6:21 am: I’m a thrown blanket, I need a tissue. (The second part is because I was stuffed up. The first part came from Sarah and me talking from adjacent top bunks after we woke up. Someone came in (Kristin?) and asked who Sarah was talking to. Apparently Kristin couldn’t see me three feet away from her because when I’m lying down in my bunk I look like an empty blanket someone threw on there. Thanks.)

7:21 am: Breakfast was of Gallo Pinto, buttered toast, eggs, leftover bread pudding, coffee and hot chocolate.

2:54 pm: Ow, this seat is hot. I’m outside in front of the station, Daryl and I brought down a table and a couple stools into the sunshine to sit and do stats. This morning was the Opilionid lab (spider-like arthropods, like Harvestmen, or Daddy Longlegs). It took a while to find their colonies in all the nooks and crannies of the forest, although we did find bats roosting in an overturned tree cavity. Luckily, we had Allison to reach her hand into the throbbing masses of the Opilionid colonies to pull out individuals and note the number and location of parasitic mites on their bodies. I stood a distance away and recorded the data.
    We saw Mealy Parrots quite close and Athena caught a Broad-Headed Tree Frog baby. We saw a Megaloprepus caerulatus, a Helicopter Damselfly, a huge beast with a hypnotizing asynchronous wingbeat. The creeks are getting shallower as the dry weather continues. Puddles and ponds are now mud holes, smelling of wetness and fertility. The area around the station smells like laundry soap as every available structure has been converted into a perimeter clothesline with all our laundry hung out to dry.
    Lunch was of Gallo Pinto, a beef stew with corn tortillas, cabbage and tomato salad, watermelon, and pineapple juice. I really like the vinegar in bottles packed with hot chilies.
    Walking around this morning, Sarah was having a conversation with the birds. There’s this one that does a “GRONK….. meep” sound; a low, mechanical gronk, like a truck horn, followed by a high, metallic meep like sheet metal scraping together. My voice doesn’t go high enough to “meep” effectively, whereas Sarah has now earned the name “the Grim Meeper”. We also saw two Magpie-Jays (these are the disruptor-sounding birds, thanks to Celia’s soon-to-be-home, the Mennill lab for providing the world with sound clips). Two paraques were calling last night during dinner. I need to get back to stats. The number of bug bites I have still impresses me, and my arms are only tanned on the tops.

7:04 pm: I’ve forgotten an appalling amount of stats in a very short time. Everyone was split up and had to calculate the class data for a particular lab. Daryl and I got the tree transect data; I couldn’t do a T-test by hand without help. We have until 12:00 pm Tuesday to hand in all our labs; I have precisely nothing I could possibly hand in at this point. I should do a good copy of the work I just did. Right after I’m done writing in this.
    We had a major thunderstorm this evening. Dinner was Gallo Pinto, a really good pasta dish, chayote vegetable mix, and pineapple juice. We seemed to be a bit short on food tonight. Either there was less of it or sitting around thinking all afternoon increased everyone’s hunger more than usual.