what am i doing here?

I realized I never really explained what it is I'm doing here at Wolf Hollow. This place is wildlife rehab center and they take care of animals from the islands and neighboring areas. They only work with birds, small marine mammals (mostly harbor seals), and small land mammals (no big cats or bears or wolves, ironically enough). There is a really neat internship program they have set up where we get to participate in pretty much everything they do here. The cool part is that this internship also counts as part of my senior project , plus I really want to learn more about wildlife rehab because I want to do something like this in the future. We have free housing, a double wide mobile home that they set up recently, but inside it looks straight out of the 70's. It's so nice living RIGHT next to the center because it makes for a short commute. I was on the early shift this morning (7:30am) and my alarm didn't go off so I literally rolled out of bed and went to work!
I didn't get to post anything yesterday so I'll try and update for the past two days.
Yesterday I fed formula to a cotton tail bunny, fed the mallard ducklings and baby merganser(water fowl) and let them have a swim, did a lot of laundry,
gathered wild plants for the animals to eat, and observed the harbor seal feedings. We have two baby harbor seal pups in right now that have been here for a while. One was a premature female who is still pretty tiny and the other is a bigger male. They are super cute, but more care is taken when feeding them because a tube has to be inserted into their stomach (Today I got to work with them, it was so cool! they're squirmy buggers though).
Last night we had a BBQ in honor of two of the interns who'll be leaving soon. All the staff and a few volunteers came over to the intern housing and we ate A LOT of good food! It was nice getting to know everyone out side of work, but of course we mostly talked about work and animals in general because that's what everyone loves! We did have a discussion on East vs. West coast, because I'm the only intern from this side of the states! Sarah, who is from Florida, made a cake for the dinner and when asked what it was she said "It's a Poke Cake", what? "a POKE cake", what the heck is a poke cake! None of us West coast people knew what she was talking about, it was just like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and the Bunt Cake scence, we were all rolling around laughing. But apparently it's a cake that you poke and then pour jello over and it tastes pretty good!

> So Nolan, my little brother, said he wants a pet river otter, so I told him I would see what I could do about bringing him back one (just kidding, but I think they're adorable so I was only kind of kidding). Come to find out there are two little otters here right now! Everyone kept talking about how messy the otters are; I thought they were exaggerating, but today I got the truth.....their room was DISGUSTING!! Otters are naturally really playful, so the floors and walls were covered in food and poop! What a blast I had cleaning that up, and it has to be done every single day....Sorry Nolan, I don't think you'll be getting an otter for your birthday.

Today I had to do a lot more work on my own, which was a little nerve racking because there is so much to remember, plus the stuff I haven't even learned about. All in all it was a good day, except for the heat wave...82 degrees here! These were record highs for the island, and some of the locals were melting. Also Dad was asking me how much gas is here: $4.76 for the cheap stuff. I think that's pretty much the same as back home, so I guess things are priced more similarly here than I thought.

A little about my roommates: Laura goes to Virginia Tech. When I found out she does belly dancing I had her show me some moves. It was a lot of fun but I am not very coordinated so it was a failure.
Alec goes to school in Massachusetts and his girlfriend is also living on the island for the summer. He is into Medieval swordsmanship and has some homemade sparring swords here. Again, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to learn something new, so I asked him to give me a lesson. I guess he gives lessons back home so he was a really good teacher and and I actually learned a lot! I ended up getting jabbed countless time, but it was still pretty sweet. Who knows how many other random things I'll get to learn this summer!