Making a story…

I remember on my 21st birthday (not the party, the actual birthday) my grandparents and aunt came for lunch and each of them told the stories of what they’d been doing the day I was born. The reactions, the mundane tasks. My parents had thought I would be a boy (they hadn’t asked the doctor but both suspected for some reason) so when I was a girl my dad ran out and got me a pink dress. My aunt told my brother about me, my mother was relieved that she’d changed her mind about my name (I’m pretty sure I was gripping the sides of the birth canal until she changed her mind) and so on.

So while I was attempting to stumble along the treadmill last night (darned festive season got me again) I thought about what I could tell little A when she gets old enough to ask about the day she came along.

Do I tell her:

• I was so nervous all day my brain was mush and I was useless until I went home, where I read Steven King’s Dark Tower series until I ran out of books.
• I got the message before my mother and she got all offended.
• I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone until I’d been given the all clear (people have to be informed in a certain order to avoid offense and stuff, and leaking something before time can mess up a carefully constructed social network)
• I broke the security boom at the hospital. Well not broke as much as I was the one that pushed the button as it began beeping long screeches and not going up. I got to park in visiting doctors parking for free!
• After all that stress I forgot the word for ‘maternity ward’ and went to the front desk where I demanded that the young man on duty ‘show me the babies’ – he was somewhat alarmed, but did help me once I explained that my brother had just given birth and that I had to go and see him. In retrospect I’m still surprised that he didn’t casually misdirect me to the local psychiatrist for a straight-jacket fitting.
• That that little girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and my brother and his wife just… fit. They’re the right parents for her, and she’s just completely and absolutely perfect.

You want me to WHAT?!?

When I was eight years old I tried to jump off a high-dive board into the swimming pool at school. I realised for the first time that I was afraid of heights as I sat down, clutched the edges of the board and shook uncontrollably until I was able to crawl back to the platform.

By the time I reached 15 or so heights had become such an issue I found myself unable to stand on a desk without shaking, and walking over bridges made me incredibly nervous.

So anyway when I was fifteen I went on a school camp where rock-climbing and abseiling were two of many incredibly cool activities (like archery and raft-building) and I decided that it was time for me to get over all of my nonsense and climb that silly rock face.

Much screaming and crying and shaking and swearing in front of the headmistress later I got to the top! Unfortunately abseiling did not go as well, as I freaked out, went into hysterics and clawed my way up the rocks to the top again (I tried about five times, including once with an instructor next to me holding my hand).

Since then I’m largely better with heights. I climb things whenever I get the opportunity (kind of like poking at an old scar to see if it still hurts) and I discovered years ago that if there is a lizard to catch I lose all fear of anything, and so I’ve become relatively comfortable scrambling around rocks.

The fear of abseiling stayed with me though, and even though I was invited a few times I was always too scared. At the same time it was annoying. How can I be the fearless lizard-hunter if I’m terrified of dangling off the side of a cliff?

Anyway on Saturday evening as I was fixing up my nap-smudged eyeliner (I know you’re not supposed to sleep with makeup on, but does taking a nap count?) I got a call from Leia inviting me to go abseiling on Sunday. I agreed immediately (which was rather funny because I think she was expecting to have to beg and stuff).

So early on Sunday morning, she arrived with coffee and took me off to meet the other crazy cliff-danglers. And they pointed out the first place we’d be abseiling from/off/at/on (?)

You have got to be kidding me!

“Don’t be silly it’s only 50 metres! You’ll be fine…”

By this stage the others went to admire a little waterfall (complete with dismembered cow-head)

while the view of the bridge started doing this to me:

We got to sit around and wait for Leia and another guy to set it all up, and the bridge loomed over us, looking higher and higher by the minute. Fortunately the others were really nice and one of them even had blue hair so we compared notes and all chatted about silly things while I felt my heart-rate rising with each passing moment.

By the time we got to the bridge I felt like I was somewhere between throwing up and passing out. One of the other guys went first so that he could help people at the bottom and he very happily climbed over the edge and slid off.

And then it was my turn.

Let me just say: kneeling on a tiny little pipe while shaking (and apparently ghostly pale) and being unclipped from the safety line because it got tangled is NOT fun at all.

It is a good thing I hadn’t had breakfast.

I didn’t cry (yay!) but it was close.

I clung onto the bridge so tightly I ended up bruising my palm.

And for some reason once I had finally done the ‘letting myself slip off the bridge’ step (talk about going against every instinct known to man…) while being photographed a LOT and not really caring much at all (I cared later). I opened my eyes and looked around and… it was really pretty up there!

So i said so, and everyone laughed a lot and took MORE photos of me (smiling and with my eyes open this time) and then i got to work getting down to the ground because the harness had shifted slightly and become rather painful.

(this isn’t me, as I kind of had my hands full while trying to avoid an ugly death)

It LOOOMS!

(This isn’t me either)

All this next to the crazy bungee jumpers leaping around…

(I thought they were supposed to go straight down?)

(It may look graceful here, but you didn’t hear the guy screeching like a girl…)

From there we had a lunch break and then headed off to the next spot – a cliff-type thing that looked a lot shorter from the ground than from the top. We got to swim in the river, take a nap and generally enjoy the scenery for a few hours

While Leia and co set up the ropes.

