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Week 6: Phytoplankton Limitation Experiment 3

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Well despite starting earlier this week, we didn’t get quite the blooms we were looking for at all of our sites. Ironically, the early start may have been the problem, as the night collection may be to blame. Yes, that’s right if I would have remembered my Intro Oceanography classes from years ago, I may have recalled that zooplankton undergo vertical migration during the evenings to feast on phytoplankton. If we had collected some of these migrating zooplankton then its a pretty safe bet that it will affect our results. There was some question this week as to whether this could have been the problem, as we still got pretty strong responses at our OSU site. On Friday however, our Toledo, Cannon Quarry, and Elk City sites weren’t showing the responses we were quite hoping for, but instead of coming in over the weekend we decided to wait till Monday.

The one common theme throughout these six weeks has been that is quite difficult to work with something you can’t see. A million different things could be going wrong at any given moment, and the possible migrating zooplankton from this week is just one example of this. Paranoia can strike pretty quickly. Thoughts race through your mind: Did that bottle not get a spike?Is our nutrient spike solution degrading? Is the equipment malfunctioning? Were zooplankton not successfully filtered? Are the lights in the tanks producing tank effects? Or perhaps the most frightening of all: Is this just how things are? That explanation has seemed more and more amazing to me as the summer has gone on. I can’t help but think of the great experiments in science over time, and wonder if they experienced similar paranoia before acceptance. The answer to that question is probably a resounding yes. Science is paranoia. Science is exhaustive. Science is complete. It may take many experiments and many results, but eventually the answers to the questions will be teased out of the data.

So that’s what we’ll continue to do over these last few weeks–try to tease out some answers from a few more weeks worth of data, and try to minimize and/or justify the paranoia when necessary. It is a process that I am thoroughly enjoying. It is like unraveling a conspiracy one clue at a time. Alright, that’s all for now. Until next week, when there may be another wrinkle in the conspiracy, or perhaps another clue if we are lucky. Good night!

Week 6: a week without an end

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This week was for lack of a better term; long. Diana and I agreed to cover for Brian this week while he attended a family reunion. As a result I worked on both Sunday and Monday. I was also still recovering from the exciting time that I had at Da Vinci days last weekend. The week was fairly typical however, once Thursday came around I found myself getting ready for a break (but of course I still had 3 more days to go).  Several interesting things did occur this week though. A man brought in some interesting “shrimp” that he had found on Saturday. Unfortunately, we could not find anyone to identify it (everyone was off that day). I also had record high numbers on nearly all of my Estuary walks this week (all over 17 people). We are still tweaking the tsunami tank.  This week we installed a protective case around the two wave engines to prevent people from messing with the motors. Additionally we also did yet another ineffective software upgrade to the system. I’m still waiting for my Legos. On Friday I did my most spectacular ocean quest yet. There were actually more people in the auditorium when the presentation ended than when it began (quite an accomplishment).

We seem to have had more volunteers that normal this week, perhaps I am just imagining things, but I probably met at least 5 “new” volunteers this week. The unusual length of the week has taken a lot out of me. Normally I go for a nice walk on the beach every day after work. I was not able to do that until Saturday night. There was also the fact that my half way progress report was due this week for my internship class. I was very happy once I had completed that assignment. Finally getting to the beach on that last day made it that much more enjoyable. I also had fun watching the Olympic opening ceremonies with some of the other interns I look forward to getting back to my regular routine and also my nice long vacation that is coming up in August.

Working forever…….?

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I have seen more and more that work can have crazy busy times and super slow times.  I have been working for 7 days straight and will continue to work 3 more days.  Yet, these hard times at work will bring me a long awaited vacation of 5 days.  I have bought train tickets to go to Vancouver, British Columbia and Seattle, Washington, more about that later.  At work, I have been doing various things such as estuary walks and ocean quest.  There have been some amazing days at work.  There were days this week where I was completely amazed by the public and it made me feel on top of the world.  I had one couple in particular that went on my estuary walk and asked millions of questions that I could actually answer and they said they were so happy with my tour and welcoming attitude.  They talked to me constantly in the visitor’s center, I even talked them into staying for the eye level tank feeding and ocean quest.  They even went up to McKenzie to say how happy they were with me and how this experience was one they would not forget easily.  That day, I felt like I was really accomplishing something this summer and making a difference in people’s lives.

