Today, Picasa decides to refresh itself, and I lose the entire webalbum I’d posted on this summer. In the process, it breaks every single link I’d created to my journal. I’m pissed, and spend half my morning trying to resolve the issue. I re-upload many of the photos, but it looks like I have to manually restore the links. My laptop also keeps ( Read more... )

Moses’ team has disappeared on him; he sits on the computer next to me, scratching his head over the translations. After lunch a group of kind, portly nuns arrive in a white van to tour Noloholo: Buddy and Laly are in a meeting so the Duke interns walk them (very slowly) around. The Noloholo hill and its rocky paths are not kind to old ladies in ( Read more... )

We go on a bit of a lion chase this morning, when Buddy and Laly phone Dennis to tell us they came upon a lion lying in the road during their game drive. By the time we get there, the lion has left for the park interior. Buddy, Laly, Christy and a French visitor head off in the first car, instructing us to hang behind as we try to follow her path. ( Read more... )

My mom calls me and the Chinese feels odd in my mouth, my tongue curling around the foreign shape of the these words, refusing to go where it must. Although I’ve now memorized over 400 Swahili words, my recall is still very slow. So slow that even though I can understand what people ask me, they’ll often walk away muttering “you don’t understand ( Read more... )

Ever since we moved into our tents, we’ve been using an outdoor bathroom, which is basically a pit-toilet with four walls and a pointy roof made out of green canvas. There are good corners to hide and build webs in, but most of all, there is a large abundance of food in the form of flies. This little world is an arachnologist’s dream. Now, ( Read more... )

Through the whispering grasses we drive, the afternoon sun browning us to the color of everything else touched by those rays in this landscape, until we too dry and murmur like the rushes in the wind. We’re headed toward Lorkimon, the ridge that rises like a fish’s spine above the Steppe in the distant north. The day had been an unlucky one - one ( Read more... )

I’ve been waking up exactly 1 minute before my alarm goes off every morning, crawling gladly out of my sleeping bag toward coffee and life. I often consider how much I love my tent, and its mesh ceiling that allows me to slip into sleep with the companionship of glimmering stars, and in the morning shows me dark branches tangling overhead ( Read more... )

Work has proceeded pell-mell these past couple days, and projects are piling up. By the end of my day, I am too tired to write! It’s now Saturday morning, and many questions have been resolved, so I take a quick breather to compose this email ( Read more... )

This morning I woke well before dawn (5:15) to tag along on the morning tracking transect. Of all the tracking transects, this one is usually the best for wildlife because much of it runs along the Tarangire Park boundary. We weren’t disappointed. In between watching the Hadza and Maasai hurl sticks into a baobab to knock down the delicious seed ( Read more... )

At 5:30 I wake up to see the moon, Venus, and Jupiter gleaming brightly above the horizon. According to space.com, Venus is currently “more than 17 times brighter than Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.” In August, we’ll be able to see Mercury, too, just above the pre-dawn sky ( Read more... )