Selamat Hari Raya, to those for whom it's important!

Day 26

I realized a couple of days ago that Shaun's acceptance to Caltech was probably not abnormally early. A more detailed look at the websites of schools I've applied to say that they call accepted students for tours during the last weekend of February or the first one fo March. Which means, well, you know.

Anyway, while I've been online fretting about this, everyone else has gone to watch the Superbowl, which I can honestly say I don't give 2 hoots about. Even as an excuse to get drunk (which I can't afford tonight anyhow). I'm not sure how that particular cultural phenomenon osmosed over the 650 miles of Atlantic Ocean between us and the land of Dubya, but every sports bar in town is lowering beer prices and running Superbowl Squares tonight, the Passin' Wind included. What. Ever.

Day 25

ineluctably, i have been sucked into the dark world of souvenir buying.

the problem with buying gifts for people is that there's always a chain reaction: getting something for person (a) then necessitates getting something for persons (b) and (c) who will otherwise be upset, which then of course involves persons (d) through (w) and before you know it you're knocking on the door of that guy you haven't seen for 6 years to deliver sherry pepper sauce.

Books:
It's been on my reading list for several years now, and has finally made it to the top: A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. Oprah's Book Club, though. Hmm.

Day 24

Bermuda's Crystal Caves are strikingly impressive, even if they have been done up (expensively) as a tourist spot. The story goes that they were found by 2 teenage boys in 1907 who rappelled 120 ft into the darkness of a hole down which they lost a cricket ball. They got in free; 96 years on, Bermuda charges $12 for entry and a 15-minute tour, and thousands of visitors a year get to goggle at artificially-lit stalactites and stalagmites and have calcium-carbonate deposits drip on their head for good luck. I would have complained that it was a rip-off, but the BBSR paid for our trip on the pretext that caves are an important habitat for invertebrates, and thus something we ought to know about (yah, right). You can see Mamie's photos here

Random stuff

* Miranda confirmed my suspicions that she was named after the character on The Tempest, making it especially apt that she should be a young, eligible girl on the very island that inspired the play.

* RODPFBSE x lots. I have this down to an art, ladies and gentlemen.

* The British culinary odyssey continues for the Americans with grilled tomatoes for breakfast and meat pie (not for breakfast).

* Paris! Whee!

Day 23

5 minutes from the BBSR is the causeway linking St David's to St. George's; below that causeway is a stretch of intertidal mud flats, and under rocks and buried in sand on those mud flats are a hella lotta worms. These we collected, by the bucketful. We only had to wade this time instead of snorkeling but it was just as bad in terms of the cold, and towards the end we were all shivering by the shore cursing at the truck for being late.

I never thought I'd be excited by a platyhelminthes or polychaete, but it was kind of fun cracking open the rocks to get at the creatures inside them, sort of a Halloween-esque equivalent of an Easter Egg hunt. We were hoping to get a 15cm long Sipunucula, but no dice - the biggest specimens we managed were only about 8-9cm long. Anyway, now that the oohing and aahing is over, we get to memorize another tome full of phylum/order/species names. Good times.


The Colby kids have left.


Also: the plan goes apace.

Day 22

So, yeah, there's no news.

Day 21

3 weeks. I can't decide if they've gone quickly or slowly.

Books:
I have capitulated due to peer pressure and agreed to read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I have no doubt that I'll sunsequently read all his books and look back on myself with disgust as I did with such notable non-writers as Stephen King and John Grisham.I don't even know if you would call it a guilty pleasure. Life's too short for trashy novels.

Day 20

Environmental policy is turning out to be quite a bore...I usually give an instructor a while to settle into a rhythm, get his teaching style settled, but 5 lectures is really the limit. I suppose it's just as well though, because inverterbrates is a lot to handle on its own.

Visited the Perfumery which is up the road by the Swizzle Inn, and received the briefest of tours from a sullen West Indian woman who looked like she hated her job more than anything on earth. I was rather severely tempted by the cedar wood cologne, but decided not to get it unless I have some spare spending money at the end (yes, I actually am on a budget this semester).

