Campbell's Journal of Earthwatch

 

Here is my favorite picture of myself, so far on the trip. I am currently in 3AM mode and my foot is cramping. Ouch! I adore the photo though. *_*

Day 1: June 16 2002

 

Today I arrived in New Mexico. My plane flight went pretty well. My tickets worked as I had hoped and there weren' t any glitches along the way aside from some turbulence due to thunderstorms in Texas and a late takeoff on my second flight due to runway traffic. It is so strange to think that I am here in a world so unlike my own. Unlike in Jacksonville, this area is very topographically varied. In a matter of moments, one can see mountains, plateaus, mesas, and plains. It is also incredibly dry here and it feels like there isn't really any air. When I got to the airport, the Earthwatch people weren't there to meet me outside security because they thought I was coming in on the 1:09 flight when in actuality I arrived 11:00ish. After we left the airport the first day, we went to Old Town in Albuquerque where we went to a science museum and saw a neat IMAX movie about caves. For dinner, we had Mexican food. Then we went to the hotel and checked in. Amanda turned out to be my roommate and now four days into the trip, I know she is a very good roommate and I glad I selected her. Hooray for reflection and memory!

 

Day 2: June 17 2002

 

This morning I had the joy of discovering that the continental breakfast offered Froot Loops. lol. I know Connor will have the correct appreciation for this i.e. the Amelia Island picnic. After eating breakfast, we went to the LANL badge office to have our picture ids created. My picture was neither favorable nor foul, it was just odd. I will have to take a picture of it before I go home since they insist upon the fact that we turn our badges back in. Post badge creation, we went to the Bradbury Science Museum to take a tour. Instead of a tour,however, we got to hear about how LANL is financed and operated and hear its history. I think this was more interesting to me than the tour could have possibly been. Also, the guy who gave it was an excellent public speaker. We went to Subway for lunch and waited behind a crowd of 80 people. In the afternoon, we had a class at Canyon School explaining how to use telescopes and the CCD camera. Since we had extra time, we ended up playing with the CCD camera for entirely too long. Dinner consisted of pizza at Canyon School. That night we went out to Fenton Hill to take a partial daylight tour and get used to the site. The nearby basin of arsenic there worries me immensely. The site is pretty neat though. There are lots of white domes and radio equipment accompanied unfortunately by lots of *tripping hazards*. Something really really neat on the way home was that WE SAW A BEAR. Also, the road is insane. All of the people there said they had never actually seen one [a bear] before so that was awesome. After Fenton Hill, we went home and slept for the GET test the next morning.

 

Day 3: June 18 2002

 

