I'm baaaaack

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post. I have been ridiculously busy with my research towards the tail end of this program (2 weeks to go) and have completely neglected to update this thing. I'll talk about my research in the next post; for this post I wanted to focus on things I've done that are not research... which isn't much, unfortunately. Anyway, a list:

- Went to Cleveland Museum of Natural History and got a behind the scenes tour. This was really cool because we got to see all the bird and mammal skins, as well as some mounted reptiles, that are stuffed, mounted and used for displays. This was the last time we did a whole group "sponsored" REU event.


- Bill Zawiski of the Ohio EPA had our whole group to a stream quality monitoring activity. Wait, wait, wait. That sounds boring. What I meant to say was we got to go electro-fishing; which is exactly what is sounds like. We all jumped in the stream, wearing waterproof waders, and got a giant fishing net hooked up to a generator and basically shocked fish into "paralysis" and scooped them up in the net and tossed them in a bucket. As a note, the fish were not actually harmed or killed, the bucket was in the water with holes in it to allow water flow, it was basically just to contain the fish. Anyway, it was a pretty sweet little activity, definitely a cool skill to learn, even if it was only a basic lesson.

- Saw "Inception" last night in the movie theatre with Bayoan, Mollika and Alicia. Great movie. I definitely recommend it.

As far as noteworthy experiences go, that's about it. The rest is just the usual: hanging out, eating out at some cool local restaurants, bird watching.

That's about it.