DramaDramaDrama

Sorry to Sarah (again) but Hatting must wait, it’s been a tough week…

On Tuesday Laura came to visit! She’s been based in Oxford doing scary things like a masters in running around Columbia and a doctorate in visiting SA often and having a ridiculously dark tan for someone who lives in the rainlands…

Halfway through an awesome chat with her and The Great One (she’s like an oracle of advice for people like me who have no idea how to speak human half the time) I got a phone call from my mother to say she’d been in a car accident so I rushed off to fetch her.

She’s fine (albeit a bit shaken up), but the car isn’t, so after much paperwork (insurance accident reports and so on) and my mild freak-out at having to be the responsible adult for my mother (thanks for listening Luke), we’re also trying to figure out how to deal with being a car short, with me pulling long hours in the lab, my Dad (who came back from a business trip yesterday) working like a maniac and my mother’s tendency to never stay in one place for more than a couple of hours (her work involves lots of travelling and is relatively close to home so she’s used to driving backwards and forwards several times a day).

So I’ve been playing taxi-driver a lot, which means I have to limit time in the lab a bit so I have to focus more. It also means I’m three steps from foetal position under my desk most of the time, as my mother likes to schedule meetings in/around rush hour. There’s a reason I leave home at 5:30am twice a week and after 9 the other days, and why I never leave the lab before 6pm… People in Joburg can’t drive. Seriously!

At least nobody got hurt, the other person admitted to being at fault and has insurance and it was on a quiet street so there weren’t too many problems post-crash. I’m also hoping to use this as an opportunity to get my mom to go to the gym with me a bit and get some exercise, I nearly got her to dancing class this morning so maybe next week…

We’ll make it work, we have to, her car needs a new front axle, so it’ll take a while. I just feel like I’m living in a sitcom: “Sorry, I can’t go out tonight, my mom has the car!”

Oh and my phone died. As in the three buttons I absolutely cannot use the phone without (like the ‘ok’ button) don’t work…

Because this week wasn’t being nasty enough. On the plus side I get to use my dad’s old phone (which is like one of those nokia blackberry-esque thingies) which is AWESOME! and I’m about a year overdue for an upgrade anyway, so I’ll be phone-shopping with my father soon. Maybe me awesome cousin who knows about these things can suggest a new phone? I’m not handling the QWERTY keyboard well, I keep pressing letters more than once because I think of ‘L’ as ‘555’ and so on… I’ve also got longish nails right now so the tiny buttons are being really difficult. Any suggestions are welcome!

And Luke and Leia are back this weekend!

And I just had such awesome coffee!

Oh, and a preview, just for Sarah (and for Tamara considering you can just see the edge of one of the earrings I got at her open house last year!):

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!

Rejected...

So I was youtubing the Flight of the Conchords and I saw the song ‘Rejected’ and laughed like I haven’t in years. As it’s stuck in my head at the moment I figured I’d use it as a title.

Random stuff aside, the reason I’ve been so quiet lately is that, besides the usual insane load of labs I have to teach in at the beginning of each year, I decided that I need the experience and agreed to do some lecturing for one of the courses. The scary part is that it’s tomorrow and it’s on a topic that I’m not particularly clued-up on!

On the plus side I got the materials over a month ago and I’ve had plenty of time to prepare, and I have actually been preparing, albeit slowly. It’s just scary because I’ve never done it before! I’m not afraid of the kids- I’ve failed enough of them over the last few weeks that I don’t really have to worry about my authority being in question, and the field trip is only next weekend so they haven’t yet seen me half asleep, cranky and clutching at my coffee-cup as if it’s the only thing keeping me alive (I love camping, really, but teaching and camping at the same time is exhausting, particularly when it includes trying desperately to avoid seeing the lecturer in charge in his underwear… true story!)

The lecturer who traditionally runs this section has also been amazingly supportive, he’s talked me through lecturing styles, points to focus on, ways to avoid being boring (lets hope!) pacing… and we went to one of his lectures last week to get an idea of how to approach talking to 70-odd rather stupid children. So I was feeling fine!

To tell the truth by Friday the people around me were displaying several signs of nerves and freaking out on my behalf, and I was feeling calm and confident and generally ok. Then last night I went over the plans one more time and then did a trial lecture to Lara.

For the record, Lara is the most awesome friend in the world*! She is now a lawyer who is totally clued up on rodent diversity, and she listened and participated and asked questions (including sticking her hand up and going “Ooh! Ooh!” in a way that was creepily reminiscent of my students) and she pointed out things that I would have forgotten.

1.This is something I know, but most of my friends are used to me and don’t notice anymore: I speak fast. Really, I watch movies at double speed because I understand what they’re saying because I tend to talk that fast. I also write super-quickly. When I’m nervous I speed up even more. I’ve been known to give a 15 minute presentation in under 8 minutes without leaving anything out. As La said “You’re an awesome teacher, just try… keep it below the speed of light?” So I’m stressing that they won’t be able to keep up with me because they are undergrads, and if I’m anything to go by, they’ll want to write down every word.

2. I go off on tangents. I have the attention span of a two-year old, which can make me super effective as a sequential-multi-tasker but awful to follow in a conversation. I generally have at least three or four conversations running at a time and I switch between them – once again I don’t notice and a lot of my friends don’t either, but Lara, in her pretending to take notes eventually gave me a blank stare and said “You just harped on about flower structure for five minutes, I’m assuming that’ll be in the exam?”

