Dr. JZG's birthday

For my birthday my students gave me the best present ever - they made a cake for me. But it wasn't just any cake, it was a soils cake! We have been studying soils in class for the last two weeks and they made me a cake with what they have learned.

Figure 1: The gorgeous cake that my class surprised me with on Wednesday.

As you can see below, the cake has an O-horizon (green frosting), an A horizon (chocolate), E horizon (yes, it's that rare, acidic forest soil with a vanilla E horizon), a B-1 horizon (chocolate), and a B-2 horizon (mixed chocolate and vanilla). They also included biologic processes (gummy worms) and fossils (some crystal things). 

A cross-section of my cake.

Although I haven't been posting at all, I have to tell you, I absolutely LOVE my job. Being at a small liberal arts college is most definitely the perfect job for me. I am so energized by interacting with my students and they are so intelligent and ask such fabulous questions. They push me to really know what I am talking about and to keep them productively engaged throughout the entire class or lab period. This is by far the hardest job I have ever done, but I love pretty much every minute of it. 

We are doing lots of outdoors stuff now in class. On Monday we went to a farm to study soils for geomorphology. Thursday we got new GPS units, so the GIS class started to set them up and we came up with a lab that they will do combining GPS data with other data I download for them. This coming Monday in geomorphology we are going to learn to measure rivers and then the following week we have a big field trip to a nearby river to look at how lowland rivers function. At the end of the month I am taking the geomorphology class to West Virginia (the same park we went to for a bike race last weekend) to study mountain rivers. I'm so excited about it! The semester seems to be flying by now that spring break is over. 

I love this job! 

--Dr. JZG