For the record, I don’t care that those ropes can theoretically hold up a car. They’re SO thin! And the little spindly trees…

I had a full-on freak out and said lots of nasty things. To help matters my ropes got tangled up again which meant I had to do some square-dancing on the cliff-edge (step left, then right, turn around, turn back, step right…). Leia responded to my stream of verbal abuse (I don’t remember much of what I said, I was terrified and having nasty flashbacks to my previous experiences) by laughing, which made me yell even more. I do remember her explaining that she was giving me some slack on the safety rope and I yelled at her and made her take the slack in immediately.

Slack is scary.

and of course once I’d got going, yelled at her for laughing (you can’t grip properly if you’re laughing…) and had to negotiate the whole falling-over-backwards thing after a pesky ledge I made it down, collapsed into a quivering heap and confirmed via the radio that I was alive, albeit shaky (you should see the photos I took after this point, they’re completely blurred…).

I felt kind of bad for all the things I’d said, particularly since I hadn’t died and so most of it was entirely unfounded. Plus I hated that although I had finally ‘beaten’ the fear, I was still scared and it didn’t feel like I’d accomplished anything. A few minutes later the guy in charge radioed to ask if he could use my camera up top (I’d left it up there), so I gave him one condition:

“Can I do that again?”

And I managed to smile most of the way down the second time!

Keeping busy

Went for a quick bite to eat and a drink with two friends at six last night (to celebrate one of them getting a shiny new car) and wound up getting home at midnight. It was really nice to spend some real quality time with one of them (I hadn’t seen her since I got back) and my worries about her not getting along with the other friend were unfounded – they got along like a house on fire which was awesome!

I’m going to see these guys this weekend:

I’m so excited! I used to be hectically into the local music scene but I’ve lost touch with it over the last few years and I can’t wait to get back out there.

I got a new CD by these guys:

And I’m off to the bush on Monday with ‘the girls’ which is horrible because I had to miss a 25th (that I RSVPed to months ago) and had to cancel on, plus i have HEAPS of work to get through which I’ll have to take with me. At the same time it’s awesome to get out of the city for a little bit.

Who knows, maybe there will be lizards?

No way!

So I didn’t do any exercise between Saturday and yesterday, and felt all icky as a result. To be fair I just haven’t had time – with all the stress lately I’ve been battling to focus and get my work done.

To add to that it seems that people realised that I was leaving soon and we’ve had a steady stream of people in the lab. I would be annoyed but they were all people I wanted to see. And as much as several hours discussing the biological and psychological implications of studying the paranormal/supernatural was probably a giant waste of time, I’m pretty sure that in some small way my life was enriched as a result! I guess it all falls into enjoying the university experience as a whole, rather than being too focussed.

Anyway back on topic, last night after dinner I decided to go off to the gym. It was awesome! I should stop going more often! Basically I cycled and almost died (it seems I can run OR cycle, but developing both sets of muscle just doesn’t happen) and then I figured I’d do a short run, just to give the other muscles a reminder as to their existence. I have also been having really nasty dreams (and insomnia) lately so I figured exhaustion could help my situation somewhat (It didn’t really as I wound up dreaming that I had to put on makeup in an abattoir before going goth clubbing in fieldwork clothes…).

So I ran a little bit and thought ‘hey! this is supposed to be a sprint, why is it so easy?'’ so I ran a little bit faster. And faster. and faster. I was tired, but I kept doing things like wondering if I could do one  more minute, or run at a steeper incline, or actually max out the treadmill speed-wise (almost! I think it maxes out at 15km/h and I was going at 14.2 but that involved sprinting and gasping and stitches after a very little while). and before I’d noticed it I had finished the 20 minute thing and I was all hyped up to run further.

So I did. Admittedly, I was listening to Trivium which is so energetic I had to keep going, but before I knew it I had run about 30 % further than normal!

I think that’s what I love the most about the whole gym thing. Those random moments when you realise that those scary things aren’t so bad after all! Like doing a shoulder-balancey thing in Pilates, or cycling an extra 10 km, or actually doing a pull-up (I almost did one the other day! the friendly body-builders were very supportive!).

And now I must go and pack the big scary 4x4 and get it home before tai chi!

Oh, and this is officially my favourite music video ever (right now!) the song is awesome too!

Shiny things, men in uniform AND fireworks!

So A couple off weeks ago I was invited by my fabulous cousins to attend the dress rehearsal of the South African tattoo. This is the advert:


Basically my cousin's fiancee was dancing in it and as he was helping around backstage the free tickets managed to get redistributed to his younger sister and she offered one to me! I was super-excited as I wanted to go last year but didn't get around to it until the tickets were sold out... Plus I had no idea that my soon-to-be cousin does Highland dancing! And the cousin who gave me the ticket (therough the other cousin of course) drove me there and home which was SO nice! We also got to catch up a bit which is nice as we were almost inseparable as young kids and then kind of took our own paths as we grew up.

The show was so much fun! There were fireworks, the lights were pointed at the sky (it was outdoors) which meant that we got to pretend that there was a UFO above our heads until the performance started (I am easily amused) and we got to sit in the second row from the front and see EVERYTHING!

