Virtually Home

Departure day. Fail to sleep, rise at 5 a.m. The coffee maker is gurgling. Leaving for the airport in a few minutes, and dreading commercial air travel. Hopefully all will be well. I will be sans telephone and internet for two weeks. See you in 2011, hopefully parasite-free and with many photos to share.

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

I have been invited to participate on my first real field trip, which is exciting on a level about on a par with the way I used to feel about field trips in elementary school. My boss at the museum happened to have teamed up with some other biologists at OU to teach a seminar class on the flora and fauna of Belize this semester, only to have none of their students elect to go on the research trip during the winter break. And so I get to be the token undergraduate among four professors and two grad students working on various research projects. So far, I've really only been given a packing list, a brief lecture about the history of the Mennonites that colonized most of the country, and a warning about botflies. A cursory Google search of botflies brings up a bunch of horror stories about larva picked up in Belize developing in tourists' scalps, along with sarcastic comments about how the infested person might have gotten them. In case you're wondering, yes! We're goin...