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).

Should have had more soup...

I felt a whole ton better yesterday, and had a fairly productive day! After I left the lab I went off to the vet to tell that that I will work this Saturday (I figured that a cold front and flu makes going on fieldwork 2 days earlier a bit silly) and then went down the road to say hi to Jo and to get more soup.

I think the whole of Joburg has this flu - they were out of cough mixture, medlemon AND all the nice soups. Joey was awesome though, she saw me, told me that I looked 'really sick' (i.e. terrible) and made me mint green tea. She also insisted that I stay with her for a few hours so I decided to skip having a nasty soup and have dinner with her.

It was fantastic! I haven't much time with her lately, considering that we used to go for coffee at least once a week, often more than that but I've been so busy buried in the lab that I've neglected her slightly. We both pulled out our laptops and discussed our photos (she is also a professional photographer, although I wonder about her style sometimes), showed her pictures of all the people I work with and places I go to regularly. She was very funny in her reactions to some of the people, I guess I talk about the lab and the people here so often that she had a mental picture of them that didn't quite add up.

A few other people came to visit, and before I knew it I had been there for 3 hours and I was exhausted, so I went home. I woke up at 2am unable to breathe, and I realised that as great as the Thai food was, soup would have been a wiser option! At least I got up early! Coughing works so much better than my alarm clock! And now I'm off to calibrate equipment and try and figure out exactly how it all works...

Once again, the restorative powers of soup!

I discovered yesterday that although allergies may have played a role, that I had full-on flu. After an entirely non-productive morning where I nearly cried at the futility of my attempts at visual modelling and Luke was really kind and offered sympathy and bought me popcorn (I will write something about the restorative powers of popcorn at some stage, although it is only a temporary fix - a bit like a band-aid when you need a cast and a hospital bed).

Just after lunchtime when I went all over campus looking for lunch and deciding that I didn't want anything I gave up and went home. I took some work with me, but halfway home I realised that with several layers of clothing, a scarf and the heater on full I was shivering violently. By the time I got home I had all of the aches and pains of flu to go with my fever and I couldn't even swallow the cough syrup that I hadn't poured all over my carpet the night before.

So I made a hot water bottle and crawled into bed. I woke up at sevenish and went to a 24-hour grocery store to get throat lozenges and tomato soup, and then went straight back to bed. I woke up this morning a little bit congested but otherwise fine! As I felt like death after my 4 hour nap in the afternoon, I must give credit for the recovery to the fantastic restorative powers of tomato soup!

So forget the flu-caps and vitamin C, just drink soup!

For crying out loud, it's AUGUST already!

And no, I'm not going to do the 'my oh my, time has flown this year' thing. It has, and it hasn't and that's entirely a topic for discussion at another time, preferably after rather too much Perky Pink. What I'm shocked by, is that it's August, not even 2 weeks from the official beginning of spring, and it's colder than it has been all winter, and foggy!

Just to make things worse, I have all the hayfever associated with Spring, and a bit of a cold from the freezing weather, which meant that I woke up this morning sounding like Norah Jones. I was also up ever few hours during the night to re-dose on cough mixture, which I managed to pour all over my carpet at 3am. And the chemist wasn't open at 7am (how DARE they) so I'm having to make do with an old box of medlemon and some nasty lozenges that don't work.

I ahte to admit this, but I'm almost looking forward to the brutally hot weather in the lowveld!

AAAAND... WE'RE BACK!

I ended up not going away last week because I was missing a mildly essential set of configuration files (yes, I live in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, and I can't go because I need something for all the piles of techno-geek equipment that I have to use down there). So I decided that I couldn't let the time be wasted and I settled down to get some major work done. And I did!

Ok, well I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, but I stayed in the lab until late every night (except Friday when I had to get to a birthday party at 7 so I left at 6) and read a lot, and played with stats programmes, and finished going through 2 super-awesome stats books (although Luke's supervisor said I haven't learned much becasue I'm not using sequential models yet... I told him that stats is a lot more subjective than people realise and I'll figure out sequential models if and when I need to use them). The bonus of all the reading is that although I may not have progressed too far in terms of deliverables I can feel my thinking getting sharper and when I read the scary scary papers I can mostly understand them. I even took a landmark paper and pointed out all the flaws last week! w00t!

And that is why I never let anyone else read my work. Which is a problem.

The weekend was good, I went to Chris's birthday party at Joey's house on Friday. It was fun, but I felt kind of bad - although it was Chris's birthday (and Chris and I really don't get along well), all the people there were Jo's friends, and although we had a great time, I don't think we spoke more than 2 words to him the whole time. Lara was there which was great as I haven't seen her in a while. She's been writing tests, which means that she usually vanishes from the face of the earth for a week or two and studies like a maniac. Her last test is today so I'm hoping to spend some time with her before I head off on fieldwork again. I was supposed to joing Luke and Duncan later, but as the only left home quite late I decided to head home instead and get soem sleep before work the next morning. I felt liek a little old lady trying to get home before bedtime, but I managed to get a lot of reading done at work, and I didn't make any huge mistakes, which is easy to do when I'm tired!

Sunday was FREEZING! We got hit by a nasty cold front and I was very grateful to all the heaters in quarantine where I found two dead frogs :( and spent some time hand-feeding a gecko who has decided to be friendly! I try and ignore all the times that he has bitten me in the past. FRom there I ended up fighting with a spreadsheet for one of the curators and then I helped Elaine feed her piglets (SO cute! And they were hungry so they snuffled like crazy and then drank really fast!) and then we went for lunch with Luke, Brett (one of the vets), Caleb (a volunteer) and Louise who has a dodgy sense of humour and always makes us laugh! Althea joined us for all of about 5 minutes and then ran off, so after lunch Luke and I went to see her and Luke got to meet the baby monkey who has grown a lot and she's getting more hair on her head so she looks less like a cross between a gremil and Gollum.

