In the spirit of not wanting to talk about what's actually going on

I was thinking this morning about how I should really be working on my lecture for next week, but I'm stuck at one point so I figured I'd do a search through my email and look for a memo I made a few years ago for one of the pracs which we're running tomorrow. I searched and Gmail came up with one result - a chat message from when I was in the field for the first time, two years ago. At the time my friend Ben was helping out and we were doing quite well, but a lot of bizarre things happened.

 

I thought you guys would enjoy seeing a little bit of what we might consider as normal...Here is an except of some of a conversation I had with Luke telling him about what was going on that week:

 

me: so did I tell you about this morning?

 Luke:   No...

me: for the first time in almost a week it wasn't raining, so we took all the traps we have and went off to the field
  proceeded to get pretty sunburned and caught 10 male lizards and 2 HUGE geckos
 

Luke: Cool!

 me: and then looked up to realise that the farm was on fire

 Luke: So what was the weird stuff that has happened?
  WHAT?!

 

me: this after the roof in the bathroom fell in and we got flooded yesterday

 Luke: Yes, I remember that... :D
  So, what happened?

 me: not the farmHOUSE, the grass and stuff

 Luke: Oh! LOL. OK then :)

me: but it was hot and windy and the fire was moving quickly and I was sitting working as fast as I could and then ben decided that the bakkie was going to get burned, so he hurtled down the hill and moved it
  and then got lost coming back so I thought he'd died

Luke: Sounds fun! Veld fires are scary! I remember that one in the Kalahari! That was unbelievable! It was so unreal!

me: I know! anyway I thought Ben had died, especially considering he was nearly attacked by a Mozambique spitting cobra last time we were in the field, and some kind of mamba today

Luke: Woah! You are NEVER coming on my field work! I'll get jinxed like him!

me: but he yelled until I answered and then followed my voice through all the trees, and we finished up and packed up and ran off to the car.  Which was not on fire...  and then I'd decided to take the ring road - it's bad and you need to use lowrange but at least the fire wouldn't be all OVER THE ROAD and Ben decided to drve us back through the fire  we nearly died!