Yesterday I was awake forever-well over 22 hours. I was too tired to get home to write in my book journal so actually this info is going here first on the public less fun journal. Yesterday morning we tested out of GET training. It was the dumbest test ever! Some of the questions were even on there more than once. BAH..... The good news was that the combination of ludicrous questions and the openbookness of it caused everyone to pass. The scores in our group ranged from 100 % - 90%. I was right in the middle with a 95%. Speaking of people, everyone else on my team is very agreeable to me which is really wonderful. Because before I left home, this was something I was quite worried about. While at GET training, we saw a guy eating Steak Chunks... It was gross. We went to Smith's (a grocery store here) to buy lunch foods to take up and eat at the ski mountain. Yes, indeed, they do ski here in the winter because after all we are in the mountains. Amanda and I bought popcorn for our room, so now if we become locked interminably in the hotel room by an evil force, we will not die too soon. Thus, less doom! :) We took all of our food acquired only after a long struggle with the automatic scanner to the ski place. When we got there I ate lots of Caesar salad. YUM!!! A non-sandwich at last!!!! After lunch we went on this psychotic hike directly uphill for 30 minutes. I have no idea why I did it because no one was forcing me and my sandals were nearly ruined. For some reason though, none of that really seemed to matter. We sat around outside the ski lodge for awhile after the lunch and talked and took pictures. After a slight break, we went back to Canyon School again to learn about coordinate systems. Also... Galen showed us a presentation on asteroid tsunamis that was really neat. Like the previous day we had all this time left at the end that we used to play around with the satellite tracking program on the really old stank computer in room 168. I thought it was more interesting though than the computer program from the day before. DOS is weird though and I don't really know how to use it. :( Not that it really matters at all, because it doesn't. We had dinner that night at China Moon. I know parentals, you are now thinking how "right up my alley," as you would say, that is. The food was decent, not as good as Mandarin Dragon because they had the kind of weird Lo Mein they had at the "Dragon Lady Restaurant" (sorry guys only connor will get this....well actually maybe Mary Beth's aunt and uncle too if they actually read this <incredibly unlikely> And -- they think about it for awhile). They had unusually flavorful fortune cookies that I liked a lot though, which almost made up for the lack of a soft-serve machine- almost. Oh on a totally random note, in case you were wondering this background is a picture of a nebula I really like. I think it is called the Rosette Nebula, maybe. I will check on this. After dinner, we went back to the hotel to get tons of warm clothes to go up to Fenton Hill to stay until twilight. These are the warm things I brought with me to Fenton: long sleeve shirt (actually I was wearing this), mommy-u's warm old Talbot's sweater, the green warm jacket and my gloves. By about midnight, I had all of these things on and continued to get colder from then on. I still had an interesting experience there though, despite frozenness, as you shall soon see. On the way there, not until 9ish, we encountered an enormous amount of *deer elk things* on and around the road. Consequently, slow driving occurred, and so the 45 minute drive took over an hour. When we got there, the telecopies were already being set up. I got to help align one and I actually was successful on the first try. YAY! We spent the first couple hours of the night learning how to use the "go to" feature on the telescope. We also looked at a few Messier Objects, which are spiffy sky things (like galaxies, clusters, nebulae, etc.) that Messier a Frenchman catalogued several hundred years ago. I sort of don't remember last night very well at all, especially the ride home, but I will do my best to recount it from here on out. I know that at some point during the night I made seven different sketches of phenomena that I saw through the telescope. I also know that after I spent awhile trying to do a super good job sketching the field that the asteroid we are trying to track, Phocaea, is supposed to be in. After all that effort, I found out that actually we were looking in the wrong place the first time and so I had to do it all over again. By that point. I was rather annoyed at the asteroid. So, I didn't even really try. Some time around 2:45 AM or 3:00 AM or something we took an inside break for awhile to warm up. Something else nice was that hot tea was delivered to me twice. Really late at night, we looked at binary stars through two telescopes to compare how well we could see the separation between the two stars in each. By that time of night, the sky was totally amazing and incredibly dark. I could see thousands of stars and the Milky Way, which can almost never be viewed in JAX due to our intense light pollution. I also got to try to look at the outer planets, which had risen by that point. Uranus I saw as a bright star. Neptune I saw as one of two less bright stars. Pluto, I just had to pretend to see b/c with a magnitude of 13.8, it was pretty much invisible. Eventually, we went home. I can't really remember the ride home. Neither can anyone else. I know it happened around 4:30 A.M. and there was some kind of joke about cannibals and canoes made out of skin and everyone laughed like 50 times, before Lisa even got to the part that was supposed to be funny. Then there was some candy, and eventually during the ride home all of us fell asleep and didn't know it, and then suddenly the hotel magically appeared. I have really no idea at what point I fell asleep I remember seeing the Valle Grande, an ancient caldera, so I know I was awake for that, but then I have no idea. argh.... We went to bed at about 5:30 AM in order to wake up at noon. Sorry this day was so long. 22.5 hours just takes awhile to type.

 

Day 4: June 19 2002

 

