Week Four

 This week, I went out sampling with Jami on Monday and Tuesday. We went to a few creeks, two rivers, and three waste water treatment plants. It was interesting to see how Jami's sampler works and to see the inside of the WWTPs. Also, llamas! I didn't know farms in Oregon raised llamas! Ha!

After getting the samples from the sites, I stored the bottles in a cooler and brought them back to CMOP to filter out all the particles and dispense the filtered sample into several falcon tubes, which were then frozen to preserve the original concentrations of ammonium. On Wednesday, I did another temperature experiment and found the best way to get my samples down to 4 degrees is to stick them in the -80 degrees freezer for about 5 minutes. Crazy cold! On Thursday, I analyzed the samples I collected with Jami. The WWTP sites didn't have as much ammonium as one of the creeks we visited, but one of the WWTP samples did turn a menacing black color after I added the working reagent, which was weird since all the samples I've ever run have always been colorless. It looked like that sample was going to explode in my face, or maybe it was going to turn into a huge, monstrous black blob that feeds on fear and it would roam the earth searching for bad little boys and girls who didn't eat their vegetables and it would gobble them up to punish them for their vitamin-rejecting ways!! I've never been much of a veggie person.  D:

Then, on Thursday night, me and some of my fellow lady interns went out to the soccer game with Nate, Nate's wife, Shampoo-Commercial Nirzwan, and Alex. That was really fun and I never knew that soccer players were allowed to create a human body wall to block against goals. Weird! I bet the person who came up with that idea was mega hardcore. Then, we went to get crepes and then to VooDoo donuts! Awesomely delicious! Chelsea impressed everyone except her stomach by ordering the bacon donut. Apparently, it actually wasn't too bad. On Friday, me and my roomies went to Cannon Beach - jellyfish! I was so excited to see a jellyfish not in a zoo; I caught it in some little girl's bucket. And Saturday was the fourth, so we went to Portland to see the fireworks.
Week four over and out!