Other than that everything was pretty uneventful, I must get back to work now as my supervisor should be back in teh coutnry today and I need to show him some *sigh* deliverables.

Perfect Day

I was thinking about the old song "Perfect Day." I'm not sure why it's been stuck in my head for the last few days. It was a special edition that was made by a whole bunch of artists for charity and the music video was released just as we got DSTV (and thus MTV) for the first time at home. I watched MTV non-stop for month, and saw the video millions of times.

So anyway, I've been sitting at my computer for the last 2 days trying to focus on a PCA while "It's such a perfect day... I'm glad I spent it with you..." echoes arounf my head. As much as it's annoying, it's more because I don't know the rest of the song, and I know that if I listened to the whole thing I could move on with my life. I'll have to go and try to find it later (the joy of living on South africa is that we don't have iTunes - well we have it, but other than podcasts we're stuck...).

I was thinking about what the perfect day would be. Lately I've been reminiscing about my honours year a lot, where we worked like complete maniacs and nearly had breakdowns, but in that was such a sense of purpose and cameraderie that it was awesome. We also got up to so much stuff, from TP-ing someones desk to running around the passages with towels as 'superhero capes" around our shoulders. I realised that I miss coming in early and having breakfast at my desk. I miss taking a break and going to get lunch and sitting and eating it together.

The closest I've come to that feeling lately was 2 days ago when Luke and I set up a LAN connection in his lab and closed the door and played computer games against each other. Of course, as luck would have it, just about everyone in our department suddenly ahd a desperate need to see Luke and so we got caught within about 15 minutes of starting. It was really funny!

So yes, that's what I'm thinking in an effort to block the ridiculous embarrassment of this olympic games. Seriously, Zimbabwe has more medals than us! And what happened to Ryk? And will the commentator ever learn to pronounce Roland Schoemann's name? There's only so much "Roe-Laaaahnd Skoe---meaaan!" that I can handle!

Santini's!

So on Saturday night I was finally dragged off to Santini's a sokkie-club in Honeydew! Sokkie, for you non-South african's out there is a traditional form of dancing that is enjoyed by Afrikaans people and ridiculed by pretty much everyone else. It's also known as "Langarm sokkie" and looks kind of like a weird afst waltz accompanied by regular music remixed to have a very distinctive beat. All sokkie-music has the same beat, so besides being distinctive, once you've figured out the dance you're pretty much set for life.

Not to be mean about it, to watch a bunch of people who actually know what they're doing is pretty impressive. I've resisted going to Santini's as long as I could, but Saturday was Laurin's birthday and I didn't really have a choice. La has always promised that she'd be there the first time I went, but she's writing tests and stressed beyond belief, so I was on my own.

Despite all my protests, it weas actually pretty cool! I was amazed by:

1. The old south african flag was stuck up EVERYWHERE! Darren and I counted about 6 flags, and the place isn't very big!
2. Men in short shorts and rugby jerseys - yes it is the Afrikaans uniform, and we had been playing rugby, but to go clubbing?
3. The number of girls in rugby jerseys - ddn't really match the mini-skirts, but hey...
4. The number of old people (toppies) out-sokkieing the youngsters
5. The game trophies on the walls
6. and, despite all of that... the signs everywhere were in English! And not just the ones about not smoking or drinking on the dance floor - which I could understand meaning that the English visitors don't know how to behave or something, but even the signs for the entrance and the business hours and the bathrooms...

All in all it was an awesome evening and Laurin seemed to have a great time! And not all of the music was sokkiefied, so those of us with less coordination got to have fun as well. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I might be going back there sometime! I'll try and add some photos at some stage, as soon as I can get them from other people...

E-yes...

After reading more papers all day I realised that I was tires when I was reading a paper on eyes (visual ecology) and found myself wondering what an "e yes" was. To break it up a bit, I went to Wikipedia and clicked on the link for a random article. This is what I got:

Signalman Kenneth Smith GC was posthumously awarded the George Cross for the bravery he showed on the night of the 10th of January, 1945 on the island of Ist in the Adriatic.
On patrol with fellow members of the Long Range Desert Group, he picked up a ticking bomb which saboteurs had placed in a wireless room in a house sheltering women and children. He managed to get a few yards outside the house before it exploded, saving the lives of his army comrades, partisans and civilians.[1] The citation published in the London Gazette on the 19th of October 1945 praised his "superb courage and complete disregard for personal safety"

a complete disregard for personal safety should ALWAYS be praised!

It's a monster!

I must explain that "monster"is not entirely a bad thing. Ever since Thandi the mandril hit her first 'terrible twos' stage, a few people I know have referred the the monkeys as 'monsters' which I've picked up from them. It's actually quite an affectionate thing!

So anyway, as of Saturday night, Oliver the spider monkey has a new baby sister. He really doesn't lke her very much, but she's still really small and doesn't do much, plus they're not in any physical contact. Her mother basically abandoned her lke she did him, and so for the first month all ahndling is with rubber gloves and facemasks and everything is super-sterilised before she comes into contact with it.

To backtrack a little bit: we saw Sarah on Thursday night and it was awesome! She brought me a really cute little keyring thing of a little chef eating sushi (complete with chopsticks!) and it was really really great to see her again. It felt weird - like she hadn't been away at all. I walked in, said "Hi Sarah." and then "Hang on... SARAH!!!!!" it just felt realy normal to have her back. She's such a bubbly and energetic person that I think there was a pretty big void when she left and it was just... right... or something. Unfortunately she's not around for long, but I hope we can see her as much as possible before she leaves again at the end of next week.

On Friday I was a total zombie and nearly fell asleep several times during the day. I'm not sure why, but I decided to go off to see the Dark Knight in the evening anyway. It was fun, although going fof to Luke's side of the world was confusing - I always get lost out there - not only on the street, but also in the shopping centre, in the parking lot... I really do appreciate the fact that most thigns are nearer to my house usually and I totally appreciate all the driving that other people usually have to do! It was a good movie, just a bit long and I kind of fell asleep once or twice before neaking out right before the end - it was late and my Dad was going to be stressing about my safety and so on and so on. I did enjoy the movie, but I guess it's partly that I'm not really a batman fan and I've hardly seen any of the other movies or read the comic books or anything that I didn't find it as life-changing as everyone else did. I'm glad I saw it though, and I thought they did a really good job.

