return of the blog

i spose y'all are curious about what i'm up to down here in DC/VA, living on my own and having a 'real job'.... i figured maybe i'd pick up my old blog and dust it off with a little update of what i've been doing for the past few months, complete with a few pictures. by this time, i've gotten around to doing quite a few of the 'touristy' things in the city like the museums and the monuments. i finally made it out to the FDR memorial today which dad has been bugging me to see, and i have to say, it's quite great. it was a crazy 92 degrees down here today.. i'm ready for fall already! one of the things that's really been great has been all the free music and festivals going on down here. last month, i made it to a couple of jazz festivals, and saw some other musicians at the kennedy center, which has a free performance every single night of the year! yesterday, i volunteered at the 'green festival' which had a lot of environmentally minded speakers, organizations and businesses so that was cool. being down in this area and amongst so much political activism is very cool... a few weeks ago i was involved in a war protest with about 10,000 other people. it's been nice having so many people that i know around town, including janelle and a good number of people i knew from cornell. my new roommate's quite nice, and so is our apartment... it almost feels too nice though it was what happened to work out. i'm totally loving being able to walk, bike, and take the metro pretty much everywhere, and poor reggie's probably collecting quite a bit of dust in the parking garage. work has been pretty good... a mix of computer modelling, lab analysis, and a little field work. it's rather interesting seeing the inside workings of the federal government. the people i work with are pretty cool, especially the younger ones. my bosses are nice, though our personalities don't totally mesh. there's quite an interesting age gap going on at the USGS... all the permanent employees are in their 40's and 50's while all of us younger people are just temporary employees because they're not doing much regular hiring. as most of you know, i spent the last 2 weeks in Iowa (Iowa Falls/ Eldora to be exact). the stream reach we worked on was the south fork of the iowa river and we did a bunch of measurements of velocity, stream discharge, dissolved oxygen (to quantify how much photosynthesis was going on), sediment mapping, and GPS surveying of the stream bed and banks. it was nice to get away from the city for a while and be out in the middle of soybean fields working outside. it was definitely nice to get back to my own bed yesterday and be able to cook for myself again. (let me tell you, it is not easy finding things without meat in them in iowa! we definitely gave up at least once and had a turkey sandwich when there wasn't much other option) for now, i don't know of any other field work that i'll be going away for, so it'll be back the office and analysing samples and data. next weekend, i'll be heading back to good old ithaca for homecoming and to rendezvous with a bunch of friends, so i'm definitely excited for that. i'll have to get back to you on the pictures, because my new mac computer doesn't seem to be agreeing with the photo uploader for this website right now...