Anyway I’m stressing out now! I asked my mom if she’d do a run-through with me, but she’s swinging between being way too keen and not caring, so I think I’m actually going to gym to work out the stress a bit and then I’ll come back and go over my notes one more time. Wish me luck!

And if the worst comes to the worst, I have Lara on standby for drinks and sympathy on Monday night!

*This isn’t necessarily true as I have a really awesome bunch of friends, but in this case I think she deserves a special mention as most lawyers would not agree to spend a Saturday night being told about rodents by someone who can’t even stay on topic!

a day in the life of...

Last night, as I was finishing up after a lovely quiet day at work, I got a message from Luke inviting me to movies with him and a few friends. Immediately the internal battle began – since I’ve been on antibiotics I’ve been too tired to go to gym and as it was my first day off the drugs I was planning on going to the gym to battle it out and panic over how unfit I’ve become. Seriously, if I go to gym every day it takes weeks for me to notice any improvement, but if I miss even one day I go downhill ridiculously fast. It’s really frustrating, but I guess I’m stuck with the metabolism I was born with and I have to keep going and live with it.

At the same time I haven’t been to see a movie in ages, and I hadn’t seen the usual movie gang in a long time either. To top it all off, Alfred, one of the guys who works at the vet, heard me stressing about the decision and decided to encourage me to go to the movie. So I decided to go home and then decide from there. When I left work I found that every single robot in the area wasn’t working. So there was a lovely gridlock. I called a friend who lives nearby and she said that it was clearish around her, so I managed to use backroutes and get to her house. She told me in no uncertain terms that I WAS going to the movies, and as I’d left some clothes at her house I was able to change (there was a horrible dog-vomit incident at the vet yesterday, and although I was able to avoid being in the line of fire at any stage, I still felt dirty and disgusting. Then she sat me down and did my makeup. Oh my gosh. The makeup! She’s done it for me before, but typically before we go out clubbing or somewhere where the panda look is ok. I did not intend to arrive at the movies looking like I’d been punched in the eyes, but when I went through my bag for my trusty makeup-remover wipes I realised that I’d left them at another friend’s house (moral of the story, pack up before you leave!).

So I got to the shopping centre and was greeted by a round of double-takes and a few very shocked expressions. They tried to say it was all about the hair (which is relatively bright red at the moment) but I felt really awkward. Once the initial “It wasn’t me! My friend did it and I can’t get it off!” explanation was out of the way I tried to ignore it, but I must admit, I felt uncomfortable, even in my car on the way home, until I got home and scrubbed it all off!

We went and saw ‘Yes Man’ which was really funny, although I caught myself wondering if it was really that great – a lot of the humour that had me giggling helplessly was the type that usually makes me avoid movies entirely. Either way, I was obviously in the right mood for the movie and I enjoyed most of it thoroughly (there was one scene that will stay with me for a bit, and not in a good way)!

This morning started off relatively well, I chatted to a friend, saw my parents off (they’ve taken my grandparents on holiday until Monday), went to gym and nearly died (seriously, a week ago I was the fittest I’ve been in ages and now it’s back somewhere beyond square one), checked my email, too a swim and the went rushing off to work. And that is where it all went wrong…

I was happily driving along a particular stretch of road that connects up to William Nicol (one of the big main roads). This road has two lanes in each direction, no driveways or concealed entrances and enough robots scattered along it that you don’t really ever have to worry about pedestrians jaywalking or anything. And for some completely incomprehensible reason, the powers-that-be decided to make the speed-limit along there 60km/h – the same as in a built-up area on a single lane road with driveways and schoolchildren and so on. In the nearly 5 years that I’ve been driving the only cars I’ve ever seen sticking to the speed limit along there are the dodgy ones that are stuck together with chewing-gum and string that can’t make it over 40 unless they’re on a downhill and they don’t have any passengers.

So of course, today of all days, they decided to sit behind the bushes with their speed cameras. And every single car on the road was pulled over. I was the second-last of my batch and the cop was really nice and polite, we chatted about the weather and how hot it was and then he decided to tell me that as I had been driving at 72km/h he had to give me a fine. I freaked out and explained that I was late for work (which by then I was) and that the road is straight and I hadn’t noticed and so on. To tell the truth I don’t think they’d used the camera on me at all, as they only pulled me over when I drove past, saw the cops and braked with a terrified expression on my face. I apologised profusely and asked if I could call my boss because I was running very late by then (I was about 15 minutes away and I had 5 minutes before my shift started) to tell him that I was going to be late and to find out if the morning receptionist could cover for me for a few minutes until I got there.

I don’t know if the guy had just been trying to scare me, or if the fact that I had taken off my sunglasses, made eye contact and asked how he was today made any difference, but he let me call the vet and explain that I was stuck in a roadblock with police, and then he told me to wait while the lady before me got her ticket. Once she had left he explained that he didn’t want her getting upset that she got a ticket and I didn’t, and he let me off with a warning. And so I drove like a grandmother to work where I collapsed behind the front desk and told my whole long story to the other staff at the vet. Charlotte, the morning lady (who looks about 20 years older than me, but it turns out she is actually a grandmother already) was really sweet and told me to drive carefully and was off on her way.

And that was my day today! Lets hope it gets better!

