Friday, August 17, 2012

Day 18 (Aug 16 2012)

The filtration continues.  And continues.  As does the labeling of tubes, the washing of bottles, the pouring of water into bottles, the addition of nutrients to bottles (and then the mesocosms), the towing and hauling of nets for collecting copepods (some days the nets come up full of copepods, some days the nets score nothing but ooey, gooey, smeary, net clogging, difficult to wash away Bolinopsis; one never quite knows ahead of time what the tide will have brought into the lagoon).   But all of this work means that things are developing in an interesting way in the mesocosms and that we are running full bore to do the maximum number of experiments to better understand the flow of energy and materials through the food webs in the mesocosms.

With all this sampling out on the mesocosms, which entails wrapping your legs around the metal bars of the mesocosm raft and then leaning way over to haul in and then up and out of the water (with one hand) a meter and a half long, 12 or so pound water sampler that you must then grasp with your other hand (so that your arms are stretched out as far as they go away from each other, one above the head, the other below your waist) so that you can jiggle the lever to release the water, it was inevitable that someone would strain a muscle in their back.  That person, rather embarrassingly, has turned out to be me. But everyone has cheerfully stepped in to accomodate, volunteering for the early morning sampling teams and etc, covering for small little weakling invalid me.

We've been informed by Jussi that we will have visitors next week.  Program coordinators and other responsible parties from the university here (NTNU) who'd like to come have a nice dinner with us (they have clearly heard how good this new cook is) and watch us in action.  There is a possibility of a reporter, too, which is a little bit daunting as, when faced with these sort of situations, I inevitably launch into full Californianese ("...and, like, you know, we're totally working on this, um {hair flip} totally cool topic....").

And in perhaps not totally unrelated news, Sari divulged to me yesterday that, as an exploration of excursion as part of a German class she had (oddly, enough, in Germany, as a young German student), she once wrote an entire 4-page story, about the state of a relationship between two people, although that wasn't really what mattered about the exercise at all, or about the outcome, in a single sentence.  I don't know how she sustained it. Or I guess I should say, even I don't know how she sustained it.





Aug 16 2012a-  It suddenly occurred to me today how funny I must look walking around all the time blasting my music to myself through my little rubber ducky earphones.






Aug 16 2012b-  Nathalie, Annick, and Juli came back from shopping with a haul of junkfood that, despite how well fed we are, is oddly uplifting just to look at piled up on a little table in the lounge.






Aug 16 2012c-  That really is a bottle of blueberry cider.  It has not yet been opened, so I can't tell you what it's like.





Aug 16 2012d-  Our most current newspaper.

2 comments:

  1. I see you are just as behind with the news as we are. Maybe you shouldn't work so much!
    http://www.kyivpost.com/content/russia-and-former-soviet-union/teddy-bear-team-rejects-belarus-kgb-summons-311555.html

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