Day 84

I swam with THREE sea turtles off Klein Bonaire yesterday!  (That's the little island.)  It could have been 5, actually.  One was a different species but two were swimming in the same direction as me, and I saw them together, so I'm assuming that I saw three.  But still, TOTALLY AWESOME!!!  Sea turtles are so graceful and cute!  Not like land turtles at all.  And for once, I was the only one to see them!  Muahaha!  (Sadly, I was in class doing work and I didn't have my camera.  Not so sad: yes, that is actually what I get to do for class here.  I'm gonna miss that.)

Other than that, though, it's been mostly crunch time around here.  We're working on powerpoint presentations for our research projects, since we're apparently giving a public presentation to whoever wants to come.  And I actually expect that 'public' to be around 50+ people, so I don't want to screw this up.

I spent most of the day lounging around at the dock, though.  I met a Dutch guy named Jolt, how cool of a name is that?  (I also know a guy here named Marvelous.  He's actually pretty great, so I think he lives up to his name.)  I did go out and take a few pictures of cup corals for my project, but I have to go out again and take more tomorrow.  It's a rough life.

Here's the only semi-decent photo I took today:

In other news, let's all learn something today: the directions (north, south, east, and west) are not generally capitalized; they're only capitalized when referring to a specific region.

Example: I live in the Midwest, which is north of Bonaire.  I live on the east side of Michigan.

Source?  Purdue Writing Lab, baby.  That's pretty legit.  I bring this up because my advisor (whose native language is not English, mind you) berated me today for not capitalizing directions in my paper and powerpoint.  Her exact words were, "Isn't English your first language?  You should know this."  And the intern with her (who is not a nice person in general) completely agreed with her.

If there is anything we can all learn from this--other than the correct capitalization of directions--it's that you shouldn't act too smug when correcting people, because there's always a chance that you're wrong, in which case you are going to look pretty stupid.