The inner bunny-hugger

So I haven't posted for a while because I've been entirely caught up in the oh-so-joyous world of applying for animal ethics permits. For the non-zoologists out there, basically everything I do involving animals (even observing them) requires me to fill in a 13-page long form (including 3 mini-essays) which is given to a committee of very scary and qualified people who decide whether or not it is necessary for me to do the study. Last time I did this it was a huge drama because they wouldn't give me clearance until I completed a whole ton of corrections. That's all fine, except that the secretary didn't bother telling anyone, so I ended up starting fieldwork late becasue I had to do 2 piles of corrections and then wait for the next committee meeting where they made me go in and talk to the committee - something that has never happened before as far as I know!

Let me just point out that I have huge respect for the whole ethics thing. Firstly, you can't study at the university without clearance - it's part of a contract type thing I signed when I started this degree. Secondly, it's one of very few things that I get to apply for directly, not through my supervisor, and as much as I hate responsibility, I like that they hold ME accountable for my actions. Thirdly, you can't publish without ethics clearance and fourth: it makes you decide on an end-point, so basically when the animals aren't looking too fantastic, you can go back to your end-points and use them to decide whether or not you should remove an animal from an experiment. I also like to think that if there is ever a more humane way of treating my animals, the committee would know and would help me to implement the changes necessary. I've also, on occasion, had to show people around the animal facilities to show where they're being housed, and demonstrate all my techniques to a vet to make sure that I'm not hurting anything.

So anyway, there is a cut-off date for applications - in this case it was friday. If you miss the cut-off then you can't apply until the next month, so everything is set back - a major issue if you depend on the breeding season for everything like me, and if there is a rainy season starting soon that will stop my work completely from time to time while I wait for the rocks to dry off a bit so I can go back out into the field. So on Wednesday I realised that I had 2 days to do my application - one day of you count the fact that it would have to be read over by my supervisor (which takes at least half a day of tracking him down) and the by the guy in our department who has to sign off the application before I could submit. I went straight into panic mode, and didn't even go to the zoo for the rest of the week. I'm pround to say that my application went in on Friday and everything should be ok!

On top of all of that my supervisor yelled at me for not finishing something that I'm currently taking a break on, and went on to tell me all about how hard it'll be for me to get a posting after I finish this degree, which sent me into a depressed spiral. I told him the next day that I don't want to go into academia, which I think scared him slightly, but I'm hoping that he'll start to understand where I'm coming from now. Either way he's out the country for a month soon and I'll have to go back to fending for myself. Oh well...

This morning at the zoo felt decidedly weird, I missed being there every day, but I also realsied that I really don't have time for it, and I should start to pull back and refocus on my work. The frogs are looking fine, despite my not being there, although 2 of them are missing, which means that they probably escaped and then dried out and died in some corner of the room. I got to sit in on a rock-monitor post-mortem though, which was really interesting!

The first are totally not in my top ten anymore...

Sorry I haven't blogged recently after the rather frantic pace of blogging over the last week or so... In the last week I have:

• dyed parts of my hair blue. This has been covered but I still find it super-exciting!
• been at the zoo at 5am setting up vivariums
• been at an official zoo-section opening with all the ambassadors and dignitaries while still...
• not cracking an invite to the official "we set up a display!" party
• force-fed venemous snakes (not a first, but totally awesome!)
• been yelled at for being late at the zoo
• Sent volunteers to their doom - babysitting Thandi isn't a walk in the park anymore! It's more like a sprint through the zoo chasing the psycho monkey - literally!

as well as numerous other things I won't mention! It's been mildly hectic!

Last night I went off to Billy's in fourways to watch first project perform. It brought back a lot of memories, about 8 years ago I was a total First Project groupie! They're a lot like those blue guys in Las Vegas, where it's a bunch of guys on drums, and they're really amazing and they don't need anything else. The drums (and random bits of metal, like STOP signs) are all that they needed and they were really incerdible. To add to the fantasticness the performers are all relatively good lokoing guys who perform without any shirts on.

That may explain why Billy's started filling up with rather a lot of girls last night... by 'girls' I eman everything from the 16-year-olds who had snuck in at about 6pm to avoid the bouncers to 40 and 50-somethings who tended to behave a lot like the 16-year-olds, but with elss dignity as they couldn't be kicked out for being underage. One such aldy was dancing on the bar by about 8pm, and not getting the attention that she felt she deserved - an image that I would far rather remove from my brain!

So anyway after a few drinks from a fantastic waiter with an unintelligible accent that had us falling around laughing (seriously, we were drinking Coke for the first part of the evening and it was still funny!) and a few fantastic conversations, some of which were centred aroud Lara's fantastic chest-hair (for the record, she doesn't have any, but if she did, we would totally make it super-stylish!) we went off o the dance-floor stage area to grab a good spot close to the stage. We got one that was slightly too close - during the performance I was about a foot away frmo one of the performers, and my ears are still sore! Then we waited, and waited, even dancing to the rather awful remixes of Britney Spears and the Black-Eyed Peas, and nearly starting a fist-fight with some dodgy old guy who seemed to think he was destined to be a pirate, and who got a little bit too close to Nicola and me. While I was content to shove my elbow into his ribs and give him a look that would have melted glass, Nicola found it a little bit more difficult to find her 'happy place' and the guy was only saved by our reshuffling the group to move her away from him once he decided that it was funny to push past us every 5 minutes.

We spotted the performers about 10 minutes before they weer due to go onstage. So they have no excuse of waiting for traffic or any such rubbish, but they kept us waiting for almost an hour and a half, and when tehy went on there were only 3 guys, rather than the usual 5 or so that I remembered. Plus, they had backing music with vocals and stuff, which took away all the magic of the whole thing. It was still cool and I had fun, but I found myself wishing that I was 16 again, listening to the original stuff they used to do.

