New COAS People

Well this was the first week of meeting all my fellow new COAS graduate students.  They are a great bunch of people with various backgrounds.  Some come straight from their undergrad while others have done tours with the Peace Corps, studying abroad, working with the USGS etc etc.  Last friday at the General Grad School Orientation I met a really cool girl named Ashley Hatfield from NY who went to school in Colorado and is now here studying geology.  She loves mountain climbing and has done many of the high peaks in NY as I have.  I'm definitely going to stay in touch with her while here and try to climb together... really ironic that she happened to sit down at the same table I was sitting at alone. 
    Mac Barr and I ironically graduated in the same class from Bowdoin and now find ourselves in COAS together after years of being out of school.  I've also really hit it off with a girl named Anna Pakenham who just got done with the Peace Corps in Guam where she became a master scuba diver.  Everyone I've met seems to have had great experiences and adventures in their past like I have which makes me feel right at home here.  This week we had a tour of the Hatfield Marine
Center and Newport Acquarium at Newport on the coast as well as a tour of one our research vessels where I got to sit in the captains chair and check out all the dials.  Hopefully I'll be able to go on a research cruise at sea in the near future.  (we have to take a saftey course where they put us in dry "gumby" suits and toss us into the cold pacific waters and leave us there for a while.. I've heard funny stories about
them boating off and leaving people to scare them).  We also were able to eat lunch at a cool restaurant on the wharf which is owned by a prior COAS student.  I had Dunganese crab soup and crab sandwich which weren't as sweet as New England Lobster but still pretty damn good.   
    We also got a tour of the OSU wave center by Meg (girl I stayed with while visiting here in January) where my roomate Jason also works.  The facility was enormous and Jason informed me that if we pull the right strings there I could actually jump in and surf the wave pool (he pointed to some suspicous looking surf boards against the wall with sand on them).  We also got to see the Tsunami wave simulating pool which is one of the largest in the world (Jason told me he has kayaked in it).  It was very cool.... Check out the video of it in action here: (will post soon).  Meg did a great job on the tour :)
    After the wave center tour Anna and I asked Meg if it was important for us to go the All College Meeting scheduled shortly after.  Meg didn't think was too important so Anna and went to Dixon Rec center to go bouldering for a few hours... little did we know that our names were actually called out in front of all of COAS to introduce us and Anna and I were two of the few missing... whoops!  We then headed out (this is Thursday still if I didn't mention it) to the COAS picnic in Walnut Park.  I
heard there would be beer so I road my bike from my house up the hills from the valley to Walnut Park to partake in a soccer game with everyone and chow down at the BBQ.  For 2 bucks you could have all you could drink.  After a few hours I was amazed that the keg of Fat Tire Ale was still flowing so Mac, Eleanor and I decided to step it up a notch and make sure that it was kicked (embarassing that a party of
nearly 75-100 people couldn't kick a keg.  (the tupperware container in the pic is the end of the keg with Mac :) The bartender I found out was the owner of Squirrels ( a
very popular bar downtown) so I made sure to stay a while and chat it up with him so he would remember me if I came by looking for a job later in the year.  Well, after a while Eleanor, Mac and I and an burly bearded man named John from the wave lab kicked the keg before dark.  The three of us road our bikes (very sloppy at this point) to Chris Holme's after party where we continued to have a great time keg tossing and hanging out with the upper classman.  Mac was lucky enough to get a
ride home by Anna with his bike on top of her very cool diesel Bug (seriously it gets 50 mpg!) and I'm sure he was glad to get the ride because as you can see from the picture it was that time of night.... haha.  It was a rough night for Mac, Eleanor and I but we definitely made sure to represent the incoming COAS class and make an impression on the upper classman, ya know, show them that we know how to have a good time :). 
    It was a great first week meeting everyone and hanging out with the COAS faculty and locals.  I feel very at home here with everyone and I know that I'll have a great time here at Oregon State and will be able to experience the Pacific Northwest as much as possible.

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