I need this like I need a hole in the head

It's the last night of my summer school, and I've spent the last day and a half working on a project using the software tools and data available through the national virtual observatory. I was working with one other guy, and we got some basic results, but mostly we've been learning how to use the tools, and which ones work better than the others. Now I've got to write it all up in a 12 minute talk which I'll present in the morning. At least that's the plan. But I have this bottle of bourbon which needs to get finished before I fly out tomorrow, and it will be a tough decision which one to work on first...

The picture above is from Tarangire national park. There is a large resident herd of elephants there, and they get thirsty in the dry season. The baobab trees store water in their trunks, and the elephants get jealous, so they use their tusks to gouge out holes in the baobab, and drink the water which comes out. After drinking a bottle of bourbon, I might have that same desire tomorrow morning...

The Safari Starts!

I've been at a conference for the past week here in Santa Fe, NM. It runs through tomorrow. I took so many pictures during the safari trip that I don't have space to store them all on my laptop. I've got the full resolution images on my external hard drive, and thumbnails on the laptop so that I can still organize and tag all the images even when the external disk isn't attached. But to upload pictures to the blog, I need to have the full res version (well, something bigger than just my thumbnails). Realizing this, I uploaded a bunch of pictures last Friday, while the hard drive was attached, intending to write up accompanying text later in the day. Well, day turned to night turned to day turned to another week and here it is wednesday with no text written. Yet. Let me quick change that, for this first batch of pictures at least.

We started our journey on Saturday afternoon, flying from various parts of the U.S. to London. We continued on Monday morning with a flight to Nairobi, and then on Tuesday with a bus ride to Arusha. Finally it was Wednesday, day five of the trip, but day one of the safari, and we were itching to get started. It didn't take long. We drove out of town, away from the moist, runny slopes of Mt. Meru which encompass Arusha, and into the dryer lands south and west. After a quick stop at the grocery store for supplies (water, gin, rum, chocolate), and a two hour drive, we got to the entry station for Tarangire National Park. We got out of the cars to stretch our legs, and to pay the park entry fee. There were some really colorful birds in the parking lot, including the multi-hued starling which is sort of the local version of a pigeon: plentiful in number and typically found creeping up on you at the picnic table while you are eating lunch. Speaking of which, while we were itching to get started, our guides told us it was time for lunch, so we had to eat that before we could start looking for animals, and we thought, "how much longer is it going to be before we finally see something?" Well, not long at all. We finished our lunch and went back to the landcruisers to discover that we were going topless (for one. Loosely topped for the other vehicle). We hopped in, drove through the park gate and one minute later came across a herd of zebra & wildebeest, and ten seconds further down the road passes a monkey, and we realized, Wow, this is going to be an amazing trip.

Monkeying Around

That first afternoon & evening in Arusha, we were all pretty tired from the travelling. Some people wanted to nap, others wanted to... also nap. I wanted to explore, so while Jaime settled in for a snooze, I grabbed my camera and walked to hotel grounds trying to get a picture of a massive ant trail I had crossed earlier. On my way to the ants, I got distracted by a bird, and since I was excited to use my brand new super telephoto zoom lens, I tried to follow the bird up into the tree as it hopped higher and higher on the branches. I lost the bird, scanned around a bit, and was surprised to see something much bigger looking back at me: this monkey. That was a very exciting first find, and I knew I had to go up to the room right then and wake Jaime up to show it to her. Luckily I was right, and I didn't get yelped at for waking her, and she was even more excited to see the monkey than I was. We proceeded to follow it all the way across the hotel grounds, the monkey hopping from tree limb to tree limb and the two of us walking along the various garden paths, until the tree limbs stretched further than the garden paths, and we lost track. Great fun, though, and a precursor to what was to come.

Relaxing by the Pool

Hola Y'all, I hope everyone had a relaxing labor day weekend. We had a whole gaggle of friends come to visit: Claudia & Jared were in from D.C., Morag, Dara, Knut, Tyra, and the whole Blum family came up from Tucson, and Morag's beau Mike came in from Hawaii, all to hang out, have some barbecue, watch the diamondbacks play the dodgers, and to generally have a fun & relaxing time. It went well. We grilled pizzas on friday, smoked lots of ribs on saturday, had more barbecue on sunday, and even more on monday (plus some salad too).

