Purposely Cast Away

Rocky Mountain..."Hi."

So, I lied about not posting until I got to Guam. Right now I need a break from filling out incredibly large amounts of paperwork, so what better relief than posting to this blog? Of course, I doubt a single soul has really looked at this, and, really, why would they? Ah, the thrill and excitement! Why do I always end up talking to myself like this? Stop asking rhetorical questions? Okay.

Anyway, I arrived in Denver Tuesday night and hopped a shuttle to an American Legion just outside the Fort Collins city limits. There, I was picked up by Jim, the husband of Teri Kman, whose home I've stayed in for the past two nights. Both Teri and Jim were very welcoming (this was aided by some red wine in Teri's case). Once at the house, I met Brent, a California native who was hired as the other biologist II for the brown treesnake job. Brent is my age and he has a basic biology background, though he's aspiring to become a herpetologist. He's a really nice guy, very laid back, and seems to have a great sense of humor. He and I will be on the same incredibly long flight to Guam. We leave early Saturday morning (i.e., 7:10am) from Denver, which puts us into Guam at, that's right, 7pm Sunday night. The actually flying and layovers is "only" about 20 hours: the rest is lost in time zones and crossing the international dateline.

Since my arrival, I've been spending most of my time at the Fort Collins Science Center, filling out new employee paperwork, learning more about the project, and practicing data entry. They have a very well organized method of data entry, much of which was put together by one of my supervisors, Kathy Dean-Bradley. Apart from Teri, Kathy is the one with whom we've spent the most time. She's a really nice, intelligent woman with some impressive knowledge of Excel (a skill proven in her creation of many slick database templates and data forms that are, in a nutshell, idiot proof).

But enough about data, a topic so captivating as to put the average human being to sleep in under 10 seconds. Sorry about the keyboard marks imprinted on your face. To wake you up a bit, here's an amusing little task they had us do today to test our searching abilities: Gordon, one of the head guys for the project, came up with a test where folks heading out to Guam are given two "Where's Waldo?" books. You go through the books and time yourself on each page. Once you've done some searching for brown treesnakes on the island, he takes the observer data and sees in there is any correlation between your ability to quickly (or slowly as the case may be) find Waldo and your ability to quicky (or, again, not so swiftly) find brown treesnakes. So far, there's really not much correlation at all. Despite that, it's still a funny test and I came in 2nd, in terms of average speed of finding Waldo per page, out of all the people who have done it (about 20 or 25, I think). Sure, it doesn't really mean anything, but try not to crush this small personal victory, you heartless squanderer of dreams!

Last night we went to a place called Cooper Smith's, where good food, beer, and pool tables abound. Coincidentally, there was a black-footed ferret symposium going on that very evening: something none of us (Teri, Jim, Brent, and I) knew about. However, our Fort Collins hosts knew many of the people there, so we got to sneak in and play pool for free. Sweeeeet. We stopped short of raiding the buffet for which we didn't pay and ordered some of our own food. However, we did take advantage of the Wednesday special of getting 2 free pints with the purchase of a 14'' pizza. Let's just say we had a free round of beers and full bellies by the end of that excursion.

All is well here in Fort Collins and, with any motivation, I'll try and snap a few photos of the area before I leave. There's some really nice landscape around here, despite the fact that you can often smell cow and their by-products from the stock yards about 15 miles away. Yum!