News That Stays News

“I wondered if you’d disappeared” June 24, 2018

June 24, 2018

The immediate reason why my current roommate said this to me this morning was that this was the first time we were both awake in our room since Wednesday evening. One reason for that is because she studies howler monkeys: She has to get up before they do, so she’s usually leaving the room between 3:45 and 5 AM and going to sleep by 8:30 or 9 PM. Another reason is that I’ve been racing the clock to process all the samples from the trip up the mountain–since a lot of those plants don’t occur here, I had to work fast before the insects in them starved. I also put those two things together and decided that my roommate’s “later” departures (around 5 or 5:30 AM) were excellent wakeup calls and started heading to the lab to set up my first round of tests before breakfast. Each set of tests takes about four hours, so that let me fit in an extra set of tests on both Friday and Saturday. Which meant that I was able to finish my last few insects this morning and spent the rest of the day cleaning up my lab space and relaxing. Tomorrow, I’ll collect some more leaves and insects around the station to keep me busy before we head out on another trip even further up the mountain on Wednesday.