It also got me thinking, as I was stumbling around the zoo this morning cleaning out frogs and geckos and chatting to one of the volunteers, that I'm getting old. Or rather, behaving old. I used to be out every weekend listening to new south african artists and going to music festivals and all that sort of thing. Now I go out just as regularly, but by about 11pm I'm tired and I want to go home. And I've hardly seen any new south african artists in the alst few years - except the couple that were at MyCokeFest alst eyar. And even those weren't new, I remember hearing the Parlotones singing "Staring at the Sun" when I was about 16, so they're hardly anything new!

It is very sad indeed. So now for some nostalgia: does anyone remember Sarongas (before they became Seether), Just Jinger (before they moved overseas), Nemesis, Tweak, Cucumber Zoo and all those awesome bands we used to go and listen to? what happened to them? And who's around now that's worth going to listen to?

I won't be posting for a few days as I'm off to Kruger with an Australian tomorrow, wish me luck!

It's raining cats, and dogs and parrots...

I work at a vet on Saturdays. It's generally relatively quiet, I sit back and help the clients who come in, read a bit of the oh-so-awesome stats books (there are actually two, one explains exactly HOW the tests work, and the other explains the logic behind using different tests and how to understand the results in a biologically-significant way), catch up on Mens Health and GQ by reading the copies left by Nick, who works during the week and discuss random stuff with my boss. Occasionally there is a rush of people, like with last weekend's feline leukaemia scare, or Puppy Day, when for some reason people all rush out and buy puppies on the same day. It's not a formal thing, it just happens, and I love it because I get to spend my morning being paid to cuddle cute little puppies.

This morning I rushed in slightly late. The robot a block away breaks regularly every saturday morning. It is green one way and red the other for hours at a time, and it's a main road, so people like me who come in on the red side and need to cross, get to play a fun little game of car-chicken trying to dash across in a gap while people around you hoot and swear and tell you you're irresponsible... until 15 minutes later when they're still sitting there and then they dash across and all the newcomers hoot and flash their lights and tell them that they're irresponsible drivers. Unfortunately if, like me, you get stuck behind someone who isn't aware of the saturday situation, there's not much you can do besides, hoot and flash lights at the person in front of you, who generally gets very flustered and refuses to move and gestures wildly. Until someone turning left or right sneaks across and then they begin to understand that it has been an awfully long red light, and not just becasue they were feeling uncomfortable because of the bad behaviour of the person behind them.

So I rushed in late, and started reading Men's Health. They came to the startling conclusion that if you stop exercising you gain weight! Apparently they did a study where they had a huge group of guys, and half of them stopped exercising and miraculously were out-of-shape after a few months, compared to the control group who ran 30 km a week. You learn something new every day! The sad thing is that as a girl reading mens magazines I can laugh. I know if I picked up the latest Cosmo I'd probably find out similar nuggets of information, but I would then be forced to be offended by their underestimation of the average women's common sense. Or I'd be saddened by the lack of common sense that prompts girls to buy said magazines. At least I know from experience of many afternoons of reading Heat with Joey, that very few people actually read the words, and it's all about the pictures after all.

So back to the story... I barely had time to read 20 pages of the magazine before the floodgates opened and hundreds of people with cats and dogs arrived. The phone rang and rang and rang and I was helping people, filling out vaccination books, answering the phones, having discussions about cat collars (with an adorable little boy and his dad), getting bitten by a bull terrier ("he's such a sweetheart! He won't bite you!" Hah!) and so on. It didn't stop until half an hour after my shift had officially ended!

Actually it ended 5 minutes after the end of my shift and then some moron came in and insisted to talk to the vet about cat food, but the vet was operating on a dog that was bleeding everywhere and he wanted to go into the theatre and chat to the vet. I said no several times and he refused to listen until the vet came to see what all the noise was about. The guy was pretty loud! Unfortunately in the meantime a bunch of people drove past, saw him inside and went "Oh good! The vet's open!" and rushed in. While on the phone I had a hysterical girl with a sick cockatiel who refused to take him to the only bird specialist in about 50 square kilometres. The vet in question is really nice, and actually treats my birds, but I was unable to talk any sense into her so I think she may have gone off to pretoria with her sick bird.

By the time I got home I was so pumped up on the adrenaline that I literally fell over and had to take deep calming breaths. And the watch House until I fell asleep. Still gives me weird dreams! better than Malaria-prevention medicine!

Sunrise!

So I've started going in to the zoo super-early to get some of the work out of the way before the volunteers get there. I usually leave when they arrive and go in to university, so I can sit in my lab and look busy. I'm still battling to focus, and it's so cold I can barely type, unless I've been clutching a hot cup of coffee, which means that by lunchtime I'm so jittery I can't sit still, and then by the time I go home I'm exhausted. I really wish that a) the zoo didn't matter to me so much and b) that I could rely on the volunteers.

The thing is, they're really awesome, and they work incredibly hard, but they don't have the experience to handle things if they go wrong, and they don't have the experience of knowing what's normal, so if something gets sick, it isn't always noticed until the animal is very very sick. The volunteers that have been there for a few weeks are fantastic, they work really hard and they're very gentle and careful, but this morning we were faced with 3 brand new little first-year students. They arrived half an hour late, which looks fantastic on their first day... admittedly I'm not fantastic at being on time, but they always know that I'll be there and that the job will be done and done properly before I go.

