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!

Realisations

Sorry for yet another miserable post. Here goes:

My project has been crashing and burning in the last few weeks. the thing is, I probably have enough for a PhD at the moment, but not a good one, not an interesting one and the novel cool stuff I've been waiting to do is currently hitting a brick wall (the experiment is, I'm not planning on throwing lizards around in construction sites).

basically I've been organised and had everything planned, and now at the 11th hour I have been let down y pretty much every single person who had promised to help me. I'm talking "Sorry, this person spent all your research money, you can't order anything right now!" to 'Oh dear, this chemical costs R5000 per milligram and I seem to have lost the bottle! Don't worry, I know you need it this week, but it only takes 6-8 weeks to deliver if you order it now!" kind of let down.

So last night I lay awake trying to make a Plan C (A and B crashed and burned already) I began to feel the panic attacks as they came and went and I might have sobbed into my pillow a little bit more than I'll admit to. Add on that I'm exhausted and can't sleep and this level of panic makes me nauseous which doesn't help and I'm hitting hay-fever season so I have a cough and a runny nose and a sore throat... I made a plan and lay in bed on Google (I love having mini-google on my phone) researching the possibilities while trying to ignore the fact that tai chi has become really difficult and I'm not looking forward to it and the people I would usually go to for advice on this (i.e. my mentor, an older PhD student who knows her way around these things and Luke) are all off overseas and I felt REALLY alone...

When I realised a few things:

1. I shouldn't have this much responsibility. While I've always been very independent, being totally alone at this level is ridiculous and I don't know why I put up with it.
2. I need a supervisor. I need someone to help me and tell me what to do. I can't keep on doing everything by myself. It's just making me sick.
3. If it doesn't work out, I'm still 24, as much as I want to finish next year, the world won't end if I don't.
4. I can always do fieldwork later the lizards are active until March-April at least.
5. Breathe in, breathe out. Breath in... breathe out...

So at 3am I got myself up, found a scary price-list for everything that I need and sent it to myself so I could handle it today, sent an email to my superV demanding a meeting and managed to get a few hours of sleep.

So maybe there's hope... either way I can sort of breathe again, as long as I think calm thoughts every few minutes!

not a herpetologist, not a physiologist... cue identity crisis!

It’s official – I am not a physiologist! I spent the morning doing lab work, and had some major pipette issues (you know, those cool colour-coded thingies like they have on CSI?) Well I pipette stuff almost every day I’m doing data collection, but accuracy isn’t really all that important because when you’re taking a sample you kind of want the maximum from your sample (once it’s been centrifuged) so it’s more about getting it all out of there…

So this morning, besides my typical oversleeping and being cranky until after about cup 3 of strong coffee I had to sort through all my blood samples, while having a conversation with some random who was walking past and hearing an ex-lecturer go on about thermal gradient in my head (if your samples are in a minus-70 degree freezer, they warm up insanely fast when you take them out, which leads to me scrambling through my thousand-odd samples (fine, 600) to find number 612a_w/x_spring before the rest of them thaw. Fortunately besides having a numbering system that makes no sense to anyone but me, I pack them away in sections so it’s slightly faster than what most people have to do!).

And then with the strike going on of course South African motorists have to gawk and crash into the cars in front of them so I had to dodge two accidents to get to medschool, by which time I had poured coffee all over myself, but managed to avoid it getting near my samples, but then I nearly had an accident in the parking lot when some little soon-to-be-doctor darling came screeching around a corning at about 60km/h, saw me braking to avoid her and burst out laughing at me. What is the world coming to? And so I ran off to the turnstiles to get onto campus and…well... I was carrying two boxes of equipment, my laptop, a coolerbag with blood samples and a normal bag. I got stuck. The turnstile kind of turned halfway and stopped and nothing I did could move it.

Of course the security guard who had been glowering at me a second before miraculously vanished, but some nice students (also medics, which confuses me. They’re not supposed to be nice…) stopped to help. The problem was that our cards will only wipe once for exit or entry and they get denied after that (cuts down on the sneaking friends in and so on) and so they couldn’t help me without getting stuck… finally someone got fed up and used her card, only to be trapped in education campus for all eternity (or at least half an hour) by which stage I thanked her profusely and left her there (I was already late!)

