Well, here I am! Back on the coast. This time though, it's bit north of my science comfort zone. All 11 (12?) of us arrived here in harborfields yesterday, and claimed rooms in either the "1780 House" (5 guys, 4 girls) or the little cottage (3 girls). I'm sharing a room in the 1780 house with two other ladies, and I have yet to find out if the house is actually from the 1780s but judging by the slope and slant and noise of everything, I'd believe it. We hail from all over: Maine, Minnesota (me!), Washington, Texas, Puerto Rico, Colorado, etc. We're still in the slightly awkward/uncomfortable jumping into friendships stage, but I'm hopeful for the future.
This morning we all walked over to the lab, which consists of a main office-type building, a "double-wide" filled with labs, a "triple-wide" filled with labs, a couple docks, a conference room, and a shared library. All of which sits on the harbor that we live across. I'm convinced that it would take me less energy to row boat across each morning instead of walking 15-20 minutes, so we'll see how that goes. We got a formal introduction of all the research scientists (about 10?) who do their thang there at Bigelow, and then after some tours and logistics talk we met with our mentors. My mentor is Dr. David Fields, and I think I'm going to have a great summer with him. His lab is super awesome, even though I have no idea how to find anything in it yet. He has a bunch of really unique equipment, hopefully some of which I'll be using. One of the cool things he does is he videotapes the behavior of things (like plankton, or krill, or anything) in reaction to stimulants. He's even thinking about seeing how they react to oil... which could be really important... like rrrrreally important.
The location is a lot like an up north Minnesota area, except all the water is salty. I thought I saw a leech off the dock today but it was really a little eel. The closest Grand Marais-type town is about a 15 minute drive, and the closest town with a Target/Walgreens is about an hour. A guy working in our lab though is going to let me borrow his bike for the summer. Sweet!
Goodnight for now!
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