I just know that when I'm not there I'm going to be stressing about them all... particularly the frogs, which have become my particular... what's the word? not responsibility, but... lets just say everyone has their 'babies' there. One person does chameleons, another does snakes, someone else does big lizards, the volunteers do geckos, and I do frogs. I started with them because everyone else hated cleaning their tanks because it's difficult and they're feisty little buggers who escape all the time. But as time passed I got to love looking after them, and I know most of their personlaities and who to watch carefully. One of them even has a name (shock! Horror!) I never name anything...

It was fine before, but teh vet who almost lived down there has left now, so basically we're struggling to pick up the slack. I feel bad that this is the first time I've really emtnioned her, but it was hard to say goodbye. I've only known her sinceAMrch, but she had a huge effect on me, and I will miss her tons! And the animals will miss her more, she looked after them with everything she had, and loved them even though she was always working and exhausted.

So this weekend, when the main vet is away, the 'good' volunteers are refusing to come in because they've done over 14 days in a row, and I'm stuck at work until lunchtime, I don't know what's going to happen to the little guys.

We dewormed today, it was a lot of fun, although I'm not sure if I helped or got in the way more, but I had to explain to the new volunteers exactly how to hold lizards. Put lizard in hand and don't let go, didn't seem explicit enough... I don't think anyone ever taught me I was just expected to figure it out while looking after my first 100-odd lizards. And I learned, but quickly! I think it went faster because I was there, but there were also several escapes that were entirely my fault. One of the kids is ... not scared, more uncomfortable around reptiles. She works super-hard and never avoids responsibility at all, and I've been really impressed with her. anyway to teh story: a gecko escaped, went past about 3 people and made a beeline for her, where it jumped onto her, ran up her arm and onto her face! I caught it pretty quickly, but it was so funny! She was really good too and didn't flinch or do the "get this off me!" dance or anything, which was good.

Afterwards while taking sick gickos to the hospital for observations one of the new volunteers asked me if she could work with the frogs. I was a bit rude to her. I feel bad, but moer because weveryone I discuss it with yells at me. Yes, I can't be there 7 days a week. But I don't want a newcomer doing one of the most finicky jobs. And no, it's not my place to decide. But if they escape and I'm not there to catch it and she can't catch it, then it will dehydrate and die. I feel justified!

That is the end of my rant.

Oh and the title is from a Japan and I song. It's because I'm feeling a bit stretched time-wise at the moment. Entirely my fault as well. And the fact that I can't decide between working on a paper tomorrow or going to the zoo to practise snake-handling...

I wish I didn't have such awesomely fun distractions!

And I have cuts on my hands from deworming the other lizards on Monday (spiky tails, thrashing around...) which are inflamed from the latex gloves this morning. And it itches.

That is all!

Home again

Wow, this is the first time that I've been home for longer than to eat and sleep since... well since I got home! I usually go a bit nuts seeing everyone I missed while on fieldwork, and every time I end up exhausted, but I feel great because I missed everyone and seeing friends again is really really awesome! It's hard to go away and realise that life continued without me, but whenever I get back, besides the catching up, feeling like people actually missed me is really really special (yes, I need frequent ego-boosts. So sue me!)

So after Chinatown (w00t!) yesterday I dashed off to a farewell with some zoo folks. It turned out that it wasn't the farewell I thought it was, but the person leaving was really really cool and I will miss her even though I barely knew the girl. That's what I love about the zoo, people come and go all the time, but for some reason you get to know them quickly, maybe because they're all really passionate about what they do or something. We went off to dinner in Melville and then off to a place called Ratz, where they all did the craziest dancing I've seen in a long time and I laughed until my face and sides hurt and I nearly fell asleep in a candle.

This morning I woke up just in time to go hurtling off to the zoo to go and help in quarantine. When I arrived I saw a friend in the parking lot with the two monkeys. Here I must add something - quite often animals take a dislike to a person. It's nothing personal, they just do, and if (like for instance with Josh the baby chimp) they dislike you, you move on and it's ok. But if an animal likes you, there is no better feeling in the world! I guess it's because they don't fake liking or disliking you (unless there is food involved, in which case most animals tend to get mildly sidetracked). Anyway my friend came rushing to say hi, and Thandi sprinted over and gave me a gigantic hug! A little while later (I went from being 5 minutes late for quarantine to being more like half an hour late...) Ollie climbed onto me and refused to go back to her! I felt super-special!

From there I went to quarantine where I got to see some of the new volunteers in action. For people who had no history of working with reptiles they were really good! Very very slow, but gentle and thorough. I cleaned out frog and gecko tanks, and fed other geckos. It was fun not doing it alone, usually on a sunday I do most of the gecko room alone, which takes from 9am to about 2 or 3pm and I enjoy it, but it was nice to know that there were other people helping, and it did go a bit faster than usual in that we were out of there by 11:45 even though I did a whole bunch of stuff in the other rooms. A snake escaped which was very exciting, and 2 lizards escaped while I was cleaning their tank, which was pretty routine, although I did feel very accomplished when I caught them and put them back and the others were all impressed. a silly thing to be proud of considering I was the most experienced person there, although there was also a learner-keeper and a trainee vet at that stage.

