7:08 am: We’re about to leave. I was brushing my teeth this morning, wandering out on the front deck, when Heather emerged from the other dorm room doing the exact same thing.
    I had my requisite coffee and hot chocolate, also Gallo Pinto, scrambled eggs and ham, and buttered toast. The bite on the third toe on my left foot has swelled and turned clear, like a blister (something got me when I was sleeping, by the bite marks it could have been a spider). This is very disconcerting, and also painful. Whatever it was had to have been inside my bed, so that makes it even better. I’m wearing the grey long-sleeve shirt yet again, it’s cold and raining outside. The shirt is already dirty and coated in deet anyway, and I use the back pockets. I’m also just going to pull on the track pants from yesterday, with that nice patch of mud on the right butt cheek. I can hear the rain getting louder. Last day of quadrats, let’s just give up.

5:05 pm: DONE! Back at 12:15ish, had lunch of Gallo Pinto, beef stew with carrots, beet and red cabbage salad, ginger ale and cola AND birthday cake for Elaine with vanilla ice cream and another Neapolitan-type with vanilla, strawberry, and something green and citrus-y, lime, I guess. We headed back into the forest at 1, and wrapped up by 2:30.
    In the pain/joy of the last quadrats, we added to our jungle names. Nicole is “Nicole the Anole, Princess of the Forest”, I’m “Dragoncatcher the Magician, Machete Man, Dark Lord of the Forest”. My love affair with the machete, which caused Nicole some concern, has also resulted in a machete blister on my right hand. Singing the Imperial March in the forest got me that last bit, and it’s become the theme music whenever Nicole walks into a room, much to her displeasure. Nicole got “the Anole” (a lizard), just because it rhymed, and she did some whining, which got her “Princess”.
    I got Nicole saying “crapping hell” as a mild expletive, simply from exposure. She countered this expression with its antithesis: “pie heaven”. This came from some graffiti in the Grind washroom which said something like: “If you ever get the choice between heaven and pie heaven, choose pie heaven. It may be a trick, but if not, mmm… pie.”
    We took pictures with some of the fronds from the tree ferns. Calixto identified their genera for us. Later, Diane, Dick, Sarah, and I went out to catch butterflies. Everyone else was too lazy to move. We headed up one of the trails where the butterflies were thick around some puddles. A swipe with the net brought in multiple catches. The phrase “shooting fish in a barrel” would only be appropriate if they were very large fish in a very small barrel. Sarah caught a battered Morpho out by the compost pile. When we released another butterfly, it decided to recuperate for a bit while attached to my face.
    When biologists capture butterflies for leisure, they hold the specimen by the base of the wings, take pictures, exhaustively consult the field guide, agonize over the exact ID of the species, with much pointing to differences in vein patterns between the specimen and the illustration, reach a consensus, announce the full scientific name to no one in particular, then release the insect. Repeat.
    I took a walk to “Four Bar Hill” (a bit of a rise back down the access road where the satellite phone gets four bar’s worth of reception) with Heather and Sarah. The sun was setting and clouds were spilling down Orosi, Lago Nicaragua looming over a vast stretch of the horizon, and a cool breeze blowing in from the southwest. Katsky and Elaine were catching dragonflies at the pond as we came back. I had a shower and am about to pack. Everyone’s searching for their stuff and complaining about their projects.
    “It feels like we’ve been here for so long and no time at all” – Sarah.
    I will appreciate clean towels! The bug bite on my foot has swelled slightly larger and is as disgusting as ever. I should decide what to wear for the trip out and pack everything else.
    I just surprised Kristin; I’m lying on top of our bunk writing, she just came out of the shower, didn’t see me, I asked her if we should keep our passports handy tomorrow (we’re just heading back to San José), and scared the hell out of her. I’m at eye level and wearing bright orange pants, why can’t people see me?
    I have a blood blister on the palm of my right hand from over-using the machete, that’s on top of the callus, and the splinter. I’ve scratched the skin off most of my bug bites, oh to be clean and healed again.
    We keep confusing a few people’s names. The guys really, except Ross. People have been calling me “Daryl”, which is at least understandable, with both of us being Asian and our names starting with the same sound. Daryl, however, has been called “Brian” more than once, and there’s no one by that name here. Dick has been called “Bill” by nearly all of us, due to a distant resemblance to one of our ecology profs, Bill Neill.
    We’ve become amazingly comfortable with each other, it’s like summer camp, but with more trials and accomplishments. It’s been an epic sort of the trip, over-rife with geeky references to LOTR, what with the trekking through the woods laden with equipment, and the hobbit-scale cloud forest, and Star Wars with the cloak-ish rain ponchos, swinging around butterfly nets like light sabers, or the sound effects when using the machete, or the blaster-sounding birds, I think someone referenced Ewoks the other day. Maybe this is a fellowship of sorts: “The Fellowship of the Thing”.

9:20 pm: Sleep soon, our bathroom is in demand, not just by people in this room, I can hear the water running in the other shower, but ours is cleaner and smells better. Dinner was Gallo Pinto, a tuna and onion spread on white bread, lentils and wieners, also a passion fruit dish. I drew a bit more after dinner, Doña Olga got a copy of the station drawings.
    Major card tournament going on, talk of graduated licensing, Daryl’s taking pictures, Nicole is copying out data, Josué came around looking for Chantal and sat at the card table for a while. Chantal went off to help Ross with the ants. Josué wanders around, grabs my flashlight and turns it on and off while looking directly into the beam. When that gets old he grabs some pens and pencils, we sit on the floor and review our vowels, numbers, and animals. I draw things, he names them in Spanish. We exhaust my Spanish vocabulary quickly.
    We’re up at 5:30 for breakfast tomorrow, start walking out by 6:30.