Don't kick the narcoleptic!

So the conference was actually quite interesting, and I found myself enjoying it far more than I wanted to admit! I met some nice people (of course I ended up sitting with a bunch of zoo-keepers, I seem to attract them!) and heard some interesting talks. It was at a dam that was more like a small ocean, it had waves and everything!

My talk was ok, I think. There were a lot of questions and I had fun as always (I love the question session in a masochistic kind of way, it's when you figure out if you REALLY know your stuff or not!) and I was asked a question about my lizards by the guy the lizard was actually named after! HOW cool is that? Yes. I'm a nerd.

So After about 24 hours of being there I got my uber-cool conference bag (it has a tomato frog on it) and drove the four hours home in some pretty intense rain. The traffic was appallin once I was nearly home, so I detoured to visit Lara for an hour or so to wait it out, and ended up staying for nearly 3 hours. She passed all her exams really well and now has a second degree! We also fell about giggling to a bunch of random songs that I had on my Ipod. I hadn't seen Lara for pretty much 4 or 5 months, except the occasional really quick hello, so it was really amazing to spend some time with her and remmeber how much her friendship means to me.

Soppiness over, I finally got home at about 10pm and had to pack for our departure at 6 the next morning. I managed relatively quickly and then couldn't sleep because I was so excited.

So basically, I elft home at about 6:30am on about 10 hours sleep total for the previous week, and very little sleep in total since about August. That kind of exhaustion is weird, because instead of the classic yawning and stuff, you get toally wired and bouncy and then occasionally your body decided that it's had enough now and you must sleep. So the first horizontal surface encountered becomes a temporary bed.

So halfway tot he beach I fell asleep in the car. It's really not that unusual to sleep in the car, but my friends seemed to find it amusing. It was only a short nap, and ended when I had a dream that we were driving up to a traffic circle and turning right, but I could feel (in reality) the car turning left so I woke up and said "We should turn right at the traffic circle!" Turns out we were at a stop-street, but we came across a bunch of traffic circles right after that which was quite creepy!

Over the weekend I gave several repeat performances. It didn't surprise me, I usually sleep a lot between dives, and on this trip there wasn't much organisation so the dives started being quite close together and I ended up not having my usual collapse-on-the-beach time so I slept whenever else I could.

What I don't understand is how people found it so incredibly funny that I kept falling asleep. For crying out loud I hadn't slept properly in about four months, it wasn't an amusing quirk, it was a necessity for survival!

I will write more about the trip at some stage, I'm just trying to get my thoughts about it all sorted out in my head. I also think I should catch up on some sleep, I'm still waking up at 6am automatically...

But I just want to say: if you have a friend who believes in power-naps, don't kick the narcoleptic!