I was also impressed that the volunteers have been there every day even though they are on holiday. They said that it's getting a bit much, and that they would really like to sleep in for once, but I was really really stunned by the fact that they aren't planning on taking time off until some new volunteers start next week. For volunteers to show that kind of dedication is really exceptional! It was a really nice morning, I've missed all the Madagascans and I got to clean all the tanks of my favourite lizards, which was really special, as well as the usual feeling of amazing satisfaction that only people who do husbandry will ever understand. The feeling that you get knowing that the animals are clean and fed and that the whole room is done...

From there I took the new volunteer and her boy-scout sidekick off to meet Thandi, who I looked after for an hour and a half. She ate a lot and then settled down to sleep, after greeting me in such an enthusiastic hug that my airways were cut off and I started seeing spots. I really missed Thandi! When I tried to give her back to the zoo staff she refused to go, which as painful as it is to see her distressed, also made me feel really special!

From there I rushed off to the chimps and said hi to Luke and his sister and then dashed off home to have lunch with my parents and my brother and sister-in-law before going back to the zoo to have coffee with one of the other zoo-staff members who had been off cleaning stables all day. Once that was over I went to see Jo and Lara at work to pick up keys for my shift tomorrow, and spoke to Lara for the first time in ages. I love the way that we often don't see each other for weeks at a time, but still pick up exactly where we left off! And then I dashed off to church and then home. Which is where I am now.

So that was my day and a half! Not the most exciting post I'm afraid, but it has been a really awesome day! I missed everyone when I was off in the gammadoelas and it was really nice to know that my place here hasn't been forgotten or filled while I was away!

11!!!!

So I caught lizard number 11 today. It was the end of a marathon morning of trapping. I decided to go outside of the farm, into the conservancy, where the nearby farmers have allowed to to climb fences and trap on their properties. I headed off to the nearby dam because there are lovely outcrops right next to it, although the lizards there have always been ridiculously stubborn. I didn't manage to catch anything, and by midmorning was packing up and getting ready to move on when a tiny old lady came up and said hello.

I got the fright of my life, but I responded and we got talking. She didn't speak any English and I don't speak Swazi, so we settled on both using our relatively shaky Afrikaans. My Afrikaans is surprisingly good, thanks largely to having spent time outside of Johannesburg where nobody speaks English, as well as being friends with Lara and Jo, and meeting their friends who are almost all afrikaans and tend to forget that I'm not. Afrikaans in Joburg and out of Joburg is remarkably different though, and so I had to struggle to stop using slang, while she kept on throwing in words in other languages. I learned words for crocodile, snake, round rock, peaut and a number of other things. she insisted on leadngme around the outcrop to show me where the lizards live, and I accepted although I know most of the spots, and nothing was moving out there. Once she released me with a ton of directions in case I want to find her again - she wants to help me, and offered the ervices of her children as well, I drove away as quickly as possible to try another site before it got too late.

A few months ago when we were here on the fieldtrip, our honours student and my supervisor had found another new site that, by all accounts was fantastic. I had been avoiding it because it involved climbing a rather tall, barbed-wire fence, but decided to go for it. The outcrop is huge, and surrounded by plants with stinging hairs that I'm still trying to remove from my arms and legs and back... I explored all over the place before deciding that it ws a crappy location that only had skinks and geckos and Gerrosaurus and basically every cool lizard except the ones I was looking for. On the way back I spotted a lovely male though and stopped to try and get him. Unfortunately he hid halfway up a cliff.

I had all my equipment, except for the cooler bag for blood samples, in a backpack, so I climbed up after him, and ended up chading him around and around the stupid cliff until I cornered him in exactly the same place I had first spotted him. So I set traps as well as I could on a sheer rock face, and then managed to cahse him onto one. So I was standing on a tiny ledge, halfwy up a cliff, with a lizard on a glue-trap. Oops. I'm not qute sure how someone like me who is a)clumsy and b) scared of heights stayed so calm. But i pulled him off the trap, got the blood sample stuff out of various pockets, pressticked a sample tube to the rock, took a sample, cleaned him off and bagged him and somehow climbed back down with a blood sample in one hand and a lizard bag in the other. I had to calm down and have a water break at the bottom, but I managed!

And for the record, I tried to work with him when I got back, and he is a complete and utter brat! He almost escaped, and had me running all over the place after him!

So today was a day of firsts, I had a succesful, although painfully long, discussion in Afrikaans, went rock climbing, did my first extreme lizard sampling (should make it a sport...), oh and when I got back I did my first long hike of the trip, to check out some old sites on the farm.

Something tells me I'll be sleeping very well tonight!

Sad times

So I had a fantastic time in Jersey, only had one day of rain (which was a bit miserable) and went all over the place, seeing tons of the place. I think I saw moer of the island in the first 2 days than my mother had done in a 2 week visit! It was hard work though!

The scary thing is that somewhere that small (the distance across the island is roughly the sanme distance as what I drive to get to university every day) has almost 110 geocaches! The other scary thing is that they were remarkably difficult to find, often involving climbing cliffs or racing off to castles and towers trying to beat the tide back! I will post a bunch of photos and stories soon! I was planning on doing that here, but I just realised that the photos are on my laptop and I'm currently working on my desktop, so that might not work... the stories are far better with pictures!

I got home on Wednesday morning, right before a long weekend, collapsed for a few hours and then had to rush in to do some admin before everything closed down for the holiday. My car wouldn't start and I had to buy a new battery, so I was in a pretty awful mood by the time I got in. There I got some terrible news from Luke.

Josh, the baby chimpanzee at the zoo, was attacked by the males and had been rushed off to hospital. Luke was in complete shock, I hadn't slept in a few days and was also wandering around in a dream world and Elaine was rushing around organising people to take over Althea's other monkeys so that she could stay with him.