Anyway, on Sunday morning, after a very stressful session of collecting my mother from the airport (I'm sorry, HOW does it take an hour and a half to get luggage from the plane to the airport? and how can a 'car guard' in a place where you're paying R1 a minute for parking get to demand payment when he hasn't done anything?) I went off to the zoo hoping to get there in time to scrub out my frustarion on some frog and/or lizard tanks. I got there quite late but as it happened they were desperate for help and I got to do the whole room I usually clean out on a Sunday! I was quite annoyed to fond that a bunch of the animals which had been reallocated to a certain place had been taken on Friday and nobvody thought to tell me so that I could say goodbye to my frogs - Speckle as well as Mr and Mrs Speckle (our volunteers have great eharts but not much imagination when it comes to naming things) are gone as well as a pile of the big geckos and a few of the tomato frogs. I got to put some of the other geckos outside in the sun for a bit though and it was awesome to see them rush out and bask!

After all that I saw Althea, who showed me the new baby spider monkey. She isn't names yet, and she's so absolutely hideous that it's totally adorable! Feeding her was a huge battle because the bottles they ahve for baby animals have really hard rubber teats and she couldn't cope with them, but she's too small for a baby bottle. As I ahd to go and get a birthday present for my sister-in-law I offered to go bottle-hunting. The best to use for her was apparently a baby medicine bottle.

So I spent my afternoon and evening going to every pharmacy and hopsital that I could find looking for them. Half the people didn't know what I was talking about, and the rest usually said that they knew them, that they were amazing and fantastic things, and no. Nobody had them. Finally I went to visit Lara and Laurin and sat ont eh floor behind the coutner with teh phone book, calling every pharmacy I could think of and then calling whoever they referred me to, until at about 6 pm I found a dodgy little pharmacy that was open until 9 that had them! Strangely enough it was owned and staffed only by men, but they had the one thing that every woman who had had a baby swears by! I went and got three different variations on the nmedicine bottle adn then rushed off to Althea's house to drop them off.

I ended up staying for a few hours, I got to hold the baby while she sorted things out (it's usually in an incubator, but mid-feed Althea whould suddenlt nees something or have to rush off and I'd get to sit with the little monster who is SO UGLY it's toally adorable! Two feeds later she got the idea and drank all 10mls! I was so excited!

And I went home and collapsed and, of course, couldn't sleep. Cue the mondya morning zombie!

A homecoming!

So I decided to take a break from whining about my rather boring life, to jump up and down squealing! Sarah, the international relations student who moved into our honours room and became as much a part of our department as I was (if not more so) has come home from JApan for a visit! It's been so quiet without her!

I felt that this was a good moment to record a few of the memories that come to mind when I think of her:

1. She was the one to name my blog, which was the final act of persuasion in getting me to start one.


2. She'd run around the honours room belting out classics, like "I heard it on the grapevine"


3. Somebody complained about people using our computer lab if they weren't in our department, so the IT guy went to check. Sarah was sitting there, typing away about atrocities in Darfur or something and he went to ehr and asked if she'd seen anyone who wasn't supposed to be there. She sympathised witht he terrible nature of the simple situation and promised to keep an eye out for him. The minute he left she ran to the honours room and ahd a minor freak-out!


4. When the Australain was around and we started the betting pool (I won't explain, it's kind of random) she used to come and sit in my lab and talk crap with him until I nearly fell off my chair giggling.

Tehre are so many more random things that happened that I'm going to have to stop this so I can focus on work today rather than just sitting giggling all morning.

But anyway WELCOME HOME SARAH!!!

The easy way around

You use stats to test ideas about a population based on a smaller sample...

So if I collect every lizard on the farm, then I won't need stats.

That might be easier than reading through my second stats book for the day.

Plus I could pick up some chai tea on the way! I ran out of teabags this morning - not a good way to start a Wednesday!

How many lines have a vertical...

yes, I've been spending my afternoon reading up on multiple regressions. It's actually been quite fun - I'm finally understanding the mechanisms behind the printouts! the honours student also came past to say Hi earlier, he's been coming past most days, and its nice. I'm on my own in the lab most of the time and it's nice to ahve a bit more of a 'lab-family' atmosphere, kind of like when the Australian was still around!

Waiting...

The ethics meeting was yesterday. I have yet to hear whether my aplpication was passed or not, and I'm procrastinating going to find out. The thing is, if I have clearance I have clearance. If not, it's 2 weeks before I can apply again, and then another 2 before they have another meeting. So if I know now or later won't really change things. I'm holding thumbs that it was passed, but that's about all I can do!

Last night I cooked a really horrible dinner. Well, it was nice, as long as you didn't eat the meat. I have learned my lesson that Pick & Pay meat is to be avoided at all costs. I think it would have taken a hacksaw to cut through it! On the plus side, I made rice successfully, which is a pretty unusal event in my life. I have never figured out the whole rice thing, and prefer to make pasta or cous-cous - both of which I can cook in my sleep by now.

Last night I went to have hot chocolate with Joey, and we came to the conclusion that the only safe meat in this country is from Woolworths or Spar. We all know that Checkers is to be avoided (something that south african girls are taught as infants, along with not sitting on the seat in a public bathroom). And while P&P meat is fine, it's cut badly and always ends up super tough.

I am so going to end up a vegetarian after all this! And I can't wait for my mom to come home so I don't have to cook every night! And I'm pretty sure my father can't wait either!

Music!

