Another week gone so fast!

Mmk, so week two of classes is over and I'm definitely starting to feel it, not actually because of classwork, but because i've just been stretched a leeetle thin. 

This week I started my job, at 5:30 in the morning. That's right, I was so excited to not have to be washing dishes, but here I am waking up at 5:30 to count snails! It was ok, I'm still trying to recover though. So we met both Tuesday and Wednesday at six in the morning and drove out to the "coast", or inlet. But there was salty water and it was tidal and that's what counted. The weather was absoultely perfect though, I wish I had brought my camera, the sun was just rising over the water, none of the fishermen were out yet so all their boats bobbed gently on the water. The first morning a GBH (great blue heron) was striding through the water looking for breakfast, it was breathtaking. Anyways, we spent those first two mornings just figuring out what exactly we need to be doing and how we're gonna go about it. First we had to find the snails that we were looking for, they're called Crepidula Fornica and they're pretty cool critters.This is what they look like. Th senior I'm assisting is interested in them because of the fact that the first one secured to a rock or solid surface (sometimes a hermit crab) is a female, the second one is male, and if there are more, the one on top is always male and the ones in between are both...so cool!! So that was good, even if I didn't get enough sleep.

This week has gone by so fast, I'm having a hard time remembering what we did. This week the East side of our did some bonding, last Friday afternoon we scrounged all the cardboard boxes we could out of two trash rooms and built a cardboard fort in the boys room. it was utterly amazing and lasted for two whole days before gravity just brought it down (Everybody who passed the room was astounded by our masterpiece). We helped to finish the job and then blasted "Time to Say Goodbye" through the dorm as we carried the remnants down to the trash room. The first pic is of the finished box fort (sorry it's small). The second is of Tom and me doing a victory high five, we had just successfully acquired a bunch more building materials from Hyde Hall. Then there's the one of me peeking out of the entrance and the last is of our procession with the pieces, it was quite dramatic. 

Sunday night Danny, (the boy in red above) made dinner for our whole floor in Mac house. We went to help and cut veggies. He made an amazing chocolate cake and Texas Macaroni, I am so glad that I ended up on a floor with him. Today is Jen's birthday and he baked her fabulous chocolate cookies that I can't stop eating. 

Today I went on my first Environmental Studies field trip which was fun, but also way too early in the morning for a Saturday. We drove out to Merrymeeting Bay and broke up into groups and did tests. I was in an insect group and we spent a few hours trying to catch and then count insects, it was very arduous. 

Tonight is the 80s party at Quinby House, my roommates and I have opted out of going, but we're making up for it by doing our reading and listening to 80s music, and we've definitely gotten into the party spirit, we're going to head to Supersnacks later and have a wonderful Saturday night, and then get a good amount of sleep. 

Tomorrow I hope to be going to a Diabetes walk in Portland because tomorrow is also the Race for the Cure in my Portland and i'm really sad that I'm not able to do it with the same people i've been going with for the past few years. This will hopefully be a lot of fun

That's about all for now, not much has really been happening. 

p.s. if you feel any inclination to writing snail mail, I would be an ecstatic recipient. My mail address is: 

Rebecca Perez

765 Smith Union

Brunswick, ME 04011-8407

The First Couple of Weeks

So first of all I do realize that I am not actually living in Portland Maine, but I am close enough that I think it's ok to put it in the heading. We are only twenty minutes away from the city...town? It's pretty small, but it is quite cute.

Anyways...I've officially been in Brunswick for 25 days and it's all been pretty great. I arrived here by myself on the 20th of August for the Bowdoin Science Experience (BSE). I'm really glad I decided to participate in the program, we all definitely got a head start on getting to know college life. There were 24 students and fifteen upper classmen mentors. We spent a lot of time going through all the orientation kind of things like learning how to use the library and the Bowdoin network and I'm pretty sure we had three talks about the different support systems there are in place here, which is good, but kind of repetitive. It was ok though, we had a lot of time to do other stuff, we probably played around four to six hours of games a night, often staying up until the wee hours of the morning playing Mao or Apples to Apples. We were also assigned lab groups which were led by our premajor academic advisor, so we got to meet and talk with them early. I chose the Field biology lab and it was amazing, we went out to Professor Wheelwright's house and caught frogs in his pond and put up nets to try to catch birds. We also took a hike through the Bowdoin Pines to find as many different types of mushrooms as we could. I didn't particularly enjoy that hike, I did find a lot of mushrooms, but the mosquitoes also found me...I walked out of there with about 70 bites on my legs alone. 

The BSE ended on the 26th, but we're all still hanging out and we've got a lot of dinners and stuff throughout the year which is cool. Also, the BSE has grant money that they're using to pay students from the program to help as research assistants for professors and upper classmen that have research projects. We had to apply for the ones we were interested in and I got placed with Amy Johnson, a marine biology professor, so I'm going to be getting paid to help with her and a couple other people's research. I'm really excited to get started, Rachel (I think she's a senior) is interested in marine snails and how the reproduce and other aspects of them so we're going to be going out to the coast to study them. This work study position also enabled me to not have to work in dining services, which is utterly amazing. My first year of college and I don't have to be a grunt worker, I get to actually be part of research...I'M SO STOKED!! I've talked to a lot of people who are into science and would love to have this opportunity, but couldn't take advantage of it beacuse they didn't do the BSE, so I'm completely glad that I did come out extra early. 