For challenges, the public was a large one; whether it was trying to understand the public in general or dealing with them in my project.  We had many foreigners come to Hatfield this week including Portuguese researchers and Japanese researchers to see our wave energy areas so I had to put on the shmoozing and know my wave energy research.  It was definitely a challenge when someone who knows way more about wave energy and shore erosion is asking you questions about your project and the goals of the exhibit.  Especially when there’s a 5 year old right there not following directions and basically destroying your project.  Yet, it  did make me feel empowered when I could fully answer their questions and get my point across clearly.

While I work for the next couple a days I mainly am looking ahead and seeing what I can improve upon at my job.  My project will need some more work, especially one how to keep the water from getting so dirty and murky after only one day.  I’m hoping the tsunami tank will be ready to go by Monday or Tuesday.  I’m also excited for more aquarist work such as seeing how the nudibranch  eggs develop and figuring out more about salmon.  Things like this keep my job interesting, I only await more fun to begin.

Workshop Happenings

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This last week planning for the upcoming workshop really took off. I soon found out how easy it is to miss an important message or reply in a string of 20 emails, and how complicated collaborating and communicating with people across the U.S. can be.

I spent the first part of the week catching up on the last week’s email communication and keeping my eye on any emerging tsunami marine debris/invasive information, mostly because the entire steering committee still wanted to wait on any word from D.C. about the proposal. As confirmation about its acceptance filtered through, plans to get the formal invites out began.

The second half of my week I worked remotely with a Knauss Sea Grant fellow on amending the invite list, and then with others to draft an invite letter and modify it according to the steering committee’s wishes. After a conference call to nail down some important details, I began work personalizing each of the invites (some 90!). The hope here was to reduce transmission of invite letter around to other non-invitees, simply because while interest in this topic is high, a productive workshop cannot be held with hundreds of people trying to contribute.

The invites are due to go out early this week, and then work keeping track of RSVPs will begin, as well as figuring out the best ways to compensate participants for travel, and also allocate funds for facilities, refreshments, AV equipment, and more!

Week 2: Tsunami Marine Debris

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In last week’s post I expressed the possibility that I might work on tsunami marine debris issues, and as it would have it, in the last week the perfect opportunity arose. Earlier this week, I continued working on several tasks  concerning the Heceta Head Coastal Conference and other things related to Oregon State’s Marine sciences webpage. However, early on I was made aware of a proposal intended for submission to the National Sea Grant office to request for funds for a West Coast wide workshop to help West Coast scientists, managers and communicators to form a coherent framework for response, risk assessments, management, outreach, policy, and research relative to the introduction of nonnative species by marine debris. This workshop is tentatively scheduled for the end of July and therefore requires an extensive amount of work in planning and coordination in a short amount of time.

Enter, Melissa. I have been designated (if all goes according to plan, that is) as the person to “to spearhead and keep track of all workshop arrangements/details/logistics.” Immediately, I’m a little intimidated. This simple description requires me to have a  working know-how of everything that’s going on in the seemingly countless number of Federal and State agencies, NGOs, nonprofits and spin-off task forces containing any number of combination of representatives from these groups. Not to mention keeping up to date and making sure everyone who should be included, is, among other pertinent specifics.  While such details and responsibilities are still emerging, I find myself already intrigued by this process. The number of technical workshops I’ve attended in the past is largely limited to non-pressing/impending issues such as marine reserves or spatial planning, so to have a similar process be applied regionally to an issue that is will be of high importance on current and future scales, is very interesting. I am curious to see how necessary protocols will develop.

Heading into next week my agenda includes getting steering committee members and invitees signed up to newly created listservs as well as preparing for a conference call to initiate planning for a resultant pre-workshop working group which will prepare a document regarding risk communication and coordination. Specifically this group will work to “draft a evaluative-based framework for  risk communications , outreach and engagement plan  associated with an overall risk analysis to  more effectively and consistently communicate the threat and engage managers, researchers, policy makers, educators and stakeholders in appropriate planning, reporting  and responses to: a) biofouling organisms associated with the Japanese tsunami marine debris,  b) minimize risks to people, c)  minimize risks from further human-mediated spread, d) integrate risk communications and coordination with risk assessment and  risk.management.”

