Another Week Gone?

I crawled out of bed this morning and made my way to class. We started on the topic of soils today. The main thing that I learned is there is a lot more to soil than meets the eye. It is a very complex and diverse substance, and is the basis of life really. Greg started off class with a really interesting and intriguing video promoting the soil exhibit at the Smithsonian. It had some really great quotes about the importance of soil and soil management. After class I met Greg in the lab to learn the next step in analyzing the soil samples I had previously ball milled. The samples needed to be scanned in the diffuse reflectance spectroscope. What this machine does is it takes a small sample of soil and shoots light at it at a different number of wavelengths and reads the amount of light that is reflected off of the soil sample. What Greg is trying to develop is a way for soil analysis to be done using this machine, instead of it having to be sent to another lab to be analyzed for nutrients and minerals for a fee. He is hoping to do this by finding some correlation between the results from the spectroscopy and from the soil analysis lab. So it is my job to run the scanner on the 48 samples I have and hopefully have time to look at the correlation between them and the lab results. I got through about 10 today. We also talked about me doing some sampling and testing on a question I raised yesterday. I am going to take samples directly from pig wallows and from close by areas that do not seem to have pig activity and look at the correlation in amount Enterococci, bacteria, in the samples. So I have a lot on my plate going into this last week. It was very windy and rainy this afternoon and on into the evening. Here the rain is called Manao mist because it is more of a mist than a rain. Hopefully it rained enough that Victor and I can collect samples of runoff tomorrow. Tonight I tried a new kind of dessert called mochi ice cream, which is ice cream wrapped in a Japanese rice cake. It was very interesting stuff, but I’m not sure if I need to have it again. Well, tonight marked my two week arrival anniversary; I can’t believe time has gone by that quickly. Only one week left till I head back to the mainland so I’m going to try to enjoy it as much as I can and learn as much as I can.