Behold GoreTex Man!

Covered from head to foot in polysynthetic fiber, neither rain, nor snow, nor swimming pools can penetrate his impermeable outer layer! He is GoreTex man!

So. Yeah. A tropical depression hit the island today and it's been non stop rain all day. I've never seen is come down so hard for so long. No thunder or lightning, just heavy heavy rain. Until today it hadn't rained all that much. We'd have occasionaly 5 minute downpours, but that would usualy be followed by 2 hours of sun until enough evaporation had occured to fuel another downpour. The oddest thing is that half the time when it's raining there is mostly blue sky. It's like it's so humid here rain just spontaneously forms above our heads.

We've been here a week now. All of our GPS receivers are up and running at their second location, and we've done some scouting for new sites. In a couple days we will again be changing locations. Until then it's long days in the trucks trying to find suitable bedrock outcrops for new sites.

Some notes from the first week:
-After a bad experience with 50% alcohol by volume 'Rhum' from Guadalupe (it tasted like liquid pain) I have found good Dominican Rum. Everyone at Dartmouth is invited to a 'drink Brett's foreign alcohol' party at 17 school in late September.
-I am now in possesion of a card that gives me permission to drive in Dominica. Now all I need to do is learn how to drive a stick shift. These people have no clue what they're getting into.
-Like most Dominicans, we have begun picking up hitchhikers whenever we see them. Generally they're prety cool people who just don't have cars and hang out in the bed of the trucks as we swerve our way across the island. Yesterday one of them when we dropped off came around to Glen, who was driving and introduced himself:
Hitchhiker: Yo, thank you for giving me a ride, my name is ____, but just call me Solidarity...
Glen: Solidarity? Cool..
Solidarity: yah mon, one love, peace.
And he walked off. So awesome.
-We tried to watch the world cup yesterday at a hotel in Roseau, but they had forgotten to tape the game when it was on live. They didn't really appologize, but rather shrugged it off in a 'shit happens' kind of way. I was annoyed. Apparently I'm not laid back enough to be in the Caribbean.
-A group of 19 Texas A&M students was here and left yesterday. They were here on summer school and were quite studious. We managed to heckle them a lot for being lame and not hanging out and drinking with us. Their last night was crazy though as 3 weeks of pent up alcohol abstinence was released and they raged until 2 or 3 in the morning. I was they finally cut loose because they drank the bottle of 'Rhum' that I didn't know how to get rid of because I sure as hell wasn't drinking that shit.
-Tomorrow our TA Henry leaves so that he can go to a conference. In another 10 days or so Glen is leaving too, meaning Richard will be in charge. Should be good times. On the 19th Dr. Alan Smith arrives with his REU group from Cal State San Bernadino. I'm looking forward to it because Dr. Smith will be giving lectures about all the pyroclastic deposits, which will be cool to know, plus useful for my hopeful senior thesis.
-Today was essentially a rainout. Tomorrow we are again scouting for new locations. The day after that we repeat the cycle of changing receiver locations for two days.