11 January

[Ed: The course instructors are not responsible for any permanent damage caused by someone looking at this shirt.]

I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and French-fried potatoes. Yes, oh yes. Today was Cheeseburgers in Paradise day. After ten harsh, grueling days of eating food that cannot be ordered from a drive-thru window, today we got cheeseburgers; and it was fantastic. All the lectures are over, and we’re pretty much on our own schedules now, working on our own projects at whatever tempo they may require. Yet, somehow, around noon everyone started gathering in the cafeteria (lunch isn’t until 12:30). They began bringing the cheeseburgers out 4-5 at a time, hoping to amass enough to feed everyone by the time lunch started. Unfortunately, the sweet Jamaican women in the kitchen did not realize that you can’t place cheeseburgers in front of a group of hungry college students and expect them to wait thirty minutes to eat. We didn’t, and they were delicious.

After lunch I embarked on setting up my Macgyver shave. Now, I’m only mentioning this because I think it is a beautifully perfect example of the types of problem-solving skills we learn in college, preparing us for life in the real world. You see, there is no hot water at Discovery Bay Marine Lab. [Ed: In the student dorms.] Not much of an issue since it is 85 and sunny every day, until it comes time for the boys to shave. Thus, the Macgyver shave. We have wrangled up an electric kettle, this gives us hot water, but unfortunately it’s water that’s hot enough to peel the skin off our faces. So then we went out and found a giant old-school, steel drum kettle. Why do we have a steel drum kettle you might ask? Well, we do have a stove, but it’s a gas stove, and the gas lines are all capped, and there’ s no 220 outlet to plug it in, so basically the answer is “I Don’t Know”. But we have one, and since there is zero chance of anyone using it to make tea, we fill it halfway with cold water and the other half with steamin’ hot kettle water. Thus the setup for the Macgyver shave is complete, and it works fantastic. Smooth as a baby’s anything. The girls use it for their legs, the guys use it for their faces, the hardest part about the whole has become figuring out who had the kettles last. Brilliant, I know. It’s okay, you’re allowed to be impressed.

Anyways… aside from that it was an uneventful day. Not a bad day, the weather was beautiful, the food was great, we had barbeque ribs and jerk chicken for dinner, just uneventful. We were all well immersed in our data collection for our research projects. We did however manage to sneak in a game of volleyball after dinner [see photo below], and the professor’s even decided to join us for a little while. So that’s about all. I have to head back to the lab to check on my Bollmannia boqueronensis. And to think, just last week I would have simply called them “fish”.