As I can't write about everything without it taking until next week I will do a Things I Learned list:

• You can be an individual while wearing a kilt - one of the guys looked exactly like I'd imagine a goth-piper to be. He was dressed exactly like everyone else, but the long hair and earrings remained, and the attitude was still there!
• We have drum majorettes in this country. I had no idea. They were adorable, with their big smiles plastered on and so much enthusiasm.
• There are local groups suppteaching music and dance to kids here, and they were incredible! Watching a few hundred kids doing some really fast-paced gumboot dancing is not something I will forget in a hurry.
• Yellow kilts look suspiciously like skirts, particularly when the men choose to wear them short...
• Rifle drills are AMAZING!
• It's easy to see who is enjoying themselves and who isn't - and how easy it is to ignore the performers just going through the motions and watch the ones who are smiling and really getting into it.
• Flag-throwing people from Italy are very Italian. And very skilled considering they did all their flag-throwing stunts with the wind blowing rather harad!
• I'm not quite sure why there was a stunt-motorcyle exhibition, but it was unbelievable! There are very talented (and crazy) people out there!
• The marching band leader guys (I should know the name for them) take themselves very seriously. There was a world champion leading one section and he didn't even flinch or smile or blimk too much. We discussed his inner emotions in depth from the stands.
• The Highland Dancers were really good! Not that I can talk as I was *cough*forced*cough* into it when I was four and never made any progress at all besides deciding that the swords were fun to play with between lessons. And I think it's very cool that my soon-to-be cousin can do it!
• When the older men from the SA Navy went off to the side to play electric guitars and drums for us we realised that there's no age limit on playing what you want to!
• I want to go to Burundi and hear their drummers again. They had the most incredible energy (and giant smiles) and the vibrations from the drums kind of resonated in my collarbone and it was one of the most amazing experiences ever.

So I I'll definitely try and go again next year! Failing that... anyone keen for a trip to Burundi?

Crawling for coffee

You know those silly cartoons with people crawling along in the desert looking for water? Well that's basically what I did this morning, looking for coffee. Last week I was annoyed to find out that Monday had been taken away because of the public holiday on Sunday (we have a rollover to Monday if it falls on a Sunday, if it's on a Saturday we just lose it), but I must admit that having yesterday off was exactly what I needed.

This weekend was AWESOME! I can't actually write about all of it because I do need to do some work today, so I will list the highlights. If you want any more detail let me know and I will elaborate on points.

Anyway this weekend I:

• Was on time for work
• Had insanely dodgy conversations with friends of friends
• Went out for dinner and ordered a salad because I felt like lettuce.
• Laughed a LOT
• Found out that with one more trial run I've got the job as freelance photographer at Jo's studio!
• Bonded with a makeup artist at the studio (the poor girl has had a tough few months) and learned a bunch of new makeup tricks!
• Convinced my boss to start geocaching
• Met a lot of guinea pigs (I blame that movie...)
• Went out pre-goth clubbing, and was proposed to by some random guy I'd met 45 minutes before. Escaped by accompanying a friend to the bathroom and not returning.
• Was protected by Chief Goth who refused to let anyone ask me questions without her okaying them first
• Went goth clubbing and met a bunch of people at a Tim Burton-themed wedding reception
• Begged a bunch of scary goth guys to let me wear their hats. Took photos.
• Adopted a random goth boy (with very impressive guyliner) and wore his hat a lot. He proposed. Nice waistcoat.
• Started off the dance floor when the goths were too cool to dance.
• Was "Do you come here often?"-ed by someone on the dance floor while trying to escape from his scary friend with the beard and one of my undergrad students who happened to be there. Later on we danced and he poured a drink down my back. He also asked me "where does it end?" a lot (turns out he was asking my name. Whoops).
• Raced a car through a drive-through (on foot). Won by a technicality (that I could stand between their bumper and the car behind).
• Got yelled at by Chief Goth who took us home, said goodbye to the others and burst into tears.
• sat up with Chief Goth trying to be supportive (until 4am).
• Had coffee for breakfast while sitting on the grass. It was nice, but the coffee meant I was unable to sleep for the rest of the day. had hectic conversations with CG, I'm hoping I managed...
• Had a braai to celebrate my mother's homecoming
• Saw EEbEE who had come to Joburg for the weekend! He has hair now.
• nearly died having had an hour and a half sleep the night before and staying up late talking to people in the parking lot.
• Washed and vacuumed my car!
• Cleaned out a cupboard (this led to interesting philosophical debates, like "why was it ever a good idea to buy black velvet pants? and "Who even SELLS black velvet pants?")
• Spent time with my brother and his wife.
• Cycled about 80 km (over the whole long weekend)
• Nearly killed people for talking loudly in the gym.

So ja... that was my long weekend! Do you understand my need for coffee?

coincidences

Sorry I've been so quiet, this weekend was the sudden return-to-reality that I tend to get whacked with when I get back from fieldwork... I haven't been sleeping well because I'm not used to the noise of the city (even in my peaceful and leafy suburb) and because I've been flying through Green Wing, which I finished watching now and I'm at a loss for what to start next. Suggestions?

So anyway besides dozing off periodically, taking epic naps and falling asleep on my feet, I spent time with friends, went back to work and basically had a nice laid-back weekend. The weird coincidence was that I got a message last week from someone I hadn't spoken to in years.

We were at the same school, but in different years, so our mothers knew each other from school functions, and we had the same music-teacher and so we were put into our first orchestras at the same time (I think she started a year or so after me, I started at 10, and for my first concert I didn't know anyone, which made it rather scary!)

For our first few years in various orchestras (we were in our school orchestra together as well as the local junior orchestra) we were an absolute nightmare for conductors. We giggled constantly, played practical jokes, and often had contests where we would see who could play correctly with more bubble-gum n their mouths (wild-cherry flavour was the best, and I still can't eat it without feeling mildly ill as I remember the record-breaking 12 packs at one time from 1997).

