Long as I can see the light...
Well, it has been 10 days since I moved into the house on Pleasant Street in Nahant, MA. The past 10 days have been some of the most tiring and amazing days of my life. I have completed 12 dives in 8 days for my Diving Research Methods class, basically playing around with all sorts of cool tools (or toys as I think of them) and doing labs. We have a kelp growth lab to finish tomorrow morning by measuring how much our specimens we tagged last week have grown. We are also doing a transect lab in multiple locations around Nahant, basically monitoring the density of animals per 20m^2. And quadrats, too. Oh, and yesterday we got to play with underwater cameras and videocameras. I got some good footage, I'll try to download it from the computers at school and share with you guys. Tonight, I did my first night dive!! It was awesome, there are tons of lobsters out a night. And we got to tag things (like ourselves) with glow sticks. The moon looks really cool from 25ft underwater.
I am one of only five undergraduate students in the program. Everyone else is a graduate student. I live in the further house from the Marine Science Center, but its a massive three-story Victorian house built in 1850 or something like that. The original brick oven is still here, but we don't use it. We also have a massive porch. I love living in an old house, it feels like the mill or something. We even have a cat. She's an orange tabby who is grossly overweight named HoneyBear. I'm absolutely loving every minute of this program so far. Tomorrow is the last day of the DRM class (which means I can stop logging 2 dives a day for 5 days in a row x_X). We're having a big theme party tomorrow night, too. It's a "three c's" theme. We have to dress up as something that begins wtih a C. Then, real classes start on Monday morning with marine invertebrate zoology...
I'm super exhausted, from diving until 10 at night today. I will be very very thankful when tomorrow is finally over, but I'm super proud of myself for surviving this week! Cheers!