I spent the following day with Thandi, the mandril and helped out with her as much as possible. Ollie, the spider-monkey went off to a babysitter for the long weekend - he's a lot easier to handle than she is!

She's really cool though and we get a long well. To tell the truth I never really got alnog with Josh, as much as I really did like spending time with him. That doesn't mean that I wasn't really upset that he was attacked, or when he died the next morning. I just found myself really worried about everyone who was close to Josh, who was devastated.

Althea vanished completely and we had no idea where she was or how she was doing. It's understandable, he was her baby after all, but at the same time it's incredibly frustrating when you know that someone you care about it having a really hard time but there's nothing you can do! A lot of people who were close to Josh weren't even told about the situation until a few days alter. Not because they weren't appreciated but because everyone was so wrapped up in their own shock over what had happened. Luke was very promptly 'looked after' by everyone around. I think he went to several hundred movies with concerned friends (me included).

So anyway that was the hectic week back. I'm waiting for a meeting now and then I'm hoping to go and see Thandi and Oliver again. This whole thing has made me very worried about their future! when Josh's intro seemed to have been a success I wasn't really stressed, but now I'm worrying about where the other two will be introduced and how it'll work out.

Here's Luke and Oliver, just to complete the monkey collection!

I'm sorry about the 'bit and pieces' nature of this post. It started a while ago and then I saved a draft and forgot about it. I'm not sure how to deal with Josh, so I'm not sure how else to write about him.

He used to fall asleep while the other chimps were around and then he'd wake up and panic and run off to rejoin the group. He was afraid of climbing. He loved anything sugary. He adored cucumber and beans. He was fascinated by shoes. When I stopped him from weating broken glass he decided that he hated me, but if I hung upside down from his jungle gym he would run over and stroke my face and try to figure out what my hair was.

He was a very special little ape. And he will be missed. A lot. I just hope that people remember all the happy times he ahd and the fun he had, not just the little chimp on a stretcher that was published in the newspaper on Thursday.

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!

minus a brother, plus a sister and family of Mediterraneans

so Friday I didn't even go into wits. Instead I delivered wine to the reception venue, then went to the church to practise walking down the aisle in my shoes. Halfway down the aisle I thought 'Hey, I can DO this!' and took a confident step, only to slip and hold onto a pew to keep from falling. the guys polishing the floors managed to keep straight faces which was impressive! after that I went makeup shopping - I wear makeup quite often, but I hardly ever wear heavy makeup and the colours I needed I didn't have and so on. From there I had my toenails done, my nails done (they are currently about 2 inches long and I have gouged my eyes from trying to remove my contact lenses), and my eyebrows done. All this while rushing home to help pack cars with all my brother's stuff to take to the new house and battling with the 'I'm not at wits!' guilt.

After all that I went home and collapsed, waiting for 4:30 to arrive so I could go and collect Carla's honeymoon luggage. My brother decided to move some more stuff accross and I joined him. their house is HUGE! It's a double story with 3 big bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (2 baths AND a big shower and a whole load of other rooms. from there we went to get the luggage from a highly emotional Carla and then my family (my parents, my brother and me) went out for dinner.

This morning I rushed out early and got my hair done, amid frantic phonecalls from Carla and then calm and then frantic phonecalls... they did my hair really nicely, so of course it rained like crazy and I had to do the whole jersey-above-head-rush-to-car thing, rush home, do my makeup, have lunch (at 11:30) and then go off to Carla's house to change and help her get ready and so on.

The wedding (after a good 3 hours of preparations) was really beautiful. I didn't trip or slip on my way up the aisle, my brother did a happy-dance (literally) when he saw Carla, they both burst into tears in the middle of the first hymn, she cried in the middle of the vows so he had to pull faces at her to get her through them , and the 2-year old flowergirl/ringbearer who had flat-out refused to walk down the aisle or sit still at all at the rehearsal, sat on the altar cushions quite happily eating the jellytots that had been hidden in her basket.

From there we went to the reception, where all the trouble started. We were having photos in the garden, but as it had been raining we kept getting stuck when the heels on our shoes sank. I had a list of all the photos that needed to be taken, but it turned out that the photographers didn't so they took mine and sent me off to fetch petals. In the meantime I was needed in pictures and got yelled at and then Carla yelled at me for not organising people for photos because I had no list. When I said that the photographers had it she got even angrier and kept screaming that it wasn't my list, it was theirs. And that ruined my day a lot.

The reception was also really annoying. For starters, I was at the main table,which is a long table where you only sit down one side, facing the room. I was almost on the end, next to my dad (not exactly renowned for talking at family functions) and the best man, whose girlfriend was 2 tables away. Every time there was a speech the video people put these BRIGHT lights on us and the photographers were everywhere. It really annoyed me. Like after the first dance it was the father-daughter/bridal party dance and I was dancing with the best man (neither of us knew what we were doing) and we kept bumping into the video guy. It was so irritating!

I'm sorry, but I think a beautiful day was slightly marred by the need for 2 photographer and a vido guy. I have big problems with people who spend so long trying to save bits of memories that they don't actually live them, and I felt that that was what was happening tonight. That and getting screamed at by my new sister-in-law was fantastic. She was still 'not speaking' to me by the time that they left. which really upset me.