Well, of course the 19th actually started about halfway through that last entry, but who cares. I have decided that for the purposes of this online journal I am going to count days as just being from when I wake up to when I go to sleep, something that is going to vary a lot throughout the trip based on whether it is an observation night or not. Our wake up call this morning occurred at noon. Yuck! Luckily for me, Amanda volunteered to take the first shower. We went to lunch at this diner thing and we just carried the food back to our hotel. I ate chicken strips and drank this really good organic lemonade that I don't think we have back home. From when I woke up, until about an hour ago, (It is now 4:30 PM.) my entire body hurt from exhaustion. Now I am pretty much ok though. We'll see how today goes. Tonight we aren't supposed to be staying out late. In case you were wondering, right now I am in Canyon School typing this on a lovely Grape iMac which I am slowly but surely learning how to use properly. Anyway, this is where I stop for now, because I just got the 10 minute warning and I don't really have much in the way of precognitive powers. Ok. I am back. It is the 21st now, but I haven't had access to this computer for a few days. I think this always having to type about several days at once is going to become a trend. So here goes.... After we finished building our web pages, Don talked to us about the electromagnetic spectrum. Something else neat that happened on the computer though was that I got an e-mail from Mommy saying that she sent me mail. YAY! Mail=Good For dinner that night we went to this restaurant that did not really favor b/c aside from hamburgerish items they had country-fried everything. I do not understand this as I am not in GA, or something. Consequently, I got a veggie plate consisting of mashed potatoes, carrots, and broccoli. This was decent except that my mashed potatoes had too much gravy on them. Oh well. Something really funny is that this restaurant serves sweet potato sticks with a gargantuan amount of whipped cream. Weirdness... After dinner went to a lecture at Bradbury led by Todd Haines about neutrinos and the sun. This was pretty interesting. I learned how they construct neutrino detectors such as Super K in Japan and Milagro here in NM. Todd made an amusing analogy comparing neutrino groups to US soccer fans, and he also had a funny picture in his PowerPoint of superman shooting gamma rays from his eyes. That night was really really fun. We (all 8 of us) walked from the hotel to Baskin Robbins alone. This was really good a) b/c ice cream is just good b) b/c BR is apparently the "cool kid" hang-out here as there is neither a movie theater nor a mall in town c) b/c we got to make fools of ourselves. I got World Class Chocolate ice cream which was a really delicious mixture of white chocolate mousse and milk chocolate ice cream. Lisa got this blue raspberry sherbet w/ a chocolate and rainbow sprinkle waffle cone. She was so excited that she was still talking about it yesterday (the 20th). After we finished eating, we hung around outside BR to wave foolishly in a line at all of the "cool kids" who were peeling out of the parking lot. It was really fun there, not so fun for Lisa though b/c that is when the boys started teasing her. Poor girl..... We finally got home around 11 and then Amanda and I stayed up and talked for a few hours about all kinds of things. I can't really explain what. We just talked about different teenager issues, and what our lives are like back home, and I told her the weird circumstances under which I met Connor. We finally went to bed around 2 AM.

 

Day 5: June 20 2002

 

