Champagne and Socks

I keep meaning to write a report of my trip away last week but I am so deluged with work that I haven’t felt like sitting down and writing fun posts.

I was meant to do 6 days up north, spread over two weeks, but deadlines got in the way and I stayed in the office the first week. I was kind of glad. My deadlines were getting stressful and more pressing and I didn’t really want to be 6 nights away from home and Twelfth Planet Press. We really did need all the team up on the field work, in the end. There was a lot to do and everything always takes longer than you think in the field.

Highlights:

– the house we rented was pretty good

– my workmates are good cooks and we ate delicious food. A was unable to go out into the field due to being 7 months pregnant so she stayed at the house and ran the project from there. She was always stashing excellent snacks into our field supplies. And chocolate was mandatory. I do love my work mates

– I worked really long hours (not a highlight) but it’s amazing to see what a change in scenery and task can do for your attention span

– we were doing a bit of frontier type science so that was awesome fun

– discovered some awesomely awesome things that we got genuinely excited about – nerdish but fun, and doing it with other nerds who got equally excited

– did NOT get lost but did take about 3 hours to traverse 1 km in thick thicket bush. Might have scared myself a lot with Blair Witch flashbacks (and fear of spiders), might have had a field partner with a very very wicked sense of humour who preyed on that. It was only funny in the retelling. Especially since we were both genuinely rationing our water at that point.

– fell in love with kangaroos. OMG swoon I love them for their tracks to and from water holes – and the ones from a water hole ROCK like I cannot tell you (the same 1km distance only took 1 hour by kangaroo track)

– got bitten by  a spider – and um, was still more upset by the spider being ON ME than that it BIT ME. Gross spider that I’d never seen before. Still have the giant red welt.

– saw a just hatched long necked tortoise – SO CUTE!

– saw emus

– saw thrombolites in real life

– got back into appreciated a good cup of tea

Other highlights included being able to use the week as a jumpstart on feeling fitter which whilst I haven’t carried it on since getting back, I at least feel in a more kindly frame of mind about it. Was really careful to drink a lot of water in order to be hydrated in case of getting lost etc. and that has stuck with me since, which I’m happy about doing. I read a lot. And I knit almost a whole pair of socks – photos to come.