my sandbox

So my summer internship is over and it’s back to California tomorrow.  I’m excited to get back to Victor, and Arty, and California friends.  And I’m excited to start my new job at Berkeley’s bioscience library.  I like work, and I’m going to be doing some challenging stuff and, doubtlessly, learning a lot.  But I’m reluctant to re-assume all the trappings of working life.

Travis and I were just talking about this when I was visiting him over this past weekend.  One of the nice things about this summer internship was the fact that I had work, without all the trappings of work.  I could show up to work smelling like fish cause I’d just helped to pick gillnets, and that was cool with everyone cause they smelled like fish too.  There was certainly no expectation of looking nice, or having showered, or any of that.  Commuting consisted of walking across the street from the chicken coop to the office, although sometimes I did have to walk across the street in the rain.  I could work extra hours on four days to scamper off early for the weekend on Friday.

So even though I’m excited to start work at Berkeley, I’m mentally rebelling against the need to dress (and smell) nice again, to commute again, to adhere to a schedule again.  I’m particularly unexcited about the commute - I’ll be taking BART, which is nice cause I’ll be able to read on the train, but it’s going to be around an hour in each direction, all told.  That bumps my workweek from 40 hrs to 50 hrs, right there.

So all this is making me feel particularly determined to find a close-to-ideal situation when I’m done with school next May.  I doubt I’ll be able to find a job that allows me to show up smelling like fish (and I guess I can live with that).  But I want to be picky about where the job is located (Victor and I want to move back east to be close to our families), and where we live in relation to the job, and the character of the town that we live in, whether it holds opportunities for Victor as well as myself, whether it’s a place where we’ll want to spend some time.  Hopefully there will be enough opportunities when I graduate that I’ll be able to exercise some amount of pickiness - maybe my resolutions will melt away in the light of the reality of the situation.  Victor and I have both made a few sacrifices for the sake of library school and my fledgling career (thank you, Victor); nothing major, but we’ve still made some decisions that have steered our lives away from how we’d ideally like to live.  I’m hoping that with my first professional job, we’ll be able to re-adjust our priorities back to be more in line with our ideals.

Of course there are birds here, and I’ve taken pictures of a couple.  Bird numbers are high, but I’ve not seen very many different species so far.  There are a ton of tree swallows, who like to pick up insects from the lake.  Also common are grey catbird, yellow warbler, common yellowthroat, house wren, barn swallow, cliff swallow, and American robin.

There are a bunch of nestboxes here on fences and phone poles.  I don’t think anyone’s doing anything with them now but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were part of a research project in the past- maybe David Winkler’s work on tree swallows, since he’s a Cornell guy (I took ornithology from him!) and since the boxes are primarily occupied by tree swallows.  One of the boxes close to the chicken coop is occupied by a pair of eastern bluebirds:  here’s a couple of pictures of the male:

And, here’s some of those tree swallows:

As promised, some pictures. You can check out more pictures (individual commentary attached to some pictures) here.

This is the chicken coop,where I and most of the other interns live. It’s divided up into five units, which are studios with small kitchens, bathrooms, and living areas: I have the leftmost unit. The central part is a common area, where we sometimes play cards.

Gazebo overlooking the lake. This is basically the front lawn of the grad students’ house, which follows:

(I don’t know why I have so much trouble holding the camera straight).

This is our little harbor with a couple of the research vessels.

And this,which used to be a barn, is now our office and lab space- it’s directly across from the chicken coop.

Sometime I’ll take some pictures that actually have people in them - that will be nice.

Howdy. So I’ve reached the end of my first week at Shackleton Point, on beautiful Oneida Lake here in fabulous central New York. The folks here keep saying that this place used to be a “gentleman’s farm” before the gentleman kicked it and left the land to Cornell back in, oh, I’m going to pull the date 1940 out of my ass (+/- 10 years). It’s around 400 acres, meadows interspersed with woods studded with white clapboard houses and barns and things.

I live in what used to be the chicken coop, along with 6 other interns. Before I came I was told that I’d be living with the grad students, who get to inhabit the ol’ massa’s house, with lake views and the whole bit, but it hasn’t turned out that way- no room. But, I’m glad - the other interns are a fun bunch, despite the (sometimes shocking, to me) disparity in our ages. The one bad thing about them is that many of them live around here, or down in Ithaca, which means that a bunch took off for the weekend, leaving the place feeling rather deserted this evening. The chicken coop consists of two Quonset huts joined in the middle by a more permanentish structure which serves as a common area. The Q-huts are divided into 5 apartments, one of which is unoccupied. Three are occupied by a pair of interns each, and the last is my domain- I get to live alone because of my general elderliness and venerability.

Each apartment is kind of a little studio, with a kitchenette stocked with random utensils of varying degrees of functionality, a bathroom outfitted with small plants that grow out of the drain, and a sitting/bedroom area well-equipped with live spiders and dead flies. If you let your imagination roam just a little bit you can still catch a whiff of chicken droppings. Fortunately I don’t anticipate ever having to shut the windows.

Our first few days mostly involved orientations of one kind or another. We had an overall orientation, then a lab safety orientation (which I had to take because I’m going to be working in a building that has labs in it), then a boat-safety orientation (which I had to take because I will sometimes, if not often, go out on a boat). The orientations were typical of their ilk in that the ultimate goal was not to convey information or keep us safe, but to obtain our signature on as many pieces of paper as possible as magical talismans against future litigation.

We’ve had a couple of social events - a pizza meet-n-greet on the first day and a potluck on Wednesday (this will be a weekly occurrence). For the potluck, I made an appetizer by slicing up some granny smith apples, smeared them with cream cheese, and topped them with smoked salmon- this caused quite a stir. One of the staff objected that they didn’t usually have this sort of thing, and that the traditional appetizer for potlucks was beer. Turned out he was ok with having both, so all was well in the end. A subset of potluckers hung out around the bbq pit for a few hours after dinner, which was a good time.

So at this point you may be wondering about, you know, that job thing that’s the whole reason for me being here.  But, the laptop’s running low on juice so I’m going to save that for another post.  Also forthcoming:  pictures.