Yesterday morning Amanda and I got up at 7 and were fairly tired at first, having had only about 5 hours of sleep. Luckily, we felt better soon enough. We were running kind of late b/c we lingered in bed longer than we should have, so I, having taken the first shower,headed upstairs to scarf down a bowl of cereal and bring Amanda an apple. I wasn't sure what color she wanted. I had seen her eat a green the day before, but I wasn't sure if she liked to alternate or something. Thus, I brought one of each thinking that I could keep whichever apple she didn't want. She took the green, and now I have a red delicious apple living in my book bag along with a sack of pretzels. At this point, there were also several baby carrots, but those have been removed since. I also have a stash of several Jolly Ranchers. To get back to the story though, our activity for the majority of the daytime yesterday was a geology tour with Carol Hogsett. This was actually really neat, since there really isn't any geology in Jacksonville, aside from, "We used to be under the water, but now we aren't," and, "There is limestone under the ground which occasionally sinks in and harms people." FL geology is actually rather annoying to me b/c it prevents several forms of mass transit that I favor. Anyway though, back to the tour... Our first stop along the way was the Valles Caldera. While there the geologic history of the Jemez Mountains was explained to us with this really complicated geologic map. It was kind of exciting though, because everything here is volcanic and earthquakey- so at least there was more to say about it than just 2 seconds worth. Next we stopped along the side of the road near a pumice mine and got to collect our own pieces of pumice. Then we stopped somewhere else on the side of the road and got to find our own fossils of prehistoric sea dwellers. NEAT! Finally, we went to these hot springs at Soda Dam where everyone got to feel the water and taste it as well if you wanted to (I didn't). During the tour, we took lots of pictures allowing me to eventually finish my last roll of film yesterday. After the tour ended, we went over to Fenton Hill to see Milagro a neutrino sensing device similar to Super K. While there, something really fun happened, I found a rainbow colored computer cable that had been thrown in the trash. Quelle joie!!! Amanda, Georgia, and I are going to use it to make belts and wrist cuffs one of these nights. It is lovely. Also, next to all the huge computers they had this little chest filled with drawers that were all named in very technical ways, except for one which was called "Junk." We thought this was really funny, so we all took pictures of it. Oh, also earlier in the day, we had lunch in Jemez Springs which is this big spiritual area with a nunnery, a Buddhist monk place, and a rehabilitation center for pedophile and alcoholic priests all within a mile of one another. There were some neat hippies eating lunch by us. After I finished eating a super scrawny lunch of a different red apple than the one in my sack and three carrots that were different from the ones in my sack, I went into this little gift shop/ spa/ "bathe in real Jemez Springs water" place. In the shop, I used a really nice restroom with incredibly good smelling soap and bought a bracelet and a gorgeous card with a faerie on it. Flashing forward in time again, after Milagro, we had a 1 hour hotel break in which first I tried to sleep and then Amanda and I floated our pumice in the sink to make sure it really worked. Spiff.... photos occurred. We left them floating in the sink to see if they would still be floating when we arrived home or if as the wholes within the filled with water they'd eventually sink. That night we headed to Santa Fe to go to the planetarium there. On the way, we stopped at Gabriel's for dinner. The food was good, but I was disappointed b/c I couldn't get any pasta which I was completely craving by that point. Also, they make their own guacamole from scratch there, so I actually tried it. I don't really like guacamole though. Then we went on to the planetarium which I was really unimpressed with b/c Mocha's is just way better. So, that made me feel pretty proud of Jacksonville for having a good planetarium and happy for myself b/c I get to work in a good planetarium. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and got ready to go to Fenton which was kind of crazy b/c it was totally cloudy and was even precipitating which is bizarre for NM (though they really really need it b/c all the forests are closed here meaning no camping and almost no hiking since the fire threat is so extreme). Finally, we were dressed but we had to hang around the hotel for about 15 minutes to see if it would clear up. Of course, it didn't, but we went anyway. This brings me to my realization that we spent a whole lot of time in the van yesterday. That's ok though, b/c actually I have grown really fond of the van. This is because now, pretty much no matter where we go, we all sing <even the boys>. It is so cute and fun. And when we don't sing, then we sleep and sleep is good too, especially here, b/c half of our nights are at night and half of our nights are in the morning. After the typical almost an hour of driving, we arrived at Fenton Hill. We ended up sort of hanging around in the big building there for a few hours doing a lot of nothing. I used most of the time there to catch up on my written journal. We also sang Happy Birthday to Galen at 12. From about 12:25 to about 12:45 when they finally gave up on the clearing and let us leave. I went on a computer there and checked my e-mail again. Good news!! Mommy says that she got my senior pictures in the mail and they look really good. What a relief!!! Just as I finished e-mailing mom, I heard that we were free to go. Since it will still pretty early (1:30 AM when we got to the hotel. lol) We decided to set back out from the hotel, after about 15 minutes, for White Rock to paint the rock there for Galen's Bday. Photos of this can be found elsewhere on the site. The rock is at the intersection of two main roads as soon as you get to White Rock (the closest town to Los Alamos) from I-4. Much like the cannon at Tufts you can paint messages on it and camp out if you want to to make sure that no one paints over you. When we got there around 2, someone had already painted a happy bday message to Holly. We painted over that. Sadly though we found out that sometime between 2:45 AM and morning, someone else came to the rock and painted over our Galen message with a welcome home message and so he never got to see it. :( Luckily though, we have photos. After we got back to the hotel, we went to sleep.

 

Day 6: June 21 2002

 