Many of the aspects covered by the conference for collaboration and communication are very new to me, but have exceedingly important implications for my interests in how scientific and economic principles are integrated and communicated within multidimensional processes, such as responding to an impending threat like invasive species which has the potential to adversely affect everything from our west-coast ecosystems to our economies. I therefore enter the next week excited about gaining new insights about inter-agency workings, but also the implications these have for my broader interests.

It’s Friday already?

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To be honest, this week has breezed by so quickly that I am having trouble recollecting everything I have been up to. The only thing that sticks out in my mind about this week is some very important news I got about the Australia job…

I GOT THE JOB!!!!!!!!!! I AM GOING TO SHARK BAY AUSTRALIA!

Whew, now that the cat is out of the bag I can breathe easy. I officially found out the news on Tuesday evening via email. I’m extremely excited to be a part of the research team, and even more excited to finally have an answer to what I’m doing this fall. Much of my post-OSG plans had been hinging on whether or not I was going to get this job. As a result of getting the position, I will not be applying to graduate school this year and instead will prolong the process to next fall. After I get back from Australia in the end of December, my plan is to move to Portland to get my Graduate Certificate in Geographic Information Systems through PSU.

If you are interested in learning more about the project that I will be a part of, watch the video at http://www2.fiu.edu/~heithaus/SBERP/index.html

Alright, now back to the land of working at Oregon Sea Grant. As you know from my previous post, I am finally able to move forward on my event planning project and I have made progress with that this week. My biggest accomplishment was writing up some “proposals” on what the breakout sessions for the event would look like. So far in planning the event, our planning group has given a lot of lip service to having breakout sessions, but have not made our ideas concrete. I decided that it was time to move forward on figuring out what these sessions could look like. After meeting with some people and doing a lot of reading, I was able to develop a solid outline for us to work with.

An interesting side project I was thrown into this week was working in the areas of fisheries economics. Some of the staff at OSG decided that one of the impact statements I worked on needed better numbers to quantify the economic impact that was being claimed in the document. I spent a large portion of this week digging through economic reports on the fishing industry in Oregon and stock assessments of certain target species for the industry. Needless to say, it was a grueling process and made my head hurt. However, in light of the project making my brain want to explode, I found it interesting. I’m a very analytical thinker and I really like working with numbers. A lot of working on this project required me to problem and solve and think about how I could take X value and turn it into Y value.

On a not-so-serios note, I think my office is a inter-species breeding ground for insects. First, I’ve been getting returning visits from the hornets of doom. It’s always a pleasant surprise to have one swarm around my head when I’m in the middle of a phone call. Second, I have had a new species of insect cropping up in my office. It looks like a dragonfly mated with a carpenter ant. I don’t know where they are coming from, but they have taken an affinity to me and my office. My co-workers are now used to my daily yelps from the office and running out to grab paper towels to squash the flying visitors. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that Ballard sits on top of a nuclear waste site; it would explain all the genetic freaks of nature that keep cropping up.

To end this post I’d like to wish good luck to all the other scholars who are heading back to their colleges/jobs/internships in other areas of the US. As for me, I’ll still be lurking about Sea Grant for another two weeks. Stay tuned for more stories from “The Adventures of AnnaRose and the 3rd floor of Ballard.”

Knauss Fellows meet with Dr. Lubchenco

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Our Summer Scholars are our most prolific bloggers, but other Sea Grant scholars are having busy summers, too. The Knauss Fellows Class of 2011 recently took part in a “NOAA 101” briefing and had a chance to meet Dr. Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator (and a former Oregon State University marine zoologist):

Knauss Fellow Brett Hartl with Dr. Jane Lubchenco

(Oregon Sea Grant Knauss Fellow Brett Hartl with Dr. Lubchenco. Brett is spending his fellowship providing marine policy analysis and support for Democratic members of the House Natural Resources Committee in Washington, D.C. Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Read more about the Knauss Fellowship program

Things to do!

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Ladies and Gentlemen, after weeks of harping on how I didn’t have enough to do, I am happy to announce that I am now overflowing with tasks to complete. Hooray! Many things have happened in the past couple weeks and I’m under a bit of a time crunch today so I’ll have to skip writing you a novel today. This weeks post will be in the form of Q&A.

What’s changed between last post and now?

