Today it was back to work! We had four new people today. I met Ryan on Saturday, Jessica and Sam yesterday (Jessica is such a sweetheart! She always asks how everyone is doing and has such an upbeat attitude toward everything! I wonder if all Montreal-eans are like that) and Margaret, or Meg as she likes to be called, was dropped off to stay at Mary's this morning. Meg is from Boston but has lived in Ireland for 3 years as she attends University in Galway. She just graduated with her degree and will be going for her masters. I'm so glad Mary put her in Megan's room so I can continue to enjoy a room alone. Is this relevant to the story you ask.... probably not. Anyway... But this did make our little group 9 instead of 7 so it made me wonder how we were going to arrange the ride as the CRDS bus only fits 7 plus the driver. Well, we found out when Fin got there that she was going to come back and pick two of us up and that ended up being me and Meg. :P That's going to be a little annoying for the whole week. We also have to return in shifts.
So today we were all supposed to be making a plan of our lovely stone pile. Jessica, Ryan and Sam went to help Emma and Laura in Cutting 1. We got Meg, but we were also joined by two girls from Ireland Carolyn and Pearl. (They're great). I started out doing the drawing but it seemed like all my stones were coming out shaped like triangles! So I gave up on the drawing. During this time, Meg wanted to be ahead of the curve and decided she could start mapping Feature 3 (another pile of stones in our cutting). So, once she finally got everything together I was commandeered to help her and Pearl. So I told her I wasn't drawing as my last attempt was bad. So Pearl and I happily took points and gave them to her while she attempted to plot them. Luckily, this didn't last too long as Ian volunteered us to join him for geophysical survey work. Last week Ian did magnetometery where the instrument uses magnetic signals to detect features below the surface and he will use those readings to pick possible locations of interest. This week we are working on earth resistivity. There is a mobile unit with two mobile probes that go into the ground and detect an electrical current from two stationary probes off site in order to detect the resistance of the soil to the electrical current. This can also detect features but we were told by Ian, this warm weather is not the best time to do this as it is better during the fall or spring when there has been more wet activity and the moist soil shows up better and can better detect features. So there are small ropes on the ground that are 20 meters long and they are spaced 1 meter apart to create a 20 x 20 meter grid. There are red lines on the ropes at 50 cm intervals so we place the probes in the ground at each red tape. Well, this may sound easy and it's not that the machine is heavy but doing this in the heat at a rapid pace was so tiring! This was how I spent the rest of the day. Just taking turns with Pearl and Meg. I was the fastest of the three of us and nearly finished a whole grid by myself as Meg and Pearl had to go listen to the Health and Safety shpeel that we listened to last week. I did get to chat a good bit with Pearl and she's actually older than the other girls at 23. She'll be finished with her degree this coming year. She has four brothers, one a social worker in Dublin, one who's still in college one who's a contractor and one who's working in Australia. She's getting her degree in Community Work or something along those lines.
Well, after a hot day in the sun everyone else had cleaned up and were heading off site and they told me to meet at the house to get picked up as there were some going in the second pick up because they needed to get some groceries. So we helped Ian pick up his equipment and I said goodbye to Carolyn and Pearl as Meg had already ditched out and I headed to the site house. On my way I ran into Elle who was running to the shop to get ice cream for others. She said the site house door wouldn't open so she couldn't get in and they handed her money through the window. We went and got ice cream, I got one too and fed them back through the window. I learned the first group hadn't left yet and that's when Jean Marco pulled up with the van. Elle and I realized he'd have to come back anyway for the other 7 so off we went. Ha ha suckers!! Just kidding. I was just hot and was ready to take a shower to get all the sweat off of me! Anyway, that was my day, busy and hot but still worth it because, after all, I'm in Ireland.
Love you all and gnite!
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