TOMODACHI

I MADE A FRIEND. At lunch I saw Samir and he introduced me to some of his Japanese friends that live in my dorm. One of them, Sho, and I exchanged emails and phone number and we chat in English occasionally. AND SO, Monday night Patricia, Sho and I watched AVATAR.

Tuesday I didn't do much and got off of work early. Tuesday night, Patricia, Michael, Lauren and I all went to wing night. It was THE BEST. Wing night is THE BEST. Patricia and I are gonna go again with Sho. He says he's gonna take the "Blazin' challenge," where you have to eat 12 mega-super-hot wings in six minutes. I wish I could tolerate hot stuff so I could take that challenge :O

Radical Week

WOW. I haven't updated in a week. There goes my good record-keeping streak. The reason why I haven't been up to updating is because this past week has been the most torturous since school ended. I had to get up before six for three days straight and that meant less than 8 hours of sleep..UNBEARABLE.

The highlight of the week occurred during our Wednesday morning trek to Lake Martin. EPIC STORY: when we were leaving, Michael sent Key to go lock up the fence.. and so he definitely locked himself INSIDE IT. omg my life is average. He ended up having to climb over the fence because Micheal refused to call maintenance and explain to them how Key got locked inside..


Thursday I made the mistake of agreeing to get up early. This time, we went to go spread lime (a buffer, not the fruit, sadly..) in the ponds. I guess lime is really bad for you to inhale and can burn your nostrils and may give you a nasty rash if it comes in contact with skin. Luckily I experienced none of these things.. yet.. but lime can definitely be added to the list of harmful chemicals I've inhaled during this experience. And then, I keep wondering why I'm suddenly so bad at math ..


Anyway, to spread lime, we had to pick up these 50lb bags, dump the crap in buckets and then spread it around the bottom of nasty drained ponds. Eventually everybody had to take their shoes off because we were calf deep in mud. This ended when the safety dude discovered us and yelled at us for #1) not wearing shoes #2) not wearing protective clothing (but it was sooooo hottt), and #3) spreading lime.. .... ?

Fun things I did this past week include Auburn Family Fun Day on Wednesday. We hit up the free corn dogs, bingo and free stuff booth. The best thing about it was that there was a kissing booth right next to the germ tent. All in all it was a true southern experience.. probably (??).

Friday night was the "Art Walk" downtown and there was this "Muse" scheduled to play. All last week Alan was like, maybe its THE Muse, the EUROPEAN Muse, and I was like, "probably not...they're definitely touring Europe right now..

I went on to explain that it would probably be some old guys who play the banjo.." Alan persisted, saying there was a small chance it could be the real Muse. AND IT DEFINITELY WAS...old guys playing the banjo..

Today at breakfast this dude named Samir who lives in the Cambridge asked me if Patricia and I wanted to go to lunch with him and some friends. I agreed to go and later in the day I went with him and some Chinese girls to a Chinese buffet. I haven't eaten so much in centuries. While we were there, Samir told me he'd introduce me to some of his Japanese friends who live in our dorm. MAYBE ILL MAKE TOMODACHI.

Lots of Asian Things

I'm bored. Officially :(

BUT, recently I've been watching the cartoon "Avatar: The Last Airbender" and it is SO INCREDIBLY GOOD. Comic done by 'rufftoon' at deviantart.com:

Dahahaha. Zuko is definitely one of my favorites.

Also, this past weekend, I went and saw "Karate Kid" with Patricia. It didn't live up to my expectations even though it starred Jackie Chan (My Lover and Hero).

All in all, the original Karate Kid is much better. I'm a little sad to say this because it feels like I'm letting down my man Jackie :(

Today. O God. I went into the lab at 9am and labeled and packed materials for our trip out to Lake Martin tomorrow. Once I finished and Alan realized that I had nothing else to do, he had me come with him, Lauren, Key and Michael to the ponds to do things. It was around 10 or 11am or so and already the sun was as fierce as Scorpius in a pride march. I went around with Lauren and had to mix oooey-gooey green fertilizer liquid with stinky pond water and then dump the whole thing around a bunch of ponds. It didn't take too long but some of the crap splashed back in my face which probably wasn't too healthy.. ....