Today we were awakened at noon when Lisa came over from next door to see if we wanted to go to lunch with she and Varen. Of course, since we had just woken up we couldn't go, but it was really good that she came over,b/c otherwise we probably wouldn't have gotten up in time to take showers, get dressed, eat lunch, and walk to Canyon School by noon. Last night's sleeping was really great though because it was the first time all week that we got to sleep for 8 hours. Huzzah! *_* So we got dressed and we walked over to Smith's to buy microwave dinners to cook in our hotel room. I got Macaroni & Cheese (yay! The noodle craving was finally satisfied.) and she got chicken teriyaki. We got through lunch with only minor cooking catastrophes. hehe. Then we came over to the school, where I am now typing. When we got here, we had about an hour to type. Then we stopped and sang happy birthday to Galen. Then we got some more time to work. After that we stopped to hear John give us lectures first on the asteroid tracking project that we are doing and then on halos and sun dogs. The halo and sun dog thing was pretty neat and now I am all ready to go out and look for them in winter, on the few day when it actually is cold in JAX. To be continued..... Well, I am back here again finally and it is now the 24th, so here goes... After the lecture on Friday, we went to dinner at Central Avenue Grill. The fun thing about this restaurant is that all of the tables are covered in white paper, and you are given crayons with which to draw on them. I drew my name and decorated it. Then I drew the salt shaker, some random 3-D polygons, and little symmetrical line drawings. Finally, since I was missing French, I just started writing random things in French on the table. For dinner, I ordered Caesar salad and tricolor lasagna. The prospect of more pasta would have seemed incredibly exciting, but I was actually really full since it has only been a few hours since "breakfast," and I just generally tend to be less hungry on weird schedule days. In case you were wondering, the 3 colors on the lasagna were red (mariner), white (alfredo), and green (pesto). Something that surprised me was that Jared's lasagna (he ordered the same thing I did) had the colors in a different order than mine. After dinner we went back to Canyon School. Jim Wren was there to give us a lecture on ROTSE and RAPTOR which are robotic telescopes. After the lecture, we got to go to this secret spiffy area that tests your car to see if you are stealing radioactive material when you exit. While we were there we saw more robotic telescopes, but at the same time, we got to take some really fun photos, one of us in front of some radioactive material that we made glow with a green flash to amplify the freakiness of the situation and another of us in front of this HUGE magnet that is worth $1 million dollars. After that, we went back to the hotel and had free time, since it looked as though rain was eminent rendering a Fenton Hill night impossible. We decided to walk over to the Baskin Robbins parking lot because we had heard that there was live music there on Friday nights, but just as we arrived there around 10 PM, the music ended. How strange to end a concert so early...! So then we decided to walk down to Starbuck's (about 5 more blocks away) taking no heed of the fact that lightening was flashing all around our heads. It began to drip just as we approached, but we just assumed it would be ok since we could just stay in Starbuck's until the rain died down. However..... we discovered that for some ridiculous reason Starbuck's in Los Alamos closes at 9. Ridiculous! So we have now pretty much come to the conclusion that everything in Los Alamos is closed by 10 PM except Blockbuster and maybe a few restaurants, but even the restaurant part is just a supposition. Anyway, so there we were stuck many blocks from home, with no umbrella, surrounded by fork lightening, and it was starting to rain harder.... (cue scary doom music) In truth though, we all survived. Surprise... surprise eh..... So anyway, we all just started running. This was a slight problem for me b/c I had my Urban Outfitters sandals on, and they have no arch support whatsoever, and they felt like they were going to break. So I ended up losing Amanda and Georgia for a few minutes, but then since Los Alamos is much much much less littered than J-ville, I decided to go barefoot. So, I caught up to them and then we all just decided to go ahead and walk and we also tried to take some pictures of the lightening, but I doubt I actually caught any in mine. Then Amanda and I ran some more and caught up to Jacob who was behind the other guys because he was wearing his Birkenstock clogs- also bad rain running footwear. Finally though, we got to the hotel Conoco to buy snacks only to see the entire sky rip apart and some of the most rain we had ever seen begin to blow completely sideways. The Conoco is in the hotel parking lot though, so we decided to run for it. Later that night, the storm got even worse and we got to take lots of photos of rivers racing down the road in front of us and whatnot, b/c, needless to say, drainage is not a major concern of people who design roadways in New Mexico. Amanda and I had invited everyone over to our room for a "party," because our room is the farthest from the rest of the hotel being at the end of the hall and having Lisa and Varen and then Jacob on the other side. Our "party" we pretty silly. We ate popcorn and zebra cakes and got to watch Jared "cuddle" with Amanda's bear. At some point, Jared and Amanda went up to the 3rd floor to watch the rain and Varen went to bed. Then Michael went to join them. Awhile after that Georgia and Jacob went to bed. So Lisa and I were all alone and, thus, decided to go find the people on the third floor. So we went up there and found everyone (Jared, Amanda, Michael) outside Michael and Jared's room which is directly above mine on the 2nd floor. The only catch is that they don't have more of our people on their one free side, instead they have some grouchy neighbor who eventually called the front desk to get us to be quiet. So the desk lady came up and knocked on the door of the room and then she goes "KA-NOCK KA-NONK ZIP IT." Wow. That was so funny. But the result was that everyone who was still awake (5 people at this point) came back to Amanda and I's room. This was probably some time around 1. Of course, we had nothing to do. We ended up watching infomercials and bad inline skaters, the least impressive of which was Sven who would just skate around and occasionally grind on something. At 2, we kicked everyone out of our room, wrote in journals for awhile, and went to bed.

