It's been quite a month. I'll start with the Katherine river floods. Actually, I'll back up just before that. In the week before leaving for my interview at UW-Milwaukee, Keith and I were expecting John (from my Dad's lab group) to arrive with a wind tunnel for our frog experiments. The day after he arrived, we had planned a trip out to Wave Hill station (about 800km south of Darwin, at the edge of the Tanami desert) to set up some dataloggers for our project on algae communitites under quartz rocks. We were getting worried that we had missed the end of the wet season, and weren't going to get microclimate data for this year. Well, we shouldn't have worried - turns out mother nature wasn't done with us yet. The day that John came, the Katherine river was flooding. Seriously flooding.
For those who don't know your Top End geography very well, the Katherine River drains part of a big escarpment over Kakadu National Park and Arnhem land. It is a large river, with a deep gorge, and a large catchment area that is mosly over bare rock, so when it rains, the water quickly runs into the river and fills up the gorge a little. Well, We had huge rainfalls over the town of Katherine and the catchment, so the river filled completely. So much that it flowed over the Stuart Highway, which is the only road connecting Katherine, Darwin, and the rest of the Top End to the rest of Australia. Now the really amazing part is that the bridge over the river is about 18.5m (about 60 feet) above ground level at Katherine. Well, the river crested at just over 20.5m. That's a lot of water. Fortunately for us, we decided not to go, or we would have been stuck on the other side of the river, in the middle of nowhere until the water receded. (when I say the middle of nowhere, I mean it - the next town on the other side of the river is about 400km away, at least in the direction we were headed).
So, we averted that disaster, and focused on building the wind tunnel, and retrieving frogs from the field that had been fitted with radio transmitters. Of course, with the huge storm to the south, we had beautiful weather in Darwin. We finished the wind tunnel, caught the frogs, and John headed back to Reno.
That left me with two days to finish preparing for my interview in Milwaukee. No problem. Well, okay, other than a ridiculous amount of travel, no problem. My flights went smoothly, but it is a long haul to get from Darwin to Milwaukee. My first flight was at 2:00am, arriving in Brisbane at 6:00 am (1st night of sleep lost). Then I had 4 hours of layover, before getting on the flight to Los Angeles - 12 1/2 hours, arriving at 6:30am (2nd night of sleep loss). At this point, I hopped in a taxi and visited my Aunt and Uncle in Manhattan Beach. A shower, some breakfast, and I was ready to go back. I had arranged to meet Trai and David (friends from way back), so we went for a bite to eat, and they dropped me back at the airport in time for my 5:40pm flight. I arrived in Milwaukee at 11:30 pm - 38 hours after leaving Darwin, down 2 nights of sleep, and with an internal clock that was about 10 1/2 hours out of sync. I had one full day to recover before the interview started.
At 8:00 am Monday, the interview began. I met the committee chair in the lobby of my hotel and we had breakfast and talked about the position, etc. At 9:00 am, I met with the department chair; 10:00 with the search committee; 11:00 facilities tour; 12:00 lunch with the vertebrate biologists; 1:30 prep for seminar; 2:00 seminar; 3:30 field station tour; 7:00 dinner; 9:30 collapse in a heap. Whew, day one ended, and things were going pretty well as far as I could tell. On day two, I was picked up at the hotel at 8:30, and went along with half-hour meetings with individual faculty members all day until about 4:00 pm, when we retired to the student union for a beer. Interview done. Wow, what a whirl. In all, the job sounded great after the interview, and I thought things went well. Of course, there is no way to know how well I did relative to others, so now I'm waiting for the final decision, which is supposed to happen the first week of May.
After the interview, things didn't slow down much. I went to Madison and spent a day working on a manuscript with Bill Karasov. The next day I met up with some friends - Danielle for tea/lunch, Jane in mid-afternoon, and Pat & Bernadette in the evening. Of course Pat and Bernadette coerced me into playing frisbee - goaltimate actually, which is a fun variant on ultimate. After that, we retired to the Great Dane for dinner, followed by a bit of a soak in their hot tub. The next day, back to Milwaukee, for some Karaoke fun, a Brewer's game (where they hit 5 home runs in a single inning - tying a major league record), some wandering around Milwaukee, and general catching up with Kiersten, Greg and Ron.
This Wisconsin mayhem was followed by another exhausting flight to Israel. I left Chicago at 11:30pm (why are these international flights always scheduled so you lose a night's sleep?!?!), and arrived in London at 11:00 am for a 12 hour layover. I decided to head into town and visited the British Museum. Great stuff. Too bad London is so bloody expensive. I'm pretty sure I spent more for that one day in London than I did for the entire week in Wisconsin, and all I did was take the Underground to the museum, had a light meal and a pint, and returned! So, at 11:00 pm, I got back on the plane for the 5 hour trip to Tel Aviv (note the lost night of sleep again), followed by a train ride, and a bus trip to finally arrive in Sede Boqer at about 11:00 am. Ugh.
Being here has been interesting. I'll talk about it next time, but for now I'll just complain about jetlag. I managed the first 10 1/2 hour change okay for the interview. I suspect that was mostly adrenaline, but it worked. The second 8 hour change has killed me. I muddled through the first day and a half here okay, but the following day I was totally dead. I'm pretty sure I slept a total of 18 hours that day, and another 12 the next day. Amazing. A word of advice - don't make 8+ hour time shifts until you have fully acclimated to your current time zone, or you'll be sorry. I'm dreading the last one back to Australia. Of course, it doesn't help much that each leg of my trip has involved losing 2 nights of sleep. On the last leg, it will be the same - 2 nights of sleep lost, arriving at 4:30am. Ugh. I may sleep until June.
