ODFW Adventures: V

At 5 weeks, I can hardly believe that half of my internship has already flown by! It seems like I just got here!! But I still have 5 weeks left to make my name in a small government branch. And don’t worry, I’ll do my best.

This week I made two food extravaganzas to make up for last week: pad thai and an Indian soup (the name of which I have forgotten). They were both eventually a success, although the soup ended up taking nearly two hours to make. The pad thai, with rice noodles, shrimp, vegetables, and a delicious sauce, was quick and tasty. Next time I think I will add some fresh lemon juice and extra ginger to give it a distinctive zing. The soup was a pureed blend of carrots, coconut, banana, and other ingredients along with pieces of chicken. Despite the time and hardwork it took to create that soup, it is delicious. All in all, I consider it a successful cooking week!

As for ODFW, remember back when I mentioned I was done counting samples, and I was destined to finish out the remaining weeks at my desk? Well, missing samples have been FOUND, and I have begun counting the final 9 samples. This will certainly keep me busy for the coming week, and I am saving my counted samples so that when I write a new protocol that will attempt to confront and fix the issues of high variance I have discovered in my previous samples, I can test my methods. I also downloaded the GPS points where the spawn was collected onto my computer and have successfully used GIS to represent the points on a map of the Yaquina Bay. All things considered, the whole herring project is moving along well and I can’t wait to look back on all I’ve done when I leave Newport!

I also helped work on the Nearshore Strategy by creating a table of all the spelling errors in the original document that will be part of our “Roadmap” task, which will show all the revisions that will have been made during this 5-year review. I also commented on a document that definied several technical terms and acronymns in order to make it easier for the general public to understand.

It seems that I have a busy week coming up, with samples to count, GIS to play with, and working on the annotated bibliography, so I’d better get started!