Later in the day, Alan came with us to lunch at The Cambridge, my dorm, and of course he had to make me feel awkward as soon as we got there. He knows I'm studying abroad next year and so when we walk in he spots this Asian girl and he says, "Hey are you one of the Japanese people that live in the dorm," and she gives him a 'wtf' face and says "Yes I'm from Japan." And I'm all like *face palm*

Alan proceeds to introduce me to this girl and then forces us to exchange email addresses. O God. Then when I'm standing in line for lunch one of the Japanese boys that I budged in line for the salad bar randomly asks me if I was at the soccer field the other day. I was like, "uh. no." and he was like "fjasdklfjadsssomething in unintelligble englishalsdfjaf." And I awkwardly asked him if he was on the soccer team and then left. It was a really weird lunch. Now I feel like I should seclude myself in my dorm room and eat banana chips and trail mix all day while watching youtube videos out of embarrassment, or something..

Filling Bags

Today we worked on setting up Alan's experiment. This one was a lot easier to do than mine because we set it up on a pond on Auburn's campus. Also, there was a dock in the middle of the pond that we could use:

When we got there, we all worked on putting these gigantic bags into the framing. That didn't take too long but it wasn't easy.


Next, I was able to test the water outside the enclosures using the hydrolab.


Alan also had me doing science with a graduated cylinder. I measured out the nutrients for each enclosure.


Finally, we had to fill the enclosures. Since this is my blog, I only have pictures of myself filling these bags--and doing everything else-- but to be honest, I only filled like 2-ish out of the twelve. It took over five minutes to pump water into each enclosure and it was pretty hard. The hose is crazy and pushes you back.

This picture's funny. I'd like to think of it as Alan approving of my enclosure filling skillzz..


After about 2.5 hours we finished the job. It looks..kind of ridiculous.. but that's OK. Alan says he's gonna use this setup to run an experiment to see how changes in nutrient ratios affect phytoplankton.


After we got through with this Alan tried to make me do MATH, which I didn't totally understand.. and so I went on livejournal and facebook. As you can tell, the afternoon was extremely productive..

Later in the day, Alan's wife took Patricia and me over to the farmer's market near the school. It would've been a lot more interesting if it weren't about 95 degrees out. Even Patricia was complaining about the heat and she's from Alabama.

RIB NIGHT made up for the intense heat. They had all-you-can-eat ribs at a restaurant downtown. I love ribs. I love my ribs. And I love everything about ribs.

Yesterday and Today !!

Tuesday: Was probably the best day of the summer so far. Six of us went to set up my experiment at Lake Martin including Alan. It was a big project so we had to take two trucks and two boats. We left campus at 6am and picked up the boats. Since it was so early, Alan set us up with some tasty doughnuts:
Once we got to the lake, we tied the enclosures together into one long row. This part didn't take too long because we put the cans and frames together on Monday. It just looked pretty stupid because it was a line of 18 trashcans surrounded by pvc
pipes..


Next, we towed the cans out to the center of the lake to fill them with water. But, because the whaler boat didn't start, not only did we tow the cans but also we had to drag Alan and Patricia in the whaler. It..once again..looked really weird-ish. Just keep in mind that we're doing all of this near a high security dam, so there are guys watching us on security cameras when we look like this:


Once we reached a good point a little ways out from shore, Michael and Alan began to fill the barrels with a pump they'd brought. This pump is huge and sits in to bottom of the boat. It was really complicated because they had to balance on the side of a not-so-sturdy boat while holding a heavy tube filled with water. The water was passed through cloth filters before it finally made it to the bucket:

Finally the filling was finished and we towed the cans to a little inlet where we had previously put the Daphnia last Wednesday. Michael checked the Daphnia cans to see if the animals were still alive and they were (!). Even the can I had accidentally got sunscreen in still have Daphnia. SCORE.

