So safe to say I did finally get to the forest after 3 weeks of buraucratic hell. As much as I hoped for some peace and quiet and hard work, the problems are still coming at me fast and furious.
To be brief, the agile gibbons still are not habituated, I am overwhelmed/bored by the leaf monkeys, and my friend Luca got seriously sick with Dengue fever. All very nice to kick off my fieldwork. Also, my dehydrator for drying food samples was zapped when the generator broke, so I will have to either fix it or construct some sort of drying device myself. Still working on this. Of course, I cannot really start my study until all of the groups are habituated so there is time. :/
I am afraid that I am going to be one of those people who is in the field for 3 years to get a good 11-12 months of data. I think my advisor will also kill me for this with some sort of Jedi/hyper-organized German mind trick. Of course there is also the problem of money, which I do not have (at the moment) to even cover 12 months right now. Even if I get the Leakey grant it is only another $ 9,500 or so. Oh, and did I mention that the assistants all approached Luca and me one evening to say they wanted a raise. Fantastic. I sure would like a raise too. Maybe I should just declare bankruptcy and stop paying my credit card bills. Any suggestions? I have already considered selling organs, but my giant ones would never fit in these tiny Indonesian bodies. There is of course also the option of charging for all of the "photos with white people" that people insist upon wherever I go. Last night Luca and I were eating dinner and first two guys insisted one taking pictures (on a camera phone) posed with each of us separately. Then after about 10 minutes they brought the super sweaty and possibly in need of a change baby. They just plopped the thing in my lap and I had to hold it for several photo attempts while they tried to get its attention to look at the camera. Am I Santa, the Easter bunny at the mall, or maybe this is Disney land? I mean seriously I might as well be wearing a giant fluffy costume.
Oh and for some more bad news, my computer completely died about a week ago. I was working on it one evening and it just went black with no warning, no blue-screened error message, no nothing. After that it could not even turn on. I think that this is an electrical problem caused by unstable power from the generator. I came out of the forest the other day and when I tried turning my computer on again in the hotel it started up like normal. I did not lose any data and everything seems to be working. This could also be related to humidity and or temperature, but I keep my computer in a dry box. I bought a 5 kg surge protector today in hopes of avoiding any further problems, but we will see. It should be fun carrying back into the forest.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I think I will send you a power conditioner. It seems that the $250 to spend on this will definitely be worth the money saved on other electrical devices you own. What type of power do you need? And where should I send it? Too bad I don't have my Best Buy discount still...-Kristin
Post a Comment