April Spring Easter Fall Vacation Vac

I leave in a hour for a five day field camp for my ecology class. Five days of looking at plant defenses to herbivory, collecting marine samples for someone's phd thesis and looking at fish communities for someone else. I cant help but get the feeling we are being used. People from previous years have spoke highly of this field camp, but they also spoke highly of the class. They said the camp made the class good. We will see. As i may have mentioned, the class is not good.

After the field camp, i have 4 or 5 days of traveling up the eastern coast and relaxing. this will happen, but in what form i am unsure. left it to some other people to plan. i am in charge of food.

then i am back for the second quarter, another invigorating 7 weeks of class. seems like a paltry amount of time, but it is established and accepted that a semester is 13 weeks of boredom.

On a positive note…two other students and I have started a pseudo ocean carbon flux class. It is not for credit and did only start the 6^th week of term, but it meets more than the other classes, is actually interesting, the prof actually knows something, and the info presented is actually worthwhile, as opposed to copied out of a textbook.

I spent the afternoon freeze grinding shit into homogenous powder for isotope analysis. No word on the status of our dassie application, but I did by chance bump into the head of the animal ethics committee. He said he hadn’t read my app yet, but was concerned. He assured me the committee would meet soon....as in sometime in the next month. They are all very busy people.

Back around the 10^th.

Wine Tasting and Human Interest

It has been requested of me to include more stories about things that are not rocks. Apparently rocks are not interesting, so I have made some effort here to include some more human interest stories, enjoy.

The weekend started at 5 on Friday with ultimate Frisbee until 7. Followed by the wine society wine tasting at 7. We tasted 4 wines from Constantia uitsig…chenin, sav blanc, chard, and a red blend. Frisbee and wine society are weekly activities that start all weekends for me. At 8 I walked from the wine society to the mountain and ski club wine and cheese party. Was there until 12, then walked back to the house ate pizza and went to bed around 1. woke up at 7 ate breakfast and walked to get on the bus to go on a wine tasting tour with the wine society. Got back at 6, spent some time with the Australians and their sa firstyear friends as they did a centurion. Followed by dinner around 10 and then a two hour life philosophy conversation with wes. Thoughts and topics brought up in our discussion gave rise to the current feeling of satisfaction this weekend. That and plans to make donuts in the morning.

Throughout the weekend and my time here at uct I keep having the same thought….that is a growing appreciation for a liberal arts education. The thought is not so much about the content of the education, although that in itself has merit and probably contributes to the focus of the thought. The focus is on how the environment, be it the selection process or the education system itself concentrates certain types of people and how thankful I am to be in contact with those people. Being away from Pomona for a year has definitely taught me that that certain type of person I find at Pomona does not occur in high densities outside Pomona. In fact they are damn hard to find.

I can attribute this point more to wes than anything. He described the lifestyle or the pace of the life style liberal arts college enforce on the students…basically overwhelm yourself and try and survive. Some might think that my weekend plans from going from one event that ends just as the next starts from 11am on Friday until now, 1am Sunday is a bit too busy. I don’t know if this has anything to do with attempting to swim after being thrown in the pool, but it is busy and has nothing to do with academics. Granted wes was talking about academics, classes along with work and social engagements, but it is still interesting to contemplate the effect of the liberal arts style on my lifestyle.

Wine tasting was centered around the Wellington harvest festival. Went to about 6 wineries and tasted lots of very different wine, some good, some bad and some I liked. There was a pervasive feeling of the classiness and a sense of ego thou ought the day. I was just there to enjoy myself and to explore some wine. Others were there to demonstrate their excellence in wine tasting ability, in particular their ability to memorize and recite reviews from a commercially available wine guide..there is only one for SA.

A common story among the wineries was that they were purchased around 10 years ago by established people who employ winemakers to make wine with owner’s name on it. One particular winery was owned by a beast of a man. He was at least 6.4, but that isn’t so unusual. What was unusual was the size his various parts, chest, head, neck, wrists. His wrist was at least the size of my calf. There was good reason he didn’t wear I watch. There was magazine article in the tasting room about how as a lad he was forced to play rugby due to his size, but his true passion lay with cricket and hence the reason he put in a cricket green on his farm. His name was Schalk Burger and he had two beasts of sons.

Here is a shot of the random fridge that just showed up in the living room one day…a gift from the gods maybe? Either way we have begun to play pictionary on it. Can you guess the movie depicted?

I decorated my room with some magazine pictures..this is one of the best.

This is a gross sponge that lived in the kitchen way too long. Then it got replaced and found new employment migrating around the house with little notes attached to it. Wes and izaac slept with it a few nights, without nowing

Donut creations

Massive grasshopper again

Another view east from cape town…taken on hike Sunday.

Beach and Big Rocks

Sunset at the beach, wednesday night after some frisbee and before some sorbet


I went camping agian this weekend. Basically got out of the car 1.5hours from town and climbed up a steep gully to the mountain club's ski hut. Spent the night and walked back down sunday morning.
It was exciting at the top. All around there were mountains and all mountains that could be climbed. They were steep, but not too steep, all mottled with rocks and vegetation. You could easily walk out get lost in exploration and enjoyment, which i might do given the chance.
Some mountian clubbers
sunrise

too much time with penguins

So this is the kind of stuff you can find on the internet. i suppose if i spend enough time with the penguins here i might be able to get a similar shot. still in permit and application limbo for getting permission to go catch furry animals. going camping this weekend.


