introspection is dangerous!

So once again I came home lizard-free today! It was still a very action-packed day, I explored 2 huge outcrop, confirming my suspicions that they were lizard-free, and managed to get nicely sunburned in the process. At a third site, I went to a spot that I know to be a good lizard-trapping area, to find a massive snake crawling into the crevice I was planning too set traps at. When I say huge, I estimted the length to be around 2 1/2 metres. Even taking into account that I got the fright of my life, you're still left with at least 2 metres of scary snake! I like snakes, I really do, but I like them when I see them with someone who knows about snakes. I like to handle them if I know for a fact that they can't hurt me, or that if they do it won't put me in hospital. To see a giant snake while in an area that has no cellphone coverage, at least 40 minutes drive from a hospital... that's scary!

So the snake went across the outcrop and into a revice, no doubt having a lovely snack on the lizards inside. They were fantastically oblivious to him, some of them even ran up and tongue-flicked a welcome. I hope that he didn't get any of my males, but I didn't get close enough to watch, plus his head was under the rocks, and I couldn't see what he was doing.

When I'd stopped watching him, sneaking closer to look at him properly so that I can try very hard to ID it when I get home, i moved to another outcrop, doing some fabulous offroad driving and settled down to try and get at least one more male. No such luck. so I started thinking.

I discovered last year that fieldwork is very dangerous in that while you're very active and busy all of the time, it's mostly physical work, and very little else. Plus you have to spend long hours out of doors, waiting for lizards to go onto traps, which means that you start to think. If you add the sun, the heat and the lack of other people to put things into perspective, the introspection can get very unpleasant, if enlightening!

It may help to point out that almost all of my very deep and insightful opinions on relationships, people around me, religion, science, science AND religion, education and many other topics, were thought up and thought through while sitting on a rock, in the sun, waiting for a lizard to stop jumping over my traps and run onto them.

Today was no different. I started to figure out why I have been so frustrated lately (lizard-trapping notwithstanding), why I'm still here when I could have given up and gone home, and how that links in to my somewhat irrational and yet exceedingly rational fears about life in general. It's left me a little bit subdued, and for once I wish I was at home, so that I could talk some of it out with someone. at the same time I know what the answers are, but how to change things is another matter entirely.

So I came home and watched "Good Luck Chuck" it was awful, and therefore exactly what I needed! I'm going to go and fond some other terrible movie to watch... I have a whole bundle of terrible horror movies that Joey gave me before I left, maybe I'll giggle my way through one of them before I go to bed. Too bad I didn't bring the mutant-cow-baby-slasher movie with me!