The Fog rolls in and We All Feel A Little Older

Well hello folks. I sit here in a government office building in a cubicle and write to my blog via email because I'm scared of the man finding me on blogspot.com. Its kind of funny, really. I tried to go to facebook and a little government message popped up telling me it was "inappropriate." Oh, America.
Anyway, things are going wonderfully here. I have finished my second week of work after today and I'm feelin fine! More than fine. I have learned so many things out here, more than I have learned in an entire semester at school in certain cases. But that's mostly because I learn best by doing and not reading about it. Anywho, so far I've seen so many beautiful and amazing things. I measured a Douglas Fir with a DBH (Diameter at Breast Height for non-forestry folks) of 99 inches! The second growth trees get crazy big out here too. It's kind of shocking to learn that most of the national park is actually second growth. There are patches here and there of old growth groves but most of it is second growth and a lot of it is crap. Can you believe they actually clear cut a 40 acre patch and then reseeded it from airplane with seed stock from OREGON?! You should see this stuff. Bean pole trees that fall over and it's so dense in there it's hard to walk and that's with NO other plants but ONLY trees. There is no ground cover at all. No ferns. No nothing. Weird. Anyway that's kind of an extreme example but there's a lot of that kind of thing. So basically what I'm doing is plot sampling all around the park to determine which areas need to be thinned the most so the forest can get on with it and we can stop intensively managing it. Every day I get into the office at 7 and I have coffee and shoot the shit with the guys in the office and then we head out to wherever there are plots randomly picked out on a map, navigate to them with a GPS and a compass and then do a variable plot with a basal area factor (BAF) of 40. All the trees that are in the plot we write the species name, of course, then take the DBH, height, and crown ratios. Then we do a fixed 1/100 of an acre (11.8 feet) plot for all the little stuff with a DBH less than 4.5 inches and write down the species and all that. And then we write down the names of all the other plants in and near the plot, like the ferns and flowers and such. We've been doing plots in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park so far but we have some to do on the West side Access road. You guys don't know where these places are but west side sucks. It's all blackberries and really hard to get through but Howland Hill is super nice. Anyway, it's cool because the state parks and national park kind of work together and everyone does work for everyone else and shares data and stuff. It's a neat little partnership. So. That's work. We come in at 7, leave at 5:30 and we get every Friday off so it's pretty sweet. I am always laughing at work and that makes all the difference in the world. Yesterday Jason and I shot quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail back and forth to each other all day long. Beautiful.
Outside of work I usually just hang around the house and we listen to music and cook dinner and eat with my housemates every night. I'm really glad that they are totally loving the communal meals. We are all getting along really well and everything is super laid back, which is good, because we spend every minute of every day together so it's great that we all like each other. Sometimes we go up to Requa, which is where some other volunteers live (they call us VIPs here. Isn't that sweet?!) and party or hang out or whatever. We go into Arcata every weekend to get some unrestricted internet access and groceries. Last weekend it was Oyster Fest, so it was just all these vendors in the plaza selling sweet oysters and beer with music and bunch of drunk hippies. It was fun but got pretty crowded after a while so I escaped to a coffee shop and wrote a blog but I guess it didn't post now that I'm looking at it. Anywho, that's all I know. We're heading to Eureka tomorrow morning so I'll try to write a more deeply reflective piece (ha) instead of this brief overview of my life. I hope you're all doing well. I listen to "Me and My Uncle" and "Mr Jones" like crazy because they remind me of home. The pictures of all you beautiful people on my computer save my happiness sometimes. Sometimes I get a little lonely out here even with all the great folks so I thank you all for keeping me going through memory.

Dave's Temporary Insanity Sauce - "It's temporary but time is relative."
I love these people. And I love you all!!!

Love
Jess