NtsFrmBdga: 30 second update

I have to go eat dinner SOON:
-Saw some humpback whales today, far offshore. Could really only see them breathing (probably a mother and a calf) and the occasional glint of a fluke as they dove.
-Saw some seals, chilling on the rocks near the research station. Apparently they're always there, so I'll have to go back and check them out more often.
-Project 1 Status: 90% Complete
(Done staring at fish breathe! Not quite done subjecting fish to lower dissolved oxygen concentrations -- or "gassing them" as we like to say. Oh no, it's cool. My groupmate is Jewish and he's the one that named our setup "Fishcowicz".)
-Project 2 Status: 15% Complete
(All that remains is tidepooling tidepooling tidepooling, which, thankfully, is fun.)
-Got to go tidepooling twice last week. It's fun! It doesn't quite make up for all the other non-fun we have here, but it's nice to have some respite.
-The weather's turned for the nicer, which is great, but watch it turn back to foggy and nasty just for our 5 days of tidepooling that includes our weekend. (I feel a song coming on...)

Stay sane! No wait -- that's my advice to myself.

Notes from Bodega: Studying for the Lab Exam

It's hell trying to keep the northern clingfish and the spotted kelpfish and the striped kelpfish and the kelp clingfish and the rockweed gunnel and the rock prickleback and the black pricleback and the black surfperch and the silver surfperch and the shiner surfperch and the surf smelt and the topsmelt and the jacksmelt and Embiotoca jacksoni straight. Them and about 40 other fish -- and I haven't even started on the sculpins* yet! This exam may have made me hate fish, but I will say I do still love to eat them.

*Corraline, scalyhead, smoothhead, bonehead, rosylip, wooly, mosshead, buffalo, silverspot, pacific staghorn, tidepool, fluffy (my favorite), and THE CABEZON.

Notes from Bodega Bay: Part Hell

Bloody hell. This place is ridiculous. In the past week I've spent almost every waking moment studying, taken 2 final exams, written (yet another) project proposal, wading through journal papers, and preparing to set up and start our projects. Gahhh. If you can't tell, I'm not exactly loving this place. The weather has been incredibly nice in the last few days, gorgeous sunshine and temperate weather. I wish I had the time to enjoy it. The best part of my day is the my bike ride to the research station, seeing the waves roll into Horseshoe Cove, whatever color the ocean may be that day -- anywhere from grey to deep, deep blue, to light green. And then about 30 seconds later I lock my bike up outside the building and the long day begins, sometimes not ending until 10pm or later. Yesterday was slightly more interesting since we went tide pooling in the afternoon and got to chase fish out of algae with nets and put them in buckets. What wasn't fun was dissecting them later on and looking for parasites. Leeches, fine, they're on the outside and they wiggle, so they're easy to find (if not to get off the fish). What's way LESS fun is trying to find leeches on a fish that's still flopping and struggling for life, even though its spinal cord has been severed. What else isn't fun? Poring through a dissecting microscope searching for itty bitty (and I mean seriously tiny) trematodes, nematodes, and cestodes. That's right -- a real good ol' gol'danged worm hunt! Yeee haw!

I have got to get out of here.

Notes from Bodega: Pictures

Enjoy. I'm too tired to write.

Notes from Bodega: Part III

"The days are long, but the weeks are short."

Truer words were never spoken, as we have 3 lectures today, 3 tomorrow, and lots more coming up. That's the downside to having a heavily research-based program -- they have to smush all the material into the first few days. It makes every day drag on forever (hence our constant feelings of exhaustion), but already we can tell time's going to fly. Well, more in the "oh, crap, we have no time left to do our project/write-up/etc.!" than the "OMG this is SO much fun XD!!!1!" way. I'm trying to get myself in the mood for it all, repeating in my head that while this isn't turning out to be ideal (okay, so maybe playing with seals was never going to happen) I could be doing many worse things. And besides, I signed up for this so I might as well get as much out of it as I can. I may not want to do this, but lots of people have to do things they don't want to do in life, and at least I get to pick the things I don't want to do.

Apparently the weather this weekend was nice (it sure was at home!) but it's so foggy and grey today that it's difficult to tell where the ocean and sky connect. The research station's only about 50 yards from the sea cliffs, but the only difference that marks the ocean from the horizon are the small shadows caused by the wind rippling across the surface of the waves. Even the foam on the waves, which usually is so thick it looks like dry, cracked icing, seems to match the sky today.

We're just about to get down to the crunch on our project planning, right before we take our finals early next week, and in the midst of my birthday and leading our seminar discussion on Thursday ("Colour Vision in Coral Reef Fish"). I'd tell you what we're planning, but it's likely to change a thousand times before we finalize it, so I'll save us both the effort. I can tell you it will involve fish and physiology. Because the classes I'm taking are Field Biology of Marine Fishes and Ecological Physiology of Marine Parasites.

Notes from Bodega: Part II

There ain't a lot to do here, until you factor class in. Then there's no time to do anything. Today seems to be one of our more lax days, with lecture only from 9.30-11am and again from 1-3pm. That being said the rest of the time is spent poring over past student reports, trying to plan our projects, reading 5-8 textbook chapters (depending on your background in physiology -- mine is practically nil), studying preserved fish in the lab, reading and analyzing journal articles for our weekly seminars, and other such classy things. Most days, however, all I can manage is to stumble far enough into my room to collapse onto my bed for a quick pre-dinner nap, since our schedule usually runs 9.30am-12pm lecture/lab, 1-3.30pm lecture/lab, 6pm dinner, and 7.30/8-10pm field trip/seminar/lecture. Last night we had an 8-10pm seminar on the aforementioned journal articles, the night before we went seining for fish, and the previous two nights were labs and orientations of sorts. Mostly I'm just too tired or too stupefied from lecture to think about studying, so I try and recover during daylight hours and end up staying up till the wee hours of the night trying to read dense textbooks/journal articles/lab manuals. Sigh.

In other news... there is no other news. It's very pretty here, but that's not exactly a news flash every time I look out the window. I have seen a bunch of animals, though, ones even not related to our classes: lots of deer; quails scurrying around the brush outside the cafeteria; pelicans, egrets, other sorts of sea birds feeding in the bay around sunset; blue jays perched on branches by the roadside on my morning bike ride to the research station; wild turkeys pecking by the trees at the bottom of the road that leads up to the dorms; seals in Horseshoe Cove poking their heads out of the water at us in interest... we're inundated with nature here. Not that it's a bad thing -- it's very exciting for all us noobs and city people. I miss concrete and street lamps (there's one here) to an extent, although I imagine it wouldn't be so bad if I actually went into town. But that's 3 miles down the road, and I'm tired and busy. They call this Marine Biology boot camp, and boy, they weren't kidding.

I'm on a library computer right now (too lazy to haul my laptop to the lab), so I'll have to upload some of the pictures I've taken later, possibly while I'm home this weekend. I'll spare you the pictures of preserved fish I took from the lab.