Pass the pink

It's freezing! It's been raining all day (apparently it started around 3am) and I'm totally unable to get warm. I went for a run on Wednesday and pushed myself a bit hard and now my ankle is punishing me - partly for overexertion and partly for not moving to the Sahara or Mexico or something. I swear I'm going to be one of those 90-year-olds who can predict the weather based on ankle-twinges.

I've been on a bit of an emotional rollercoaster lately. I guess there was some truth in what that person said when they said that my wearing pink signified that I was looking for change. Thigns ARE changing, but it's not a pleasant experience. Wednesday was one of the worst days I've had in a long time, although I was rescued by a friend who didn't quite know how to handle me and so talked about other stuff. I felt better after that.

Thursday was one of the hardest days I've ever had - mostly a result of Wednesday. I won't go into details, but there were some things that needed doing, and I did them. I spent a lot of time inwardly cursing Hollywood as well. It's all their fault! They make it look so easy and then you realise that while ripping off the bandaid (so to speak) may be the least painful method, it doesn't mean it's pain free, particularly when you're a slow healer...

And then there was Tai Chi. I know, I've had complaints that I talk about it too much. It's my blog and I will discuss the art of looking graceful (or trying to) while kicking someone (imaginary) in the shins if I want to. So THERE!

Anyway Tai Chi was my saviour. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, I had my ankle strapped to the point of non-mobility and I wanted to crawl into bed and cry rather than be sociable with the Tai Chi crowd (who are actually pretty awesome people, even if most of them are 20 years older than me and far more flexible that I ever will be). There were two beginner-beginners and me, and the advanced folks, so the other two were given some stuff to start on while the teacher (well the temporary teacher anyway) basically taught me a ton of new stuff! Bearing in mind it took me 3 1/2 weeks to learn the first form which only had 13 steps, I think I learned 11 this week of the new form! And one of them is the coolest thing EVER! It's called 'single whip' and it's SO much fun! I bounced out of there feeling so much better about life!

For the record the teacher totally thinks I'm crazy now! I think he noticed that I wasn't really myself and he was super-nice to me, while he fixed a lot of stuff I think he let more slide than usual because he knows I love learning new steps. His son (the real teacher) said he'd take over us newbies next week, which makes me quite nervous. I know the basics but there's a lot of polishing up I need to do to get it perfect.

I was on the Tai Chi high pretty much until halfway through labwork, when exhaustion set in and by the time I left (after 10 grueling hours in the lab) I was barely able to walk, and I had to go home and make dinner which woke me up somewhat.

So now I'm stuck with the dilemma- I'm freezing and I've got aches and pains. Is this punishment for the last week? Or is it the start of Swine Flu? I really wish I knew because right now I'm shivering with a blanket around me and I'd quite like to get to the gym and warm up, but obviously if I'm going to get a fever or something that's a bad idea. I tried practising tai chi but my house is too full of furniture and WAY too cold!

So for the record: "what's your problem?" is not something I want to be asked. In whatever code. It's nasty.

6 weeks to catching lizards and being able to breathe again! Just 6 weeks! 42 days and counting! I want to get away right now. Maybe I need more pink?

Solitude

This is kind of how I'm feeling right now. I can't explain it, but at least now I know I took this photo for a reason!
So a few days ago I was chatting to someone who has become a pretty close friend over the space of about two days (I'm not even kidding, starting a friendship with an hour-and-a-half heart-to-heart is NOT who I am!) and we ended up discussing depression. When I was a teenager I was diagnosed with it and given the requisite little white pills. I took one. I think it may have been half of one, but I don't really remember. All I now is that I never took one again, I refused to live my life feeling like the world around me wasn't really real.

Anyway he said that when you're depressed the colours around you fade and the world seems dull and ugly. I didn't really think too much about it, except to remember a specific sunset that was beautiful, that didn't move me in any way emotionally although my intellectual side could admire it.

So this week, with the crazy hotbed-of-emotions that is the meat-market lab (can't really call it the primate lab now that it's being cohabited by a primatologist, mammalogist and me) coming to a rather unpleasant and yet necessary end last night, when I woke up this morning the world seemed a little bit duller. I did a very girly thing - put my head under my pillow and refused to face the day for a few more hours, and not because of exhaustion (although that helped).

And I've been gripey all day. The people around me have been so amazing, I have been patted on the back, sympathised with, bought chocolate, treated gently... and I just don't want to talk about it! I was amazed by the depth of response in some people, people who I never expected to get that angry on my behalf and yet who did. People who seemed to notice that something was up and treated me gently even though they had no idea why. People who pulled me aside and gave me sympathy without making a big scene (which I was dreading at one point).

I guess part of me wants to cry because I feel so much like I belong here, and I have a little family of colleagues who are so totally amazing. It makes me feel like I am worth more than that, I am worth waiting for, I am worth someone putting in the effort and making me feel special. And that makes the colours a little bit brighter and tomorrow morning I may just leave the safety and warmth of my bed a little bit earlier.