The main thing that has changed that has given me lots of tasks to take care of is that consensus was finally reached among all the various luminaries that influence my project. As I’ve mentioned before, my project was stalled because it has been difficult to A) get schedules of head-honchos to overlap and B) get them all on the same page of agreement when they do get together. Throughout the last week, some crucial decisions that affect my project were made and now I finally have a green light to move ahead. All of the work I had prepared to move forward with 7 weeks ago can finally be put into action! I have 3 weeks left with Oregon Sea Grant so the rest of my time will definitely be a race to see how much we can move forward on before I leave.

What are you doing now?

Well, my tasks that I’m up to are not as glamorous as wrangling sea turtles, but they are important. Right now I’ve been working on developing an event agenda, finalizing catering, reserving the venue, figuring out the logistics of registration, and other event planning tasks. In addition to event planning, some of my impact statements I’ve worked on need more refinement, so I’ll be hard pressed to finish that task before next week.

Didn’t you go do some sort of presentation?

Yes, this week was the final symposium for the Summer Scholars. For all the other interns, they will be done by the end of next week with their projects. Because I took some time off to go on vacation, I have extended my time to where I will be around until Sept 2nd. Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked, back to the presentation. Yesterday, I went out to Newport to the Hatfield Marine Science Center to spend all day listening to my fellow interns present about their projects. I kicked off the event (thankfully the last name of Adams always gives me the privilege of going first, which I love.). Overall, I feel good about my presentation. I had wanted to invest more time in it, but I had been filled with lots of other tasks to take care of this week and had a 10 hour day at work the day before the event. However, my feedback forms that I got back from my presentation indicated that everyone liked it for the most part.

Giving my presentation on policy to an audience composed of mainly scientists brought up a couple frustrations I continually run into when I give policy related presentations to a scientific audience. First, I always get a comment that someone wishes they would have seen more “results” from my work. For science, this is easy to do. You do your science, carry out your methodology, crunch your numbers, and then you’ll have some graphs and statistics to slap on a powerpoint to show your audience what you have done. Policy, particularly in regards to the projects I have been given, is not that concrete. Last summer, I helped produced a government recommendation. This summer, I’m assisting developing a workshop. There isn’t a way of representing those things in a graph. Instead, I explain what those items are about and their implications, but that never seems to satisfy a scientific audience.

A second thing I get comments on is having more pictures of my own. Unfortunately, policy does not have the glamor of running around with cute baby animals or standing in a lab with sophisticated equipment. If I took pictures of me in my “natural working habitat” I would bore my audience to tears with pictures of me sitting in front of the computer, or on the phone. Heaven forbid I try to take pictures of the meetings I go to. I would get some seriously weird looks saying “Who is the creep taking pictures?” It’s just something you don’t do. As a result, I have to rely on trying to spice up the text of my powerpoint slides with stock photos or pictures I scavenge from Google.

It would be interesting to give my speech to a room full of individuals who are in policy on a regular basis and get their feedback. I’m sure their response of what I should work on would be different.

Did you get the turtle job?

Stay tuned next week. I’ll know if I have the job by then.

Where did you go last week? I almost cried because I didn’t have a weekly blog post from you?

Do not fret dedicated blog reader, I was unable to blog because I was off in Idaho and did not have internet access. I spent a week at a family reunion wakeboarding and riding my road bike :) A welcomed break from sitting in front of a computer!

Make sure to catch the Perseid Meteor Shower tonight and tomorrow!

Over and out,

AR

Ladies and Gentlemen, after weeks of harping on how I didn’t have enough to do, I am happy to announce that I am now overflowing with tasks to complete. Hooray! Many things have happened in the past couple weeks and I’m under a bit of a time crunch today so I’ll have to skip writing you a novel today. This weeks post will be in the form of Q&A.

What’s changed between last post and now?

The main thing that has changed that has given me lots of tasks to take care of is that consensus was finally reached among all the various luminaries that influence my project. As I’ve mentioned before, my project was stalled because it has been difficult to A) get schedules of head-honchos to overlap and B) get them all on the same page of agreement when they do get together. Throughout the last week, some crucial decisions that affect my project were made and now I finally have a green light to move ahead. All of the work I had prepared to move forward with 7 weeks ago can finally be put into action! I have 3 weeks left with Oregon Sea Grant so the rest of my time will definitely be a race to see how much we can move forward on before I leave.

