Milford, ME

It's been about three weeks since I last posted, and so much has happened in the meantime! I survived the trip from Rutland to Maine relatively unscathed (although very, very tired. Long drive). The apartment is beautiful, it's very open and sunny, and the rooms are big. The landlord is a fantastic guy. My roommates/coworkers are a lot of fun, and work is going well so far. Expect lots of details about my job to be posted in the next few days (weeks, months . . .). For now, just a few highlights:
First day on the job, that's me at wetland 25! If you look closely, you can see that there's still snow and ice on the ground. It's strange to think that less than three weeks ago it was still really snowy up here. Another view of wetland 25. See all the snow? Even just a week ago there was significant snow on the ground at some of the sites. It was particularly weird when we were having the 80 degree weather and still wading through knee-high snow.

Then, on my first "real" day on the job (those other pictures are from a day we just surveyed a couple to see how much snow was left (a lot)), we had a moment worthy of Failblog: Our truck got stuck in the mud, and we had to call a tow truck to have it pulled out. We really didn't think that we'd get anyone to help, and we didn't have cell service where we were, so we'd already hiked about 3-4 miles when the guy came out to meet us. And pulled the truck out. The mud was ridiculous.

The truck's name is Bessie, by the way, and she is the largest vehicle I've ever driven. It's kind of fun to drive it. And necessary to have such a truck, because we do almost all of our driving on dirt roads, many of which are in rough condition.

There is of course much more to tell (all about the actual work, for example, and all of the wildlife we've been seeing, and life aside from work), but hopefully this will be a nice little taste of what I've been up to lately!