Once again, a music themed post! To tell the truth I've been playing with some data that I want to present soon, only to find that the results were exactly opposite to what I expected. So I went online looking for the lyrics to a song I was listening to, and I came across this (here) and decided to give it a try:

Music game (A to Z)

ok, look at your Music and write down for each Letter (A to Z)- the first Artist in your list- the last Artist in your list- the artist you like most

#
1-ski
9 Lazy 9
3 Doors Down (don't judge me!)

A
A.C. Newman
Azure Ray
Architecture in Helsinki (going through a bit of a phase...)

B
B(If)Tek
Bush
Bonobo

C
Cafe del Mar
Crystal Method
Calexico (I had 'Cruel' on repeat for a day or two...)

D
The Darkness
Dynamic Shadows
Deep Forest

E
Eagle-Eye Cherry
Excuses for Skipping
Everclear

F
The Fabulous Thunderbirds
Future Loop Foundation
Funeral for a Friend

G
Garbage
Gwen Stefani
Goldfish

H
Half-handed cloud
Hugh Masekela
Hayden

I
Ian Pooley
Issa Bagayogo
Indigo girls

J
Jack's Mannequin
Just Jinger
Just Jinger

K
K.D. Lang
Korn
The Killers

L
La Pieta
Luther Vandross
Lemon Jelly

M
Machine Head
My Morning Jacket
The Mountain Goats

N
Nail
Norah Jones
Neko Case/ New Pornographers

O
Oasis
The Owls
Of Montreal (I think, I have a short O-list, and couldn't really pick anything...)

P
Panda & Angel
Puddle of Mudd
Parlotones

Q
Queen (that's the only Q that I have...)

R
R.E.M.
Royksopp
Radiohead

S
Sacred Spirit
System of a Down
She & Him

T
Taking Back Sunday
Tree63
Travis

U
U2
The Used
The Unicorns (added points for the name...)

V
Van Morrison
Vusi Khumalo
Violent Femmes (more for associated memories than anything else. V is also a short list!)

W
The Wallflowers
Wonderboom
Wilco

X
I don't have anything :(

Y
Yello
Yvonne Fair
Yellowcard

Z
Zero 7
ZUCO 103
Zero 7

That was amazingly quick! I was also amazed by how much random music I seem to have collected over the years! My inner hoarder just can't take anything off my Ipod, just like I can't seem to clear the CDs out of my room when I'm far more likely to plug my Ipod into speakers than ever use a CD player again!

Rooftops

I love being on rooftops. I don't know if it's a symptom of my watching too much TV, or just a result of my spending part of my monday evenings on the roof in the break in the middle of orchestra practice, but I love it. Admittedly, I'm not fantastic with heights, although I've largely got over my fears as I have to climb after lizards all the time (plus going to Namaqualand requires extensive rock-hopping skills if you're going to have any fun at all).

So last night Duncan was singing in an Eistedfodd in the same building as where I had orchestra practice. We all went along to support him and it was lots of fun! I got there a bit early (Luke was bringing dinner but got stuck in traffic) and I went to listen to the JYO practising. They were terrible, although I can't really say that the standards have dropped too much because I listened to an old CD the other day and we were really not very good either back in the day... I also went through to the little practise room where I had lessons for the first 3 or 4 years of my viola 'career' and the room next door where I used to sit and pretend to do my homework while I waited for my lesson. My mom used to drop me off an hour or so early every week. It brought back a lot of memories, although the most vivid was of me almost passing out several times during my early lessons. Holding something that's quite heavy on your shoulder and standing for an hour can do that to you if you're not used to it! I also started on an instrument that was slightly too big for me, which didn't help. I was supposed to start on a 3/4 size violin with viola strings on it, but they gave me a full-sized violin instead.

After all that Luke arrived, and as we only had about 10 minutes before we had to go in to the Eistedfodd, I shoed him and Candice the roof. It's one of the best roofs ever! It's flat (which always helps) and has ladders and things between levels, and cool ramp things to climb on (or not). There are also raised sections with windows where you can watch the people inside the building and between the sections are cool little alleyways (where Luke was almost attacked by an exploding pigeon). When it was about 5 minutes before we had to be in the Eistedfodd we left, only to find that it had already started.

It turned out that the section before (high-school kiddies) had run over time and we weren't actually late, but we were convinced that we were, and so we snuck in (in full view of everyone because the door is right behind the performers) and settled down. It was in the room where we had Foundation Orchestra practice (when I was 10-14) and I got to reminisce a little bit in order to try and ignore the guy belting out "Cry me a River" - not the JT version, for the record. The kids weren't bad at all. There were a few problems, but they were all young, and from the Arts School, so I'm sure they'll be ironed out soon enough.

Then the adult section started. By then Candice, Luke and I had been joined by Duncan's sister and brother-in-law and it was quite entertaining to watch everyones faces as the first guy butchered an Aria and then tried to sing "All I Ask of You" with his daughter. I'd thought that he was bad, but she sounded like... there's no word for it! Every time she went for a high note (I say 'went for', not 'hit', because I don't think she hit any of the right notes...). Candice very kindly gave me her scarf to shove into my face to hide the giggles and I tried to focus on rolling it into a little ball and ignore the horrendous display, but it wasn't working so I threw it at Luke to distract him (he was pulling the "I'm not impressed" face which might or might not have been trying to stop the giggles). After that was a guy who walked off stage before the accompanist had stopped playing, and a potential dentist/orthodontist who hides dead bodies in his dustbin - he was actually pretty good!

Finally it was Duncan's turn and he was awesome! I've never liked opera music, I find it boring and the excessive vibrato annoys me (sure, it helps with sound production, but we have microphones now), but I found that Duncan's singing (besides being really erally good technically) held my attention completely. I actually felt that he understood what he was singing (and not just in the movements, you could hear it as well). by the end of the song everyone was paying attention - even the weird adjudicator was tapping her feet! At the end of it people started clapping before the song was even over, and the applause was sincere, not like the polite clapping that was happening before. It was so awesome!

