Summer of 1993 - Regular Outside Duties

 Most of my duties as a research assistant had to do with monitoring how well the wetland treatment system was working. Three times a week I took samples from a number of different locations, and checked the temperature of each pond. Here, I'm pulling up the thermometer to get the reading of that pond at the outlet weir.

I'm not sure I can remember all the places I had to take a sample from each pond, but for sure the inlet water (where it came up the pipe from the previous pond in the series).

Also, water had to be collected from each outlet before it ran out the weir.

And the fun one was getting a sample from the approximate center of each pond. For that, there was a canoe. I was usually going out alone, but SIL Loretta visited me there and someone took some pictures of us, so there were two people in the canoe that day.

Then there were these automatic samplers that pulled one sample each day. Battery operated, and the sampling bottle was larger than the usual small ones. Each unit was about the size of a 55 gallon drum. The top snapped off, and they held a circle of bottles. The cover snapped off.

And then you lifted off the battery housing. Under there was where the bottles rested in a ring around the edge.

So that makes 4 samples from each pond, which would be 24. Seems like there were 27 in each batch, but I'm not sure why I think that. Maybe the river at the pump, the river below the final outlet, and somewhere else?

Stay tuned for what happened to these 81 samples that were collected every week.

Meanwhile, if the weather was hot, I also took care of watering the test plots that were the project of the other couple- the ones that had less well-established plants. Chips loved to play in the sprinkler!

And where was Chips when I was collecting the other samples? Right there with me, of course. He got to be quite the canoe dog. I have no idea how he managed to stay put on the slopey prow of an aluminum canoe, but this was his favorite perch. He was beginning to show his desire to always be "top dog."

I also have a funny story about something he learned the hard way. We were coasting in to the shore where I would pull the canoe out, and the surface of the water was completely covered with green duckweed. He thought it was solid and leaped onto it as if it were land. Imagine his surprise when he got a complete dunking and came up totally green!

In other news: It's quite a bore, even if important to do- I edited, I wrote, I walked to the post office.

Total miles hiked in 2024: 169.8 of which 52.8 is North Country Trail

See The Cast of Characters