Of course I had to go through another turnstile before I could get into med-school, but the security guard reappeared (I think it was the same one) and let me through the other side so it was ok.

Anyway the guy who is letting me use his lab is probably the nicest person I’ve ever met and he basically took me up to his lab, showed me where everything was, helped me to get started planning and left me to it. It was quite scary as I suddenly noticed exactly how many things I do wrong in a lab (now that it actually matters, fortunately today is a trial run). I also realised that I am SUCH a zoologist. Physiologists are all lab-coated and gloved up and I find it so tedious. I’ll do it, if just to avoid the lovely radioactive stuff I’m working with, but I hate it.
I’ve never known a zoologist to wear a lab coat willingly, except for Luke’s case but that involved working with dung, so of course that changes things. I wear mine if I’m teaching or if I’m doing something really disgusting – although not always – the best part of teaching a dissection is that you get to wipe your hands o the nearest student. As for gloves… it’s fun once or twice, but having fingers that smell and taste like latex gets old pretty darn quickly. The only time I wore them willingly was when we were de-fleshing a mildly decomposing mole-rat to get the skeleton out…

I also quite like the fact that in zoology you face simple dangers – being bitten by a test subject, catching a weird tropical disease or picking up an exciting gut parasite. My doctor has his textbooks ready whenever I make an appointment and I can recite symptoms and treatments for most of the more common zoology-linked ailments in English and Afrikaans. I can deal with these things; I’ve been doing it for years. Working with things that are toxic and/or radioactive… I worry when I realise that I may have to face the consequences in a decade or two when we find out that it was FAR more dangerous than we’d thought…

Physiology is scary – there’s also the fact that I’m working with amounts that barely even register. I’m talking 1/50th of a millilitre – that’s like 1 percent of a teaspoon. So making a tiny little error can really mess my results up. And as nobody has ever worked on my lizards before there is no way of checking if I’m messing up or not. No pressure!

And of course, there’s the simple and obvious fact- lab work is boring. Mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly, boring. Give me a rock face with a sneaky lizard any day! And once you finish with pipetting over and over and over and over, while trying to keep track of everything and take notes and not let things thaw or freeze or explode (I have bad karma around breakable things) you get to sit and wait for it to incubate. For three hours! THREE HOURS! And of course with the strike and the traffic and silly students there’s no point in going back to main campus so I had my lunch with the medics (cringe) and set up my laptop in the lab.

Thanks for keeping me entertained guys! Now I have to do some reall work… only an hour before I get to try to avoid blowing things up again!

Oh and I went spinning with a friend alst night and it was totally not as bad as everyone said! i think I work harder when I cycle on my own though, none of those pesky rest periods... and it's Tai chi day! I've got the form I'm learning on my ipod now so I'm hoping the learning will go faster this time :) w00t!

shoes and guilt

First things first: the people in our lab eat popcorn almost every day. We love it and there's a place on campus that sells it relatively cheaply aand they make it really well as long as you don't look very closely at the oil... So when I was getting quotes for a coffee machine I got one for a popcorn maker as well (an air-popper not needing oil and all that nasty stuff) but we decided against it. Then I saw it on special for next to nothing on the weekend, Leia is super-keen to chip in and get it, Luke not so much...

As the deciding vote I can't make up my mind (no pun intended) so I have put up a poll (top right hand side of this page). Please vote and help me on this! It's not as arduous as commenting (although you are more than welcome to eplain your choice) and is totally naonymous so all you lurker out there are welcome to click a button and make your voice heard, but not identified!

Ok, so to the point of today's post... I got new shoes, and NO I don't feel guilty because they were on sale and therefore better-than-reasonably priced! I actually picked a different pair and was already at the checkout when I saw the shoes that I REALLY wanted, and the long-suffering salesman let me try them on. And what are the chances that the only pair left fitted me?