What are you doing now?

Well, my tasks that I’m up to are not as glamorous as wrangling sea turtles, but they are important. Right now I’ve been working on developing an event agenda, finalizing catering, reserving the venue, figuring out the logistics of registration, and other event planning tasks. In addition to event planning, some of my impact statements I’ve worked on need more refinement, so I’ll be hard pressed to finish that task before next week.

Didn’t you go do some sort of presentation?

Yes, this week was the final symposium for the Summer Scholars. For all the other interns, they will be done by the end of next week with their projects. Because I took some time off to go on vacation, I have extended my time to where I will be around until Sept 2nd. Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked, back to the presentation. Yesterday, I went out to Newport to the Hatfield Marine Science Center to spend all day listening to my fellow interns present about their projects. I kicked off the event (thankfully the last name of Adams always gives me the privilege of going first, which I love.). Overall, I feel good about my presentation. I had wanted to invest more time in it, but I had been filled with lots of other tasks to take care of this week and had a 10 hour day at work the day before the event. However, my feedback forms that I got back from my presentation indicated that everyone liked it for the most part.

Giving my presentation on policy to an audience composed of mainly scientists brought up a couple frustrations I continually run into when I give policy related presentations to a scientific audience. First, I always get a comment that someone wishes they would have seen more “results” from my work. For science, this is easy to do. You do your science, carry out your methodology, crunch your numbers, and then you’ll have some graphs and statistics to slap on a powerpoint to show your audience what you have done. Policy, particularly in regards to the projects I have been given, is not that concrete. Last summer, I helped produced a government recommendation. This summer, I’m assisting developing a workshop. There isn’t a way of representing those things in a graph. Instead, I explain what those items are about and their implications, but that never seems to satisfy a scientific audience.

A second thing I get comments on is having more pictures of my own. Unfortunately, policy does not have the glamor of running around with cute baby animals or standing in a lab with sophisticated equipment. If I took pictures of me in my “natural working habitat” I would bore my audience to tears with pictures of me sitting in front of the computer, or on the phone. Heaven forbid I try to take pictures of the meetings I go to. I would get some seriously weird looks saying “Who is the creep taking pictures?” It’s just something you don’t do. As a result, I have to rely on trying to spice up the text of my powerpoint slides with stock photos or pictures I scavenge from Google.

It would be interesting to give my speech to a room full of individuals who are in policy on a regular basis and get their feedback. I’m sure their response of what I should work on would be different.

Did you get the turtle job?

Stay tuned next week. I’ll know if I have the job by then.

So much to blog about

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Ladies and Gentlemen, after weeks of harping on how I didn’t have enough to do, I am happy to announce that I am now overflowing with tasks to complete. Hooray! Many things have happened in the past couple weeks and I’m under a bit of a time crunch today so I’ll have to skip writing you a novel today. This weeks post will be in the form of Q&A.

What’s changed between last post and now?

The main thing that has changed that has given me lots of tasks to take care of is that consensus was finally reached among all the various luminaries that influence my project. As I’ve mentioned before, my project was stalled because it has been difficult to A) get schedules of head-honchos to overlap and B) get them all on the same page of agreement when they do get together. Throughout the last week, some crucial decisions that affect my project were made and now I finally have a green light to move ahead. All of the work I had prepared to move forward with 7 weeks ago can finally be put into action! I have 3 weeks left with Oregon Sea Grant so the rest of my time will definitely be a race to see how much we can move forward on before I leave.

What are you doing now?

Well, my tasks that I’m up to are not as glamorous as wrangling sea turtles, but they are important. Right now I’ve been working on developing an event agenda, finalizing catering, reserving the venue, figuring out the logistics of registration, and other event planning tasks. In addition to event planning, some of my impact statements I’ve worked on need more refinement, so I’ll be hard pressed to finish that task before next week.

Didn’t you go do some sort of presentation?

Yes, this week was the final symposium for the Summer Scholars. For all the other interns, they will be done by the end of next week with their projects. Because I took some time off to go on vacation, I have extended my time to where I will be around until Sept 2nd. Anyways, I’m getting sidetracked, back to the presentation. Yesterday, I went out to Newport to the Hatfield Marine Science Center to spend all day listening to my fellow interns present about their projects. I kicked off the event (thankfully the last name of Adams always gives me the privilege of going first, which I love.). Overall, I feel good about my presentation. I had wanted to invest more time in it, but I had been filled with lots of other tasks to take care of this week and had a 10 hour day at work the day before the event. However, my feedback forms that I got back from my presentation indicated that everyone liked it for the most part.