After all that (and a really appalling couple of schoolkids trying to sound like Mariah Carey which I will not try to describe becasue the words don't even exist) everyone else ehaded for Eastgate for a celebratory cup of coffee, while Luke and I grabbed pizza frmo his car and, with David and Athena in tow, went and had dinner on the roof. It was freezing, but lots of fun. I love rooftops! From there I followed Luke to Eastgate and we had coffee with everyone and then he showed em a fantastic route back to the highway. I go to Eastgate regularly and never know how to get home afterwards, except for a very long way around.

So that was my evening, and it was awesome! And congratualtions to Duncan for a fantastic performance and for winning the highest award available!

The beauty of friendship

Yes, cheesy title, I know! But bear with me - it's been a pretty horrible weekend, and I was saved from complete and utter despair by an awesome night out with some pretty amazing people!

My weekend was horrible because I haven't been sleeping well. Even today I lay down for a nap and ended up dreaming that I wasdrowning in a dirtly green swimming pool. I woke myself up because I was thrashing around trying to swim... On top of all that (lizard woes number 5) the last really sick lizard was dead when I went to treat him this morning. I'm praying that it wasn't the result of anything I did. I'm justifying the whole situation by sayiong that I did my best, that he wasn't really improving very much, he was realy far gone to start with and that I was silly to let myself get attached to something that was that sick (silly to get attached to anything that is, in fact, a test subject). Is there a name for some kind of reverse-Stockholm syndrome? It was still pretty upsetting. Fortunately just after that whole thing I had coffee with a friend from the zoo, and it was really nice.

So anyway, last night I went out to dinner with Lara, her (and my) friend Nicola and a bunch of other people. I knew an alarming number of them, and even more alarmingly it was because I've taught them at some stage! It was fun though, and we laughed a lot, between lots of really rough Afrikaans jokes... and various lous and random discussions. La and I also met someone from Sevende Laan in the bathroom, which got her all super-excited! After that we realised that it was still pretty early, and although La needed help to walk to the car (Nicola was driving) we were all up for going off somewhere else, so we headed off to a pub near my house.

It was really awesome! I tend to stayt clear of pubs and clubs, as I find that I always run into people that I know either from babysitting them (sad, but oh so true), teaching them or serving them at any of my various jobs. It's incredible awkward and I always end up feeling old and embarrassed. The bonus of this place is that I think they actually check ID, so it was packed with people of around my age. When I finally found Lara and crew we set off to the bar to be stopped by a very tall (and very tipsy) guy in a suit. He rushed over to La and gave her a kiss on both cheeks. I figured that either he knew her, or he was really drunk, in which case the best option (once he left her and headed for me) was to let him do the cheek-cheek thing and then he would either introduce himself or go away.

So it was left cheek, right cheek.. the he grabbed my face and pulled in to me! La tells me that she's never seen a look on my face like that, and it was really luck that he did, indeed, go away or I would have had to hurt him. Unfortunately he didn't stay gone, and spent the next half an hour wlaking past us and casually slapping my butt until I had to switch places with Nicola (you don't want to upset her!) and he got the message.

Once Lara and I'd recovered and we;d all managed to squeeze in at a table in the back, we decided that it was a good time to take photos. One of the other people (Natasha, neither of high heels or Eyes) had a camera with her, and Lara and I tried very very hard to do self portraits with the two of us in various poses. It didn't work. Most of them involve one of us laughing while the other poses. Eventually the owner of the camera reclaimed it, but carried on taking photos, so there is a fantastic series of pictures of us in various stages of gigling fits. I hope to get a copy soon, because it's been a long time since I've laughed until I cried, and I think that having a memento would be a great thing to get me to giggle should a weekend ever be as depressing as this one!

So yes, friendship is really a wonderful thing, and I'm giggling as I type this, so I'm going to have to stop there!

Desert! Mole-rats!

So I was just thinking about how boring my life is at the moment. Yes, in the last week I have had to battle with the power-that-be to get sick animals to a vet, where they were treated inbetween massive snakes (including a beautiful anaconda that bit a friend of mine), but in general, the months that I'm in Joburg tend to be pretty routine and boring. I don't work an office job, so I guess my life is more interesting than most, but there is very little to write about. When I go on field trips everything gets more exciting, but even that has faded a bit.

Fieldwork now is incredibly routine and I like it that way. I have to occasional excitement of the roof falling in or watching random antelope from my window, but otherwise it's pretty much business as usual. Back in the day (I'm getting old) fieldwork was always to different exciting places where we met new and crazy people and had weird things happen to us.

So back to the point: a long time ago Luke and Id ecided that we would write a book called "The mole-rat diaries" all about our adventures catching mole-rats. On the last trip (it was almost 2 years ago) we actually started keeping accounts on his laptop all about what stuff happened. I stopped after about a week becasue I was too tired at the end of the day, but I have a few pages that I thought I would put up here in installments. I figure when I run out of actual stuff, I ahve the photos and the memories to try and carry on.

So watch this space for the new and exciting series of the Mole-rat Diaries (Helen's POV)

Family ties

I am exhausted at the moment! Last night my aunt arrived from Cape Town. She lives in England, but had a business trip to the cape, and now she's spending a few days with my grandparents. Her flight arrived at 8pm, so my dad and I collected her and went to my granparents house for a late supper. Wow, my grandmother is a really good cook, and while I appreciate that she made us an incredible meal, it was the size of about 2 of the meals that I cook at home, so I spent most of the evening feelnig mildly ill.

It was really nice to see my aunt again, but I found it strange, and a bit sad, that I'm not upset that I won't see her again before she goes back overseas. When I was youger she came out once a year and we all went on holiday together. When she was in the UK the biggest treat for us would be to phone her and talk for 5 minutes. Now I guess we have Skype and email and it feels like she's not all that far away.

I'm struggling at the moment a bit - the sick lizards are taking a lot of time, as well as the fact that I feel obligated to help at the zoo more often because they've helped me out. My actual work is falling behind, although I'm getting a lot done, and I'm making up for it by staying up late. When I finally collapse into bed I struggle to sleep. I think it's all the stress. This morning I think my body outvoted my brain, and I slept until 9:30. That means that this weekend (besides coming in to university every day to treat sick lizards) I'm gonig to have to catch up on a lot of work.