The orchestra community is horribly cliquey, and this extends to children's groups, so there were two 'cool groups' one of them run by the two of us, and the other run by two horrible girls called Alexis and Whitney. We would audition every year for our orchestra and seating placement (you sit closer to the front if you're better than the others) and one year I did pretty well and moved up into the Youth Orchestra, while she stayed back in the junior orchestra for another year.

I doubt we were any different ability-wise, but I played the viola, while she played the violin, so I think I was more in demand, plus I was older and getting closer to the end of high-school and so they wanted to get me into Youth a bit faster. Either way as it happened, I went through, along with one friend who was desperately shy and didn't actually talk, and Alex and Whitney and their entire little group.

It was horrible! It took me almost a year to settle down, the music was difficult, the people were mean because you can't be a cool clique unless you exclude somebody and I was all alone there. it got better after a few months when a new violist arrived and we made friends very quickly and so we began to form a whole new gang, and by the time I was too old to be in the youth orchestra I was very sad to leave.

Anyway the girl I hadn't seen in ages was promoted up to the youth orchestra after a year or two, but by then we'd kind of grown apart. She'd moved schools in the interim and I hardly ever saw her, and as the baby orchestras performed first at every concert and we performed at the end, I don't think we'd spoken for ages. We stayed friendly, but not really close at all, and when I finished and went to university we kind of lost touch.

So anyway on Thursday or so I got a message from her asking if I remembered her and to see what I was up to. As it happens she's off doing community service (a year of community service is required for all health-science professions, two years if you're a doctor) in the middle of nowhere and was coming back this weekend. As she studied in Cape Town she doesn't know many people in Joburg and so she figured she'd get in touch.

We went for brunch on Sunday and it was awesome! As it happens, she's living in the middle of nowhere about two towns away from the middle of nowhere where I do my fieldwork! It was really nice to chat, particularly as she's as shell-shocked to be back in Joburg as I am and we were able to commiserate over the headaches, nosebleeds and insomnia that come with coming home. She also goes into Nelspruit quite often to use equipment at the hospital and to get meat (apparently she has a grocery store near her, but their meat selection is limited to feet, beaks and bones, heaven only knows what they do with the rest of their animals) so we know the same part of the world pretty well which lead to lots of

"And then you go and there's the two women in the car-"
"With the choc-chips! And then the people by the-"
"orange farm with the tractor! and the guy who takes his shirt off and-"
"He drives the tractor down the highway! Who is he?"
"He makes the broken-pot water-features things they sell them-"
"Oh I know that pace, I think they're quite pretty although the-"
"Guy with the shotgun is insane!"

And so on. It was very cool.

And now I'm so excited to go back on fieldwork because there's someone I can coordinate with so we can have shopping/town trips at the same time and coffee...

The big 300!

So I just realised that I have over 300 posts on here! I think this is number 303! As I didn't catch any lizards today I figured I would write about my blog instead (rather than a diatribe on how awful it is when the lizards aren't cooperating and you have the "I'm too sexy for my shirt" song stuck in your head).

Oh and for the record, thanks to everyone who was nice to me when I felt awful yesterday, the headache is almost gone and I've been drinking lots of liquids - my water bottle, which I had thoughtfully filled with Game this morning to stave off the dizziness was totally attacked by ants and I drank most of it anyway! Proud?

So yes, it's been almost three years since I started this blog, I didn't really want to, but I as peer-pressured into it, and having had rather a lot of fun having comment-wars on other people's blogs I figured I might as well go for it. Oddly enough I think that out of all of us I'm the one who still blogs the most regularly, with the exception of Sarah, who started a new blog when she moved to Japan, which makes me giggle on an almost daily basis!

I have weird memories of blogging, from typing out an angry post on email on my phone while my friend and her new boyfriend mauled each other repeatedly in front of me, to one of the first posts, when I'd used out lab's psycho-tap to scrub tiles one Saturday and sprayed water down the front of my pants, on a day when the high-schoolers were touring, so I made a cup of tea and sat and drank it while holding a wad of paper-towel over my lap and writing about how awkward it was. There was the soul-searching (not really) moment when one of my mother's friends accused me of being a goth. there are many many posts on my fieldwork, with my favourite being about a day when everything went totally wrong, but I didn't let it get to me.

I don't ever really have "I should blog this!" moments, although sometimes I do, but generally forget about it until I'm in the middle of another post. I have a few dedicated and awesome readers, and a few who read my blog even though I've never met them! They've also gone in phases, three years ago we had a bunch of Americans living in Korea who we got to know pretty well, then there was the phase with the weird American who freaked out if we didn't comment every day...

There are people who I email regularly as a result of my blog, and people who have blogs that I love reading even though I have no idea who they are- for some reason they make a discussion on their choice of curtains fascinating!

So I guess I should say thanks! Thanks to the friends who forced me to start this. Thanks to the people who read and comment and make it feel like I'm doing more than talking to myself. thanks to the friends who make my life so weird that I have stuff to say! Thanks to the lizards who give me plenty of experiences that I feel the need to retell.

Happy 300 guys!

The most awesomely awesome day EVER!