Copywrite by Nathan Myhrvold, http://edge.org/3rd_culture/myhrvold07/large-15.html

fishies, fried fish and rats

The coast near kalk bay

Fridays make to be busy days. The last two Fridays have been the same up until about 10pm. Start with waking up around around 8, water the garden, then grab some apple bread, or biscuts for breakfast and make the hike up the hill while eating on the way. Get to campus around 845 and either go find a lab and read articles on dassies or goto the library and read the ecology textbook. First class at 11, ecology, lame, done by 12. Eat some bread. Goto second class, Environmental Analysis, boring, done at 1. Eat the rest of my bread and carrot lunch. Make my way to the zoology building and get to work making some cages. Finish up around four. Walk back to the house, arrive about 420, grab a snack and pack dinner, change clothes. Hike back up to campus for 5pm ultimate Frisbee. Play till 7, then walk to the wine society for wine tasting. Finish up there and walk home between 9-10pm.

Denise, the yet to be seen housemate.

I don’t know what I did last last Friday night. But I do know I was up till about 4am, took a nap and got up at 6am to go wake, say happy birthday, and cook breakfast for a friend. After breakfast, we went to go explore some tide pools. There were lots of fun little creatures and a big crab that escaped the camera. After the tide pools we had some fried and grilled fish and some excellent mussel chowder.

Starfish, orange and red

This last Friday, I went to bed at about 11. and got up at 6am again. This time there pancakes at my house, then wes and I went to climb devil’s peak and we did. Made it back to the house around 12 making it about a 5 hour journey. It was not very windy, but completely clear this time. We could see a solid blanket of clouds move in over the city off the atlantic. Then about 4pm some people came over to the house for a braai..or BBQ. That ended around 2pm and involved some grilling, some pool swimming, lots of conversation and fun. Sunday went to the beach, swam and had fried fish again.

Crab

I am still trapped in paper work limbo for the dassie project. I went to turn in the ethics proposal today and was told I had used the wrong form. Apparently the form on the website is wrong, but they haven’t changed it yet. So I got the right form and filled it out again, but now I need to wait for signatures again, and figure out how to get a permit that was not mentioned on the old form. Maybe this weekend, maybe next weekend, who knows. Once I do get little furry animals there will be a naming contest and associated adoption program..adopt-a-dassie.

Starfish of some sort on a Sea Urchent Skeleton
Today for ecology we looked at invertebrates in water...brings back memories of days spent swimming to playing in the canal behind the house.
I found out there is a snake farm nearby, kind of like a petting zoo. might try and get myself over there. more importantly the snake farm raises rats to feed to the snakes, plus they sell the rats for pets on the order of $1 per rat. next time we braai i might have to goto to the snake farm for meat first.

West Coast Klipfish

An Overnight Jaunt to Ceres

One of four housemates, wes. he is doing Fulbright research on drought tolerant corn. he is from corn country somewhere.


So i went camping last weekend. Spent most of my time exploring a little creek solo. lots of cool rock pools, including these:

A flower.
Some landscape shots

Furry Creatures

So I am a bit behind posting. I have some pictures, but those will have to come later. So classes have started, almost done with two weeks now. Thus far I have had no homework or reading. A huge change from the globalization course with 5 hours of reading from day one, Chinese class with 100 characters to learn per night, or good ol’ Pomona. The students are now on campus, and that means my net access is degraded, not only in terms of available computers, but also speed. Yesterday I tried unsuccessfully for 30min to open my email. TIMED OUT.

Class is lame. Lamelamelame. I have two classes and an independent research project. Class one is ecology. I haven’t technically had an ecology class, but I have had most of the content for this class. It is lame on top of redundant. So far lectures are just powerpoints of the subheadings out of an ecology text…and the lecture gets the examples wrong all too frequently. I am in the class with what seem like little kids…way too young, and not interested in the class at all, but I cant really blame them. I will go to class a few more times..but then I think I will just spend my time reading the text book and skip.
Class two is called environmental analysis, the same as my major, but not the same content. The course has two halves. Part one is environmental impact assessments- things developed in the US with NEPA in the 70’s. Supposedly more holistic development plans, but in practice maybe more of a legal hurdle. The second half is geographic information system, GIS, basically mapping software. This class is a bit better than the first, but still very basic, slow and there is no reading….strange. the benefits are that I would not have been able to take a course like this at Pomona.

The research project. Still in the planning phases..but soon to take off. The basic plan is to catch some furry creatures, put them in cages for a few months and feed them different grasses and leaves. Then look at the carbon, nitrogen, calcium and maybe phosphorus content of their food, shit, and pee. Sounds great huh? The point is not to collect shit in little jars everyday, which I will have to do. The point is to try and figure out how much of a filter the little animal is, do their excrement mirror their diet? They will not be just any old creature, we will use rock hyrax, dassie. It is something the size of a groundhog that is not a rodent and might be related to the elephant. It just so happens that the hyrax tend to form big fecal urine deposits called middens. The middens can be 20,000+ years old. There is a guy here doing a phd on climate change in southern Africa using pollen from these old shit piles. My project should help him understand carbon, nitrogen, etc data from his middens and help identify key points in history for vegetative change. So next weekend or the next next I might go to the desert with some cages and a jar of peanut butter and see if I can come back with 10 or so furry creatures that are willing or forced to go on a little holiday retreat here at uct, where they will be fed and watered on a daily basis and all they need to do is let me have their shit.