Maine Field Trip Day 2

The next day, after gorging on all-you-can-eat lobster dinner, we explored the marine center's facilities and watched a talk on lobster fishing in Maine. Some surprising things I learned were that lobster fishing is thought to be sustainable, lobsters can live to be over a hundred years old, and lobsters can live without food for months (years!)-

Saturday night's dinner

Today we packed our bags to leave, but before heading back to Smith we went bird watching at the ocean. Seagull watching. My partner and I did our bird watching on the actual beach, and I was so jealous of all the people that got to relax while we were working. The weather was perfect after such a rainy start to the weekend-

Maine Field Trip Day 1

This weekend my marine ecology class took a trip to Maine to explore New England rocky intertidal communities. We stayed in dorms at Darling Marine Center, about an hour outside Portland.

Our exploration of the area included a boat ride where the captain dredged the bottom with a giant, heavy shovel-bag. While we were out there it started to rain pretty intensely but we still managed to have an interesting time and hauled up some interesting marine specimens-

Following the boating trip, we ate lunch and headed out to a nearby beach. The goal of our beach visit was to help us refine the experiments we had designed in lab.

The beach was rocky and beautiful, and it was completely covered in fog when we first arrived. I couldn't even see the water or the horizon-

 

 

overcrowded barnacles

Some of my classmates checking out the intertidal

Me and my group members

An example of some of the interesting tide pools we found

Paddling with Aunt Lynne

Today I hung out with Aunt Lynne. We went out for Mexican food and eventually ended up spending the late afternoon paddling on a nearby pond. It was a beautiful, calm evening. Incredibly, it even warmed up enough for us to take a brief swim-

Baldwin Barbies !

I finally arrived back at Smith for cross country preseason and its been a busy/ tiring/ weird week and a half. I wish I could be in preseason forever but classes start tomorrow and I have to face reality. 

Today, in honor of the start of classes, Smith held its annual and very unique convocation. At this school convocation isn't some boring event. Instead we jazz it up with house cheers and dress up in costumes according to our house themes. This year Baldwin house went as Barbies (and Kens):

Brant Lake with Martin II

Martin came and visited me up at Brant Lake again, and if it's even possible, I think I probably enjoyed this time more than last time. We spent a lot of time hanging out at my uncle's nice house on Schroon Lake. We played a lot of games including BANANAGRAMS, my new obsession:


We also ate a TON of food. I swear I thought I would never ever ever ever be hungry again after a week of just gorging myself on ice cream and cookies but turns out that a week later I forgot all about the diet I swore I would go on and I'm again eating pints of ice cream a day..


Like I said, we also made cookies and above is the Tollhouse cookie recipe without baking soda. We didn't realize we were missing the baking soda until we started taking all the ingredients out and then we were like, the hell with it, and just made very flat but very delicious cookies. They were especially good with all that ice cream :D

Finally, on Wednesday Christa came up and we got to work painting the trailer that my dad uses to haul stuff around. Soon it's gonna be put to use dragging all my tons of crap to college. The theme was "Sea creatures in space." Whatever that means, haha.

Rock Climbing at AIR

I finally fulfilled a childhood dream and went rock climbing at Albany Indoor Rock Gym (AIR). I got Allie to come along with me and we had a blast climbing walls and getting stuck in their cave system.

First one of the staff members, a guy who said his name was "Billy Joel," taught us how to belay each other. Although sort of a crotch-pincher, it wasn't too hard and we got the hang of it quickly. We climbed for a bit and then hit up the indoor caving system:

To be honest the caves kind of creeped me out a bit. At first it was the fact that I may get stuck. I solved that by sticking Allie in the front so that if she got stuck in a hole then I wouldn't go that way. Probably not a good friendship move.

Then I got worried about all the crap in the caves. Like I said, those things are tight and probably have never ever been cleaned. I don't even know how they were able to paint them all black. As we were crawling though I kept stepping in piles of dust? paint? human remains? Who knows what..

Finally, as we went farther and father into the massive indoor cave system I began to think, "what if there was a murderer hiding somewhere in here with an axe and we can't see him because it's pitch black and we'll come across him and he'll chop our heads off or something."

Clearly, somebody would probably realize if one of the patrons was dragging an axe into the cave system and then how the heck would somebody swing an axe in such a tight space? These were things I didn't think about at the time and if I had it probably wouldn't have made for such an exciting caving experience.

I am so game to go back to AIR again. Can't wait to check out the climbing wall at school >:D

Smith College Running

Every day I'm more and more excited to get back to Smith and see those people I haven't seen for a year and half since I've been abroad.

The only thing I'm worried about the upcoming cross country season. I've been training since I got home in June from Japan but it doesn't feel like enough. In previous summers I was up to running an hour and ten every day, easily, at a fairly quick pace. Right now I'm struggling through forty-five minutes.

I guess the only thing to do is keep training.