Day 1: Getting Introduced

Well it was my first full day here on the island of Oahu and man was it a beautiful one. I got in last night and was met at the airport by the professor I am working with, Greg Bruland and his wife, Holly. After attending a Wednesday evening church service they brought to my dorm, Hale Manoa, and I went right to bed; it had been a long day of travel. This morning started off with a bike ride around campus to try to get oriented and obtain some kind of layout of the campus. I then met with up with Greg around noon and after an informatory bike tour and some lunch we went back to the lab to get to work. I was introduced to some of the equipment we would be using in the lab, the acid bath, the diffused reflectance spectroscope, the soil oven, and many of the other tools. I was then taught the process for preparing the soil samples that would be gathered from various plots in the field. I took on the task of ball-milling, a process which takes the dried and sifted soil and turns it into a homogeneous fine powder, my own group of soil samples to prepare them to be scanned. While doing that I also prepared a motion sensor camera to place at one of the plots tomorrow in order to capture footage of the feral pigs trampling the undergrowth. That evening Greg and Holly picked me up to go down to the beach across from Kapiolani Park to see the sunset, take a bit of a swim, and eat at a great local hole in the wall restaurant, where I was able try local foods, such as poi, Laulau, haupia, and chicken long rice. It was delicious. Tomorrow we are headed to a couple of the plots to do some field work. I can’t wait.