New Home: Hot and Flat

I have moved to the opposite of Alaska. Literally, central Florida is a whole different ballgame. I'm not complaining though, even if I am sweating buckets. It's actually beautiful here, it sort of reminds me of Brazil, not the rainforests, obviously, but the tropical scrub/pasture ecosystems of central brazil look a lot like the scrub and pasture of central Florida. Hot, sunny blue skies on sandy soils and crazy scrub palmetos. Great lightning storms in the early evening too.

I'm working as an intern in the plant ecology lab of the Archbold Biological Station. It's a really interesting place actually, you can look at the website, www.archbold-station.org to see pictures of my new home and read about the work that people are doing here. I'm living in the women's dorm room, which is nice enough, AC thank goodness, and spending my mornings working on a restoration project for the lab, which mostly entails planting native plants in old pastures, and recording lots of info about them. Afternoons will eventually be for my own research, but since I don't have a topic yet, I'm doing a lot of reading trying to find some good ideas.

Everyone here seems really nice so far, there's about 6 other interns living here now, a few more soon to arrive, and also several research assistants and other staff who live on the station as well. So I'm making friends- people are interesting in food and running around outside- so we've got plenty in common. On my run yesterday I saw both an endangered tortoise and an armadillo, so that was pretty exciting. Especially considering that I didn't get very far because it's so darn hot. I saw a rainbow towards the end of my drive in, so I think it's a promising sign.