Oops.

I was sitting, hunched over my dissecting scope as per usual, when Brad pushed open the doors to the dead lab and fixed his eyes on me. "It was you!" he declared. I am intimidated by Brad. He is tall and confident, does incomprehensible mathematical things for his research, and goes surfing during his lunch break.

My mind raced, trying to come up with anything that I could have screwed up. I drew a blank. "What did I do?" I asked meekly.

"You put seaweed in the trash can! The live lab smells like death!"

To me it had seemed perfectly logical to put the seaweed that had tangled up my attempt at a plankton tow in the garbage, but apparently sargassum seaweed contains an unimaginable potential for olfactory disaster.

Oops.

I was grudgingly forgiven--how is a young woman schooled in the great planes to know anything about the threat of seaweed in a trashcan?

I'm finding it harder to forgive myself, however, for the fact that I drank at least several amphipods today. I was sorting through my sample, putting the counted organisms in a beaker of water... or so I thought. It also so happened that my cup of coffee was right next to the beaker, and as I took a refreshing sip of morning delight I realized with a start and a gurgle that I was drinking much more than coffee and milk. Blech.

Thus is the life of a "research biologist" who actually has no idea what she's doing. I'm staying positive though. Several graphs that I created in Excel are boosting my confidence, and I found eight blue crab megalopae today, which is practically bordering on data.

And, although Port Aransas can lonely and inexplicably bizarre, the chocolate chip cookies have exactly the optimal ratio of chocolate to cookie. For the fourth of July I sat with some other REU students on the roof of the lab and learned that Texans do fireworks right as I confronted 360 degrees of mortars exploding like popcorn on acid. After I deploy my crabbie-catchers at sunsest, I like to dangle my feet from the pier and make wandering sounds on my harmonica while black skimmers graze the surface of the waves with their beaks. I have an enticing pile of books to read.

It could be worse.