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.