 

Day 7: June 22 2002

I'm not really sure what time Amanda and I woke up on Saturday, but I know that we went to Smith's and got more frozen noodle things to microwave for lunch. We had to be at Canyon School at 1 so that Don could give us a lecture called, "Introduction to Radio Astronomy." Unfortunately, we didn't have anytime to work on our web pages then, which is why I am so far behind right now. The good thing though was that reason we couldn't work on our web pages was that we had to go back to the hotel and get ready for Galen's party that night. Before the party, we got to go swimming at this community pool in White Rock where the Gisler's have a membership. It was a really nice pool with an indoor showering and changing area, a high dive, a low dive, and two water slides for little kids. Not everyone went swimming though. Jacob and Georgia stayed back at Galen's house to help the Gisler's get ready for the party and Michael, Lisa, and Varen just sat by the pool. So that meant that Amanda and I were the only Earthwatch kids that swam, but Andy and Ellie ( Galen's kids who do almost everything with us, ages 16 and 14), Jake, age 19, who went to Earthwatch two years ago and is now a summer intern at LANL, and Holly, age 9, who is the cousin of Andy and Ellie from Wisconsin went swimming too. I didn't swim for very long though, because I started getting cold due to the wind, and it looked like everyone was just going to play basketball. So, I took a shower and joined the non-swimmers by the pool. We decorated Michael's wrist with "neat" bracelets using Lisa's pens from Germany. My decoration consisted of pink and purple flowers connected by twisty vines. We left the pool around 5 to go back to Galen's house for the party. That was really really fun. We had chicken fajitas for dinner. Some people played badminton. Others played chess. Some didn't play anything. Then we had this really spiffy time when everyone was playing instruments and singing (b/c the Gisler's have every kind of instrument you can imagine and even ones you can't imagine). I had a lot of fun getting to sing b/c that is something that I haven't gotten to do much before this trip, and now I am getting to do it all the time. After the music time, we had good homemade ice cream cake, cookies, and brownies, and we watched Contact, which I have decided I like very much. Quite clever! The movie was even more relevant though b/c tomorrow (it is actually Monday right now) we are going to the VLA or the RFHA, as we prefer to call it, where most of the movie takes place. The Gisler party ended at about 1 AM and then we went home and slept.

 

Day 8: June 23 2002

 

Yesterday we got up around 11:20, I think, because we had to meet for lunch at 12. We went back to China Moon for Chinese buffet. Amanda, myself, Jacob, and Georgia all liked it. Lisa and Varen left b/c they refused to eat Chinese food again and Michael and Jared couldn't even go b/c they were in the middle of doing their laundry, which is really what we probably should have been doing, since Amanda is out of clothes and just borrowing my shirts now which is ok with me. But still.... we need to wash clothes soon. Anyhow, it was just the four of us and Scott at lunch. The food was pretty good and then we sat around forever and made a paper sculpture garden that I photographed. We also got lots of fortune cookies, b/c we kept getting lame fortunes. Finally we headed back to the hotel to get ready for the hike in Bandelier at 2. The Bandelier hike came as a bit of a surprise to me b/c I was told the following, "You will be going on a 1.5 mile hike on a paved road." What actually happened was, "You will be going on a 1.5 mile road some of which is not a loop; some of which is paved; most of which is in full sun in New Mexico in June. It will also be necessary that you ascend ladders and eventually 140 ft straight up the side of a mountain using ladders and steps that no one with an above average circumference would have been able to navigate." As much as it sounds like I am complaining (not to mention the fact that I didn't bring enough water), I actually had a great time in Bandelier. It was really interesting to see the cliff dwellings and I got to take lots of spiffy pictures. However, the shower when I got home and the water and chocolate ice cream sandwich that I purchased upon finishing the hike were greatly appreciated. TBC....... Ok. I am back and it is now the 26th. It's a shame that we so seldom have time to update this journal. So anyway, after we were all clean and what not, we went out for pizza. This was kind of weird those b/c they only got pizzas with tons of toppings on them. Thus, I had to pick lots of stuff off. I also called home during dinner. That night we went up to Fenton Hill, but we couldn't really see anything due to 2 factors a) the full moon b) the smoke from the fires in E. AZ The night was still fairly interesting though, b/c I had very engaging conversations with Amanda, then Jacob, then Amanda again. Don also showed us his spectrum analyzer, and we had fun trying to pick up signals for FM stations and stuff on it. At some point around 2:30 AM, I completely crashed for about 30 minutes. After that though, I was pretty much ok. We also had this "evil tea" around 3 or so that made us all super sick. Yuck! We left around 4:15 that night I think. The van ride home was pretty typical. It started with singing and then everyone just fell asleep.

