Eleuthera Journal, day 7

Friday 3/24:

Overnight it rained rather heavily, and it looked distinctly cloudy and hazy this morning. It cleared up a bit at times, but it’s been raining off and on through the day. I’m glad I decided to do as much swimming as I did earlier in the week, as today has really not been a great day for it.

I’ve been continuing my re-read of A Game of Thrones, although it’s occasionally hard, feeling as it does like I’m watching a train wreck about to happen. I suppose it’s only made worse by the fact that there’s no real indication that things will get better until at least the fifth book.

Had more of the wheat bread for lunch, which was tasty. I’ve been drinking a fair bit of tea on this trip since there hasn’t been much in the way of coffee. There were a few beans left from some previous inhabitants (apparently from Alaska?) which I used to make some coffee one of the first days, but it hasn’t been possible to get any decent coffee on the island. David got some hazelnut flavored stuff, but my feelings on flavored coffee being what they are, and the only other coffee being some Maxwell House, my desire to partake of it has been rather limited. I’ve been having both hot tea and iced tea, the latter of which is quite refreshing, and since all it takes to make it is making a cup of tea and pouring it into a big glass with ice in it, it’s been rather nice. Earl Grey makes for rather odd iced tea, perhaps, but still quite tasty.

Beth and I just went for a walk along the beach. It was interesting to see what the rain had done to the sand and how different the textures were in different places, depending on what wound up below the water level during high tide and also how much water it got in it. Some places were very spongy, and if you jump there, you can sink in quite a ways. Further up where the water never reaches the surface is very rough from the rain. It also seems like the rain, if it’s heavy enough, stirs up the sand enough that the larger bits come to the surface. There are some very interesting phenomena in general that occur with the interaction between the sand and the water in how the different grain sizes get separated and piled up, both on land and under the water. Clearly there’s a lot of physics that could be studied there, although my guess is that it’s probably too difficult to model. I feel that if I were to study such things, I really should get to spend a lot of time on tropical beaches examining the sand and stuff. I wonder how one includes that in a grant proposal. In any case, I’m not sure how I would go about such a big shift in field, or whether there’s much of that stuff to be done around DC. I guess I will have to start thinking about post-graduation jobs sometime soon.

We’re off to Tippy’s again tonight for dinner, leaving shortly. I’m not quite sure what I’ll have this time, but I suspect that a margarita is in order, at least.