When Nature Calls: Seventeen-day Work Week, Sweets, Summit, and a Seriously Flat Tire

You may have noticed that I skipped last weekend's update. That's because I was working for 17 days straight! I swapped weekends off so that I could spend some time with my mom, who is vacationing in Hawaii (more on that next time)! But yes, that means I had a very very long work week. And yes, I hate all of you who were posting about wanting your 5-day weeks to be over 2 days into them. >:-|

Anyways, it wasn't actually that bad - I got a lot of work done during the weekend that my normal crew was off, and I had a great time working with the people that I don't normally overlap with. Plus, I GOT MY OWN ROOM FOR 3 GLORIOUS NIGHTS. When you eat, work, and sleep with the same group of people every. single. day. including your weekends, you really want some time to yourself. It was magnificent. I could listen to music, read before bed, not wear ear plugs, and not wake up when other people woke up. Seriously fantastic.

Just trying to get the spare tire down...

One of the highlights of that weekend was Easter, for the good and the bad. It started out poorly when Caitlin came back with a flat tire. I don't know if any of you are familiar with spare tires on trucks, but they are suspended under the backside of the vehicle, and there is like a Chinese finger trap that you need to solve to get the damn thing down. It took us over 1.5 hours to get the spare down. Not to change the tire... just to get the spare off of the vehicle. And during that time it started raining. Part of the instructions said "Turn the crank and lower the tire, then raise it back up. Repeat this step a couple of times" You literally have to lower and raise the tire over and over again... AND IT STILL WASN'T WORKING. At one point someone suggested we get wire cutters to just cut it down, because our boss would "probably understand". We accidentally got it down eventually, but then the next challenge was removing the lug nuts. For some ungodly reason each tire has eight lug nuts. They seemed to have been last put on using a machine in a shop, because it took one person standing and jumping on the wrench to finally loosen them. And even then we could only loosen six of them - the last two had been stripped by the machine, so we couldn't get the wrench to stay on while applying force. Over two hours had passed and we still hadn't even removed the flat. It was Easter, and we were wet and tired, so we gave up. (Fortunately the other crew arrived the next day and managed to hammer the wrench on enough to apply force and get the last lug nuts off. Ridiculous.)

Meanwhile, we dyed Easter eggs! Well, attempted to dye them. We didn't have food coloring, so we resorted to otter pops, paprika, and cumin. They did not work. Granted, we were using brown eggs, so that may have been part of the problem. The other part could've been that we were using otter pops, paprika, and cumin. But I tested people on which eggs were dyed in what, and some people guessed right! After that we had an Easter egg hunt. We found some plastic eggs in the pantry the night before and wrote our initials on two eggs each. Then we randomly divvied them up and hid them. This was not like an Easter egg hunt from my childhood, where you chose cute and clever places to put an egg. This was ridiculous. Each person only had to find the two eggs with their initials on it, and it took an hour, WITH hints. But we did it! :D Made up for the flat tire. Kind of.

Other highlights from the week - we caught a Chinese hwamei (Melodious laughingthrush) and an 'Io (Hawaiian Hawk) - the first one for the project!

Chinese hwamei

'Io

I decided I had far too many chocolate chips lying around and decided to make fondue.

I spent half a day as a nest searcher and helped monitor some nests. That was really fun because I haven't been watching these birds in their natural environments very much, so it was awesome getting to see them sitting on nests.

We played some games in the evenings, including Settlers of Catan, Pictionary, and of course bowling down the hallway of the bunkhouse using water bottles and a soccer ball. Great way to unwind!

We also took a trip up to the summit of Mauna Kea - nearly 14,000 feet! What an amazing view, and not what you'd expect on Hawaii. Afterwards we stayed at the visitor's center for the stargazing program, which was also pretty awesome. Not a bad seventeen days after all!