Preparations and Pizza: One Week Until Summer Classes Begin!

By: Johnica Morrow

With only a week before summer classes begin here at Cedar Point, the staff is busy preparing the kitchen, cabins, and classrooms for your arrival! We have a full kitchen staff ready to create tasty entrees and delectable desserts for everyone in the weeks to come. Many of our staff members are students working at CPBS as part of an internship program through UNL’s department of Hospitality, Restaurant, and Tourism Management. We also have staff members from other universities as well as from Ogallala. Our kitchen team had their first of many staff meetings yesterday morning and then they all worked together to learn the ropes for preparing a great Cedar Point meal. Today, the students on the morning shift were busy learning the differences between the French and German styles of rolling pizza dough from the new kitchen manager, Airicca Roddy.

Airicca showing Ramsey, James, and Adriana how to roll pizza dough like a champ.
(They learned quickly...just look at those excellent pizza dough balls!)

Most of our cabins are cleaned out and ready for students and professors! We’ve dusted out the spider webs and swept up all of the mummified flies scattered throughout the floor. (Poor, sad, hungry, homeless spiders!) We’ve also got most of the classrooms stocked and set up for imparting most interesting biological concepts unto young, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed biologists in the next few weeks.

We already have a few researchers hard at work collecting data when the weather allows for them to do so. Unfortunately, it has been dreary with cold, wind, rain, and even a little snow, but they seem to find ways to stay busy when their research animals aren’t out and about! In the next week or two, we should have additional researchers, comprised of undergraduates, graduates, and interns, joining us for a summer of exciting investigations!

We are also working on recruiting speakers for our CPBS Summer 2014 Seminar Series. Seminars will be held every Wednesday at 7:00pm in the library of the Gainsforth Resource Center. Topics will range from spiders to birds and beyond. Seminars are free to attend and will be beneficial, especially for biology students! All students are encouraged to attend these seminars while at the station. More information to come!