Basically, I felt like I was coming down with a cold Saturday night. Sunday I felt it and new I had gotten sick, and come time to wake up for my first day of work, and I felt like shit. But it was time to get moving. I hung around for a couple hours before I actually had something to do. The crew leaders were just finishing up some lab work. After the other 2 interns arrived (I got there Sunday night, they made it there Monday morning), we got started on some mundane work. We simply had to attach 3 vials to a flag, over and over again. Took us around 90 minutes for us to finish up 200 flags. The vials have fluorescein in them; the vials (attached to flags) go into the water in the evening, and then 24 hours later we retrieve them. Doing lab work on Wednesday, we'll be able to measure how much photodegradation has occured over the last 24 hours in the streams.
Before we ditched the vials out there, we were going to get our feet wet (literally) out in the field to start us off. We went to a stream that took us 45 minutes of driving to get to, and that has pretty rough terrain to walk through. Dana Warren, Matt's (grad student) advisor and our PI, tagged along to help us out. I didn't have waders on, which proved to be a problem. I eventually slipped my feet into the stream which got my feet completely soaked. Oh well. But it was tough work still. We measured out a couple hundred meters of the stream, as well as took some measurements of the stream (called bankfull and wetted measurements), which are part of our habitat survey. This took a couple hours. Also, as I was attempting to catch up to a few people, I must have walked through a bee nest or something, because I ended up getting stung twice on my legs. If only I had my waders, then I wouldn't have gotten stung. But oh well, no problem. Tired as hell, plus with me being sick I was extremely wiped out at this point), we went back to HJA. However, an hour later, we needed to go back out to place the fluorescein. Matt ended up telling me to stay back and rest, since I was feeling pretty crappy and looked pretty crappy too. So I finished off my night by just relaxing on a couch for quite a few hours. But I was told that everything was successful, and they ended up leaving around 6:30 and got back at 10:15. Was a long work day.
Stay fancy.
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