OOOoooh… We’re halfway there!!

Snowy Owl!

Wow, hard to believe that the semester is halfway over already. The end of the school year looks so much closer on this side of spring break.

Things that have happened since last post:

As always, awesome field trips!! My ornithology class drove out to Ocean Shores, WA to look at an irruption of Snowy Owls. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean taking a fieldtrip to Hawaii to look at lava… An irruption is a sudden increase in an organism’s population size. Snowy Owl irruptions occur about every 4-5 years in relation to the population size of their prey, lemmings. Labs in my Ornithology course have been really interesting; we’ve also been able to spend some time doing bird surveys in the area and dissecting birds to learn about internal anatomy and specimen preparation.

Regatta number 1. We had our first regatta the weekend before spring break! We raced in a dual (only two teams) against Willamette University. It was really great to be back on the water and moving fast. Per annual tradition, we had some fun jumping into the lake following the regatta. Our next regatta is this weekend, which will be much bigger with about ten teams. Head out to American Lake if you’ve never seen a regatta!

Spring break!! It is currently the week after spring break, and as always a

Rowing in the snow!

little difficult getting back into the classes/homework schedule… especially when my sister sends me texts about what she’s doing on HER break. I stayed in Tacoma over spring break for daily-double crew practices. The weather here was crazy! We had everything across the board: wind, rain, hail, and sun. And usually combo within one practice, which kept us on our toes.
We did get a weekend break from practices, and I was able to go home for a day, and Portland for the next, which was a much-needed break from rowing. I actually happened to go home during spring break of my freshman year and by coincidence took two very similar pictures.

2009

2012

Thesis: Yikes. How is it the middle of March already? I’ll be giving an oral presentation of my thesis at the Phi Sigma Symposium in April, which is coming all too soon. I anticipate I will be spending a significant amount of time in front of a computer for the next few weeks in order to tie up loose ends.

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