Whew, must have been a busy day if I've totally forgotten to post until now. Never really crossed my mind. By the way, have you ever noticed that most of my paragraphs begin with the letter W? In fact, most blogs do. "Well..." "Wow..." "Whew..." etc.

It is readily apparent that I'm starting to loose it. I'm not sleep deprived, not under-fed, not really drinking, and I'm staying out of the sun for long periods of time. It's just a cabin fever mentality I think; the effects of staying on one tiny patch of one tiny island for so long. As I put it aptly today: "I've got jungle fever, and it isn't that kind."

Virtually everything here is hilarious. You've got monkeys throwing poop and nuts at the crew, totally eccentric scientists with more peculiarities than you can imagine, warped and bitter grad students who are far more cooped up than I have been, nature at it's most extreme and weird (ie: menacing crocodiles, crippling bullet ants, agoutis with massive meaty haunches), two cabals of 12-14 year olds and all the hormonal trauma inherent in that. Well, it's just about as "colorful" as it can get out here.

I knew that I had gone over the edge (or 'round the bend) when I absolutely spaced it today in the bathroom. For absolutely no reason whatsoever (I was completely clear of mind and cogent) I walked up to the trash can and started to relieve myself right there. It was shocking. About two seconds in, I realized with abject horror what was going on. I mean, picture it, it's like you wake up from a blackout and you are peeing in a trash can. Luckily no one was around so I was able to remedy the situation immediately and with all due discretion. I'm still not exactly sure what happened, but it has me a little nervous.

I'm realizing now that there are several people reading this who might be a little taken aback by the foul nature of the above paragraph. Hi grammy, hi Alfonso.

I spent a little time today taking pictures of things I know people would want to see, but that I find boring. For instance, a typical path in the woods, a landscape of the forest from within (I haven't been shooting this stuff, I know, I'm stupid). Next week I will sink even lower and snap pictures of the dining hall, of my bedroom, of the work area etc. I won't post these pictures online because I'm already eating up the-logos.com's bandwidth and space enough already.

The cool news today is that I went out to the broadcast site on Donato again and hung out there for a long time. It's really fun and the researchers and kids are totally pro at this point. Too bad the kids leave tomorrow and the rookies come in. I hope you all have watched at least one or two shows by now. I'm not bringing any tapes home with me or anything. That being said, if you've got a fast connection, I recommend you watch one of the Expedition Field Notes segments that we pre-tape a couple days before airing and rapidly edit together. This one is called "Predator and Prey" and is really really intense if you consider that the audience is 5th and 6th graders who aren't expecting what happens. It's about 12MB so be ready. Here it is!

Also of special note today is that I finally got myself up into the canopy. Bryson peer-pressured me into it and slapped a helmet on my head and a harness around my delicates and up I went! Unfortunately I brought my camera up with me so I only got shots of the ground. However, an Argo was kind enough to take a picture with her camera. Be warned that the photo has all the qualities you'd expect of a photo taken by a 15 year old girl with a cheapo digicam:

Cool, si? I will likely go up again.

Also of note today, I got my first chigger last night. It itched pretty bad but I just visualized the little thing making a home in my skin and scratched it out. It bled for a minute but the itching is gone. I also put After Bite on it. I think I got a few more today. I am able to deal with this now. Refer to my first post in this blog and that's pretty funny. C., my roommate and coworker, has several. He borrowed my After Bite last night and asked what it was. "Ammonia," I replied. "Really?" he said, and took a massive inhale of the stick. He was down hard for about a minute. Good times, good times. HHI reading of 7.

So tomorrow evening I actually get to go off island finally. I get my night of R & R back at Gamboa Resort. Honestly? Whatever. It may be ritzy but it's quite nice out here and I'm not lacking anything a 5-star resort could offer. There is a big party tomorrow night though so I should have a good time. Sunday morning will possibly see me heading out at 7am for a very VIP tour behind the scenes at the Miraflores locks on the canal. That should be sweet. If anyone wants to take bets on whether I make it though, be my guest. Unfortunately I have to come back to BCI at 8pm on Sunday night. This is in the thick of the Superbowl action so I might be a little pissy about that. The good news is that it looks like our satellite guys will 'jack the signal for us and beam it into the lounge. That could be very fun.

So be forewarned that I may likely not post Saturday and Sunday nights. I might pop in for a quick, "I'm alive and had fun and did this and that and pee'd on a fake ficus by mistake" post, but no promises.

Oh and if anyone has a high bandwidth connection and has the iPix plugin, I can send them a large panorama or two of BCI. I think you go to http://www.ipix.com I'm willing to bet that only my dad will do this. But email me to let me know.

Off to sucky civilization!

Written by Orion Smith on Jan 30, 2004 at 10:01pm

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