Panic stations!

So I've been fluctuationg between enthusiasic and productive, and sitting in a heap wanting to cry. It rained all weekend, so I used the opportunity to sit in a heap and not do much, and then had a great trapping day yesterday. today was brutally hot, I saw about 7 or 8 lizards and proceeded to spend all day in the hot hot sun not catching any of them. I got myself a pretty impressive case of sunstroke, and a talking-to from a friend back home becasue apparently I shouldn't have taken aspirin for the headache that came with the package. Seriously, it's like tickbite-fever bad but without the glamour of the fever and the nausea... actually I think I prefer sunstroke!

Anyway, I am one of very few people in this world who has a custom-built lizard treadmill. It's of vital importance for my work, nd was built by a combination of an engineering student friend (who, back in the day, beat up another kid for pulling the tail out of my My Little Pony) and a friend from my class at university. It's had it's issues, as it was designed and built with very little by way of specifications (I gave them a size and a speed required) by two people who have never worked with lizards.

I spend a lot of time ever few weeks fixing up little gaps with duct tape (a lizard can squeeze through a microscopic gap! and adjusting it and so on. This trip it's been working perfectly though, until tonight! I was running a set of lizards when one of them managed to get his tail between the belt and the rod thingie that it wraps around. It happens occasionally, and usually you just stop the treadmill and extricate the lizard. This guy had really got himself stuck though so i had to dismantle part of it, remove lizard and then put it back together.

Then it started acting p. Nothing major, just the belt slipping to one side, or it went too slowly, and I had to play with the tension a bit. Finally, it all looked like it was going to work properly when it ut stopped. There was an aweful noie from the motor and nothing moved.

So I'm going to be spending tomorrow in town trying to hunt down an engineer (fortunately there is a university with an engineering department nearby) to fix it, and if I can't fid anyone here I will have no option but to put it in the car and go home for a day or two to get it fixed by the engineer who made it.

To tell the truth, today was a really unpleasant day, and I would like nothing more than a day or two at home to 'recharge' a bit, but at the same time the weather is good for lizards, and I never know when I'm going to lose time to rain, so going home seems like a waste. At least the masters student is rriving tomorrow so I'll have someone here to feed lizards if I have to go.

So anyone at home: watch this space, you might be running into me in the near future!