Awesome things that happened today:

1. After two days of solid rain and miserableness, it was a beautiful day! It was sunny and warm but not boiling hot, with enough breeze to be comfortable. The sky was the most stunning blue and it was clear, the rain has cleaned out all the dust-haze from the mountains so I can see for miles!
2. I can walk properly! I even went up steps one stair at a time, unlike the shuffle both feet on each step thing I was doing. It'll be a few days before I'm back to scrambling on the nastier rocks, but I was able to cope today, as long as I don't kneel on it, it seems fine, with a few painful twinges ever now and then to remind me to take it easy.
3. I caught five lizards today! FIVE! And there were a few more so I'll have enough to keep me busy for a day or so, on one of the easier outcrops until I can cope with the climbing again. FIVE!!!!
4. My equipment arrived from Joburg today so I can finally get finished with the lizards I've caught already. I've checked it and it seems to be working fine which is a huge relief!
5. I discovered that although I've kind of gone off weet-bix (my cereal of choice for about a decade) it's absolutely delicious if you sprinkle some cinnamon on top!
6. Because I had to go into town to get the equipment, I was able to stop and get petrol (a huge stress gone, I always worry about having to hike out of here, 4x4 uses a lot of fuel!) and creme soda!
7. As I was filthy from trapping and had to go into town I was able to get to the showers before the anti-poaching guys could use up all the hot water again!
8. My laundry is dry! And despite having a broken oil bottle in a pocket, as well as over a week of trapping dirt on all of it, it seems to have come out stain-free! Gotta love Vanish! Plus I saw the episode of green wing with the dead thing's box, and now whenever I think about laundry I have to yell "What? They haven't been WAH-SHED?" The kudu think I'm nuts.

Bad things:

1. I accidentally got the lavender no-rinse fabric softener (the washing machine here is a great luxury, but a bad rinser) and so now I smell like an old lady.
2. I told my mother about the leopard. The panic in her voice... not so good. Whoops.
3. The anti-poachers are still here. As much as I guess it's good to have two guys in tents with rifles around in case anything scary happens, well... there are two men with rifles sleeping in tents in my garden!

So bad:3 good:8

What a great day!

Scary stuff!

So last night it poured with rain, which is quite weird for winter here, but the weather has been a bit strange on this trip. I was sitting at my laptop at around midnight (don't judge me! I get distracted and then I realise that it's 2am and I haven't slept...) when amidst the noise of rain hitting the roof, i her a weird thudding noise, like something was crawling around on top of the house.

I was very brave and took the supa-awesome spotlight that my folks got me for my birthday and went looking. I didn't see anything, but it was really dark and I didn't get much further than the verandah - the steps down were wet and my knee was really sore and swollen from falling earlier- couldn't bend it at all - so I didn't want to get hurt.

A little bit later I heard it next to the house - the sort of almost-grunting/snoring/rasping noise. Yip, I was visited by the leopard last night! I know there are rumours of a few in the conservancy where I'm living at the moment, and a few people ave seen them. I hear them quite often and I've found kills up trees before, but this was the first time one has come near the house. I think he may have been trying to snack on the vervets and monkeys that shelter near the house when it gets rainy.

This afternoon I heard it again, really near the house, but just beyond the tree-line so I couldn't see it, but I think one of my kudu might have had a nasty shock. If he's been around the house it explains why there has been a distinct lack of game in the area for the last two weeks!

On the plus side it was freezing and cloudy today so I couldn't go lizard-hunting, and think my body decided that it was time to force e to get some sleep so I could recover from my fall. I got up ridiculously late, pottered around for a few hours, went back to lie down for an hour and woke up at 5! It seems to have worked, considering that I've taken a grand total of 4 disprin over the last 24 hours, I can bend my knee again, and as long as I don't push myself I can sort of walk around! The bruise isn't as impressive as i would have hoped, there's something about pain being reflected on the surface that's very satisfying (don't I sound emo? It's not like there's anyone here to sympathise!), but if the weather report is correct, and the fact that I can see a few stars is anything to go by I should be back on the lizard-hunt first thing tomorrow!

The little things that make me happy

So a few nights ago we ended up sitting on the roof of the building next to ours, drinking rather awful wine and starting at the Joburg skyline and it made me realise just how special everything is. So I figured I'd make a list of things that make me happy. It might help me to stop this weird urge I'm having to hug people lately... our lab is totally emotional at the moment, we're discussing feelings and stuff!

1. the lab: I know I don't really belong in the lab where I'm sitting, as I have a desk upstairs in the other lab, where I lived for almost four years, but at the moment I'm really enjoying the company and random academic discussions (and the coffee machine).

I got this sign from my supervisor who is leaving and clearing out his office. I think its so cool! I'm also starting to make my spot in the lab feel like my own, but putting up things like the sign and some old old floppy disks as well as infiltrating the primate toy collection with wire lizards...

This was my desk back in honours, which is the last time I had a pin-board (until now!). I loved that board so much! note the collection of travel-mugs so that I never had to be without my coffee (or tea in those days).

2. Random humour in everyday life. My dad took me out for dinner on my birthday and this was on the menu. know it's immature but I had a good chuckle when I saw that "Uncle Nev's T-bone" was available (sorry for picture quality, dim light, cellphone camera...).

3. The crazy zoo people (who I don't see often enough!). Last time I spent a significant amount of time there they let me in with some baby jackals. They were SO cute! Almost like puppies but with small feet and ears instead of big floppy ones like dogs have.

4. My job (well the official one anyway). I can never get over just how lucky I am to work somewhere where they don't fire me for going away so much! I generally enjoy interacting with the people, playing with the animals and trying to get the credit card machine to work. This is the awful swipey thing for manual transactions. I hate it! But it works so I should stop complaining!

5. The gym (and the crazy people there). I'm still loving the whole exercise thing and for some reason I'm running more often than cycling these days. the sign in the change room is... adjustable... this is the handiwork of a friend of mine...

