Saturday, May 24, 2008

Weird days and weirder dreams

I woke up today to see that it was cold and cloudy. So I went back to sleep. Half an hour later I got up anyway and decided to get some work done, as well as some necessary housework, washing dishes, sweeping floors, washing out showers and so on (wow I sound so domesticated!). For the first part of the morning it was as if the farm was messing with me. The sun would come out, and I'd rush and pack for the field, then it would get overcast and cold really quickly. Finally, only about an hour after the time I usually leave for the field I decided to just go on and try catch lizards. I was going crazy!

So I went off to one of the biggest outcrops on the farm, where a friend and I once caught something like 12 male lizards in a day (8 in the mornng and 4 in the afternooon). I stayed there for about 3 hours before it got really cold. It had been sort of on-and-off all morning, but I'd managed to get a bit sunburned and have a nasty fall that left me shaking. I twisted my wrist a little bit but it seems t be ok. I'll strap it up before bed and it'll be as good as new by tomorrow. I caught one male, out of all 2 that I saw (seriously, did they all die or something? this is ridiculous!) I also caught an adult Gerrhosaurus validus which was unbelievably cute! I was going to bring him back to photograph him, but decided not to. Kind of an act of good faith to the lizard population or something. Besides, he was so scared! They have really big eyes, and I think the Mickey-mouse syndrome part of me responds to that!

After that I came back to the house and was planning on going off to scout out a few other locaions but it got super cold then so I figured it was pointless. I took my usual after-lunch nap instead where I had the craziest dream! It was about the zoo again, for some reason I've been havng a lot of zoo-related dreams lately, often involving non-zoo friends of mine. Weird. I was also relieved to find out that the Protest March was relatively uneventful, as I'd been worrying about my friends who were taking part.

After that I did the final measurements on some of the lizards I'd caught. It's called 'speccing' them, which basically means that I measure their colours. I've been speccing a lot of lizards for other people recently because colour is what I'm really really into,so its become kind of annoying for me. Which has been incredibly sad. I remember the day I learned to use a spec, my friend Dee and I ran all over the place finding random stuff to measure (Laura's collection of birthday cards being a huge contributor!) and I was so excited. It's sad when you lose the fun part of something you love.

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I was speccing my lizards again, or maybe it was because I was listening to Silverchair (thanks Travis!) while I was doing it, but I really enjoyed speccing the lizards again! I'm so glad, and Im feeling so positive about everything suddenly. Im not sure why. But I'm really glad!

1 comments:

Luke said...

Glad to hear you are making some sort of progress! What is the plan if things just don't work out? Will you give the super-V a call?

As for the keys...it was really dumb. I put them in my boot while I picked up some other stuff and then just didn't pick them up. They weren't particularly obscured by anything...I just failed to notice them. Thank God for the fact that my dad was kind enough to bring me the spares!