This is them:

Aren't they awesome? They come with a choice of black and pink laces, so I went with the pink, which make people visibly recoil at their brightness, but I don't really care, I like them! The best part is that I don't have to lace them up, and the padding which makes them super-comfy also makes them really nice and warm! And they match my pink paper-clip earrings!

So the guilt? well today I worked at the vet and from there went to the centre where I used to work to return DVDs that I hadn't got around to watching yet. I figured as I was going to go straight to the lab I'd get spinach and feta pie while I was at it and of course I walked past the hairdresser that I used to go to.

I moved from them to my friend's husband's sister's husband's aunt instead as she's much cheaper and really good and she works from home which is conveniently near to where my friend lives and so she used to come and keep my company while I got my hair done. She was also awesome enough to dye my hair blue and organise blue extensions when that didn't work!

Unfortunately since my last haircut, my friend divorced her husband, which made his family really angry and makes me scared to have Renee anywhere near my head with a pair of scissors. but as it's been a good six months since my last haircut and I'm in desperate need of one I figured I'd make an appointment considering that I'm working less than a kilometre away this week. Renee thinned my hair a lot last time so I've been able to have it loose, but lately that's grown out and it's too thick to do anything, even if I straighten it. and all the layering and stuff has mostly grown out which means it's just...everywhere!

So anyway, back to the guilt, i was on my way to the highway when I saw a woman sitting at the side of the road. She wasn't begging, she was just kind of sitting there. She held a blanket that might ave contained a baby, but I think was actually just strategic padding (I hope so anyway) and just sat, in the sun which was pretty warm right then.

I never give money to beggars, but I often keep food in my car that i hand out, or clothes or something. I've heard the stories of begging being more lucrative than working and all that but at the same time I worry that they're usually told by people who have jobs. At the moment there is NOTHING available, even the government-run companies aren't hiring people (despite dear Jacob promising 500 000 new jobs) and lucrative or not, to cast off your dignity and sit at the side of the road has to be totally soul-destroying. I don't often give stuff away, but I try to make eye contact and say hi and apologise, and just treat people like humans rather than pretending that they don't exist while revving to try and make the light change faster.

but today i didn't have anything, so I figured who was I to have made an expensive hair appointment while this woman was sitting there with nothing. The robot (traffic light) was red so I sat there for a while, until I decided that she could probably get more from my pie than I would and so I opened my window and offered it to her. It was still warm and she seemed really grateful and the light was about to change so I said it was a pleasure and to have a really good day and she went back to her seat.

As I changed to first gear I saw her settle back with bit more gusto than I'd expected, to see that she'd FALLEN down a hole that had obviously been dug to change cables or something for the robot! There was the plastic orange mesh stuff around the perimeter and I think she was using it for shade and it ad given way or something and she literally fell in backwards, head first!

The robot was green and people were hooting and I must admit my first thoughts were of whether I could leave my car, bearing in mind that my laptop was in the boot and that was probably a bad idea as I hadn't backed up this morning's work... so I waited until she stood up and waved that she was okay (although she seemed somewhat wobbly) and I had to go.

I can't believe it happened! And maybe if I hadn't tried to give her a pie she wouldn't have hurt herself!

I mean really, what are the chances of that happening?

And yes, I just wrote a post about homeess people and shoes. I am officially shallow.

Technology 1: Helen 0

So after much moping around and eating chocolate on Thursday, followed by almost killing myself at the gym and basking in the endorphin rush (mmm... treadmill...) and then having to take muscle relaxants in order to stop the cramping so i could sleep (treadmill? not so mmm...) I woke up on Friday morning in a fantastic mood and ready to take on the world!

We had donut day and I started organising things for when i had to leave, and then, once Luke headed off to teach my first-years I started moving stuff from the lab upstairs to the lab downstairs because that way I could be near my laptop and tick things off my packing list as well as being easier to carry things out to the vehicle from the ground floor.

