JELLO!

I know it's been a while...a lot has transpired in the past few weeks...

I started the new job!  It's been great so far but quite busy!  I leave in a week to go to Gainesville, FL for training for a whole week!  It should be fun and very informative, since as of now all of the protocols and overall tasks are kind of a blurry mess in my head.  In the meantime we are just getting the lab slowly up and running...ordering supplies, readying the lab, familiarizing ourselves with protocols, gear, and the general day to day stuff to make NEON work - its a crazy system!  There are passwords for everything and I forget them ALL every weekend!!  We start sampling mid-April.  In the meantime we'll have a total of 4 permanent techs, and a handful of seasonal techs that will work with us from April to about October-ish.  This first year is a bit of a test run of sorts, we won't be sampling everything just yet (no streams this year - boo!!), but it should be good to get out the kinks!  We'll still sample plants, soil, ticks, mosquitos, small mammals, beetles, and a host of atmospheric data - woo!!  I need to remember to take photos of the lab so you all can see how we progress!!

Dan and I just got back Wed night from a Dauphin Island trip where we were the very responsible chaparones for 14 high schoolers ranging from 10th-12th graders.  There were a total of 5 chaparones which made the adult-to-student ratio quite manageable, but still, very very tiring.  We lucked out with good weather, and saw many a cool things (rays, dolphins, squid, shrimp, jellies, fish, birds, plankton, ack!)!!!  Dan got a fancy new SLR digital camera, so he has most of the cool photos, but here are a few of mine from my phone..soon I'll share his photos once we get a system going with the downloads...anybody else Apple's photo stream?  I am slowly learning the technologies of the now!!! ..sigh

Anyhow,

that's all for now..

xo