Chat-Uh-Who-Chi.

Welp. Sorry for the lack of posts this week, but in all honesty, I was wating for something worth posting. This past week was a week full of Nitin, so naturally we had some long work days (12-14 hours...). By the time I'd get back from the field, I'd be too tired to blog. Along with that, the posts only would have been a near continuous string of complaints and boring accounts of how sweaty I was all day, or how the dirt felt beneath my absolutely repulsive fingernails. That said, Tuesday was probably the only day worth mention. Coweeta held a conference here where a bunch of the graduate students who were working on ongoing research here onsite gave oral and poster presentations on their work. Coweeta was PACKED. Luckily, breakfast, lunch, and dinner was served to us, compliments of Coweeta for all our hard work as scientists and I got to hear some pretty cool talks such as...

-Future species composition will affect forest water use after loss of eastern hemlock from southern Appalachian forests (Brantley)
-Listening to Nature, Listening to Community: Progress from the Coweeta Listening Project (CLP) (Heynen)
-Magnifying Complexity: Using the Integrative Framework to understand exurbanization in Macon County, North Carolina (Vercoe)
-Variation in hydrologic and sediment transport behavior among the nine intensively monitored watersheds in the Upper Little Tennessee River Basin (Jackson)
and
-The "Ring of Asphalt" and Changing Precipitation in Southern Appalachia: A regional perspective (Shepherd)

There were a TON more, but that was about all my attention span could handle for one day. Following the conference, there was a keg and coolers upon coolers of beer for all the apparently unbelievably thirsty researchers. Drunken scientists were scattered about in every nook and cranny of Coweeta for pretty much the entirety of the night. I'll tell you, I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. I'll admit that scientists may be a bit quirky at times, but they definitely know how to have a good time.
So skipping past the rest of my slave driven work week to today...
Today. Was. Awesome. Me, Catherine, and Bryan (the new guy that got in Tuesday fresh from Honduras) went tubing down the Chattahoochee River today back in good ole' Helen, Georgia and finished off the day with a hearty German meal and some windy mountain roads...

Bryan.

Catherine.

Not quite sure what Bryan is doing back there haha.

Catherine.

I could get used to this...

All the people in the restaurant watching the tubers go by.

Alpine Helen, GA. 

Going under the bridge!

Riverside restaurant.

Rapids!

Geoff, does the poster look familiar?? Haha

The most beautiful parking lot ever...

that just so happens to be a Walmart parking lot...bet you didn't see that one coming.

I've decided that there are few things better than tubing down a river in the mountains for a day, especially if said river flows through a cute alpine village!