On my last trip down I realised that something was missing. I went back to the lab and looked: nothing. I went downstairs and looked through all the boxes and bags: nothing. I went upstairs and scratched through my supervisor's gigantic pile of stuff from clearing out his office: some interesting things that I will have to ask about otherwise... nothing. i might have ripped a couple of posters in a temporary rage as I realised that my supervisor had confused the kits and gone off with a piece of equipment that is kind of fundamental to my work (it makes the machine turn on. Mildly important you know?). I went to the undergrad lab to see if Luke had any bright ideas, and my kiddies all looked happy to see me, but I wasn't very nice to them. I should send chocolate...

So I went downstairs and kind of stomped around a bit until the IT guy came to say hi and i pretty much burst into tears. He ind of looked awkward and patted me on the arm while I tried to make excuses t turn my back so I could wipe my eyes and low my nose discreetly and then he said "you're not having the best week, are you?" and i said "It's all sort of adding up and..." cue the sniffs and shaky breaths as the floodgates threatened to open a bit more.

He was awesome pointing out the fact that I'd said just the day before that I never cry, which WAS true, it had been years! And I had to find it quite amusing that while I was quite incapable of crying over a guy, I can cry over a piece of electronic equipment! He took me to a workshop where he and another guy tried very hard to adapt something else to do the job, but it didn't work although they tried EVERYTHING, and finally I decided to give up, as I can delay that phase for a few days and drive back home for a night to pick it up when he gets back. Lets just hope he doesn't extend his trip... As is I was waiting for other equipment, so rather than having it couriered I can just go and collect.

So I drove home so that I could get dropped back at university to take the field vehicle home and on the way some moron cut me off at a traffic circle. I lost it. Who knows what happened but I was screaming and crying and swearing and banging the hooter repeatedly - the guy covered his son's eyes and drove on. I had to drive around the block a few times before I cold stop crying and then I went home, washed my face, went back to university and ended up having junk food and a very long drinks session with the IT guy before i went home at about 11pm.

I must say, I think it's good that I'm finally figuring out what's going on in my head, in part because i think I'm starting to re-prioritise life slightly and in part because I've suddenly catapulted into a really awesome friendship with the IT guy, and he makes me examine my thoughts and actions in depth. I think I'm going to need the quiet time just to figure out what on earth I thin about everything, but I guess it's a good thing!

Oh, and for the record, I am currently in the middle of nowhere and it's FREEZING! The title of today's post refers to the post I was planning on for today, but for some reason my laptop won't read my camera, and this one needs pictures!

Go back to high school

SO, once again I have promised to write about something and I'm not going to. Yet. I will have to make a list and work through it all one day. I DO want to write about diving, I DO want to write about visiting the zoo yesterday and seeing the monkeys again and playing with a lemur. And back in time I still need to write about the desert trip and the bush pig bathtub guy and the farmers wife with her leaf blower.

But for now, something is bothering me.

I have a friend from high school. Most of the people I spent time with back then I have lost touch with and, thanks to Facebook I chat to one or two of them from time to time, but that's about it. Partly because high school was not a happy time in my life by any definition of the term, and partly because I find that if I do see them we have nothing to talk about. I'm away a lot and so when I'm around I really try to make an effort to be a good friend, but that means (as nasty as it sounds) prioritising people. I can't get my work done and still see all the people I care about. I can barely cope with getting my work done and seeing the friends I would classify as 'close' plus the people I am in the "getting to know" phase with who I really do want to get to know better.

I used to be a good friend, I never forgot birthdays, I kept up to date with how everyone was, I drank so much coffee with various people that my mild liking for coffee developed into a full-blown addiction. But not anymore.

So back to the point. This girl is... difficult. We were friends through school because we did a lot of extracurriculars together. We were at a fancy private school where I didn't fit into the traditional mould of "long blonde hair and eight layers of makeup" and neither did she. She went off on a weird pagan phase and I was into punk rock and metal and would have dyed my hair blue if a)my parents and b) school regulations would allow it. We were both from normal families which had morals and values rather than piles and piles of money and as such we found that we could relate to each other.

But after school things changed. I went to university and on my first day, in my first lecture I found an empty seat and shyly asked if I could sit there, and the girl who moved her bag out of the way became one of my closest friends. And so it continued. I'm not saying that university was a social cakewalk... but I was never alone or unhappy and I have been blessed with some of the most incredible people who I can call my friends.

