Work hard, play hard

Today was our last day before the students come for the second summer session here. And we made the most of it! We worked hard and then played hard. This morning we had a staff meeting at 9am to discuss what needed cleaning or fixing or sorting at the center to prep for the students' arrival. Brett and I worked mainly in the staff offices and the student lounge area inventorying first-aid supplies, sorting through last session's lost-and-found, wiping down tables, sweeping, mopping, putting up new door tags, and printing out new copies of our center protocols to go in each of the rooms. We all took a lunch break together and then worked for a few more hours before going for an early evening snorkel.

To view the above video, you must be reading this blog post from the website (as opposed to email or a feed reader).
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2vpbWbcAls)

This evening's snorkel was really exciting and gorgeous. I've been working on identifying some of the fishes here, and I'm slowly getting better at it. We saw some goatfish, nassau groupers, cowfish, angelfish, squirrel fish, parrot fish, a trumpet fish (which may have actually been a sharksucker), and a gigantic porcupine fish! Plus, about a gazillion others that I couldn't identify yet. At one point, after looking at a really interesting fish right underneath of us and nodding to each other about how cool it looked, Brett and I picked our heads back up and found a huge caribbean reef shark right in front of us! Brett nearly jumped out of his shorts, but quickly pulled it together starting filming as we began to follow it along the sea floor. (The water was fairly shallow there, between 3 feet and 15 feet, I'd say.) One of the other staffers here who knows a lot about sharks was snorkeling with us, and she later told us she thought the reef shark we saw was pregnant. Reef sharks give live births, whereas some other types of sharks lay eggs. I wouldn't have known the difference, but that was exciting to learn about. We also saw a spotted eagle ray, several sea cucumbers, and a moray eel on this same trip. And... I got my first boat driving lesson! I still can't drive it by myself, but at least now I can practice as long as there's a licensed driver in the boat with me. All in all, we had a blast! As soon as we got back to our room, Brett said, "Yup, I like it here."

Tomorrow bright and early I fly to Providenciales via Grank Turk to pick up the students. They fly in on several different international flights, so I'll pretty much spend the entire day in the airport greeting students, learning their names, and taking photos of them to put of the SFS website before we all fly to South together. Which reminds me... my bio's up on the SFS site now too, if you want to check it out:

http://www.fieldstudies.org/pages/6151_jessica_moyer_student_affairs_manager.cfm