6. My menagerie at home. This is Max being cute. It's hard to believe he's almost 7!

And of course number seven: in a few days time I get to go away from the awful awful traffic and noise and pollution to have a distinct purpose in life on a day-to-day basis and get back to the real hands-on fieldwork. Which as much as I'm dreading it this time, I also just can't wait! And of course the fact that I hate to go away is because I'm so lucky to have so much here to come back to!

exciting stuff!

I totally just finished my data-entry! It’s so exciting! And the vet just received an order of rather scary stuff, like morphine and anaesthetic and they totally let me sign for it!

And I took my camera to show to Joey this morning and we had all kinds of fun rushing around the video-store posing and generally looking like morons. On a more serious note, now that we both have fancy cameras and I’m comfortable working with animals, we’re thinking of starting a business photographing people’s pets. I got the idea yesterday after I saw the cutest puppy ever! It’s basically a complete mongrel, who was abandoned at the vet with a broken leg. After the owners didn’t come and collect her she was adopted by a really nice lady and she’s SO cute! I’ve never seen all the staff at the vet melt at the sight of a puppy before! And the coolest part: the dodgy mongrel from the prison arrived for her check-up in a Porsche! Ideas for starting said business?

In other news, Lara and crew totally played guitar-hero without me last night, I’m so offended… and I’m getting more blue streaks put in on Friday! So exciting!

Why do I do these things?

Yesterday was the honours student's birthday, and I didn't know until I decided to indulge in some Facebooking tonight. Now I feel terrible! We'll have to have a ... what are those thing called? A pinata? I've never seen one before except in weird TV shows... I felt really bad today because a few of his lizards died and he nearly cried.

So anyway today I discovered that the major issue I've been having with my equipment was NOT a hardware fault, but a SOFTWARE problem. I think. so there is hope that I might actually be able to leave, and take all the readings that I need. There is hope!

The masters student also wanted to measure the colours of the paints she's using before I go away (potentially taking the specs with me), so she went off today and bought a ton of different paints. She had tried to go the scientific route and use a paint company that measures their colours that could match it more exactly, but they messed up, so she picked out a whole bunch of colours and then we measured patches of each one and picked out the right colours, or chose which ones to mix and stuff. It was quite fun actually!

So, to get to the actual point of the story, one of the colours was supposed to be a light orange. It turned out to be a super-hectic lumo orange! It practically glows. I was completely in love with it right away (bear in mind, my hair has gone from blue to fire-engine red in less than 2 months, and the last shoes I bought were bright yellow... I like bright colours!) so I decided to make a sign fr the door with it. I ran out of inspiration though and ended up just painting random abstract symbols on a piece of paper (yes, I have two degrees. Your point being?). I also repainted the practice model lizard by adding orange stripes. It looks like he's been outfitted in camo-gear now! with orange eyes and nostrils. He's scary!

So after I'd walked Luke to his car and had enough of fighting with the equipment, and not feeling like playing with the honours student's data yet (I said I'd have a look, because he's totally stuck), so I boiled to kettle for chai tea and then caught sight of the tube of orange paint. If it was a movie there would have been alternating shots of my eyes, the paint, me, paint, me... in quicker and quicker succession. With the music doing a dramatic crescendo.

So while the kettle boiled I found a paintbrush and painted my nails with the bright orange paint.

It was a messy job, but I figured it's just acrylic (or so I thought) and I could just neaten it up with some wet paper towel. When I tried I succeeded in smearing orange paint all over my palms, a lab coat, the sink, my tea-mug my lower arms and possibly my face (no mirror in the lab and the honours students next door were looking at me oddly, but I have no way of figuring out if that was a result of paint on my face, or paint all over the rest of me. It's also pretty much indelible. Whoops.

So I went outside and chatted to the honours students, and they were all stressed out,. so I felt all patch adamsish because they couldn't look at me without giggling. The plus side was that I didn't want to touch my keyboard until the paint was totally dry! I'm just hoping I can soak the orange off when I get home. Whoops. Oh well, live and learn I guess! and it is a VERY funky orange, so maybe if I paint over it with clear nail polish when I get home. Actually I have clear nail polish here, from the skeleton-reconstruction it ended up in my dissecting kit... I'm going to go and do that now!

Fun times!

Chai tea

I found a box of chai tea at the supermarket and brought it into the lab. I've been drinking it constantly since then, with soya-milk and a little bit of sugar. The whole lab smells nice now!

Apparently it has as much caffeine as coffee. Is this true? Or just another myth like the coffee having less caffeine than tea myth (so not true!). Coffee has been giving me headaches so I had to give it up, which means that my caffeine levels are dangerously low at the moment!

I am a strange strange person...

So I spent most of yesterday fighting with the complicated papers again. It's not often that I can say I spent an entire day on a single paper and not feel gulty for procrastinating - I worked hard and thought hard and wrote out pages of ridiculously long and scary equations which I think are almost starting to make sense to me! The rest of the day was spent helping my supervisor who is having computer issues after upgrading his referencing program (I could have told him that version 10 is evil, but he probably wouldn't have believed me, considering that he still hasn't changed back to the old version after a very horrible battle to remove a single letter from a reference...) It was actually quite entertaining, how it was almost a role-reversal day - for once he was trying to find ME! Excuse my grammar there, it's 8am and it's already been a long day...

