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.

Today's blog: A Short Story

Once upon a time there was a tiny tiger with too many teeth. Then one day he lost all of his teeth, and so a bunch of engineers invented screws with laser microtexturing that fit right into the gums and had zirconium teeth coated with enamel so they were very strong and not cytotoxic and they looked just like his old teeth, only better and more expensive. Then he spent a lot too many hours trying to get wire mesh to fit inside of a poorly constructed solar oven. He was very grumpy. But then he finished writing his funding application, and so he expected to be much happier, but surprisingly, he still was pretty grumpy. It was the worst kind of surprise.

This was basically my day, but without the tiger.

Carpenting

Sam, Jo and I spent about seven hours today acquiring materials for and building wooden solar ovens. We had no kit, and no instructions or guidelines other than some basic passive solar theory. The only electric-powered tool we had was a drill. It was tough. Things were fun, and then they were frustrating, and then everyone was swearing every 30 seconds or so, and then we actually started feeling a sense of accomplishment, and then things got silly, and now I'm pretty sure that I could sell a garden gnome I made myself for maybe §40, if you know what I mean. Joseph, a cool young Maasai man and our "field assistant" for MAE 436 (although we spend no time in the field for this course), showed up to help us out (although our prof was absent for the entirety of the construction). Around the sixth hour, he began improvising some lovely little ditties that I greatly appreciated, both because they mentioned African wildlife and conveyed a sense of violence.

The lyrics of the first, Big Lion, were as follows:

Big lion, in that bush, but I will hit him with my big stick.
(repeat ad nauseum)

His later work included a variation of Big Lion:

Big lion, in that bush, and when he sees us we run like deer.

After Josephine pointed out that acting like a deer is not the best way to make yourself insusceptible to lion attacks, it reached its final form:

Big lion, in that bush, and we will run like lightening
(giggle at the absurdity of running like lightening,
which I suppose isn't done in Kenya, at least not idiomatically)

Although we made it through many refrains of Big Lion, and a few of Big Elephant, my favorite was the hyena song:

Hyena with one short leg and lots of sharp teeth. One bite, one kilo of donkey.

This was only sung a few times, and was usually followed by an admonition to be very afraid of hyenas. Even if they inexplicably have one short leg.

Right-o, then, I have a thesis funding report to be nursing along. By which I mean, I am going to sleep now.

Catcher in the Cynadon

ed. note: Written while staying at Lewa, a reserve about an hour North of Mpala.
The courses I've had in Kenya are very, very different from the courses I've had at Princeton, but there are still parts that are similar: reading scientific papers, taking notes and discussing them; spending late nights scrambling to finish all of the assignments; wondering why it is again that I never make time to clean my room. And, similarly, the field research I've done here, although it's in Africa and there are giraffes watching me work, is in some respects like the lab work I've done on campus. There are all the routine observations that need to be made, doing the same thing the same way each time, and carefully recording everything. Serious science has to be this way; standardizing sampling methods and taking thorough field notes are crucial to actually getting results. It is a pleasure to be able to look up from my work and just see African plains, but it is still more work than play.
Today, though, we got to help with a preliminary study to scope out the area for grasshopper species, and that was different. After we had finished counting and identifying dung piles in the usual areas, we had to walk in a straight line and count how many grasshoppers jumped out at us. Once we had relayed our numbers back to Fiona, who would do the studies if the area was right and the funding came through, we were free to catch samples. This was definitely not work: crunching through grass up to our waists, looking for a promising specimen to be unnerved enough by our presence to leave his hiding place and fly up in the air. Carefully watching him land, creeping forward, then pouncing clumsily towards him. Hands cupping gingerly, and in my case, fighting back squeamishness as I pulled the 3-inch bug off of the grass stem, pinched its hindquarters firmly between my fingers, and brought back my prize to be put in a plastic baggie along with some dozen of its friends and relations. Often enough there was no prize, the locust would scuttle off before I grabbed it, but that was alright; it didn't have to be recorded for later statistical analysis of how much time it took me to find a large grasshopper, or to determine whether I was significantly bad at doing it. Just shrug it off and go for a new one. It reminded me of when I would go out and dig up worms to look at, or catch buckets of tadpoles to raise, playing with nature for curiosity's sake-- why I like biology in the first place.

Lazy Sunday

Didn't do terribly much today. The highlight of today might have been the pizza we had at lunch. Mpala's kitchen staff has a unique and often entertaining set of descriptors for the food they serve. Sometimes they are in Swahili, like Ndengu (mung bean stew, delicious), chapati (also delicious), or kienyeji (a mixture of all of the leftover food from the last three days. Seriously, it's just all stirred up together and served like a stew. Sub-delicious). There are also regular English entrees, which on occasion make sense. Today, it was "pizza veg meat." The pizza veg was pretty good, and the pizza meat was fantastic. I think it had sliced hot dogs in it. Occasionally, the syntax or spelling is such that you can only conclude that we are being served hilarity for dinner. Rubbeb crable was one of the best-named desserts, I think (we are pretty sure that it was Rhubarb crumble, but perhaps it was a rubber cable. Or, maybe it was just rubbeb crable). The brand of ice cream they have here, "Ooh! Ice Cream," might be the most fun to announce, though. I do love things with exclamation points! The world would be better with more exclamation points!

!!

One thing I did do today was remember that I have a few backlogged blog entries left from the mammals course. I'll put those up as well.

!-Sarah