After the BSE, the rest of the freshman class showed up (minus 12) for pre-orientation which is run by the Bowdoin Outing Club (BOC). It was really weird when tons of other people showed up on campus, we were all used to having the place all to ourselves and now there were hundreds of other kids our age wandering around in our home. This is when Mom came out to spend some time helping me settle in and put my bike together and also bring out the rest of my ridiculous amount of stuff. I met two of my roommates at this point, Jen and Mary, Hannah wasn't going on a pre-o so our room was only three-quarters filled with boxes and bags. The night of the 26th everybody slept in the Field House, it was slightly overwhelming and pretty uncomfortable. My group, Acadia Mountain Biking B, left with the other Acadia groups at five the next morning to ride a bus the three hours to Acadia national park. I spent the trip listening to Les Miserable with Cris and dozing, it actually wasn't that horrible. We arrived in Acadia and set up camp, the tents were ridiculously hard to put up, they were not symmetrical, but we finally got them figured out and then hopped on our bikes for a "short" bike ride. 

My group had ten first-years and two upperclassmen leaders. So there were twelve pretty tired college students riding around Acadia. It was fun, we headed off to find a carriage trail and it was all very pretty. The weather was perfect, the pictures show one of the lakes we biked by that first day. We only really had one incident, one girl, Caitlin, skidded turning a corner on gravel and fell pretty hard, she got a couple of scratches and it wasn't that bad...but then we decided to take the quickest way back to camp, which involved going the wrong way on a one way street, it seemed ok because it was two lanes and we were in the passing lane, and it was ok, until a bus turned a corner going ridiculously fast in the same lane we were in. It pretty much skimmed us, and Caitlin decided that she needed to take some action and dove off her bike into the ditch on the side of the road. That wasn't very pleasant, and then a cop drove by and told us that we had to turn around. So we ended up walking a couple miles uphill back to where we had started going the wrong way, and then it was probably another five or six miles back to camp. That first ride ended up being about 22 miles long, it wasn't that easy!! 

The next morning we woke up at three to hike the four miles up Cadillac Mountain to be some of the first people to see the sun rise on the continental US...it was really really cool!! We were all pretty much sleepwalking on the way up, but it was beautiful and definitely worth it. There it is, the sun just peeking up over the horizon. 

We spent the rest of that day napping and just hanging out...we played a lot of four square. The next couple of days we went biking a couple more times and did a couple more hikes. The most exciting thing we did though, was finish the Five and a half pounds of cheese that the kitchen gave us...it is not a common occurrence for a pre-o group to finish the cheese, and we did it!!Here's a pic of the cheese being cut up for mac and cheese...we all ate some at every meal just so we could finish it. 

We came back from pre-o and started orientation for realsies this time. There were a lot more talks about being safe, we matriculated and saw Nathaniel Hawthorne's signature in the Matriculation book from over one hundred years ago...kinda cool. We met with our advisors and made our schedules, put together our rooms and met our roommates. It was all very exciting, yet boring at the same time. My roommates are all really cool: Jen is from Michigan and is into technical theatre, Mary is from Portland ME and a ballerina and Hannah is a really cool hippy poet from Orono Maine. We all get along really well and our room is fabulous...and surprisingly really clean. We've also adopted two good friends as roommates as well. Jade lives on the second floor of Coleman (my dorm hall) and likes to spend a lot of time with us because none of us do the ridiculous things that typical college students seem to enjoy, so we hang out and play games and sing disney and musicals very loudly. We've also brought Malachi in because she lives far away and in a double...so now we really have six roomies.

Ok, so the picture with the beds in it is of my room that I share with Hannah, this is where we sleep and that's about it. Then next ones are all of our common room. It's really big and now that we've got rugs it's really nice and homey. Our food area is well stocked as you can see and the last pic is of my corner. It's quite lovely. My room and the boys room next door have become really good friends. The first night it rained we all went out puddle jumping and dancing in the rain for a good hour and a half, we also built a box fort in their room yesterday, it was amazing. 

To end this, I'm taking four classes, psych 101, chem 101, music theory 101 and Environmental Studies 101. I didn't get a first year seminar, but i will take one in the spring. All my classes are really interesting and I'm doing pretty well so far, even though we've really only had one full week of classes. I've also joined a few clubs that haven't started yet, like Salsa...as well as the Concert band where I'm playing the oboe. I've also joined the JV soccer team which is a lot more flexible than Varsity or even Ultimate Frisbee which i was thinking about doing. I signed up for IM (intramural) tennis and am looking into joining the Craft Center, so I'm keeping busy.

I'm having a great time out here, Brunswick Maine is a wonderful place...I do miss home a little, but I know I'll be back soon enough and until then I have Google street view to look at my house.