This girl (who I will call Susie for anonymity and because I can't think of a better name) had a similar atmosphere. I know some people from her classes and I like them all. They're all lovely, sweet, friendly people. And yet by the end of a four-year degree, she had no friends in the world except for me and her next-door neighbour. We went of field trips for our studies, I went to a lot more than she did, and I survived everything from sharing a 1-person hut with 6 other people to showering in shoes because of a spider invasion, to sharing 2 showers with 60 other people and getting up to shower at 3am to avoid the queue, only to find a queue because everyone else had had the same thoughts. And those trips are among the happiest memories I have. You learn to appreciate the awfulness of a situation for it's humour and for the weirdness of choosing a career where getting into the shower to open the door to get out of the bathroom while trying to keep your socks dry in subzero temperatures can be considered normal. And through it all you bond as a group in a way that I've never known in any other situation.

She went on her first trip and phoned me every day to complain because the bath was dirty (first rule of fieldtrips: DO NOT use the bath! Shower if you can, otherwise find some extra-strength disinfectant first!). She made no friends on that trip. One of my brother's closest friends and a girlfriend who went to the same place, and she told me that she'd never had more fun...

I tried to prompt her into a more positive outlook. I like to whine myself, but usually purely for the drama of it, but I tried to explain that she would have more fun if she tried just a little bit... But it didn't work. As the years passed it got harder and harder for me to spend time with her. We really have nothing to talk about. I got tired of the phone calls which, as if scripted always go as follows:

me: "Hello?"
Susie: "Hi, is that Helen?"
me: "yes."
Susie:" It's Susie, how are you?"
me: "I've got a leg in traction and I haven't slept for 3 days, but otherwise everything's awesome! how are you?" (obviously the injuries change between calls)
Susie: "*sigh*" and then a half-hour rant about how awful her life is and how cute her dog is and how he sat when she told him to, but the he wanted his rawhide bone. Not the rawhide bone that you get from the petshop down the road from her, he only likes the rawhide bones from the market... and so on.

I know that her life is, to all extents and purposes, pretty empty, but at the same time every call got a little bit more draining until I just couldn't. So sometimes when she called I wouldn't answer and I would wait until I had a bit cup of coffee and I would listen to her voicemail. And then I would call back, or send a message or something and we'd invariably end up having coffee or something where I'd end up having to hear all about her dog again.

The kicker for me was when she got her name changed (officially) because she didn't like correcting people's pronunciation. It was the equivalent of doing all the paperwork to change her name from "Susan" to "Susie." She's adopted, and her parents waited for over 2 years to get her, and they picked out her name really carefully and they love her to bits. I I felt like she was kicking them in the face for it.

And so, over the past 6 years our friendship has kind of deteriorated and I feel guilty, but I'm just not around enough to spend lots of time with her, and I know that every time she calls and I'm out of town she feels like I'm avoiding her, but there's nothing I can do!

So anyway. She called about a week ago while I was having a narcoleptic episode and didn't leave a message. I would have answered it too, but - as anyone who knows me during nap time will tell you, it would take a small earthquake to wake me and my ring tone isn't that loud. I didn't call back because I figured if she hadn't left a message it was because she would call back. Then the conference and diving happened and I hadn't had time to sit still since then when I woke to this message this morning:

I just want to say that I won't bother u with phone calls or smses anymore since u never answer them. Good luck with everything. Our friendship was great while it lasted. Susie"

And now I don't know what to do. I know she's lonely, but I don't know if I should respond, or leave her to her sulking. And if I respond what do I say? I feel like I'm 15 all over again!

Reintegrating into society

So, after 3 months of being pretty much completely isolated from the rest of the world, I'm back in Johannesburg, one of the biggest cities in Southern Africa. Actually, according to a quick google-search I just did, it is THE biggest city in Southern Africa. I love Joburg, I've lived here all my life. It has a buzz and a 'vibe' (inverted commas to stop me sounding like a yuppie) and a friendly atmosphere and it's beautiful in its own way. At the same time it's crowded and polluted and noisy and rushed. So rushed. Every time I go away I need a few days to learn to slow down, because here everyone is in a hurry. I'm not sure if all the rushing makes us efficient, or we just like to create the illusion that we are, but everyone is stressed out and hurrying from one task to the next. I like to sit back and watch the mayhem, but I'm afraid I'm as guilty as the next Jo-burger in wishing that we could cram another 6 or 7 hours into every day.