So anyway, back to the title. As I drove home last night I realised that I was feeling completely happy and elated. I realised that I am currently working on something really difficult and I have no clue what I'm doing, and it felt great. I figured that maybe I've been so depressed lately because I've been bored. I work hard, but most of it is techniques that I've learned before (back to 2006 when I started as a postgrad) and most of it is boring and repetitive and as much as the results occasionally look cool and I enjoy working towards figuring out what's going on, what made me fall in love with academia wasn't getting publications or looking intelligent (or getting A's - although that was always fun). What I love about academia is finding an issue or a problem and grappling with it and discussing it and arguing about it and generally fighting until I figure it out.

Lately I've been thnking hard about leaving academia once the almighty PhD is finished. Now I'm not so sure. I really do love what I do, I'd just lost that for a while.

And today I went back to gym after a few months of not going (the Madagascans needed all my energy, I went on fieldwork and then I got sick from a diseased monkey). It was awesome! I might not be able to walk tomorrow, but I'm feeling great now, albeit a little bit tired fromoleaving home at 6am after sitting up late cooking for my dad.

Facing fears

So, in a spate of putting-ducks-in-a-row, I've spent the better part of the last week doing huge piles of admin, ordering equipment, booking vehicles for the upcoming field season and sorting through data to get it into a workable form. I've also had bad days when I've gone home and needed to take my mind off life, so I've been catching up on movies.

It is here that I faced a very real fear... yes, really... believe it or not... I watched the whole of the Wizard of Oz. In one sitting! I think the fact that I had my phone with me, with a few close friends on speed-dial helped. The australian had also told me what she could remember of the ending which made it a lot less scary. I also found the Dorothy & Co were exceptionally annoynig, so I didn't really fear for them at all. Maybe if the lions, tigers and bears (oh my!) had succeeded in eating them they would have stopped singing... As for the wicked witch of the west who has been a recurring figures in my nightmares from when I was about 4 years old... well I found out that the stripy tights that scared me so much actually belonged to the wicked witch of the EAST! And the fact that I knew that witch #1 had a house land on her, and #2 did the whole "I'm melting! Meltiiing..." thing, they got a whole lot less scary.

I also faced another fear today, that is the fear of tring to do something I don't understand. As of this morning, I have decided to do some visual modelling with my data. It means that I've spent about 6 hours reading papers with really long equations that I don't understand, but I'm making progress!

Lion, Tigers and... never mind!

So I just spent 4 days in the Kruger National Park. It's pretty much this really massive game reserve in the lowveld, that at some points is less than 100km from where I do fieldwork. I was sent along with a visiting researcher from Australia, who was really cool. It was nice to meet a scientist (with the exception of my scientist friends who are totally rox) who could have a normal conversation about music, dumb horror movies and also cool stuff like geckos and stuff they found in experiments and stuff.

It was weird going there. Firstly, we used to go when I was really small, and I didn't really like it too much. My concentration-span is notoriously short, and my clearest memory is being tired of being cooped up in a car all day (it's a big% area so you aren't allowed to walk around) trying to eat pop-rocks quietly so that my dad wouldn't find out that we were eating in the car. My mom used to snea up pop-rocks to try and keep us quietly. My other memory is of it being super-hot and we bought little hand-held fans for the back of the car, where we found out that if you got new abtteries and put your hand in the way of the blades it really really hurt. I have a few memories of animals, but not nearly as vivid as trying to sleep when it was really hot and stuffy at night, and swimming in the pool at one of the rest camps.

Needless to say, when I was around 10 or so we stopped going to Kruger, and went to the beach on holiday instead, which I was a lot happier with! So the first weird thing (after all that) was the random memories that popped up when I went to places. I remembered things like sitting at a particular picnic site and nearly being mobbed by starlings, and seeing a you leopard (or was it a cheetah?) asleep at the side of the road, or the hyenas we saw once. I really didn't expect to remember all tehse things when we were in terrain so much like my field sites where I've never really thought about those holidays at all!

Secondly, it was really hard for me to be cooped up in a car all day. Partly for reasons that I will not discuss here as I think they are best left alone, and partly because it looked so much like the farm, so we'd go past an outcrop and I'd have to force myself to quell the impulse to jump out of the car and go and look for lizards! I also battled a little bit because I'm actually relatively antisocial and like to take a walk whenever I'm away to get away from people and enjoy the silence for a bit. As ti's all scary and big 5 and stuff I had to be around the australian the whole time. I was proud by how wel I masked my crankiness at times, and other times I took an extra shower or went to bed really early so that I wouldn't have to be all friendly and stuff.

Thirdly: well the Kruger is a big 5 area. This means that the 5 animals traditionally known to be the most dangerous to hunt (and generally be around I think) are there and any walking around ahs to be done in the presence of game guards with rifles. For the record they are: Lion, Rhino, Elephant, Buffalo and Leopard. Anyway althought hunting them is totally out of the question now, there is some prestige attached to seeing all of the big 5 on a trip. Don't ask me why, elephants and buffalo (and Rhino) in some parts are almost as common as impala, and if there really was a prestige-type list it should probably include cheetah, wild dogs, hyenas and a few other things I've forgotten to mention. Anyway the moral of the story is that it is nearly impossible to see all of the big 5, mainly because it's really hard to find (or spot - no pun intended) leopards. We saw it 3 times in 3 days. Really. We saw black rhino - they were reintroduced relatively recently and there are only about 70 individuals in the park, had 3 independent leopard sightings and saw a cheetah with cubs (also something that hardly ever happens). If you;d asked me a week ago what the chances were of somebody seeing a leopard and a cheetah in a single trip to the kruger I would have laughed at you!

