured the velocity of the river there (using a ping-pong ball and timing it) and we took water samples which we filtered to see all of the sediment deposits that were flowing in that section of the river. We did that twice today, and I guess it was successful-ish? For one of our readings, we got a negative answer for how much sediment we collected which obviously wasn't true since you can't lose weight... but DQ said it was ok and just laughed. Other than that, we worked on our paper for the rest of the day. We get to do it all over again tomorrow! But luckily we have no class at all so we can actually focus on our projects.

It has been really funny to watch everyone's mannerisms change the longer that we have been here. We are all starting to pick up on little things that each other does and copy them. For example, Shelly ALWAYS uses abbreviations on words and instead of asking people if they like something, she will ask "do you love it?" Weeellllllll everyone has picked up on abbreviating things and asking if people LOVE certain things. Any and every word is fair game to be abbreviated, like "sugar" becoming "sug". We constantly laugh because people do it without even meaning to now and it catches them off guard.

We are all starting to get a lot closer to each other. I still remember the first night at dinner here at the Center was relatively quiet and awkward conversations at our separate tables, but now we are all yelling and laughing across all the tables like we are a big family. It has made everything so much more fun!

Here are a few random pictures from the last few days!

Enjoy, and I miss everyone!