 

Day 9: June 24 2002

 

Monday, Amanda and I woke up a little later than we expected. So we hurried and got ready and then headed over to Smith's to get things that we could eat over at Canyon School. I got a box of Frosted Flakes (which by now several days later I have nearly emptied) and a small bottle of chocolate milk. John came in and talked to us about the asteroid we had been tracking, and we did all this crazy math that I only understood about half of. The graphing calculator saves the day again! Because the math and all took so long, we didn't have anytime to work on our web pages which is why I am so far behind now and am trying to be briefer in order to catch up. The result of all the math was basically that our graph did not work out b/c we had ignored declination in order to try to make the calculations easier. That night we had dinner at the Blue Window Bistro. It was kind of strange, b/c it was a really nice restaurant but the menu description was totally misleading as far as accurately explaining what I was to receive. Here is what it said (copied from my book journal): "Duck confit with roasted garlic and shaved parmesan on penne pasta with rich duck stock." What it turned out to be was a bowl of almost plain noodles with flavorless juice and a bunch of shredded duck. Quack quack!!! After dinner we went to Bradbury and Galen gave us a lecture on the Big Bang and Cosmology which was the neatest thing ever. I now have a copy of it along with 5 pages of notes that I took during the lecture. After that we went roller blading at Don's church's skating rink. Weird I know, but we had fun. They opened it up just for us, so it was neat and private and we could pick all of the music ourselves. We got home around 11:15 PM and then Amanda and I finally went to do laundry. It was really hot in the laundry room, so we had to sit out in the hall and there was also this one washer that shook like crazy and made us think it was going to explode or something. We finally finished up around 1:30 AM, but then we were all hyper and untired so we stayed up in our room until 3:30 goofing around, talking, and writing down silly quotes.

 

Day 10: June 25 2002

 

We got up early Tuesday for VLA (very large array) or as we, Earthwatch people, prefer to call it here the FHA (frickin' huge array). We had a really really long drive there (about 3 hours). I spent about an hour of the trip eating an apple. Everyone made fun of me for eating so slowly. BAH! Oh well. On the way there we stopped in Socorro to eat at this restaurant that had "Black Dog" somewhere in the name. I really don't remember. I had Caesar Salad. It was pretty good. Jacob was at my table and he wrote humorous poetry about everyone at the table. Some people were mean during lunch and stuck this huge sausage in Andy's drink while he was being distracted. Needless to say, he didn't appreciate it. Finally we finished lunch, drove for another hour and arrived at the VLA. The VLA on the whole was pretty neat. We got to climb up inside one of the dishes almost 100 feet above the ground and take photos of ourselves. After our shift of people (we had two groups finished) got tour from the dish, we had to hang around outside the "barn" and wait for the other group to take their dish photos. So, we sat around for awhile in the dust. Oh yes, the DUST! Wow! I have never been in such a dusty dry desolate place. For awhile I really really hated it but then it was pointed out to me that actually the land was neither the ugliest thing ever nor as I phrased it, "the place where things come to die." It was in fact, pure, unblemished land. As far as the eye could see, there were no animals or plants or buildings or people or anything. Spiffy! But SO DRY.... My arms and heels were trying to crack even though I kept applying lotion. We also went inside another building after that and got a tour. In that building they had the funniest poster ever. It said something to the effect of, "Sharing mp3's is supporting communism!" It was all red and had the USSR symbol and what not, accompanied by a blue iMAC. I wanted to burst out laughing b/c gee whiz <<hehe funny old time expression>> the cold war has been over for more than 10 years now and the poster was brand new. LOL! However, I couldn't b/c this guy was touring us around and I didn't want to seem rude. Eventually, we left the VLA. We stopped in Socorro again on the way home and ate at Val Verde this steak restaurant that has been around since 1911, I think. However, in my opinion it was not really that good. Oh well. One funny thing during dinner was that the other side of the table made the VISTA, a little dish, out of tooth picks and foil and stuff. VISTA = Very Ingeniously Small Toothpick Array. hehe. Astrophysics abbreviations are really funny. After that all we did pretty much was drive home for like 3.5 hours. On the way home, though, Michael accidentally stabbed his lip with his Jolly Rancher so hard that it bled. By the way, while we were at the VLA, Amanda got bitten by this psychotic bug and her hand swelled up so hugely that we couldn't even see her knuckles. So when we got home, we got her Benedryl. So anyway, she kept trying to resist the Benedryl and stay awake which of course is totally impossible. So anyway, while thinking she was staying awake, she actually fell asleep on the floor in front of her bed. So, I had to wake her up and make her put on PJs and stuff. So, that night we got to bed around 1:30 AM, which is actually pretty early for us these days.