And so we tied off the cans using rope and bricks and Michael and I will come back to check them next Tuesday. Right now everything sorta looks like this (minus the cans not floating on top of the water):

Finally, we took water samples from the lake and from one of our trashcan enclosures to run tests on. After that, Alan left us kids to take the Geology boat out on the lake. We found an island that had an awesome beach and hung out there for the next three hours. It was such a hot day (high 80s/ low 90s probably) and the water was around 80 so it was really perfect. We swam for EVER before finally heading back to campus.

^We're really creative and outdoorsy by trying to play baseball with a pine cone and stick..

Back at Auburn, Michael showed me how to filter the water we collected in order to run tests. That only took about 10 minutes or so but it'll suck when we have to do it for all 36 enclosures. THAT will take a few hours. After leaving the lab, the rest of the day I hung out in my room, exhausted, and watched Avatar the Last Airbender. Har harrr..

Wednesday (Today): Alan made us go to this dirty, sketchy restaurant called "The Coop," where they do fried chicken. This was my first experience eating fried chicken in the south and it was so stereotypical because The Coop looked totally ghetto-southern and probably got a C- from the health department. Since Patricia goes to Tuskegee University, she also showed us around her campus and I liked it. Patricia said she'll take me down there and show me around sometime.

Set Up

Today we got everything together that we needed for the experiment. I also got my TIGER CARD, the official card of Auburn University...AKA my new ID.

To get us our IDs, Alan took us over to Identity Management. There, a super-cranky balding man told me I needed my social security card to get my Tiger Card. Alan asked where it said that on their website and the Cranky Man got even more annoyed and showed him. Later, Cranky Man asked me in a not-so-nice tone, "Who was that man earlier who made me look stuff up on the website? SOME (lawl im a dumbass) GRAD STUDENT??! " ..and I guffawed a bit and said "No that's PROFESSOR Wilson." Durhur. I suppose he probably felt stupid after that...although Alan could look like a grad student more than a professor with his shoulder-length long flowing locks, T-shirt and Teevas or whatever.

Well, after that ordeal we returned to the Fisheries building. All the while I was laughing / crying about how horrendous my picture ID turned out. It looks like at the exact moment the picture was taken, I'm being possessed by something. My eyeballs are all wide and stupid-looking.. Anyways, until lunch, Michael and I (mostly Michael) collected the things in the lab that we'll need to set up the experiment tomorrow, and we measured out how much nutrients we need. Michael did all the math for that and I'm disappointed that I'm so bad at conversions and stuff. I guess I need a lot more practice.

After lunch we went to set up frames and trashcans for the experiment. We went over to the Ponds and tied all 36 trashcans into 18 frames. It wasn't that hard to do; I could technically do it by myself if I felt like it.. Next, we loaded them onto the boats and it looks totally bootleg: All these trashcans and piled onto 2 boats..

Now that I rethink it.. this setup would look weird in New York, but it probably fits right in in Alabama..

WTF. WORKING A SATURDAY (??!)

Today was a little different. I've never worked a whole Saturday before but I am used to getting up on Saturdays for meets and stuff. The first frustrating thing of the day was that there was no breakfast until 11am and I had to be at the lab at 10am. I ended up eating some chocolate and a quaker breakfast bar lawlz.

At the lab, Patricia and I talked with Alan about the week, about how yesterday went, and about our individual projects. Then, Patricia showed me what shes been up to recently in the lab. Turns out that she has been practicing gluing Daphnia to paperclips and recording some things about their behavior. Her experiment deals with the way Daphnia deal with different quality of food, or something. I think that sounds pretty cool and it'd be neat to apply some of the stuff I learned in behavior genetics to it, probably.

Next, Michael and I planned out some of our experiment including assigning some treatments to the trash bins and putting together a list of what we have to bring to the experiment site. Hopefully things will go smoothly on Tuesday (when we're setting up our experiment) and things wont go like they did yesterday.

