2/14/10

Valentines Day!
Today started out rough. We all woke up this morning in a dripping sweat, as the AC had turned off with the power outage. There was a major storm going on, and the air was just 100% saturated. The birders couldn’t even go out until it stopped raining. We ended up leaving late (630), and heading to our sites to see if we could even walk around. Right when we were arriving on site, a huge buffalo crossed the road. Buffalo are dangerous, but not if properly watched. So we quickly took down our site and moved on. All of the sites needed to come down today, as it was our last day of data collection. We took down the 8 we were supposed to, and then had to go out and take down one of the other sites as well, as they had gotten run off by elephants. TIA (this is Africa. I’ll use this a lot). It was a long morning, but on the bright side, we’re done with field work for a little bit.
Upon returning, we started taking apart the traps and cleaning them. There were 150 traps in all, and each had to be de-wired, opened, soaked, scrubbed, dried, and then put back together. We are currently at the drying phase. It took us most of the afternoon to do this, but it wasn’t hard work. Just time consuming. We also had a fair bit of time to relax, as we needed to wait for the traps to soak. At around 530, I decided to go to the main camp to call chris, as it was valentines day and I miss him terribly. However, upon returning, I realized everyone had gone to sundowners. Today we were reading the valentines that everyone had written for each other. I was very sad, as I had written a song that I wanted to sing, and I was going to miss all of the fun. Luckily, Laurence was nice enough to come back to get me. I am currently thinking of a way to pay him back. Chocolate is my current plan of action.
The valentines gig was very cute and funny. Everyone had drawn a name at random, and then written them a valentine. I had Lindsay, and I had written her a song. She read the “poem,” and then I announced myself and that it was a song, and sang it for her while also playing guitar. Some of the valentines were very clever, some were cute, some were totally obscure—all were fun. We did it in chunks, one at the lake, one in the dining room. After dinner, we finished the valentines and everyone just relaxed for the rest of the night. Word of the day (an appropriate addition): I love you = Zakooranza