The other thing that upset me was the way that everyone thought I'd had my makeup donw professionally. When I said I had done it they got all shocked. I felt like saying 'YES! I KNOW WHICH END OF THE LIPSTICK TO USE!' Just because I don't plastr on makeup like that doesn't mean I can't...

and not I'm tired and grumpy and I'm going to bed.

The dog is fine

As Luke, who should be my PA, explained, the dog is a lot better. He had cellulitis as a secondary thing to an allergic reaction to something, probably grass. He's on all kinds of medication, some of which got lost and was found in the fridge. My dad tried to pretend he'd done that on purpose.

And for the record, KIDSes (pronounced K-I-D-Ses) are undergraduate students. It comes from a fieldtrip (that I did not attend) where the lady in charge of catering got upset by someone's offensive language and yelled out "Don't say @%^$# in front of the KIDSes!"

It's been a very hectic few days, Saturday was Carla's kitchen tea, which was a lot of fun, but also quite crazy to set up as she was sick and hardly left the house all week (update: she's a lot better). So I ended up sitting in the kitchen, trying to tie bows on champagne glasses at something like 10:30 at night, rushing home, colapsing and then leaving super-early the next morning to cut bits of wire and arrange beads into boxes and so on.

The whole event was quite fun, very relaxed and quite tame compared to others that I've been to, but I'm pretty sure that was a good thing! So I got home afterwards and passed out on my bed to be woken 2 hours later by a phone call about another kitchen tea coming up. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! But I had to get up anyway to go to a 21st birthday party, where I ended up spending about 3 hours on a trampoline. I hurt the next day!

I was going to post whenI got home, but then I saw in the History on the home PC that someone in my immediate family is reading this, and it upset me. I don't know who it is, but I'd really appreciate it if they actually told me...

And then yesterday was running around like a maniac, giggling through pre-labs and the TAing a neverending flower-prac. Speaking of which, I have marking to do...

Good thing I have a lawyer...

I may just be overreacting as usual, but I think I must just kill my supervisor by the end of the year.

For starters I got to wits this morning after a very busy time of trying to find my brother's fiance's sisters house (she told me left instead of right on the phone and I got really lost in a suburb I didn't even know existed until today). I'm also not feeling too good yet, although I was ok-ish until about 2 or so, but being sick always makes me a bit more emotional than usual.

It was fine until I went to go see him. I got to see Vanessa again, which was fantastic! We all thought she'd be moving to a different department, but it turned out she's staying! It's really awesome and she has her own room, which is really nice but a bit on the dusty side. A temporary situation of course.

Anyway, just to clarify, the last time I went to my supervisor, I outlined what I wanted to do and he said it was all fantastic, but too big for a masters, hence the Big PhD Decision. All fine. So today I went to find out what it is that I'm actually supposed to be doing (there's no structure, which is horrible!) and he pretty much said that I don't really have a project outline, gave me a bunch of ideas and then pretty much questioned whether what I wanted to do would actually fit in or not. So basically the last time he just said yes to everything to force me into a PhD.

I'm not sure what's worse, the fact that I know have to prove what I want to do to the person who has already okayed it twice, or the fact that I have to get through 4 years without throttling the guy.

Just breathe...

It's weird, I finally sorted everything out, I have the next 4 or so years planned out and I'm really excited and a bit nervous. Everything today went surprisingly well (except getting the dog to the vet,which just didn't happen...) and I got home, following an exciting and fruitless iguana hunt and a smoothie, all bubbling with excitement and dying to tell the world.

So I called a few friends, and chatted things through with them and that was ok. and then I told my parents. Who shot it all down in flames. my mom's response was 'Well that's destroyed all our hopes of moving overseas!' and my dad said 'why do you want to do it?' and I said 'Well it's big and exciting, and it hasn't been done before so if I get it-" and he interrupted and said 'and when you DON'T?'

I'm hanging on to the excitement for all I'm worth right now.

It's harder than I expected.

and it all starts again...

Schools went back today. So the lovely, calm, Christmas season non-traffic became the usual Joburg, road-rage with broken robots experience that we know and love so much. And for some reason, although I'm technically still on holiday, it all got hectic. MAybe it's a built-in thing from 12 years at school.

Today started with a fantastic experience of sleeping through my alarm clock (after sitting up until 2am playing the Sims2 on my laptop. The game is evil!) and waking up 15 minutes after I was supposed to be at Carla's place meeting the other bridesmaids and being measured for my dress. I got there a mere 40 minutes late, and ended up chatting to her and another girl until 1pm, when I realised I'd promised to drop off a DVD with a friend for movie-night tonight. So I went careening home, fetched it, dropped it off, got some lunch and managed to go and see Jo for 20 minutes before my shift started at 3.

Tomorrow I have to get the dog to the vet and home in time to clean my car out and go fetch someone at 9:30 to go for coffee to get her back by 11:30 so I can go to wits and see my supervisor about what I'm doing this year. Somewhere in between all that I need to start studying for the field trip next week. And go sunblock-shopping. With a 2 month break you'd think I'd get everything done in time.

Speaking of which, I'd better do some research on what I actually want to work on this year. Otherwise I haven't got much of a hope of being able to do it. Tomorrow will be an interesting test of my manipulating and persuading skills! Wish me luck!

I watched Thumbsucker today. I've wanted to see it for ages! It was a good movie but SO depressing I hated it! So I started watching Lords of Dogtown, but didn't get time to finish it. It was actually a lot of fun!

Here's a picture of a frog that we rescued from a swimming-pool in Darling. He was so cute!