"Ambergris" is a good word.

Oh, and incidentally, here's the reason why there are no fast food restuarants in Bermuda. (scroll to bottom of page)

Lord of the Rings takes the Golden Globe!

Day 19

Seems that Shaun's been accepted into grad school at Caltech.

The newest addition to the growing menagerie of Bobby (the cat), the dog-with-no-name and Tweety the Wonder Chicken is Peppermint the Rabbit, who I am sure will be subjected to the same abuse as all the rest of the animals in short time.

Day 18

9 p.m.: Docksider's; nice little watering hole on the far end of Front Street, mostly expatriate, non-skeezy crowd, a little more diversity than the other places (an Asian couple and at least 1 Hispanic-looking person) darts, blackjack machines and (relatively) cheap drinks. Tried the Dark n Stormy which was quite yummy even though I'm not usually a ginger beer kind of a person. Commented on general obiangness of people's outfits. Noted that bar gets ESPN (Clay, Mamie and I swear that if we miss the Duke-UNC game, we will die, instantly. Poof. Dead.)

9:45: Flanagan's. No sign of Andrew and his friend (whose name I have no clue how to spell. Broar? Bruer?) No food, either, apparently, which sucks for a restaurant on a Friday night. Anyway, round of drinks (ROD), and Phil and Tom (both doctors visiting from the UK...not "Ross Perot story" Tom) arrive to keep us company. The girls tried to dance but kept getting approached by weird fat 50-year old drunkards who looked like they wanted to grope them, so that didn't work for the time being. ROD. The shouted, semi-lucid conversations about everything and nothing that are replicated across every bar in the world.

10:15: Jeff and Steve, Miranda's friends from last week (made at some point when I was not there) appear. This is good news for the moochers, since they're (a) people we know with (b) deep pockets. Round of drinks paid for by someone else (RODPFBSE).

10:25: Bathroom.

10:38: Bathroom

11:10: Lori* and I step outside for a breath of fresh air. "I think it's the coolest thing," she had told me earlier, "that you know how to sing are willing to admit it. Not many guys are willing to do that." Hmm. It's freezing by the water, and with it not being International Race Weekend, there's absolutely no one on the street. Hamilton really is a bit of a ghost town in the winter. I'm shivering within 2 minutes of being outside.

* Only found out that her name is not spelled "Laurie" yesterday. Oops.

11:15: RODPFBSE. The Houston Rockets win by 4; I pretend to care, and have a whole conversation with Phil about the NBA even though I know next to nothing about the league.

11:23: Mmm...Blackhaus.

11:45: Bathroom.

12:20: Kelly and I start propagating the story that we are twins separated at birth - our mother was a Vietnamese prostitute and our dad an American GI fighting in the war. I was raised in Singapore; she in the States, and by complete chance we found each other in the BBSR and were reunited after 21 years. At least 1 random person is drunk enough to believe us and buy us a round of drinks to celebrate.

12:45: "Please finish my drink," says Lori. People have been buying her stuff all night. I'm more than happy to oblige.

1:10 a.m.: Flanagan's closes, and we get dragged to Blue Juice. It's crowded and smoky and has a strange psychedelic display above the dance area which puts me off. Besides, I hate dancing, and the place is almost exclusively a dance club. It's fortunate that I'm too tipsy to really care.

1:50: "Please finish my Smirnoff," says Miranda, and I hate Smirnoff, but well, why waste good alcohol?

1:55: Cab.

2:25: Fumbling for money in the dark, and discovering that counting is quite a formidable task when under the influence.

On the way back from Harrington Sound on Tuesday, Miranda lost one of her earrings in the cabin and started searching for it while the boat was still doing the shimmy out on open waters. Um, someone notes, remember the good idea/bad idea segments on Animaniacs? This is around the time when those stick figures start popping up.

