Mid-May update

It has been an unusually busy time in the lab this week. I have been doing the experiments on the lizards this week, which takes a couple of hours per day. I'm getting better, so it only takes about an hour to draw the blood from all of them, but then there is a bit of processing, setting up, etc. And it takes me about an hour and a half to feed the guys and clean their cage. Seems that six large lizards require a lot of food, and produce a lot of lizard poop. It is fun to watch the expressions of people as they walk into the room and the smell hits their nose. It is a bit like having a cow in a small room, or at least its by-products. The major time-sink this week has been the processing of blood samples. That takes forever. It involves a lot of centrifuging - more than two hours per batch, in two different runs. It also involves a lot of little vials that have to be weighed, reweighed, filled, refilled, refilled again, etc. Each batch of 24 takes me about 4-5 hours total, though there is some dead time in there during the centrifuging when I can do other things like feeding the lizards and writing blog posts. Yesterday, I managed to get through 2 batches, but it has been a steady 1 per day for most of the week.

For some reason this week has given me a bit of homesickness. I don't usually get that, but I've been thinking a lot about various places in the US. I haven't figured out what is triggering it, but it is there. I seem to be thinking a lot about the desert southwest for some reason. Not sure why, but that's it.

I've been getting things ready for my various travels also. I have been making reservations for cars, planes, hotels, dinner, everything. Getting a bit crazy on that front. At least S. Africa is on almost the same time zone as here, and people there generally speak english. those things are a bit harder here, especially if there is a holiday around. Then people suddenly lose their ability to speak english.

No deep thoughts this time around, nor any interesting photos. Just an update. Maybe soon there will be something more interesting to post.

The catch

The catch
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

I've had some complaints about the proportion of bird photos on this page lately, so here is a photo of one of the Uromastyx aegyptius that I've been working with. I finally got a photo (in focus) with one of them. They are certainly easier to catch in the spring, when they actually come out of their burrows once in a while. I have 6 now, ranging in size from a subadult female at 800g, to a monster male at 2.8kg. Now if I can just squeeze the 4 weeks of experiments into the 5 weeks I have left here...

Lina and friend

Lina and friend
Originally uploaded by wandering lizard.

This is the smaller of the two bedouin guides we had on our camel ride in Sinai (and the smaller of the two camels, for the smaller of the two tourists). He was quite impressive - driving the camels along by himself all afternoon. And he was only 8 years old. Lina wanted to marry him.