And going away on Saturday (if it happens - it seems like the vehicle I was taking has been hijacked by the maintenance guy who won't give it back...) well I'm looking forward to it. I'm an analytical person, I don't bury my emotions, I just generally don't feel things very strongly, which is why this whole situation hit me so hard - I was all crazy and quivery like a teenager and I had no idea how to react to the fact that I was feeling the proverbial butterflies - and I can't wait for some solitude to think everything through and sort it out in my own head.

I've been in the city for far too long, and as much as I will miss the lab like crazy, I think it's time for me to get back to the field.

This has been (by far) the most emotional I've ever been on here. I'm sorry, don't freak out! Here are some pictures I've been looking at to try and relax and breathe a little bit.

Losing faith in soup

So I was still completely miserable yesterday. My voice is all crackly and about an octave deeper than usual, I'm coughing all the time and my nose started running. At lunchtime, after a very frustrating morning of discovering that one of the pieces of equipment essential to my work isn't working (and it was fine a few weeks ago...) Luke dragged me off to get lunch. All I wanted was soup, and for some reason (this isn't the first time) nowhere on campus had it! I had started feeling really nauseous, so anything else was out of the question (scary stuff: I'd been helping mount UV lights for the honours student's lizards, and he's had the same flu. Apparently vomiting is scheduled for me for the next day or two...).

My supervisor was also around for the first time in over a month (he was conferencing overseas) and I had to get him to let me into the lab after I locked myself out, and then he had to take the offending piece of equipment to be fixed after it became very evident that if I had to handle our scary Russian maintenance guy it would end it tears.

By the end of the afternoon I was sounding really bad, but I'd got one of the new programmes working with my equipment (I don't understand the readout, but we're getting there!) so I went home and stopped for soup along the way. And it didn't work.

Admittedly it wasn't my old standby tomato, it was a fancy tomato and red pepper with basil, but I still coughed all evening and ended up waking up repeatedly until at 3am, when I was coughing so hard I had tears streaming down my face (from impressive bloodshot eyes!) I dosed myself up on decongestants cough syrup (I restocked along with buying soup), painkillers and throat lozenges. I'm feeling better now (i.e. I can breathe again) but I'm tired and I don't wwant to go oout tonight but I promised and I have to get a new DVD drive for my computer and go pick up equipment and figure out the stupid readouts. It wouldn't be so bad if the soup had done its job. I'll have to go back to plain tomato tonight and see if there's a difference.

Oh, and as it was very rightly pointed out, I haven't posted a picture in a while! Here is the view from one of my trapping sites. The house I stay in is at the bottom left, on top of the little hill (the line of trees hides it).

lizard woes continued

Two of the three sick lizards had died by yesterday afternoon. I went to chyeck on them before I went home and ended up having to put them in the freezer. I had to go to the zoo and help out as a thank you for the help yesterday, and I found that scrubbing frog tanks helped a lot! It's amazing how caring for something else can make you feel so much better about life!

That said, I must go and treat the remaining lizard. Let's hope he's still alive to receive it!

lizard woes

So on Friday, some of the honours student's lizards started getting sick. One of them died that day and another died on the weekend. I offered to help with deworming them, because we know for a fact that they ahve worms, and that they've been under a lot of stress lately. The fantastic vets here decided that as I've helped with deworming before I could do it all alone, and pretty much said that as much as they were delighted to help, they didn't actually want to DO anything.

I wasn't happy about the whole sitiation, but as it happened, I had a really busy week last week and a killer headache on friday, so I went I hadn't been down to see them until this morning. In the meantime I'd checked the dosages and asked a bunch of different vets for advice on how much to administer and how to give it to them and side effects and all that stuff, so I was feeling slightly more confident about the whole situation. When I got down to the unit this morning I was completely stunned by the condition of the animals. I measured them about 2 weeks ago and they were all healthy and full of nonsense and wriggling and in good shape. This morning one of them had nasty lesions all over himdelf and another two were barely breathing and thin and dehydrated. I disinfected them and tried to give them water, but it wasn't helping, so I tried to call the vets, but they didn't answer their phones and I started to panic. I can honestly say I ahve never seen lizards looking this bad before. I knew that they wouldn't make it until tomorrow if I didn't do something, and as much as I knew exactly what to do, I didn't have a)the ethical clearance (if you can believe that! I have no clearance therefore it should just die) and b) i didn't have the stuff I needed. So I did the only thing I could think of and took them to the zoo.

It was awful! Firtly there was complete chaos as they were deworming anacondas and one of them had bitten a zoo-keeper and there was blood everywhere and the snakes smelled bad and it was just complete havoc. The snakes were cute in a way though! It was just really awful becasue the vets agreed with me that the lizards were in a complete mess and might not survive, and I felt embarrassed that I'd let them get to such a state. I like to think that the people at the zoo know me well enough to know that I look after my animals properly, but I felt really guilty to be associated with such sick lizards.

