Day -172

Great News!  Iran released the American hikers!

Day -181

This is old news.  And I didn't say anything before because I was hoping that it would just go away.  I have a deep, unconditional love of the Postal Service, no doubt born from nervous anticipation of Mail Call at camp.  I send and receive postcards regularly, I send bills through the mail.  I know how much a stamp costs and I believe it is no small marvel that for $10.75 I can have a package personally delivered to my family 3,000 miles away.

The postal service is required by the Constitution to provide affordable service and delivery to every citizen, but they don't get any funding.  They must support themselves, which is becoming problematic in these times of reduced mail volume (Darn Internet!)  To further complicate things, they need congresssional approval for any major decisions--like reducing delivery days.  My love isn't enough.

Now, instead of nervously awaiting the mail to see if they still loved me back home, now I'm nervous that my mail won't come at all.  Beyond that, I'm afraid I won't be able to afford to send packages for resupply, or that I won't have anywhere to send them.

Closing the post offices in Fontana Dam, N.C.; Glencliff, N.H.; and Caratunk, Maine, would leave hikers without an easy way to get food and switch out equipment at critical points during their treks, which usually take between four and six months

Day -242

This makes my brain go numb. 

Nothing makes me want to be outside more than 6 hours spent thus:  put the purple circle over the green dot.  Repeat 500,000 times.  I wish that was an exaggeration.  I can recall many bad days on the trail that beat a good day at microarray quantification.  Even days that involved frozen rain or leeches.



On the bright side--there's a large comfy chair in the secret office where I do this work, for quick restorative eye resting sessions, and I have a window that I can see out of without pressing my face up against the glass to catch an sliver of sky without buildings.  I can watch the storms roll in across the parking lot now.

Things are looking up!

Day -244

Spent the weekend with a handful of the Scouts giving the Scout House a deep deep clean.  We unearthed many artifacts and made some shocking discoveries.  A can of asparagus that was bulging and older than every Scout in the room.  A mysterious set of rusty keys that don't go to any of the locks in the house, or do they???  Mice eat crayons.  Ok, well maybe it wasn't that exciting.  But, it's clean now.  Hurrah!

Day -249

Night Noises

Whenever I'm on an overnight with Scouts I make sure to anticipate their fears or worries.  A big one on the list of 'things that make Scouties go Ahhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!' is Night Noises.  Before we go to bed, or during campfire we try to come up with as many sounds as we can that we might hear in the middle of the night.  "What noises might you hear tonight?"  The kids usually do a pretty good job of coming up with night time forest sounds (traffic, loud music from the neighbors [we camp inside the city sometimes], owls, coyotes, etc etc etc), and I make sure to add the ones they might not anticipate.  For instance, peacocks at 2 am can be terrifying for the uninitiated.  It gives the kids a chance to think through the noises they might hear, and a chance for the Responsible  Adults (tm) to explain that it's No Big Deal (ie: don't wake me up!).  "There now you've heard all the night noises so you won't be scared!"

Why are we talking about Night Noises?

So last night I'm laying snug in my bed asleep at a time when normal people are sleeping--oh, say 1am.  Slowly I realize that I'm not actually sleeping anymore because there's this really strange noise coming from my bedroom window.  Ping.  Ping.  Ping.  Ping.  Somewhere in my foggy brain I know exactly what this noise is.  Someone is throwing rocks at my window.  But my brain doesn't latch on to that because WHO DOES THAT?  Second option, and obviously the logical one is that I'm experiencing PARANORMAL activity.  (Did you see Insidious?)  I'm sure there are ghosts outside of my window.  I'm scared, but I crawl out of bed to look anyway.  There's no one there.  That was a little disappointing.  I drug myself all the way out of bed and to the window and there's no ghosts or John Cusacks with boom boxes and Peter Gabriel or anything.  Boring. 

Since I'm up anyway I decide to hit the head before going back to sleep.  When I walk out of my room towards the bathroom I hear the softest of knocking coming from the front door.  Robbers don't knock and my dogs aren't barking.  I figure my dogs can't hear spiritual apparitions.  Now I'm sure it's a ghost.  I tiptoe across the living room towards the glowing outline of the front door.  I peek through the peep hole.  Nothing. Can't be anything but a ghost.  I consider fixing the chain lock before opening the door but I figure that the ghost can slip through any gap.  I open the door. 

It's my roommate.  She's not tall enough to show up through the peep hole, or apparently savy enough to take her keys with her when she leaves the house.

Night noises folks.  Scarytown.

Day -251

Happy 4th of July.  Ideally, I'd be at a baseball game with a nice cool beverage.  In reality I'm at work, moving tiny amounts of clear liquid from one tube to another.  The good news is that I'm working on this most hallowed day because I spent the last week in the field! Hurrah!

The fish that I study lives along the entire eastern coast so once a year I get to drive from Florida all the way up to Maine in what I like to pretend is a warp-speed thru-hike.  There are many similarities. 

There's the 'green tunnel' of highway 95.  Driving 4,000 miles in 7 days along with fishing at 6 sites is definitely an endurance event.  


We sleep wherever we crash--rest stops, camp grounds, friends' houses.  On this trip I hung my hammock between trees in Maine and between the support beams inside an old cigar factory.

We obsess about food.  My lab mate and I made up songs about the food we were looking forward to eating ("Chimichanaga chimichanga chimmichanga, yes yes yes") and experienced extreme exhaustion while always pushing to the next site.  ("Are we supposed to be going north or south?")

We encountered wildlife.  I saw my first bear along highway 64 in eastern North Carolina.  It didn't look scary at all tossing its head back and forth watching traffic. 

We experience 'road magic'.   All of our fishing sites were easy except our last one in southern Virginia.  We had to abandon that one and move down into NC--which we'd never fished before so we were not familiar with the area.  We got down to the Outer Banks around 11 pm and realized that it was 4th of July weekend and we'd never find a hotel with 1. Vacancy or 2. rates < $200.  No Bueno.  We drove inland a bit and realized that we weren't going to find another hotel within 50 miles.  We pulled off at a gas station to buy ice for our fish.  There were some cottages behind the gas station.  I said "Hey, that looks like a hotel, but there's no sign or office"  My lab mate called his girlfriend who did a quick search of the internet for us (She's a keeper, it was like midnight and I'm sure he woke her up)  "There's a 'White Store Hotel' somewhere out there, but nothing else for miles" he relayed.  I pointed out the cottages and my lab mate agreed to drive around back and check it out.  At that exact moment, the house keeper was getting something out of the utliity closet.  I spotted her, jumped out of the van (It may have still been moving), flashed a smile and showed just a little leg.  In that manner we procured the LAST ROOM EVER IN NORTH CAROLINA for a mere $70.  The housekeeper didn't have access to the office or even a room key to give us but she let us in and made us promise to pay on our way out in the morning.  We did.


All that fun work has put me behind in my dreary-lab-work.  So here I am.  Ahh, the centrifuge beckons.

Fig. 1.  Field work is fun.

Fig. 2.  We study mummichogs, they love dogfood and will gladly swim into a trap to get it.

Day -258

I'm headed out to go fishing.  We go GA to ME.  Bombing up the coast with rubbermaid tubs of fish and then a respite at a campground in Maine before hightailing it back to FL.