They say that red is in this year

And it’s a good thing too because we are all sporting evidence of the super fun beach weekend on our faces.

I turned the jellytime responsibilities over to my REU for the weekend and then immediately left for the beach to distract myself from worrying about how she might screw up. Saturday was the perfect beach day. Then we camped out on Saturday night. Sunday was a little cooler, but eventually warmed up into an equally perfect beach day. We napped and swam and played a full contact game of ultimate Frisbee and had mojitos on the beach while the sun set. I’m sunburnt and sore and covered in beach burn and there’s still sand coming out of my ears, and I couldn’t be happier about it. In fact, I think I frightened people when I woke up happy on Sunday morning. The beach makes me happy, and I’d gotten a better night’s sleep than anyone has business getting on the ground, and when I woke up, my back cracked in like 47 places. Apparently I’ve been carrying a lot of tension in my back, and it all released at once. The REU only called once about jellytime. She had a valid question (which is not the kind that she’s known for, so I was impressed), and it was about an issue that I was able to fix over the phone. Two conclusions from the weekend:

1. My friends here rock. Going camping with a bunch of people can be such a production sometimes, but this weekend was completely chill. When we were all sitting on the beach in various stages of reading, napping, and watching people surf, it occurred to me that I was completely comfortable with these people the way I am comfortable with my family, and that’s a great thing to have. The article from Science was completely right when it said that field biologists are the happiest people in the world because they form a family with their coworkers.
2. The new tech in the microbiology lab and I are totally going to be BFF. This is a girl who knows how to have my kind of fun. She sang girl scout songs with me at the campfire. She knows how to make drip castles and doesn’t care that people are giving us looks about it or that it’s causing lots of sand to collect in her bathing suit. When I said, “hey, c’mon, lets dig a hole,” she didn’t even ask questions, just said okay and started digging (we ended up burying Des in it, so it wasn’t a completely frivolous hole).