More DR

This is everyone from the school that turned out to watch the bball game. A few locals showed up as well, but they sat on the other side to cheer their team on.

This is our team getting their butts kicked. The high school team all rolled up in a car with the music blaring and got out in what seemed like slow motion. It was at that moment we realized we were doomed.

This is Rachel and I at the invitational dinner. We were clean, it was nice.

This is my gang....everyone's all dressed up. Left to right: Courtney, Britta, Katie, Scott

From left to right: Laura, Kenny, Christina, Erica, Lacey.

Hola,

Thanksgiving dinner was awesome. They made turkey, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, walnut pie, and more. We were all so full after dinner we couldn't move. They definitely did everything they could to make it feel like home.

Friday it was back to the grind. We did more transects that we had to swim 45 minutes to get to.....it was a long day.

Saturday we had our normal things; site clean up, meetings, community outreach. Before community outreach though, our school put together a basketball team to play the local high school's. I don't know what's in the water here, but the high school team was HUGE! We never got an official score, but it was a very little to a ton. We left with a few injuries as well. Mitch sprained his ankle and Gabe banged up his knee. Although we got slaughtered, the game was fun. After that, we had community outreach. I was supposed to be on games with the kids, but since most people in town were on the bball court, only 1 kid came, Nick, and he swam the whole time, so instead the people that were on games ended up setting up for the invitational dinner.

This dinner was for anyone that hadn't been invited to one yet. The only person I actually knew that came was Ganger aka G. He brought his kids and his wife which was nice. We had a nice dinner and then went out. It was a pretty uneventful night.

Yesterday I was on kitchen crew. When you have it on Sunday, you have to cook brunch and dinner for all 40 people. For brunch we made breakfast burritos, muffins, and oatmeal. I made the hashbrowns to go along with the meal, but for some reason they turned blue.....I have no idea what happened. For dinner we made chicken fettucini alfredo. I had to mince 50 cloves of garlic which was awesome. I tried to do it like they do on the Food Network and it actually went pretty well. My fellow crew mates were impressed with my skills. Juston found the recipe for the alfredo but I was in charge of cooking it. It started out a little rocky, there wasn't enough butter.....we had checked the stocks of butter saturday morning, but they ended up using most of it for dinner, so we were a full cup of butter short. But we cooked it anyway. After everything was added, we had something that resembled very think cream of wheat. Even the guy in our group couldn't stir it at that point. So I had to think fast. I decided adding milk should help. We ended up adding 3 boxes of milk (yes, our milk comes with boxes and does not need refrigeration). After that though, it was PERFECT!! I was so proud of that sauce I couldn't stop smiling. Everyone loved our food so it turned out to be a good (but long) day.

This week we just basically have DR. I don't know what we are going to do though, because we don't have a net for our beam trawl (a net is pretty much the only part of it we really need). I really don't want to do transects for another week, but we'll see. I'll keep ya posted. I hope all of you have a good week!

Love,
Michelle