I’m just going to preface this with a big WOW for myself, this week was a LOT (also you’re going to have to work with me on the photos in here, I’m still trying to figure out formatting, haha!):
To start, I ended up arriving back in Ithaca late on Sunday night, the 20th. Of course, instead of planning on giving myself a little bit of time to get settled like any other reasonable person might do, I was up early the following morning for my first day of summer classes, which would span from about 8:30AM to 11:00AM.
After my classes were over, I was rushing to get to my car so I wouldn’t be late to my first (ever!) in-person meeting with my teammates Kelly, Charles, and Susan over at the Broome County 4-H Office. I met them, as well as some members of a fellow CCE program, “Playful Plants”, in the Cutler Botanical Gardens (Which were BEAUTIFUL).
We walked through the gardens and in the spirit of potential collaboration between mapping and plant science, we discussed some of the specific 
characteristics of the plants we were seeing, and how children might be able to interact with them in a playful manner, all in the context of garden design (for example, a springy moss that could be used as groundcover, or a bed of flowers that a child could smell). Following our tour of the gardens, we parted ways with the Playful Plants group, and Kelly gave Charles, Susan, and I a quick tour of the rest of the Broome County 4-H Office. We got to see Kelly’s Office, some of the board rooms, and even a few of the Geocaches hidden around the grounds! After that it was a short drive over to Finch Hollow, where our group went out on a short hike to take in the nature, speak amongst ourselves, and just enjoy the feeling of being outside. And all of that before 5!? Unheard of!
Needless to say, I was pretty tired at the end of the day and so I was very much not expecting the equivalent of what seemed like the ENTIRE ocean to fall from the sky (the rain came out of nowhere! I thought I was gonna die!). A quick shower and some video lectures later, my first day of Summer in Ithaca was finished.
After that, the rest of the week was feeling out the pacing of my summer courses and starting to put together some ideas for the development of some 4-H program topics, which would be presented to youth later on in the summer. Of these topics, a favorite so far has been about how the Fluorescence from chlorophyll in some plants is a measurable quantity which, when paired with GIS mapping software, can be used to give insight on the overall health of large plant populations and ecosystems, as well as indicate on how resources might be distributed so as to maintain the health of these plant ecosystems more effectively. We were mainly focusing on how we might scaffold this information for youth, so as to make it possible to fit as much information as we can into a short time period in a manageable fashion (more on this next week).
Towards the second intern check-in meeting of the week (Thursday 6/24) our group began setting the groundwork on the plans for setting up the program scheduling and design, which included finding dates where all team members would be available, as well as starting the early stages of building a rough itinerary for the youth program day from start to finish.
All in all, it had been a very busy week, with little time for R&R, that said, on the weekend, I found the time for a friend and myself to do some geocaching around Cornell, which led to some nice roundabout hiking to some places where my friend had never really been, as well as being absolutely stumped by one of the geocaches in particular (somewhere around Duffield Hall… I will be looking again when I have a free minute).
Until next Week!
-Rob
P.S. Here’s some sounds from Finch Hollow Nature Preserve, I really love sound and music (bit of a nerd about it actually), and I found this ambience really peaceful, hope you enjoy!