Fun times...

Anyone (aka lizard woes part...4?)?

So I took the (surviving) sick lizard back to the vet today, along with two others that have been looking a bit under the weather. I'd been giving them fluids and stuff so they weren't looking too bad, and even bit and peed and all the usual stuff that makes me REALLY dislike this particular species. I'll probably be taking the sick one home this weekend so I can keep an eye on him, as well as giving him his fluids. I've actually grown quite attached to the little guy! Here's hoping that he's ok!

So after going in to help with the frogs, rushing back to university, collecting lizards, rushing back to the zoo, rushing back to university... I settled down to realise that work of any description was NOT going to be happening today - an alarm was going off about 2 offices down from the lab, as well as drilling and sawing and hammering downstairs. so I tried very hard to work while the masters student read (and commented about) Heat magazine, and then I rushed back to the zoo to collect a treatment sheet for my lizards (so that the powers-that-be can see exactly what's going on) and have lunch with Luke and Elaine.

Luke was off with his chimps, so I sat with Elaine and Tommy, a guy from the technical staff who has offered to give me a zoo cap! I really don't like hats, but for some reason volunteering at the zoo has a side-effect of really wanting a hat! For the record, hats are only given out to official staff, and they can give them away to volunteers when new ones are issued (volunteers aren't allowed any current items of the zoo uniform). The bonus of the hat (besides reaching super-power status amongst volunteers) is that it means that people at the restaurant who recognise it as you either working or helping at the zoo, give you a 20% discount!

So during lunch Elaine spotted a little girl carrying a kitten, and went to yell at her - pets are definitely not allowed in the zoo, for obvious reasons. It turned out that the kitten is a stray, although she's really really tame (and SO cute!) so Elaine ended up adopting it and looking after it. The kitten is really adorable and I would love her, but I have two large dogs so I doubt it would last long in my house! Luke has it at the moment, and I'm hoping his family falls in love with it and takes it permanently. Otherwise, I'm really hoping that we can find her a nice home soon! So anyone in Joburg wanting a kitten?

Chai tea

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

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

lizard woes part 3

The third lizard is still alive! He's still not looking great, but he's definitely better than he was. The other one that we gave fluids to pre-emptively is amazingly energetic now. the first batch (which now only consists of a single lizard) is due for a check-up tomorrow, so I might take one or two others along just in case. As it is, the people 'in charge' - such as the vet who nobody could find - are really angry with me about the whole situation, so I'm hoping this won't jeopardise my ethics application (the meeting is in less than a week).

It seems that the powers-that-be are more concerned about the unit's image than the health of the animals, which bothers me a lot. I know that it's a nasty place to work and it must get depressing, but as far as I'm concerned animal welfare is of paramount importance. I just don't understand people who don't see the world that way.

On the plus side, we finished deworming the lizards this morning, and the honours student administered his first ever dose! I was very proud!

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.

I am a strange strange person...

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

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

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

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

Horrors!

So, in the spirit of duck-in-a-rowness, I cleaned out the fridge (my mother is not exactly the pinnacle of organisation at the best of times, and now that she's away I seized the opportunity), the drawer by my bed and my shoe collection.

To tell the truth, I'm not too sure how much of it was my newfound desire to put my life in order, and how much was a result of my spending most of the day reading papers that I didn't understand. Eventually I went home, printed a few of the worse ones out and settled down on my bed with a pen and a highlighter and tried to get through them. After about an hour, I got to a stage where the scientists had put together a bunch of pictures with an instruction to 'hold your finger 10cm from the page and focus on it and then look at the page without changing the focus of your eyes' or something. They followed by assuring me that not everyone can do it. After about 10 minutes of squinting I felt (once again) like I was stuck in an episode of Punkd, except that a) I really dislike Ashton Kutcher and b) I'm not famous. Unless I really am living the Truman Show, but that makes very little sense because if that was true they wouldn't have made the movie.

So I started going through some of the piles of junk in my room and getting rid of stuff. It was pretty interesting. I've always known myself to be a bit of a hoarder, but I had no idea how bad the situation was. For example the bottom of my bedside drawer was covered with old batteries. There were about 3 handfuls of them. I'm sure that I had them in my walkman way back in the day, and when they ran out I saved them to use in an alarm clock or a torch os something that doesn't need as much power as a walkman or discman. For a horrifying moment I realised how bad the situation would have been if I hadn't switched to an Ipod. I'd be wading through batteries, which would be spilling out into other parts of the house... You'll be glad to know that I put them all in for recycling!

After that I tackled my shoes, which actually began in a perfectly innocent attempt to find a certain pair of shoes, and ended up with me throwing out a huge pile of old ones. I realised to my horror that I have a shoe collection to rival a lot of people who I ridicule regularly, which makes the whole situation a lot worse considering that I probably wear about... 6 or 7 pairs regularly. I actually found my huge silver platform shoes (don't judge me) from when I was about 14. There were others, equally old that have acutally come back into fashion because I kept them for so long! On the plus side, I found my old hiking boots, which I thought I'd lost.

So now that that is done, I have no excuse (except cleaning out the other cupboards, but I don't have the energy right now) but to get back to the nasty complicated papers.

Facing fears

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

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

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

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!

follow-up photos!

here are some pictures from the oh-so-awesome Kruger trip! I'm afraid that they really aren't as good as I'd like, but unfortunately if a leopard sits behind a bush there's not much you can do. Antelope have a way of turning their butts to you whenever you take out a camera, so at least (for your sake) I'm not including the many butt-shots I have!

A contemplative giraffe.

A contemplative lapwing. I forget which kind, the bird book is at home at the moment (and I'm not...)
A contemplative waterbuck. These are the only buck you want a butt-shot for because they have lovely white rings there!
Behind the fuzzy branch there is a leopard! Forgive me for not going around to the other side, but there was a big river in the way...
A one-eared bokkie! He was the cutest little guy! I bet he tells great stories about the time he excaped from lions...