And finally, I realised that I actually know stuff! I'm famously bird and buck (antelope) impaired and can barely tell the difference between a pigeon and a mossie (sparrow), but for some reason I knew a lot fo the birds that we saw, and the antelope weren't nearly as difficult as I expected. There weren't as many different bokkies as I expected, and I geuss I've absorbed a tiny bit of bird knowledge from all those weeks in the field, but I was shocked!

I also found out that I'm actually pretty good at chatting to people in Afrikaans. We came across very few English-speakers and if you're driving past people who have just seen a leopard and they and tell you, it really does come in handy. Now I know that my Afrikaans is good, partly from travelling fairly often through South africa, and partly from some close friends who speak Afrikaans at home (and often to me when they forget that I'm English). I've been able to make myself understood and understand people well enough to organise things or ask questions, but I'm always extremely self-conscious and they realsie that I'm English and they either keep it simple or they start speaking English. On this trip I felt completely comfortable speaking Afrikaans, to a point of having random conversations, just chatting about stuff and even on one occasion (after I touched my camera to a hectic electric fence and shocked myself) swearing in afrikaans and then being rather sarcastic to the people who pointed out that it was actually electrified. It was very cool!

Photos are to follow, otherwise this post will go on forever!

Back on track - well sort of...

I decided to stop lying around feeling sorry for myself, and I went to the zoo this morning (having slept for a good 14 hours last night). It was hard, they've changed my frogs into bigger tanks, which is theoretically nicer for them, although they can dehydrate quite easily if they aren't sprayed enough, and now I can't clean tanks without a spotter (someone to watch for escaping amphibians while I clean). The openinng is just far too big for me to control what's going on. I was mildly annoyed by the whole situation - firstly I was supposed to go in on Wednesday and today to help with treatments, but they seem to have rescheduled without telling me. That's a relief as I wasn't able to do very much at all on Wednesday, so I'm quite glad I didn't let them down.

What annoyed me even more than being out of the loop, is that I was there to move frogs into tanks on Sunday and I decided (and was confirmed by the volunteers there - who are the people who actually do all the husbandry) that the big tanks, despite all the niceness of having more space were completely impractical in terms of husbandry and keeping humidity relatively constant. then on the first day that I wasn't tehre the higher-ups who have very little contact with the animals and the day-to-day handling of them made a decision without asking any of us or even listening to the little volunteers (who argued as hard as they could). They also put a bunch of frogs from different tanks together, which is bad as far as I'm concerned as a bunch of them are developing lesions and we're pretty sure they're contagious.

It's not my place to make decisions, but at the same time, it really annoys me that nobody even asked the people who are involved what their opinions were. I just hope that the frogs don't have to suffer, so I hope that I am wrong.

On a happier note, some of the big geckos laid eggs a while ago, and I hadn't known that one of the staff had put them in vermiculite and one of them hatched! It's the cutest baby gecko ever! It's so so so adorable! The whole time we were cleaning tanks this morning we'd occasionally rush over to the baby gecko tanks and start going "awwww!" it's really cute! And the other eggs are also about to hatch, we were holding them up to the lights to see the developing geckos and it's so cool!

And I'm going ice-skating again on Tuesday! I went on Monday with Luke and Duncan and Candice and it was awesomely fun, so on Tuesday Lara and I and whoever else we can scrounge up are going to go for half-price skating night! I'm glad because every time I skate I think to myself that I should go more often, and then I don't go for years and years... I can only go forwards and a little bit backwards now, hardly any of the cool stuff I used to do. But it's still fun, and I lvoe ti and I'm going to go more often. Really!

And I've spent most of the day at university and actually got some work done! I'm about to smash my computer for being uncooperative, but I'm making progress! Now I'm going to go home and sleep until tomorrow!

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!

aaaah! aaah!

So after much running around with these stupid funding applications, I decided to go geocaching on my way home yesterday. It was a nice 30 minute detour, with a lovely view, and although it might not be the nicest area, I was able to park my car, run and get it and get back to my car in less than 2 minutes!

Last night Luke and I went off to have dinner at the house of one of our numerous zoo-staff friends, where we learned how to eat, drink and chat while fending off Thandi, the baby mandril. It was fun, even if it got really cold while we were saying goodbye and Luke wouldn't stop talking so Elaine and I had to share a scarf and hop around in little circles to keep warm!

This morning it was up early to collect my mother from the airport. I left super-early, way before there should have been traffic, and proceeded to get stuck in traffic, where it took me an hour to go 10 km and eventually took me 2 hours to get to the airport. I used some of my stylish back-route knowledge and got us home in just over an hour, after detouring through some of the most wonderfully dodgy (and yet somehow kitsch at the same time) areas of Kempton Park.

So now I'm trying desperately to finalise my funding applications before I have to go off home to pack for my flight this evening, except that I need things from people to finish and they're not helping by not being here, or not answering email, so I'm afraid Luke is going to be PAing for me while I'm away.. (yay! thanks! :) )

Anyway I was talking to my mom between fits of road rage this morning, and I realised that I know more about Jersey than she does, and she just went there! I guess that's the awesome thing about geocaching, I know about all these random locations where there are caches, so I can get a totally more awesome experiece! Plus, with my pretty awful sense of direction, I get to have a GPS with me so geftting lost is slightly harder, plus I've also been looking at maps and stuff a lto, so I have a general and very vague idea of where stuff is on the island.

The sad thing is that I will probably see very little of Jersey in the 5 days taht I'm there, as I'm scheduled to go and meet with the zoo people on my first day, and if it goes well I'll probably live in the zoo for most of my stay. Zoos have a way of doing that to you!