Way too many things to talk about

Wow, I have a lot to run my mouth (so to speak) about...here goes...

Labor Day weekend was great. Saturday night I went to a combined 21st birthday party for Pat, Chris, Aryn, Pete, and someone else, and I survived!! It was great fun actually, although it totally messed up my sleep schedule and I'm still trying to get back on track. I think I went to sleep somewhere around 3:30 AM...at which point I am guaranteed to be totally out of it. And if I was that bad under those circumstances, I do NOT want to know what I'd be like with alcohol in my system!! I was reminded again this weekend that I have some really good friends here. I really appreciate that they respect my decision not to drink and that they don't give me a hard time about it...at least anymore than they give me a hard time about anything I do. ;)

It's nice to have a short school week once in a while, but it really throws me off. I had plenty of time to get all my homework done over the weekend, but now it seems like everything is a bit of a scramble. Classes were very interesting yesterday, though. The topic in Tropical Ecology was cloud forests, which are different from "typical" rain forests because they are found at very high elevations (meaning the Andes, in South America). As a result, they are consistently pretty cold, they are shrouded in fog or mist for much of each day (hence the "cloud" title), and the plants and animals that live there are extremely different from lowland rain forest species. Thanks to their mountainous location, they're often geographically isolated from one another, which means that many species are endemic to only one individual cloud forest. Unfortunately, vast areas of cloud forest have been destroyed by logging, fires, clearing for agriculture, and other human influences. Think of all those species lost...

The topic in Orientation to Ecuador was immigration. There are currently about 1.5 million Ecuadorian citizens living abroad -- that's approximately 10% of the country's population. A large portion of them lives in Spain, but a far greater portion lives in the U.S., whether legally or not. Due to a huge economic crisis in the 1990s, governmental corruption, and other factors, many in the lower and middle classes in Ecuador can't sustain their families without leaving the country. We had a guest speaker from the Immigrant Worker Project, an initiative of the Catholic church in Ohio, which assists the thousands of Latin American immigrants to Ohio by providing job placement, representation in immigration court, contact with the families they've left behind, and many other services. He told us about an Ecuadorian man who had a master's degree in agronomy. He was able to make more money working in Ohio as a crew chief at a sawmill than as an agronomy engineer back home. That pretty much blew my mind.

Tonight's movie was Sin Nombre, a really powerful film about illegal immigration and about gang violence. I'm glad we watched it and were exposed to those issues, but it's not one I ever want to see again. I'm still kind of processing it all.

On a much happier note, it is now time for Glee!! I'm so excited about this show I can hardly stand it. Yay for show choir!!