A roadblock! That car was stuck there for quite a long time because the oncoming traffic all stopped to look! Not unlike a real roadblock actually...
A likkewaan! They're actually pretty big, and we saw a lot of them!

A chilly roller. Early in the morning all the birds were fluffy and miserable looking!

An almost butt-shot.

Those brown blobs are the cheetah and the cubs. I wish you could take photos through binoculars. Or rather that we had cameras implanted in our brains and we could photograph stuff exactly how we see it! Then again there was that movie (Final cut) where that didn't work out so well!

Elephants drinking after a very cute mass-mudbath! The babies weer rushign around trying to get the adults attention, one of them resorted to sitting between an adults front feet and jabbing at it with its trunk! They covered themselves with sand shortly afterwards.

Once again, biocular cameras! The blob in the centre is also a leopard.

A rhino! One of many, but this one had his head out the trees, which is a nice contrast to all the other pictures!

Lion, Tigers and... never mind!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

I am not making a statement or rebelling

I just like the colour blue... hence I dyed my hair blue. It has nothing to do with my parents or friends or an apparent problem with authority.

It's not even that blue! And my favourite colour is NOT blue, it is yellow.

And getting to the zoo at 5am to help set up enclosures and then not be invited to the afterparty is so not cool.

And the monkey is unmanageable. And Elaine is away. I will miss her.

And I'm off to Kruger on Monday with a complete stranger.

I am really tired. Hence the short sentences.

I have blue hair!!!!

It's so awesome! I've wanted blue hair since I was about 10... 13 years later I finally got the guts to do it! That was helped by Joey calling my hairdresser beforehand and telling her that I wanted blue hair so that all the products would be ready for me.

Props also go to Joey and Laurin (not that they read this) for being the most awesome friends ever and sitting through a rather long hair-cut/colour/blowdry/reapply colour/blowdry session with me. They certainly have a lot of staying power!

I have blue hair!

:)

The Wizard of Oz

I am terrified of the Wizard of Oz (the old movie) to a point of it being a near-phobia. I don't know why, but I find the movie terrifying and ahve never been able to watch it. I have a vague memory of watching it and freaking out when I was about 4 years old, and I've tried to watch it several times since then, but the wicked witch scares me! As someone who watches horror movies for their comedic value I find being scared of a movie very strange (for anyone who hasn't discovered the joys of bad horror movies, I would suggest a movie night with Fragile, the Cave and The Descent. You'll laugh until you get a stomach-ache!).

So anyway I went through to see Joey and Lara last night for our standard after-work (for them) coffee. It's a tradition I really miss since I don't work more than about once a month for them and when I do it's usually to help one of them out, which defeats the purpose of them coming to visit for coffee. We've started a new tradition of me always going to visit on a Sunday night, and when I go away ti's often teh thing that I miss the most! Back to the point: I saw that we had a new mini-series called the Tin Man. I borrowed it, not quite clicking that it was an adaptation of the Wizard of Oz and took it home with me. And it was very cool!

I only realised about an hour into it that it was actually using most of the original characters, and a lot of strange references to the original movie which I didn't pick up on becuase I could never watch more than 20 minutes of the original (I got the "Lions Tigers and Bears, Oh my!" one but that was about it). And it was really cool! I totally enjoyed it, and just need to watch the third part tonight to finish off. I have no idea if the plot follows the original or not, but I'm pretty sure thay've changed a lot of things, but the most important change for me was that the wicked witch is no longer wearing stripy tights, which was an image in my nightmares for years when I was small! And so now she doesn't scare me!

So maybe I will give the original movie a try one day. But if I ever have children they will be banned from seeing it until they're at least teenagers. It's a scary movie for children!

I'm ok!

I spent the day at the zoo today, as is my usual habit, but everything was strange. I was greeted by hordes of people rushing towards me to see if I was ok. Now I had sent a mesage through a volunteer to say that I was sick and wouldn't be there for a day or two, but nothing to alarm them. Then I found out that rumours are circulating the zoo that I am in hospital, dying of Giardia.

3 points of interest in the whole saga:

1. A lot of people I don't really know very well were really concerned, which was really sweet. As much as the rumours were annoying, it was nice to see that people cared! So plenty of warm and fuzzy feelings on that one!
2. The only time I had heard anything was from Elaine who wanted to visit me 'in hospital' on Friday, they were all happy to rely on the rumours rather than finding out from me. So if I ever end up in hospital, I won't be expecting too many visitors!
3. I haven't heard anything from the person who is in charge of the monkeys who never warned anyone about the Giardia risk. She didn't try to contact me or anything. It really bothers me that she didn't warn anyone about the whole Giardia risk, and I would have thought that she'd be trying to be nice to avoid me taking legal action against her for negligence. Which I would never do, but I wish she didn't know me that well!

I also met the new baby pigs, which are SO cute! They really are adorable, although noisy and I admit maybe the baby gecko in quarantine is slighty cuter! I love the fact that I have to battle to decide the cutest in a never-ending parade of awesome animals! I also met Bakkies, the little Hartebees who was very sweet and tried to eat my jacket while Sebastian the Sitatunga (however you spell that) fell in love with Lynne and nearly climbed the fence to be with her. It was really funny!

That was my day, I spent the afternoon sleeping and spending some QT with my birds. I gave them a huge bundle of shiny bead bracelets which kept them entertained for ages! It was really cute and I need to figure out how to make them a toy or something out of them where they can't hurt themselves. the beads are too big to be swallowed, but I need to string them on someting they can't break and swallow, while securing them so that they can't break the beads. Any ideas?

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!

Eish-kom

After my 2 days of almost-solid sleep I found a fullish day rather tough, and I left university in the late-ish afternoon content in the idea that my day was over. I planned to go and collect a DVD or two, settle down at home, and sleep until I have to get up for work tomorrow morning.