In fact, after a lunch of breakfast bar and fruit snacks, I went out to a pond on campus with Alan and Michael to try to fix the boat. Alan taught me some things about how a boat works and he had me clean out some spark plugs and put them back in the boat. I didn't really know what was going on but I went along with it. Next, Michael, Alan and I went out in the boat and threw out some juglines. I still think it's pretty gross to put a hook through a fish's eye socket.

Finally, tonight Patricia, Michael and I went out into town with Alan and his wife, kids and dog. We went to Moe's southwest grill. I guess it's a chain, but I've never heard of it. It wasn't bad. Now Patricia and I are just chilling in the TV room. I Am Legend is on and Will Smith is hawt.

Tallapoooosa

I'm getting tanner and tanner. By the time I'm done here I'm gonna riddled with melanoma. Today was another day spent entirely outdoors.

We worked on Key's experiment. I'll tell you right now that it didn't turn out very well. He's looking at what kinds of fish are most likely to be caught at different depths using different types of hooks and bait. He's testing this on the Tallapoosa River so this morning we picked up the boat and another guy named Matt and then headed out. Because Alan wanted Patricia and me to see real ghetto Alabama, he told Michael to stop at this sketchy gas station where lots of meth drug deals go down. I don't know about that, but I'm pretty sure the gas stations been updated since Alan saw it last. When we got there it didn't look any different from a regular gas station and since I really had to go, I used the bathroom. Surprisingly, it was the nicest gas station bathroom I've ever been in. I know that isn't saying much but I was really disappointed in the non-sketchiness of the station. I think meth's pretty big around here so probably someday I'll get to see a real drug deal or maybe even a drug bust..

When we finally got to the river, the first issue we faced was that the boat wouldn't start. Matt and Michael tried to figure that out while I did nothing, really. Eventually things worked out and we put out 45 juglines in a small cove. I learned how to bait minnows and bluegills and it was kind of nasty because you bait minnows through the eye socket. While doing this I definitely accidentally popped out a few minnow eyeballs. To make things better, halfway through this delightful experience it began to rain. haha.

After throwing out all the lines, the guys fished a bit and we ate lunch. It was ridiculously hot so we went swimming. The rivers here are so weird because you can't see into them: They're totally brown. That kind of freaked me out at first because you can't even see three inches down, but I quickly got over it after noon hit and the sun hit us like a flamethrower.

When we went to pull the juglines back in, the boat motor acted up again and Mike couldn't get it to start. So basically, along with the liquid gas and pvc primer/ glue fumes, I can also add boat motor fumes to my increasing list of "deadly toxins I have inhaled this week."

At the end of the afternoon, we collected our lines. Guess how many fish were caught with 45 juglines? ONE. .... hahha. It was a catfish and it was my first time seeing one up close. Let me tell you, they're really ugly. They're not something that I would look at and think "wow that looks tasty." I mean, GROSS (!!):

Fruit Snack Emergency (!!)

BUILDING FRAMES SUCKS. But the thing is, I had to do it most of the day. It's for my experiment. The only good part of the whole ordeal was that I didn't have to touch the circular saw. Mom banned me from ever touching one in my lifetime.

But eventually, with the help of other, amazingly great people, we finished the frames relatively quickly. The fumes from the pvc primer were so bad that I got a little dizzy (and high?) ...or maybe it was the heat.. I swear things are gonna turn bad when it hits July. Can a person's skin actually melt off their body?

In the afternoon I was forced to read a bunch of papers about Daphnia. It was terrible because it's summer and all that academic drive I had during the school year suddenly vanished..


UPDATE: I ONLY HAVE THREE PACKETS OF FRUIT SNACKS LEFT. My life will end soon..

Alabama

I'm finally in Alabama! I'm here for my REU (research experiences for undergraduates) program. It's exciting and a little scary going someplace where I know nobody at all. The grad student, Michael, and an undergrad named Steve, picked me up at the Atlanta airport on Sunday.

Later in the day, the lab got together at the Mellow Mushroom for dinner. Then a lot of boring and uninteresting things happened. These things are detailed in my other, more monotonous and boring blog:

http://sorceres.livejournal.com/

ADD ME IF YOU HAVE AN LJ :)