On the other hand I know poeple who would just let the animals be euthenased or let them die rather than look like they weren't looking after them properly. I only realised later that I wasn't really obligated to do anything, but the thought of leaving them like that made me feel sick and furious with myself for even having that thought. The fact is that they're not my test subjects, and I have very little to do with them, but I caught most of them, and as such I feel responsible.

They're the honours student's responsibility, and to his credit, I checked the unit thoroughly and the tanks are pristine and the rest of the lizards are fine, so he's off the hook. He's done a pretty good job, but unfortunately we aren't vets and there are limits to what we can do. The only issue is that he had noticed that they weren't quite normal alst week, but he didn't have the experience to do anything about it. But considering the fun and games I've been having with the vets here, there's not much that he could have done. Which leaves me at war with the university vets who evidently couldn't be bothered to look after sick animals.

introspection is dangerous!

So once again I came home lizard-free today! It was still a very action-packed day, I explored 2 huge outcrop, confirming my suspicions that they were lizard-free, and managed to get nicely sunburned in the process. At a third site, I went to a spot that I know to be a good lizard-trapping area, to find a massive snake crawling into the crevice I was planning too set traps at. When I say huge, I estimted the length to be around 2 1/2 metres. Even taking into account that I got the fright of my life, you're still left with at least 2 metres of scary snake! I like snakes, I really do, but I like them when I see them with someone who knows about snakes. I like to handle them if I know for a fact that they can't hurt me, or that if they do it won't put me in hospital. To see a giant snake while in an area that has no cellphone coverage, at least 40 minutes drive from a hospital... that's scary!

So the snake went across the outcrop and into a revice, no doubt having a lovely snack on the lizards inside. They were fantastically oblivious to him, some of them even ran up and tongue-flicked a welcome. I hope that he didn't get any of my males, but I didn't get close enough to watch, plus his head was under the rocks, and I couldn't see what he was doing.

When I'd stopped watching him, sneaking closer to look at him properly so that I can try very hard to ID it when I get home, i moved to another outcrop, doing some fabulous offroad driving and settled down to try and get at least one more male. No such luck. so I started thinking.

I discovered last year that fieldwork is very dangerous in that while you're very active and busy all of the time, it's mostly physical work, and very little else. Plus you have to spend long hours out of doors, waiting for lizards to go onto traps, which means that you start to think. If you add the sun, the heat and the lack of other people to put things into perspective, the introspection can get very unpleasant, if enlightening!

It may help to point out that almost all of my very deep and insightful opinions on relationships, people around me, religion, science, science AND religion, education and many other topics, were thought up and thought through while sitting on a rock, in the sun, waiting for a lizard to stop jumping over my traps and run onto them.

Today was no different. I started to figure out why I have been so frustrated lately (lizard-trapping notwithstanding), why I'm still here when I could have given up and gone home, and how that links in to my somewhat irrational and yet exceedingly rational fears about life in general. It's left me a little bit subdued, and for once I wish I was at home, so that I could talk some of it out with someone. at the same time I know what the answers are, but how to change things is another matter entirely.

So I came home and watched "Good Luck Chuck" it was awful, and therefore exactly what I needed! I'm going to go and fond some other terrible movie to watch... I have a whole bundle of terrible horror movies that Joey gave me before I left, maybe I'll giggle my way through one of them before I go to bed. Too bad I didn't bring the mutant-cow-baby-slasher movie with me!

Running out of steam

So I caught lizard number 12 today, about 6 sites and 2 days after the victorious rock-climbing hair-raising capture of number 11. I even went back and did some similar rock-climbing only to find that there were no lizards for me to catch. It was a cold and windy day yesterday, so I wasn't all too shocked about not catching anything, as much as I was still a bit upset. The problem with doing something single-mindedly day in and day out is that after a while it becomes personal. So yesterday was a very hard day, even if it wasn't the only lizard-free day on this trip.

I'm getting to the stage where I've had enough. It's weird to say that, considering that last year I spent almost 3 months here, and hated having to leave at the end of it. It's not even that fieldwork wasa easy last time - far from it. It was easier than this time in that I found lizards a lot more easily, but thing still went wrong, and it rained all the time, and i had to live with someone I didn't particularly get along with most of the time. I think it's just the frustration of working really really hard with little reward. Plus I have a ton of other work that I should be doing here, that isn't happening. It's all the data analysis and writing that I usually associate with being behind my desk in the lab, not my favourite part of research, but one of the most important parts nonetheless.

So beside the fact that I'm working really hard and essentially getting nowhere, I've got the naggin feeling in the back of my mind that I should be using all of my time effectively. But when I get in from the field and I'm hot and dirty and usually bleeding (you try crawl throgh the thorn-bushes I went through today and see how you turn out!), with a throobbing headache from being in the sun all day, all I want is a nap. And I've learned from long experience, that naptime is ALWAYS worth it!

Speaking of which... I'm going to go and sleep now!

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.