Week 2: 6/15/09 - 6/19/09

   Week 2 was exceptionally busy.  I attended a site visit, collected back-scatter data in Astoria, and tried to get as much work done as possible in the two days remaining in the week.

    The site visit was the longest of the days.  I arrived at work at 7:30 in the morning for breakfast and left close to 6. The interns were in a different building so we watched all of the proceedings on a screen, which was pretty strange.  I believe that the image of us watching was also being transmitted, which was a bit strange.  A couple of the interns (myself included) ate lunch with the people attending the movie.  I met a man from Canada who was really into sailing.  He seemed pretty cool. After lunch the interesting talks were given. 

    I had to try to scramble to finish all of my work on Tuesday because we were leaving the next day for Astoria (Wednesday) super early.  I had to make sure to be familiar with the program, and the LISST.  I also had to continue to train myself on MATLAB (I will understand this program, I will!).

   We all (well mostly) met in the marking lot of the school at 5:30 am (ugggggggg), yet did not leave until 6:15. We just barely made the first sampling, which was great.  Luckily, I wasn't in the group that had to scramble around to get there on time.  The point of this trip was to check out the LISST 100x to record all connections and the setup of the machine.  We did have to wait around for two hours or so because the guy in charge would only let two people go on the dock at a time. 

   I was surprised to see how far away the dock was from the campus (about a thirty minute drive).  The dock was pretty cool.  I was disappointed that there was no sun present but so is life. (I think that I'm going have to take a long trip down to the sunny shores of Cali after this internship and soak up the sun : ) )The dock was shared with something that had something to do with fishing.  They apparently sucked the fish up through these tubes that were about a foot in diameter.  We went into the small building at the end of thedock and began to document the conditions of the LISST.  We took some pictures and then began to disassemble the machine. 

   We took the machine back to the college campus and began to take some backskatters.  We tested both tap water and distilled water, and we tried a lot of different situations, documenting each of them.  This work was actually tiring.  I was surprised at how exhausted I was by the end of the trip. 

   Thursday was taken up with travel back so I missed the trip intended for the interns : (.  I was a little disappointed that I did not get to ride the tram because I've always seen and wondered what that thing was for whenever I would visit the Portland area before.  I did get to go home early though, since we put so many hours in the previous couple of days.  Friday was then filled with typing up all of my notes and reviewing all of the information to present to my Senior mentor, which is what I'll be doing early next week.