BBSR's big ol' data collecting ship, the Weatherbird II has come in to port, complete with skeezy deckhands and James, our instructor for the second half of the course.

Test over. Weekend here. Sweetness and light.

Day 17

a storm whips around outside, i have a test in an hour and there's no way in hell i'm going to remember kingdom phyla class order for the 8,000,000 bermudan species we're supposed to have memorized not to mention life cycle defining characteristics reproductive patterns anatomy.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Day 16

"Don't sit there," Mamie tells me, "that's where the chicken took a crap."

Which prompts us into a discussion about the kids of one of the employees here. Said chicken (Tweety the Wonder Bird) is owned by the youngest of the three - she has painted his claws blue, and apparently allows him to shit all over the furniture at will. Miranda pointed out to us over dinner that all this is symptomatic of the fact that their parents exert almost no control over them - letting them watch HBO programs without supervision, leaving them without superintendence at a bowling alley, etc.

"What's a slut?" the little girl asked Miranda yesterday in the lounge, and really, how do you answer that question for a 9-year old kid?

"A woman who does very bad things with men," was the reply.

Insouciant: "Oh, you mean like sexual intercourse?"


Anyway, the reason I was trying to sit down on the sofa with the crap on it in the first place was that the Duke-Maryland game was on last night, and we had high hopes that the newly installed cable (illegal unscrambling) would have the right ESPN channel. It didn't. Cursing at the television, scrabbling to find a radio so that we could try and listen to it.

Installed upstairs with a tiny receiver desperately trying to pick up the broadcast, I commented on how 1967 this all was: huddled around the wireless, feet being warmed by a space heater, wooden floorboards, scratchy blankets. We tried to order a pizza to make it seem more like being in college, but at $18 for a 10", we decided that there were better ways to spend our money. Insufferable sadness, but at least Duke won.

Day 15

11 students from Colby University in Maine are joining us for 10 days. Studying rocks. All of a sudden invertebrate zoology is cool.

Books:
Super-Cannes - J.G. Ballard

Day 14

So I retract the statement, made a year-and-a-half ago, that "this is not an online journal".

The winds finally abated today, and we got to make up the field trip that we missed last week Thursday. Boat trip to Hall's Island in Harrington Sound was a choppy, 45-minute affair in the R/V Henry Stommel, piloted by a local named Alfred and nicknamed Barbara. We were soaked to the bone before we even arrived, and "not gusting", of course, is far from the equivalent of "pleasantly warm".

Actually, to be honest, I nearly died when I first hit the water -- if Hell ever had a winter, it would be that cold. Twenty minutes into the collection, Clay had lost all feeling in her hands, Gretchen (grad student from Harvard) had given up the ghost and climbed back on board the boat, and Laurie looked like she was in danger of losing a couple of toes from frostbite. I was supposed to collect Niphates erecta, but underwater sponge identification is not the easiest thing when one is in danger of succumbing to hypothermia at any second. I compromised by cutting off a piece of something long and purple before getting out of the ocean. (Incidentally, after peering at it in the microscope, I'm 75% sure that I got the right species after all.)

And then we stayed in lab until half-an-hour ago cutting everything up, which begs the question: Why am I sitting here writing about all this when I should be in my room consuming analgesic medicine and appreciating the fact that I'm dry and warm?

Day 13

The Plan (Tentative)
Feb 29th: Bermuda --> Durham, NC
Mar 10th: Durham, NC --> Beaufort, NC
Apr 29th/30th: Beaufort, NC --> Durham, NC
[Myrtle??]
May 10th: Durham, NC --> Berkeley, CA
Jun 1st: Berkeley, CA --> Boston, MA
Jun 1st/2nd: Boston, MA --> Paris, France
Jun 9th: ???, France --> Rome, Italy
Jun 16th: ???, Italy --> Madrid, Spain
Jun 22nd: Barcelona, Spain --> Hong Kong
Jun 24th: Hong Kong --> Singapore

...subject to massive changes depending on price, availability of flights, Justin, and a host of other factors.