Giving my presentation on policy to an audience composed of mainly scientists brought up a couple frustrations I continually run into when I give policy related presentations to a scientific audience. First, I always get a comment that someone wishes they would have seen more “results” from my work. For science, this is easy to do. You do your science, carry out your methodology, crunch your numbers, and then you’ll have some graphs and statistics to slap on a powerpoint to show your audience what you have done. Policy, particularly in regards to the projects I have been given, is not that concrete. Last summer, I helped produced a government recommendation. This summer, I’m assisting developing a workshop. There isn’t a way of representing those things in a graph. Instead, I explain what those items are about and their implications, but that never seems to satisfy a scientific audience.

A second thing I get comments on is having more pictures of my own. Unfortunately, policy does not have the glamor of running around with cute baby animals or standing in a lab with sophisticated equipment. If I took pictures of me in my “natural working habitat” I would bore my audience to tears with pictures of me sitting in front of the computer, or on the phone. Heaven forbid I try to take pictures of the meetings I go to. I would get some seriously weird looks saying “Who is the creep taking pictures?” It’s just something you don’t do. As a result, I have to rely on trying to spice up the text of my powerpoint slides with stock photos or pictures I scavenge from Google.

It would be interesting to give my speech to a room full of individuals who are in policy on a regular basis and get their feedback. I’m sure their response of what I should work on would be different.

Did you get the turtle job?

Stay tuned next week. I’ll know if I have the job by then.

Sea_Gil’s Blog Pt.7

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So, we Sea Granters have only have 2 and a half weeks left of the Summer Scholar Program. It’s crazy, I can’t believe we’re almost done here.

Well, this past week I got some new books to look through. One is called Distribution and Abundance of Fishes and Invertebrates in West Coast Estuaries and the other is titled Marine & Freshwater Products Handbook. I’ve already gone through the other books and I’m about to start on the products one. Hopefully, I can find some useful information from it, if not I’ll just have to return it to the library (I’ve been getting some good use out of my temporary library card at Guin Library).

After I finish that up, I’m going to start looking through articles that my colleague, Katie, has been gathering for me. I have a feeling that I will just find data about species that I have already listed in my spreadsheet, but maybe they will have some useful information that the books didn’t have.

I’ve also started working on my powerpoint. My mentor will not be around after next week because he’ll be going on vacation to Yellowstone (lucky!). I’d like to get him a rough draft before he leaves so we can discuss how I can best present what I’ve been doing this summer. So far, it’s about 7 complete slides and about 5 more that are still in an outline stage. There’s a lot of information I have to get across in a 10-12 minute presentation so it’s important that I manage my time effectively so I can relay as much of my story as I can. I think it is important to keep in mind that, though important, my work is only a small piece in a larger project studying how climate change will affect different environments across the globe.

But enough about work, I’ll get to the fun stuff now. On Friday, Betty, Deigo, and I went clamming. We got a pretty good amount and used shovels instead of the “clam guns” (I don’t really know what they’re actually called). I think the shovel approach works better for me because I found a lot more than I usually do with the guns. Betty made some clam pasta with our findings. I tried some and it was very good! 

On Saturday, Betty and I went blueberry picking at a place right outside of Corvallis. I thought I was going to turn into a blueberry like Violet from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory because I ate so many blueberries that day. They were so good! I ended up picking about 4 ¼ pounds and paid $5.50 for them, which I think was a pretty good deal. We then hung out in Corvallis for a little bit. I got two books from this cool store that sold them for about a half of the normal price. Betty brought some lavender from a store called Cat’s Meow and used some for a blueberry crisp. Yum yum!

Blueberries!

Yesterday, I just relaxed and went for a walk on the jetty out towards the beach. The beach ended up being a bit too chilly for what I was wearing so I didn’t get to walk on the beach for as long as I had originally wanted to. Oh well. At least it was nice and sunny out!

Oh, and I’m going to try out a Zumba class at the Newport Rec Center later. Hopefully that’ll be a fun workout!