Never been this tired in my life

This week started off really relaxed, but then picked up a bit. I didn't really have much to do except revise methods and work on my intro a little bit- wasn't feeling very motivated, so I'll have to get a lot of work done on that tomorrow. I sorted out some amphipods from the ulva tank on the back deck, and I have more than enough for my feeding trial. On Friday I was up at 4:50 am to go collect isopods. Luckily another one of the REUs wanted to come help, so that was nice. We didn't get all we needed (many were too big) though.

I wanted to sleep in on Saturday because when I don't have to go into the field I keep waking up around 6:20 for no reason, but my roommate had to go out, so the alarm woke me up at 6:00. On Saturday three of the other REUs and I drove into Sebastopol with the REU director. We walked around and shopped for about 4 hours while she ran some errands. I was really surprised by how many cool shops there were! There was a really awesome used book store (i resisted the urge to buy anything, though) and another regular bookstore. I bought a book with some bracelet patterns at a craft store, and then we walked around Whole Foods, which was cool. Sebastopol is pretty much a rich-hippie town (good people watching). The highlight of the trip for me was the record shop- they had EVERYTHING at great prices and in good condition. I didn't buy anything there because I was worried about records breaking in my suitcase, but i may have to go back. They even had an original Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band tour jacket! The video store in Sebastopol was hilarious because the employees make home videos and rent them out for free, just like the movie "Be Kind, Rewind" with Jack Black. They had a great selection with lots of documentaries and some used DVDs on sale for 6 dollars. We went to the legendary ice cream shop "Screamin' Mimi's" before we left. I had lemon poppyseed ice cream in a waffle cone, and it was amazing.

Today I woke up at 5:30 to go seining in the Harbor and pick up some more isopods. The grad student we were seining with is studying the different species of rock fish in the harbor (copper, yellow tail, etc.), but we saw lots of other species and I learned to identify a bunch of fish. We sae a pipefish, which was pretty insane. I also found a species of isopod that we had never seen before. It was dark red and white and it was the same genus as the ones I am working with not (Idotea). We went to two different sites and seined right along the eelgrass beds. Two of us would drag the net and then bring it back and dump it into a big cooler filled with seawater, and then we sould all drag nets through and sort the fish by species. We released the larger ones and kept only 3 species of rockfish and one species of perch.

The plan for next week is to go out and collect the rest of my isopods tomorrow morning, change water and food for the growth trial, run the feeding trial for two days (will involve weighing a bunch of algae and eelgrass), writing a first draft of my intro and preliminary results, and watching "The Birds" on the big screen in the lecture hall. Busy! Right now I need to go do my long run (waited until now because I took a 3 hour nap today) and get some sleep.