More tests and a new field trip

In an effort to avoid regurgitating Jesus’s entire last blog post, I’ll write about this weekend and the upcoming few days. Our three days in the field last week were informative, fun, and filled with some of the most beautiful landscapes I’d ever seen. Aside from witnessing what kind of methods ICE uses in their seismic station deployment and installation, I got to experience the little unexpected things that make fieldwork exciting. Some of these things:

· Taking a quick fifteen-minute detour to some ICE station in the Parque Nacional Los Quetzales and seeing the beautiful view.

· Stepping on an anthill for a little too long (I unfortunately now understand what the phrase “ants in my pants” means)

· Stopping to switch out the SD cards from one of ICE’s seismic stations on somebody’s farm and being invited in, fed, given a tour of the house, and playing with their pets.

Orlando and the box of kittens

Probably the thirtieth dog I'd pet this trip alone.

Since coming back from the field, our last few days have involved a lot of large boxes and too many cables. Despite our best efforts, the GPS units were unable to lock inside the office we were doing the huddle test in, and 2 of the sensors had potential problems, so we lugged a bunch of the boxes back to our living room and set up another mini huddle test on Saturday.

Today, we demobilized the equipment and packed up all the cables and electronics that were sprawled across our kitchen and living room. Tomorrow, all 6 of us are heading out into the field for two days to deploy 2 of our seismic sensors on the Pacific side. Since we’re leaving early tomorrow and will only come back Tuesday mid-day the earliest, we planned on dedicating the day to packing.

Instead, we went rollerblading, and what we thought would be a plain old roller rink turned out to be a full blown disco club on roller skates. I'm amazed by and jealous of all the people that can somehow dance in sync with one another while rollerblading.