Oscar

Oscar is our house fish. My new roommate Meg brought him when we moved in. He sits on our kitchen table swimming his counter-clockwise laps around the fish bowl, and pauses whenever someone moves something nearby so he can watch.

There are eight of us in B House, four gals and four guys, divided into doubles. Meg and I share the only downstairs bedroom, which is huge. A House and C House each have 9 people, and thus a larger food budget, but we are the only house with a pet.

The houses are of the fairly standard New England boxy version, with a couple steps up to the front door and both floors arranged around a central staircase. There are five total on the SEA campus, located about two miles from the seaside town / global oceanography capital Woods Hole, but only three are occupied this summer. The small campus is beautiful, as is the rest of the region here on the southern end of Cape Cod. It's quite the shift for me, though, having just come from New York City, to suddenly not be able to get wherever I want by convenient public transportation. But the biking easily makes up for it, as the Shining Sea Bikeway is just down the road, offering a short but exciting mountain biking trail on the way to a nice paved path along the beach.

Today, however, this fine Memorial Day, I am not out biking or hanging out in town. I am sitting on the couch in our common room with a couple of my housemates and doing work. We have homework ranging from a reading response on Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, to a navigational report on sailing from Honolulu to San Francisco, to a research proposal draft for our oceanography projects (which for me looks like it might have something to do with the effect of pollutants on the phytoplankton population in the Pacific Ocean). And to top that off I still have a considerable amount of work to do for NASA, which I have been putting off since Reading Week. Meanwhile Oscar continues his laps.

Cheers mates. Expect more nautical nonsense soon.