Marsh plants, phones, and Presidents! Oh my!
Well, only about three hours after voting in my first presidential election, I seriously regreted the decision I made. Not in terms of presidential candidates or even senators for Rhode Island. I was seriously regreting voting yes on Question 1 for RI. I agreed RI should spend about $80 million on our roads and transportation services.
Because today I discovered the state of Rhode Island had paved over my favorite bump on RI roads. For those of you who are from RI, you'll know exactly where I'm talking about. If you've every traveled north on Route 1, going through Narragansett, there's a series of two bumps right beyond South Country Hospital and the exit for Point Judith, right before the over-pass in the right-hand lane. I was traveling there this morning after voting in Westerly on my way back to Boston and discovered that it's been paved. I LOVE THAT BUMP! Every time I go over it, all I think in my head is ba-duum, ba-duuump! because that's exactly what it feels like to go over that part of the road. DAMN YOU RHODE ISLAND DEPARTMENT OF TRANSIT! I regret voting you $80 million dollars if you're just going to pave and make my route no longer familiar, albiet more gentle on my car. *sniffles* Bump, you will be sorely missed!
In other news, lots of projects to be doing this month. An oceanography project from data we collected off the Woods Hole boat, the Tioga. Gotta do some analysis on conductivity, salinity, etc. from samples taken at lots of different sites. Paper and presentation on that. Also collected a bunch of salt marsh plants from near my house today to do temperature tolerance tests between Spartina alterniflora and Spartina patens, that we're setting up in the salt-water tables in Geoff's lab tomorrow. Another paper and presentation on that. And we are also taking down our field experiment for ecology tomorrow morning, gotta measure our snails to see if they grew any as well as the number of barnacles they consumed. A large paper on that (which some people claim will be publishable, but I have my doubts...) and if it WAS published, we'd probably have to present that at some symposium someday. Yeesh.
I definately felt like a real marine biologist today. I took my shovel and some cheap buckets and tramped out into the salt marsh near my house to collect a bunch of Spartina samples for the botany project. People walking/driving by looked at me like I was crazy. Then I spent almost all day in the lab today trying to find equipment and reserved salt-water tables to set up the experiment in.
At some point during all that, my phone randomly turned itself off. I left it in my car because I was so pissed at looking at a blank screen, but when I picked it up again, it was rediculously hot to the touch. I think the battery or something overheated, so I removed the battery. It's brand new! How depressing. Other than that... off to study for my test tomorrow. Cheers!
Thank you for voting!