Florence

Today I went to Florence, a town just over an hour west of Eugene on the coast, with SAACS, the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society. We picked up garbage on the beach and then had lunch and ice cream.

The kind of funny, kind of sad thing about cleaning up the beach is the state of the trash there. There's the requisite smashed-up glass and plastic bags that you expect, and unexpected but recognizable bits of litter like pen casings, bottle caps, and little colored beads. But there's also a whole lot of tiny pieces of hard plastic with the exact same thickness and fragment size of the broken shells they collect with. I have no idea what they used to be, but there's an awful lot of them, dull blue and green, and they are mixed in EVERYWHERE.

We also had a few outrageous trash finds. A couple of people apparently found a partially burned bedframe, which had to be hacked and deconstructed to fit in a car trunk. Another group walked back with their garbage bags in a cracked laundry basket that might have had things growing on it. Tucked into some plants I found a huge chunk of pressure-treated wood, which I found to be an interesting coincidence. Freshman year of high school, for intro to chemistry, I wrote an essay about arsenic in the environment, and a big part of it focused on pressure-treated wood. So here I am more than four years later, on a trip with the chemistry club, and it's the first thing to pop into my head: if that wood was treated before 2004, it's probably leaking chromated copper arsenate!

After that we had lunch and ice cream. It was nice to go to the beach; I haven't been there in a long time. It was also really nice to get away from the university, away from this postage stamp of artificially manicured grass and the same semi-anonymous people milling about constantly. Living in dorms is starting to drive me a little crazy - when I go home, I don't leave school! If I'm still in Eugene next year, I think I'll live closer to campus than I did first term, but off campus.