It took me over an hour to get to my house - half of the robots on the main road by my house were out/ I found out later that there was no power at home. Oh dear. I attributed it to a return of load-shedding. For those of you who don't live here, load-shedding is when our electricity supply doesn't match demand and they shut off areas for between 2 and 4 hours. It used to be 4 hours twice a week, and we got used to it surprisingly quickly (an afternoon off work once a week was one of the 'downfalls' of the new system). The electricity company (Eskom) decided that we all ahd to cut back on our electricity usage by 10 % or face rather nasty tarriffs. And, amazingly enough, we did it! Load-shedding was stopped and we were all happy, to the point of my family refusing to use heaters even though we were all shivering and turning blue because "we wouldn't want load-shedding to happen again, now would we?" As I returned from the rather warm Lowveld in the middle of a cold front, I felt very noble, shivering away while wearing almost all of my clothes at once.

So I drove along, smiling and waving at pointsmen at the major intersections and saying nasty things to all those peopel out tehre who must have been using their heaters and thus bringing the curse of load-shedding back down on us. Until I got home to find out that the power had been out for over 4 hours, and after a long and not very productive call to Eskom, we found out that there is some kind of fault with our supply (just my suburb) and they don't know what's wrong or how to fix it. Last time this happened some areas didn't ahve power for a week.

Fortunately my mother was more awake than me, and she interrupted my lying on my bed watching DVDs on my laptop to mention that I'd brought home blood samples frmo the field and not got around to taking them to university. They were sitting in our freezer (for some reason, having blood samples in the freezer upsets her far more than having dead lizards in the freezer. Go figure). So, at 7pm, having watched Martian Child (a very sweet movie) I rushed across to university with a cooler-bag of blood samples and my laptop and phone to charge.

So now it's 8pm, and I'm sitting in the lab, all alone, and still procrastinating!

And I parked badly, and it felt realy good!

Back on track - well sort of...

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

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

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

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

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

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

where did the last 2 days go?

So I came down with a nasty bug, and my doctors are treating mr for Giardia. After all that! I think they were right - the medication worked really quickly and I feel fine, except that I've developed a nasty tendency to sleep for at least 18 hours a day! I got a DVD to watch in bed and efll asleep during the first 10 minutes this morning, only to wake up about 9 hours later with a splitting headache and some of the weirdest dreams ever!

At least I'm feeling better and I'm off the hectic antibiotics after tomorrow. I'll also have to go and do some serious work to catch up after sleeping for 2 days.

It was worth it though!

What's in a name?

Theresa at the zoo today called me "Helga" - the volunteers all started giggling helplessly.

I responded with a blank stare.

So she said "Sorry! Sorry!" the thought for a minute "I mean Elaine!"

blank stare.

I've never been partiicularly fond of my name, but it annoyed me that for the first time at the zoo, someone got it wrong. Usually I'm the one trying frantically to remember who it is that I'm saying Hi to...

stats

I have found teh coolest ever stats book! I'm loving it! I have an "Oh, so THAT's what they mean by that!" moment about twice a page!

And the fact that I'm so excited...

yes well...

Scribbles

I slept in this morning and only got to the zoo when 5 of the 6 new volunteers were tehre. It was frustrating because the new 3 aren't really learning anything because they keep going off to other rooms to help, when they should be learning to work in the busiest room, where the rest of us are focussed. The room with over 100 animals should take priority over the room with 20 or the room with 70 I would think. The experienced volunteers had an assignment due this afternoon, and only went in briefly to get the others started, but ended up spending the whole morning doing husbandry. Considering how much the zoo needs them, I would expect them to be treated slightly better!

Some of the little guys were really sick, I think from a bad reaction to the treatments yesterday, and one frog died. I'm glad I didn't know him very well, and I'm stressed out because one of the frogs has got a name now. Naming animals is bad, and I avoid it as much as possible, but soemtimes an animals just sort of names itself, and those are the names that stick! Fortunately I was able to get the experienced volunteers to agree to look after the frogs tomorrow when I can't be there, which is a huge weight off my mind! They're also going to start to get new bigger tanks ready to move the frogs on Sunday. Sunday is totally going to be Frog Day for me and I'm so excited!

So once I got to university and took several long walks to try and focus, I sat down and started redoing stats again (I found something that had to be considered, so now I'm re-analysing using a bigger model) and after a while I found myself grabbing a red pen and a piece of paper and scribbling out ideas and frameworks for the intro to the paper I'm hoping to publish from this data. The real issue is that as I've changed the focus of the study, all the reading and writing I did in order to graduate with this work is no longer relevant. So I get to go back to the drawing board and start reading and reading and reading and reading!

Something about scribbling makes you feel like you're accomplishing a lot! and the scribbles are often very useful later as you thought things through while involved with the data. So now I feel like I've accomplished something.

w00t!

Falconry!

So I went to go and follow up on an iguana who needed a home (sadly he already has a new home, so our lab will be empty for a little while longer), and got chatting to the friend who had a friend who knew a guy who had an iguana needing a home... She and a partner run a company that takes animals out to schools, resorts, functions and birthday parties and things to get children to interact with animals and learn about them a little bit. We were having a fantastic conversation (we're possibly going to go together to do a venomous snake course, which is fantastic because I didn't want to be surrounded by weird snake people...) when she mentioned that she really needs an assistant for her shows. The guy who works with her may be going overseas, and she's a bit shaky on all the reptile info. so basically I think I just got a third job. Oops!

It mayy come to nothing, but I'm really hoping that it works out! Her partner specialises in birds, and she said they'd teach me falconry and how to 'fly' birds in shows, which I've always awanted to do! Plus, it's not about the money, although it's fantastic that they would pay me, it's a bunch of experience that I wouldn't get anywhere else!

So here's hoping! Oh, and she has one of the coolest lizards ever! She brought it to show me once, and it was gigantic and totally adorable!