Mark Johnson was busy with a lot of small things, keeping the buildings trapped out, the water systems working, etc. However, the one major project was the removal of the water-damaged flooring in the Bunkhouse Cottage and replacement with ceramic tile. We now feel that the bathroom is able to stand the constant use by visitors.
   We continue to try to hire Chris Reed to help us build a trail up Poison Oak hill. We have faced considerable troubles at UCB getting a proper job description. Apparently, UC never builds trail! We hope we can get him going in November. Chris will be using a trail building machine whose time has been donated by Tom Gray at the Santa Lucia Conservancy.
    The famous government surplus fire engine is now gone. The folks at the Sweeny Granite Mountain Reserve in the Mojave have had no rain for a year, and are having to haul water. The old fire engine was prepared, and the folks from the Granites drove over to pick it up. On leaving in the morning, the brake system blew out and they barely stopped it before it dove into Finch Creek. Later, it was towed to Commercial Truck in Salinas where the Granite Mtns. Reserve will have it repaired and they can pick it up.
   New propane furnaces were professionally installed in the Robertson House; one in the bathroom and one in the living room. These replace the old wood stove in the living room, and allows the late-working and early-rising interns to attend to living without the mess and time required to get a fire going every morning and night.
  With funding from the UC Office of President, new gutters were put on the Office and Davis Lab. Mark also put new gutters on the side of the Lower Barn.
   Mark Stromberg replaced our expensive ISDN line with a Hughes Direcway satellite dish for 2-way internet connections at half the cost. We had enless problems with Windows XP Shared Internet Connection, so we went with a basic business plan with Skycasters. They offer a satellite network server and support to network a satellite conection through a proprietary server on the Direcway system. We now have 15 computers (Mac, PC) browsing at about 500-800Kbs on our ethernet 100-baseT LAN. I actually left Hastings for a week and the system did not go down. It might just work!
    Several other remote biological field stations have used the Skycasters and Direcway solution for internet access. To read a summary of wireless connections to the net and in local arrays can be found at a summary of work done for the National Science Foundation and Long-Term Ecological Research sites go: Wireless Summary.