May 6, 2006

Hello everybody!  Well, I have meant to write this email for quite some time and I am not really sure where the last four months went.  However, here I am now, enjoying the beginning of a beautiful May and thinking about how exciting my year has been so far.  Being back in Santa Cruz has been great.  I love this place and am so very happy to be back “home.”  My life as a scientist continues on a rather slow trajectory but the good deal of time I have been spending in the lab has started to pay off and I am getting some interesting (and not so interesting) results finally!  Haha!  I am still in the Earth Sciences department but will be officially switching to anthropology starting in the fall.  This is a big move for me and I certainly have some trepidation.  However, I think it is probably a good move and I like all of the great anthropology folks I know and I have enjoyed my time so far in the anthropology department.  For example, this quarter I am taking a functional anatomy course in which I am learning all about the human skeletal and muscular systems.  This is an incredibly useful class and I am absolutely thrilled that I now understand what all of those weird bumps and tendons are under my skin.  I am still planning to do my future research with lemurs and I hope to travel to Madagascar to complete some preliminary fieldwork this fall.  This is probably one of the most ambitious and scary things I have ever tried to take on.  However, I guess I won’t ever grow or be able to do this sort of thing in the future if I don’t give it a shot now.

As for what I have been up to since I returned from the islands in January:

I moved back to Santa Cruz and tried to pick up where I left off. This proved to be a bit difficult and I immediately realized that I had definitely changed since I left last spring.  Oh well.  I have worked it all out now (more or less).  I clearly miss sea creatures and I had to invest in a 50 gallon fish tank and a smaller frog tank and another cichlid tank and such before I could feel at home.  I also miss swimming and snorkeling. However, I went to Maui for a conference in February and this gave me the chance to frolic in the water again.  I have some pictures of some amazing octopus I interacted with on this trip as well as a sea turtle that swam with me for quite some time. Fun!

Then it was back to Santa Cruz.  I spent spring break down in Arizona with my lab group.  This was a great trip.  Unfortunately, I broke my digital camera so I don’t have any pictures from this trip that I can show you online.  Nevertheless, I can describe it for you.  So, we did a megadrive from Santa Cruz down to the northern portion of the San Pedro River Valley to visit an old graduate student of my advisor’s.  The area was beautiful!  A small oasis in the middle of the desert.  There were giant saguaro’s everywhere (I have never seen saguaro’s before), oodles of song birds in some small ponds next to the river, small owls living in the cactus (these were my favorite), big snakes, scorpions, and centipedes (the last two items I only discovered from frozen specimens in the freezer of our hosts thank goodness).  We got to spend some time hiking in the San Pedro river valley as well as Aravaipa Gorge (one of Edward Abbey’s old haunts).  It was truly lovely.  Then we headed North to the Grand Canyon.  I was really excited about this leg of the trip since I haven’t been to the canyon since I was 9 or 10 and I had big plans for a big hike.  However, the weather turned sour and we had to hide in our tents due to a nice mixture of continuous rain/snow the entire time we were there.  I would like to say that the canyon WAS beautiful during the intermittent periods when the clouds cleared and we could see down into the depths.  Wow!  So that was Spring Break.  Now I’m back in school and my quarter is going ridiculously fast.  It’s already half over and it seems like I just started.  It rained forever here in Santa Cruz but it has finally cleared up and now it is a beautiful spring.  I’ve kept myself busy by doing some hiking, thinking and roller-skating.  Yes, Santa Cruz actually has a roller rink where one can go skate any night of the week.  It’s superb.

Well Happy Spring to you all!  I can’t believe it has almost been a full year since I headed down to South Caicos.  My goodness!  If you get a chance, let me know how you are doing, even if it takes awhile (it’s clearly taken me awhile to get my act together).

Bye for now,

Brooke