It has the consistency of tissue paper, forms wrinkles easily, comes in the most confusing tape dispenser ever and has the annoying tendency to rip when you're trying to pull it off a glassine envelope. It's also more expensive than regular tape (which is bad since I waste a lot of it trying to get it out of the aforementioned confusing tape dispenser), but we're supposed to use it because it's acid free and is more likely to store better in the vault.

(Ahem. I forgot to blog again :( Therefore, this blog post will be rather condensed, and will cover days 4-6)

Friday: Day 4

In the morning, I finished up the Physaria didymocarpa from before. The first packet I pulled out contained a literal mountain of seed pods; I'm glad I followed my instincts and didn't start it five minutes before I was supposed to leave on Thursday. (I took a picture, it was that impressive, but my phone seems to have gone missing since then.)

In the afternoon, Ed helped me find new seeds to count. However, most of the seeds that are left are the dregs of the seed bank that nobody wants to deal with, and I went through several species since I couldn't even see some of them, let alone count them. Luckily, though, Ed found me some Limnanthes floccosa ssp. grandiflora (that's like, something- meadow-foam? One thing I've found at the BBG is that everyone seems to be a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the Latin names and whatnot, so that's what I pick up). They're pretty easy (as in, I don't need a microscope to see them), so even someone of my limited skill level can count them :)

Monday: Day 5

Erin came back early from her trip. In other news, we had another party, this time with brownies. They were also quite good.

I cleaned more of the Limnanthes in the morning, and after lunch started proofing a printout of my germination trial data (you know, the red/blue dish stuff), to check that I didn't make any mistakes.

To my delight, I discovered that I have all my hours for my PE credit, meaning I don't have to skip Wednesday in order to get my 30 hours this week :)

Tuesday: Day 6 (that is, today)

We had another cake today for another birthday party. Courtney joked that it must seem to me like all people do at the BBG is sit around and eat dessert. The cake was pretty good, except for the fact that I got an edge piece and the generous amounts of sugar in the frosting hit me like a brick wall.

I finished proofing my germination trial data spreadsheets, and, after getting booted to one of the downstairs computers, finally got around to entering my live census data for the Delphinium into the system.

After I finished that, Erin showed me how to do another step in the seed banking process: weighing.

Seeds are usually weighed later on in the process, but you need to weigh packets with 500+ seeds in order to get a precise seed count. So that's what I did.

To weigh seeds, you have to go through the very convoluted process of weighing individual packets of 50 seeds on a balance reminiscent of the cool one I used in Advanced Chemistry, weighing all your seeds together, finding the average weight of a packet of 50 seeds, and using that to find the theoretical number of seeds. Then you have to split the seeds up into two equal-by-weight groups and write down a whole lot of data in a binder. This was my first experience with the horror that is archival tape: up until now, I had been using the regular roll of Scotch tape. I'm also contemplating bringing in my graphing calculator, since it's so much better than the calculator I had been using today.

Strangely, I actually found that my chemistry lab experience helped me out a lot here.

And that's all for now. Until Thursday, seeing as I'll be at the zoo tomorrow :)