Progress

It's been an interesting week. I found out that there is another holiday going on this week, which means another 3 day work week, followed by 4 days of country-wide shutdown. I suppose it probably isn't as much of an issue in the bigger towns, but when you're stuck in Sede Boqer, with no transport, no entertainment options, no food options, etc. it can be a bit of a challenge. I had planned to send of a pile of job applications this week, but I guess that will be on hold until Sunday (I'm starting to get used to the work week beginning on Sunday).

Speaking of work, the bat research is finally under way, after many dozens of intercontinental e-mails deciding what doses, sampling times, feeding regimes, sample sizes, etc. The bats are really interesting to work with, sort of like little dogs with very weird hands. The are obviously very smart, and are quite responsive and communicative. And the fruit bats are kind of cute, especially when they are hanging upside down, staring at you from a dark corner. Nothing like lizards, of course, but I guess I won't hold that against them. The wings are quite interesting - they are a bit like the hairless part of the ears of a dog with floppy ears. Very odd. They are mostly cooperative, if held properly, otherwise, they are a bit unruly. So far, I've been working with Carmi Korine, who is a real bat expert (postdoc here), and has a lot of experience handling bats. I can tell that it will be different working with others who have less experience with handling them (e.g. me). Anyway, the experiments seem to be moving along. We won't have any actual data until I send the samples back to Wisconsin, but we're getting samples.

The weather here has been very odd this week too. We've had two nights/mornings with heavy fog. Not a weather pattern I'd normally expect from a hot desert, but that's what it was. The other day, I emerged from my apartment, which had all the sun shades pulled, so I was totally clueless about the weather, and walked right into fog soup. I could barely see the next apartment, which is only about 30 feet away. Amazing. Last night was a full moon, and the fog rolled in again. It was a bit higher, so it was more like really low clouds. It almost felt like the sky right before a heavy winter snow storm, except that it was about 65F (19C).

Today, we had a new weather system move in, called a hamsin (or something like that). It's a particular weather pattern that is best described as stinking hot. It actually rolled in late this afternoon. At midday, it was a pleasant 90F (31C) and dry, but at around 4pm. the temperature went up to 96F (35), and muggy. Now it's about 25 and 100% humidity, just bordering on fog (it's about midnight as I write this - I'm in the middle of a bat experiment right now that goes until about 12:30). We're all hoping this hamsin goes away soon. On the brighter side of things, this weather has less wind, so the dust levels have dropped a bit.