Internet... more like out-ternet. Or something clever.

The line I've been fed about our internet connection here is that when it rains in Turino, Italy, we lose our internet connection. If this is the case, someone over in Turino had better go looking for some Gopherwood and build an ark. But, after a few days of constantly hitting refresh on my inbox to see if the fickle minor deity in charge of turning on the internet for Africa had gotten out of bed yet, it finally worked! And I did a little victory dance in front of a few Masters' students from Leeds that I had never met before. So now I am able to email my funding application, which is due in three hours and I should have done ages ago, and write to you, internet.
So, we sort of finished MAE 436 today, insofar as now the course is over. We still have homework and projects to turn in, though. Funny the way that happens. And you know what that means... 1 more course! And it is going to be wonderful for a whole host of reasons:

1. It is being taught by Kelly Caylor and Trenton something, who I want to be best friends with forever because they are awesome ( I haven't run this by them yet... we'll just let things run their course and we'll be making friendship bracelets for each other in no time)
   
2. Kelly and Trenton have tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of really cool measuring equipment that they're letting us play with! Like a Laikor, which measures the photosynthesis rate of leaves while they are still on the plant. And a tiny laser that measures isotope ratios in the air. And a Unicorn Machine, where you point it at any ungulate and it becomes a unicorned version of that animal!
3. It is called Ecohydrology, which sounds cool
4. It's about plants, which means that we can go over and touch all of the things that we are studying, and they won't run away or burn our retinas like the bloody tin foil reflectors for our solar ovens
   
5. Did I mention how cool Kelly and Trenton are?
   
6. We get to go home afterwards

Anyway, it's Josephine's birthday so I'm going to go watch Monster's Inc projected on a bedsheet and maybe have a Tusker.