Virtually Home

Okay, readers. If there are any of you out there who haven't abandoned me or keeled over dead from the impossibly long wait, here's the deal: I am going to blog now. I was putting off blogging non-sequentially, since I still (and this is pathetic) have yet to finish my narrative on winter break in the neotropics. So here goes. I am blogging non-sequentially, and I don't care who knows it. My hope is that by writing about spring happenings, life will return to this blog. If only the weather would cooperate, this idea of renewal would feel complete. Jacob and I have been tossing around this idea of camping for a while now. Springtime inspires me to be outside. I really can't remember camping often, if ever, as a child. I presume this is probably because my brother and father went camping regularly with their Boy Scout troop and were probably pretty bored of it. Anyway, one weekend at Devil's Den, Arkansas last spring is the only conscious memory I have of camping. ...

It has not escaped me that I have so far failed to update you, faithful reader, on my winter break Central American extravaganza. Since returning, the real world has rather rudely made its presence known, and I've not really had much time to think about the rather daunting number of photos I took, or the somewhat impossible task of relating accurately what happened while I was away. Here goes anyway. I woke up really early. Painfully early, after not having actually achieved any modicum of deep sleep. I finished packing, drank a cup of coffee (little did I know it was going to be my last cup of real coffee for nearly two weeks) and Dad drove me to the airport in the cold, pitch-black predawn. I waited in the longest security line ever witnessed at Tulsa International (by me, anyway). Three people, on seeing my passport, asked me if I was going to a mission trip. Because clearly anyone who would deign to go to another country must also be proselytizing. Is there anything more co...

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...

Moments ago, I experienced a tragic data loss in transferring photos from my iPhone to my computer. I guess nothing better was to be expected, since the trip started off with my forgetting my camera -- an unforgivable failure. The photos posted here are the few that survived iPhoto's latest travesty. They may or may not be misrepresenting the order of events. For instance, the picture at left was taken on the flight home. Ahem. We, on analyzing the forecast for Thanksgiving Day, decided to skip town early and, when I had succeeded in attending the appointments I'd made for my "two" days in Tulsa, we all converged on the airport and took off for Florida. The way out of town was bumpy, and we were cutting through alternating clouds and clear sky all the way up to 10,000 feet. Each time we broke through the clouds, we were surrounded by towers of cloud. It was cavernous. Water streaming over the windshield and the wings from the condensation in the clouds. I couldn...

I hate Thursdays. Kind of a lot, actually. I usually have class and work from 8 to 5, mostly non-stop, with a couple of minutes to scramble on or off campus and find time to eat. And, in addition to that, I have anatomy lecture with my least favorite professor (ever) immediately followed by three hours of anatomy lab, after which I have to come home and bathe assiduously in order not to smell like dead shark. But then today, as I was leaving my lecture and headed to the dark basement room where we cut up housecats, something wonderful happened. I looked across the South Oval and noticed a bunch of people lined up on the edge of the bike lane, looking at something. I assumed it had something to do with the preachers that have been there the last couple of weeks, but there was no preacher in evidence. And then I noticed the huge bird standing in the grass. There was a juvenile red-tail hawk, standing atop the fat red squirrel he had evidently just slain, and looking quite confused as...