So getting home is one of the things that I hold on to when fieldwork gets difficult. I have friends here who I miss like crazy and I hope that they miss me while I'm away. I have my family and my animals and the bedroom that I've slept in since I was 10 and the zoo and my lab...At the same time, for the last few days of fieldwork I dread the idea of coming home. I always realise that the place I'm staying as actually beautiful, if you ignore the scorching heat, the falling down cliffs and the tangles of thorny plants that seem to conspire to grow between me and wherever I'm going.

I would sit outside on the veranda on a super-comfy green vinyl sunbed-type chair (it's hideous, but I could sleep in it if there weren't so many insects bashing against the windows right behind it) in the evenings and look at the sky where the stars are so bright that I could take a walk around the farm at midnight without a torch and still be able to see where I was going. The sky isn't black at all, but a beautiful indigo colour. And I would sit and listen to the night-jars and the spotted-eagle owls and the frogs, and the insects would buzz around me (particularly the dung-beetles and moths the size of my hand) and every now and then bats would swoop down and grab insects just millimetres from my head.

Sometimes I would see antelope in the garden, trying to be quiet while crashing through the bushes, sometimes at night I would see a jackal, sitting under a banana-palm, just waiting, and looking a lot like one of my dogs back home. As much as I'm almost completely bird-impaired, I find it easy to learn frog-calls, so after a day or two listening to the frog-call CD on my ipod (yes, I have frog calls on my ipod, so what?) I would sit outside at night and identify who was sitting in the little catchment behind the house, yelling their little amphibian lungs out. I have a definite soft-spot for tree frogs, and I often heard a close relative of my favourite frog in the whole world. On a few occasions I went looking for them and once I spotted the little guys being SO cute! Unfortunately I never got close enough to catch him, so I couldn't take a picture, but I felt that even a sighting made the stumbling around in the mud completely worth it!

Contrary to popular belief, life in the middle of nowhere is far from silent. When the reed frogs going it sounds like a million car alarms going off at the same time, but I never found it intrusive at all. All the birds and animals and insects (OK, the insects got annoying, there were a bunch of crickets that got into the house, and they were LOUD!). The water is from a borehole (and I know all the dangers f drinking borehole water) and tasted fantastic, I got to make campfires if I felt like it, wear clothes that had been ripped to shreds and stitched up with cotton that didn't match. For 3 months I didn't have to think about blow-drying my hair, wearing make-up, if there were fights between friends I was far enough away to avoid being caught int he crossfire.

I'm not saying that fieldwork is all fun and games, it's hard, hard work, with long hours, no weekends, and the exhausting feeling of powerlessness where your life is controlled by the weather. At the same time though, it's simpler. You can judge a day as a success or failure by how many animals you caught, if all the measurements are taken. If something goes wrong there is nobody else around so you learn how to fix it. It's a wonderful simplicity.

To come home is hard. For one thing my friends are used to me popping in and out of their lives, so I'm not really greeted with much surprise. I'm always happy to see them and they seem happy to see me, but it usually feels like I never left. I battle with insomnia from the noise and the light of the city. I have a constant headache from the noise and the pollution. I'm exhausted from all the human interaction but I can't sleep and recover.

And the worst part: after all that, I have to go back to the lab and learn to think all over again. I have a nice new pile of data to organise and analyse and interpret. And it's hard. My concentration-span (already pretty pitiful) has shrunk down to less than 5 minutes. I literally look at a set of numbers, do one thing to them and then need a break. I'm up against a pretty important deadline and I'm over 2 weeks behind schedule because no matter how hard I try I Just. Can't. Concentrate. Cue the reawakening of my fear of public humiliation!

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!