Watershed Field Work with Nate

Yesterday BD at Watershed practically begged me to help out with some field work this week. At first I told him there was no way I could because I had to get a draft of my thesis out to my committee by Friday but he looked totally desperate so I agreed to switch my work days around and do it for him. To my surprise I ended up working with Nate Meehan all day. We had to lay out black tarps in 50x50 foot squares in different areas of the forest representing different canopy types. The black color is used to calibrate hyperspectral sensors that our company will be flying with shortly in Alaska I believe. This was cool because i knew exactly what and why we were doing it from my remote sensing background in graduate school. Finding the right areas and hiking the tarps, wooden stakes and other gear in took a while but setting it up didn’t take that long. The 2nd one we set up we had to clear an area of underbrush that took a while. I used an ax to chop down a ton of smaller trees and lower vegetation so we could stretch the tarp out for better coverage and visibility from the air. The whole day took 12 hours and I was home by 5pm (so guess what time we left ..). It was a beautiful day and we were afforded some nice views of the distant volcanoes. I also found a massive snail which to my surprise wasn’t scared of me at all. Back at home I was pretty tired so popped a movie in to relax after a physical day of work and I had no plans on going in to Watershed again until I successfully defend my research next Friday.

U.S. Vs. England & Watershed BBQ

What a great start to a fun summer day! By an epic mistake by England’s goalie

Green, the US was able to tie their first World Cup game. The ball was literally rolling at their goalie who mishandled it and watched it roll into the goal. My daughter could have easily stopped that shot... it was nuts! Emily and I had the usual crew over to watch the game - Colin, Danielle, Scott, etc... We all went pretty nuts with that goal and were happy not to see the US eliminated.

Later in the afternoon we had a soccer game (which we won) and returned to our place for a pretty fantastic bbq under a sky of stars. I love summer in Oregon, it never rains! At

first the bbq was supposed to be just our soccer team mates as Danielle had used our extra team funds to buy beer but when Kevin accidentally invited his fisheries

friends it became a typical BBQ. I called up Chris, Jason, Jen, etc and Somes and Jesse stopped by as well after they met Colin in Freddy’s buying more beer. We fired up the grill and got the fire pit going in the backyard. Kevin even set up the slip & slide for some cool fun, although I think he and Emily were the only ones who actually took a run through it. Emily’s birthday was on Friday so Danielle had brought over cupcakes for everyone to celebrate it. She

also brought Ollie over who is the cutest dog ever (besides Dromi of course). It was a really fun party and of course flip cup finished off the night.

Two more wins by our soccer team and we may actually end up finishing with a winning record! Hooray!

Watershed Sciences & Friends BBQ

Today was the annual bbq that Layne throws for all of us at Watershed Sciences. As usual it was at Adair Park and disc golf was involved. Emily and I showed up with some extra chairs and our ipod/iphone-compatible alarm clock for some tunes. The rest of the guys were out disc golfing when we arrived but returned shortly. Ladder ball, washers, etc were there as usual and the food was amazing. Emily and I hung out for a while and had a few drinks but took off around 7 with Alexa and Kevin to head back to our place and chill for the night. On the way out Emily and I spotted a young kid longboarding down the park road so decided to pull over and have ourselves a run at it as well. When we got down to the bottom the kid asked me how long I had been longboarding and I almost replied, “since you were born” but just said, “ a long time”. ha!