First Week Reflections

I'm sitting in Starbucks sipping my tall Awake tea and feeling damp. The reason you ask? As I pulled into the parking lot a downpour decided to let forth! The wind was blowing the rain sideways!!! There was lightning and thunder!!! I could have died!!! But just for you faithful readers I braved the inclement weather!

So this week has been orientation! Most of the skills we learned applied to the Exotic Plants Management Team, but they were interesting to learn about and see how other jobs in the parks work. One of the best days was Tuesday when we learned about GPS and GIS. I might actually get to use those skills and equipment in my project as I identify landowners, their properties and the cemeteries associated with those properties and families.

Resource Management Ranger Paul explaining how GPS works. The girl next to the antenna is K one of my housemates and the guy in green on the right is N another one of my housemates.

We also got to learn how to determine water quality and do water chemistry tests. This means playing in the water. Below are pictures of our adventures!

Getting ready to head down the trail. And I promise I did not stage this, everyone turned and looked just as I took the picture!

Doing the dance to get all the macro-invertebrates into the net!

 Today our last day was spent learning about Exotic Plant Management, basically a fancy word for killing weeds! The pictures below are of some of our training.

Finally, I took the trash out on Wednesday and realized that our trash can had mold in the bottom so I wanted to clean it out with some bleach. But I realized I had no good way to full the relatively tall trashcan up. So I came up with this creative solution.......

Yes that's the shower! :)

Well stay safe during Memorial Day weekend! Next post will be probably middle of next week! Enjoy one last picture of the map we put up in TREC (the home base for our work) of the park! It's got all the different sites all the teams will be going to on it!