Just your average day in college today. We start our peer reviews for my ornithology class. We are all split up into groups of 5-6 people and over the week we get 6 random grants to review. We have to treat it like it's a real panel and we have to decide whether we think the grant is good enough to be awarded the money. It's a pretty cool idea, and it makes the class nice and relaxed as well as interesting.
I spent my evening preparing some ornithology slides for my exam this week. We don't have to do them but it makes learning the birds easier than flicking through pages of a book! I got ink for our printer which meant taking a drive out to Walmart. Hopefully this will be the last of the ink we'll have to buy. This evening, I collected Fiona from work as she had taken some of the boxes from the Food Zoo. We'll use these to pack up our stuff for the Irish students coming out here next year.
Tuesday April 28th
11am start today with rangeland ecology being more of the same stuff. Nothing exciting again happened today. For Recreation Behaviour we had a guest speaker who is a PhD student in Recreation of some sort.
This evening Fiona and I went and bought our 3D tickets to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron for Thursday night. I am quite excited for the movie if I'm honest :P We went and got some DQ afterwards just cause :P
Wednesday April 29th
8am start with genetics, we've started taking about human diseases and the likes now. Interesting enough stuff! We did some more peer review today in Ornithology and this time I was leading a discussion. I got a really cool paper which wants to study the way raven's follow wolves and feed off the carcasses left by them. They want to find out whether this behaviour is learned or innate which I think is really cool! We awarded them an 8/10 which Kris said was the highest rating of all the grants she had heard to date! So now I'm starting to worry that my own grant didn't do too well :P
My whole afternoon was spent learning my birds for my practical exam tomorrow.
I ended up falling asleep on my desk while studying them.. Not exactly the best way to study is it :P Woke up two hours later and continued with my learning.
Thursday April 30th
So I woke up at 6am to do some last minute cramming for my practical exam. 221 birds to learn and there is only going to be 95 questions. YAY. I had the exam at 8am which surprisingly didn't go horribly, it was okay! There was some birds I was questioning myself on but I don't think I did too badly.
Rangeland ecology flew today, we had three presentations and they were over and done with in no time so that was nice! We got out at 11.50 and class isn't supposed to end until 12.30 :P Handy out!!
Kate had organized a massive International photo which I helped out with today too. I was going to put the photo in, but because there's so many other people in it I don't want to, so if you're my friend on facebook you can see it there!
Fiona and I went to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron last night and by God is it a good movie! Would highly recommend for everyone to go and see it! It's also really funny too :D
Friday May 1st
IT'S ALREADY MAY! NOOO!
I skipped my genetics class this morning since I didn't get to bed until 2am last night since we went to the late showing of the Avengers. At 12.30pm I had an appointment to get the oil changed in my car and that all went grand. We left Lewis and Clark at 2pm :D
Many sing songs were had on our two hour drive to Butte as well as seeing a crap tonne of raptors! Bald Eagles, Turkey Vultures, 4 Golden Eagles!! (one of which flew right in front of my car!!) we saw some Kestrels, and some other raptors that were too high up in the sky or too far away for me to identify while driving :P
We headed straight for the 'city of Butte'. We drove around first for a while, it was like going back in time. We then went to Berkeley Pit, which was pretty cool! The whole area used to be mines, and one day they were going blowing up some part of it but ended up blowing up the wrong part and caused this massive pit! Over the years, it began to fill up with water. And because there is a lot of different minerals in this area that were being mined, they've all come together and mixed with water in this pit and have formed an extremely toxic lake. A man told us that this one time he was there he had a couple Canadian geese fly in and all die straight away because of the toxicity.
From here we drove up a hill to get a nice view of Butte. A recommendation by the same man that told us about the geese. So windy but so nice!
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| Berkeley Pit :) |
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| The view of Butte from a hill :) |
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| The menu for Sparky's Garage :) |
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| My BBQ pulled pork and BBQ chicken with sweet potato fries :) |
Today we left the motel at 11am, that was check out time. We first took a look around the shops in Butte that sold 'souvenirs'. Mainly postcards for me, I'm putting postcards from everywhere I've been into a photo album when I get back home :) We stopped at a petrol station, filled up the car and our bellies and headed off for Bannack State Park. Not the easiest place to find, and my sat nav wasn't working properly for me so we went old school on it and used a map. Fiona gave me the directions and eventually we got there! Now THIS place was like going back in time to an old western movie or something. It was SO cool!
Naturally I took plenty of pictures, I'll post a bunch below and caption them underneath.
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| This is the first building you see when you walk into Bannack. |
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| An old beat up car. |
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| Some minecarts and tracks in the town. Eerie. |
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| The church, in here the front row seats are more comfy for the more 'well off' people and the further back in the church you go the seats are wooden for those less well off. |
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| Myself peaking out of one of the little houses. |
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| The back of some of the houses. The little hut to the left of the picture is an actual outhouse! |
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| This was the school. How cool!! |
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| And this is the inside of the school, it's so cool. Of course I stood at the top and dictated! |
We decided to take the scenic route home. This involved driving through Jackson, Wisdom, over the Bitterroot Mountains, through Sula, Darby, Hamilton and eventually back to Missoula. All very tired but all very happy with our trip. For anyone coming to Montana, I would 100% recommend going to see Bannack State Park if possible! I know there's other ghost towns out there but this one is quiet, and it literally like stepping into the past. My photos just don't do it enough justice.
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| At the top of the Bitterroot Mountains :) |
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| WELCOME TO MONTANA! |
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| Beautiful picture Aoife took for me on the drive home :) |
Sunday May 3rd
Today was spent doing my genetics homework and I got it done yay! We just had to search a paper on an example of adaptive radiation that we hadn't talked about in class before - I chose bivalves. Fiona and I also packed up a lot of our apartment stuff today. This makes me rather sad. It's insane the amount of stuff you gather over the space of a year. A lot of it we bought and we were able to pick up some stuff for free so it was handy :)
I then started on my recreation behaviour paper which has to be about 10 pages long.... Over the course of the day I got 5 pages done so I don't think that's too bad? Double spacing is a blessing!
Well ladies and gentlemen, this is the end of another week in Missoula. The amount I have left here is getting shorter and shorter pretty fast and it's kinda scaring me. Unfortunately, next weeks post won't be half as interesting as this weeks as it's the start of my final exams. And because I've had exams up until last week, I can't even study for them yet. Slightly daunting mind you, but it should be fine. I'm not stressing or worrying about them, just trying to enjoy my last few days in Missoula.
Thanks for reading,
- Shannen.
