6:13 am: Up, changed. I’m reserving one clean set of clothes, I’m not exactly sure why. It’s cold-ish; a mist hangs around the trees and hints of rain. I’m pretty much the last one up in this dorm; the other group has the bird lab this morning. I can hear everyone’s watch alarms going off. Actually I retract what I said about the cold, it’s not, it’s just that get-out-of-a-warm-bed chill. The laziness factor of the dorm is increasing. Whereas before, we were bringing our personal toiletries into the bathroom and taking them out with us, we now have four bottles of shampoo, two tubes of toothpaste, and one toothbrush sitting on the wooden beams. The bathroom needs a mirror; I had to shave by feel. My towel is constantly wet, I’m eagerly anticipating laundry day. My grey shirt smells vaguely like damp straw, but sharper. I don’t know how well I want to detail the range of smells here.

11:05 am: Just smeared on some bug cream. Athena has assembled an impressive collection of fern fronds on the front deck. We did large tree transects today, it took about 25 minutes or less to do a 60m transect, nowhere near Ross and Daryl’s 3 minute “power play” of legend. “This isn’t a competition.” It rained during the lab, hard. I was working with Sarah and Athena and we had to shout to be heard when standing right next to each other. Sarah kept finding shortcuts in the methods, Athena found shortcuts through the trees, I carried the equipment. I’m very itchy.
    Breakfast this morning was of Gallo Pinto, scrambled eggs with ham, corn tortillas, Bimbo brand bread, hot chocolate, and coffee.
    I had my first real fall today, but it wasn’t my fault. I was helping Sarah up the bank of the closest stream, she pulled down on my hand, I slipped and landed on my butt. Laundry day is today.
    Things I’m looking forward to once we leave: hot showers, fresh clothes, dryness, Asian food. Things I will miss: the camaraderie, the diversity of life, being able to talk biology with anyone, the constant laughter, the coffee. Things I will not miss: the fear of snakes and scorpions and tarantulas, anything poisonous really, the sudden shifts in weather, the humidity, the biting insects and itchiness.
    We lucked out on the sleeping arrangements, only five people in a dorm that sleeps ten. Daryl snores only lightly and infrequently. The walls are thin enough to hear Ross snoring next door; there was talk of this at breakfast.
    Bugs are calling to each other outside. The rain suddenly started, heavy. It’s almost lunch.

4:22 pm: Did bug lab, not so great. Collected pitfall traps (cups of water dug into the ground so that walking bugs fall in). Someone asked Dick if we should label the cups we were collecting, he said we didn’t need to tell them apart (or something like that), so we dumped a few together to make things more efficient for us to carry. This was bad. Dick meant we didn’t need to distinguish which sample came from where exactly, but they should still be distinct from each other so that we could record the number of species encountered as a function of how many samples we looked at (a species accumulation curve). This means we now have one sample, so n=1, degrees of freedom=0. (This is bad as it leads to weak statistics.)
    There are now blank white papers sitting all over the classroom on which hundreds of soggy, mostly dead insects have been placed. We found two big, live spiders in the same trap and not wanting to have them escape on us, we put a net over the opening and took the whole trap instead of just emptying the contents. It’s a wolf spider, apparently.
    There’s a cool breeze, the showers held off for the afternoon. There is now a running tally on the blackboard of points earned through “soakers/mudslides” and “boards”, meaning how many times you fell down in the field or broke through the floor of the station, respectively. I have one point, Liz has six.
    Lunch today was of Gallo Pinto, fried steak, steamed plantains, mixed cooked vegetables, and a cabbage salad. Last night I found a certain type of bug in my food, “the food dudes”, that look just like the black beans in the Gallo Pinto. Either last night was the first time they’ve been in the food, or it was just the first time I’ve noticed. You eat the food anyway ‘cause there ain’t no more food available.
    Did some laundry today, cotton sucks; the shirt from the first day has barely dried and I just soaked it in the wash. We dumped our stuff into a red plastic basin of water and laundered old-school. I used a bit too much soap, everything smells great, but is still kind of soapy. Took a gamble and washed two out of the three pairs of pants I brought. Nothing better happen to the pair I’m wearing. In addition to the clotheslines hanging between every post on the deck, we set up a network of lines inside our dorm between the unused bunks and the shelves. The walls are bare boards, the windows are made of netting without glass, and the doors are always open, so there may not be much difference from the outside.

5:33 pm: We took a radio out on the front deck, which faces North, away from the mountain, and using a signal from Nicaragua, managed to tune into CBC Radio Canada for about 30 seconds of talk about science and technology, in French.

7:02 pm: After dinner, had Gallo Pinto, hamburgers with the very yellow butter, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and fries, major ketchup usage. Talk of Harry Potter and exotic fruit over dinner.
    It was also a Star Wars kind of day, in the morning, Nicole emerged from the forest in the mist, her dark rain poncho flowing out behind her. I commented that she looked like a Sith Lord, causing Daryl to sing the Imperial March (da da da DAH dada DAH dada) as she approached, much to her confusion. I explained it to her, about 12 hrs later. Also in the forest we kept hearing those birds that sound like disruptor fire. We also saw some jaguar prints, which were just cool.