 

 

Day 11: June 26 2002

 

Yesterday we got up around 11:15 AM or so. Lots of sleep! YAY! Then we met the group at 12 in order to go to lunch together at Central Avenue Grill. More Caesar salad. I also got a side order of mashed potatoes. Those were pretty good. After lunch we went to Canyon School to plan our presentation for the LANL astrophysics group. After lots of effort and the entire afternoon and almost all night of work, we ended up with a 5 minute talk for each person and a 20 minute skit about our project in which we tried to measure the orbital radius of 25 Phocaea. We took a break from our work at Canyon to go over to Subway for dinner. Before dinner Lisa, Varen, Mike, Jared and I walked down to CB Fox to buy cheesy Los Alamos tourist T-shirts. I got a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt that has a uranium atom with a smiley face on it and says, "I've been to Los Alamos, NM. I glow in the dark." hehe Also, on the way there, we ran into these little girls with a lemonade stand and a little white mouse. We bought from and took pictures of them. It was so cute. The lady who worked behind the counter gave me my cookie in a hostile manner. I felt rather unloved. :( Oh well. That night we went to a lecture by Jack Hills on Comet and Asteroids in Near Earth Orbit at Bradbury. The basic gist of this was that everyone in FL is going to die if an asteroid lands in the middle of the Atlantic and there is pretty much nothing we can do about it. Urf! Really though, it didn't bother me THAT much. I just started laughing and couldn't stop as did all the other Earthwatch people and so I felt rude, but I couldn't help it. It just struck me as being hilarious. On the way out of Bradbury, Georgia ran into a turnstile trying to go out of it the wrong way. It was really funny. Then we went back to Canyon and toiled some more. At 9:35 PM, we went on our second trip to Baskin Robbins. I got a rainbow sprinkle waffle cone with strawberry cheesecake ice cream inside. It was so exciting! I can't wait to get home and attack the Breyer's that mom claims she got for me. After ice cream we went back to Canyon. We left Canyon at 11 or so and then we stayed up till 4:30 AM in my case and 6:00 AM in Amanda's case working and supporting other workers. Yuck! Also, Jacob stayed in our room till 4 b/c he couldn't/ didn't want to sleep.

 

Day 12: June 27 2002

 

Today I woke up at 7:30 AM after going to bed at 4:30 AM. Fuuuuuuuunnnnn..... (note the sarcasm) And not only that, I had the astrophysics group presentation to look forward to. yay........ (same sarcasm) Anyway, so I got up, took a shower, and went to the continental breakfast and ate two bowls of cereal since I was actually awake early enough for it for once. Well, the "awake" there is really only figurative. Right now it is 3:45 and I still don't think I am awake. After breakfast, we layed around in the lobby. Then we went up to the third floor to this weird room and allegedly practiced our presentation. This actually involved one run through in a 2 hour period and me falling asleep on top of a wooden table as happily as if I had been in a real bed for about 15 minutes. After that we had to head over to the "Moon Room" at LANL, so called because their is a moon picture from the Apollo program on one of the walls. Then we presented. It went ok. They laughed enough, but not too much. After the presentation, we got to go take pictures of this palm scanner that Don goes through every day b/c he works in a classified area. But then as we were taking the pictures, this woman came up to us and told us to stop taking pictures or basically they would have to confiscate our cameras and blow them up. Los Alamos is insane! It is weird b/c if you accidentally leave your purse some where or something then they often will explode it. Craziness! For lunch we went back to the Hill Diner a.k.a. "the all of our specials are country-fried restaurant." GROSS! I decided to get a cheeseburger and now I have a tummy ache. :( That is probably half of the reason why this journal entry is so whiny and unenthusiastic. The other half of the reason is of course that I am exhausted. Well, I guess that I all. I am going to scan some pictures onto this web page and then I will be off to the hotel to take a nap. Hurray!!

 

Oh also, there is a good chance that this is the last time that I will be able to update this journal. So, I just wanted to say that I had a greater time here than I ever imagined and I love and will miss everyone!

P.S. I also just got 4 letters from Connor. They were beautiful. Connor, you completely made my sleep-deprived day. *_* I am really sorry that I haven't had time to write real mail to you at all.

 

P.P.S. In case you want to know what is supposedly going to happen to me during the rest of the trip, tomorrow I am going to Santa Fe. Saturday we will be broadcasting on amateur radio from 12-4 PM about our experiences here, and Sunday I will have a farewell breakfast, probably cry, and then return home to sunny Florida only to await the asteroid tsunami that I now know is coming to kill me.