Company

This week Berry showed up, well, he showed up on Thursday anyway. He has been away at a meeting in South Africa. Hopefully we'll start making some progress on things here next week. In the meantime, I got to haul rocks around. Yup, had to work on the cages for the lizards (Uromastyx aegyptius). They are realatively large (1 or 2 kg), like to be hot, and like to dig. We're fixing up an old aviary for them - it has pavers on the floor, so we should be safe from the digging. I'm told that their burrows can be 10m or more long. This from someone who spent several days digging out a burrow in very rocky soil. If you haven't dug around in a rocky desert, it's quite unpleasant. If you'd like to experience it, get yourself a pile of bricks, throw them in a parking lot, cover them with a bit of sand, and then go at them with a shovel. Oh, and it would probably be good to take some mirrors to reflect sunlight onto you to warm things up a bit. But I'm digressing here. Today I hauled rocks around to simulate burrows for the lizards. The good thing about being in a rocky desert with lots of construction going on is that there are plenty of blocks, pavers and rocks around for doing such things. Somehow, though, they all seemed to be a long way from where my cages are. After taking several 30kg loads from the nearest scrap pile (300m or so from the cages), I decided to call it a day. Maybe I'll build burrows tomorrow.

So, after being very excited about chasing the fan-toed gecko around the wadi last week, I found out that they are very common here in the midreshet. So common that one student here actually has a study site on the field school building. We went out one night last week and saw about 30 of them, including one with one completely useless leg. Apparently it had a close encounter with a bird early in life, but survived. Now it has one hind leg that just flops uselessly at its side. I have a photo that I'll post soon.

Um, not much else to report this week. I spent most of my time either staring at my computer screen, hoping that briliant prose would magically appear to replace the manuscript that I've been struggling to re-write, or watching olympics with a group of students from various African countries. The five of us seem to be the only ones here interested in watching the various track and field events. Got to say, those guys seem to know all the top athletes in all the running events, especially the ones from anywhere in Africa. And they seemed very interested in the medal count. I don't quite understand the fascination with the medal count, but it seems to get a lot of coverage here. There was a big cheer that could be heard throughout the campus when Israel won its first ever gold medal - in windsurfing. I have to say, living in the middle of the desert, it seems like windsurfing would be an unlikely event for someone from here to excel in, but hey, he got the gold. And there is certainly plenty of wind here.