The picture above is not from this weekend, but from our first day in Tanzania. This was tuesday evening. We started the journey mid-day on saturday, spent sunday night in london, monday night in nairobi, then took a ~6 hour bus journey (some of that time spent at the border post) to finally arrive in Arusha. We were met by two landcruisers from our safari company who took us to our first lodge, on a coffee plantation on a hillside east of town. It was a great chance to relax in comfort after a long journey, and to prepare for the long (though far more exciting) journey of the safari in front of us.

I'll try to post more of the safari pictures and stories this week, while I've already moved on to my next trip. Right now I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico (a town I last visited 29 years ago), for the National Virtual Observatory Summer School. I'm learning all about how to use the NVO tools and the internet for doing astronomical research. Today was day one, and I must say it sounds like a pretty exciting group of tools. We students (about 50 of us) will learn about the tools this week, and do some experimentation, then next week we'll try out full projects. I have one in mind already, so hopefully it's doable. I'll find out soon.

Love Birds

I was a little bit worried that our tree-trimming would scare off the local bird population, but I'm happy to say that we still have a cacophony of chirping coming from the back yard. The culprits for some of the most twittery of the chirping are a small flock of peach-faced lovebirds. Last spring we had a couple of them in the yard, but now we've got a group of 8-10 of them, and they were still hanging around last night, after the cutting was all done. I didn't have my super-telephote lens on the camera as I was walking in the yard, but did pretty well with my kit zoom lens, and some judicious cropping.

Tree Trimming

Between the heat of a Phoenix summer, and all the travelling I've been doing (and yes, will soon get back to posting pictures from), the yard has gotten a bit unkempt. So I've spent some time the past week or so trimming all the hedges, bushes, and many of the trees. The highest of the trees, the palms, were going to be the biggest challenge, and Jaime wasn't so keen on me buying a stepladder & chainsaw and attempting to do it myself. When a knock came at the door a couple days ago, and the guy on the other side asked me if I wanted him to trim the palms, I decided I should take him up on the offer. He and his friends came by yesterday to give them all a haircut. Almost a mohawk in some cases, but they are now a lot lighter, and the dead branches and dried out seed pods all were taken down and carted away. Turned out to be just in time, as well, since a big ol' monsoonal storm ripped through the area last night, and there are more forecast for this weekend. Pictures above and below show the trees before trimming on the left, and after trimming on the right. Quite a shave! Now maybe I should do the same for myself...

Do Re Mi

I guess I'll start at the beginning, since I hear it's a very good place to start. The trip was a celebration of my parents' 65th birthdays and 40th anniversary, all of which occured last year. My sister Gabrielle and her husband Chris are currently living in Africa, and Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo (of Heart of Darkness fame). Gabrielle, my other sister Dominique, and I, along with our spouses, gave our parents the present of a family trip to Africa. The Congo, however, is not a tourist friendly place, so we had to choose some other part of the continent to visit. After a fair bit of web surfing and guidebook reading over the past year, we settled on the "northern circuit" of Tanzania and the island of Zanzibar just off the coast as the best place for our trip.

There were eight of us going on this trip, starting from four different locations: my parents from Pennsylvania, Dominique & Ted from California, Gabrielle & Chris from Kinshasa, and Jaime & me from Arizona. That made the air routings a bit of a mess, but it all worked out in the end. Jaime and I flew from Phoenix to Chicago, where we met up with Ted, who had flown in from SFO. Dominique was already on the east coast for a conference, so she went with my parents to JFK. We six were all supposed to meet up in London, where our flights were scheduled to arrive only 5 minutes apart. In Chicago, I brought Jaime and Ted into the American Airlines Flagship Lounge, the special airline club with free food and booze for those of us who spent too much time on airplanes last year. Meanwhile, my parents and dominique were in the admirals club at JFK, which they got into for free since they all (and us too) had upgraded our seats to business class for the transatlantic flights. We connected via cell phone before departing, and it was fun to have a lounge-to-lounge conversation. The picture above left shows Ted and Jaime enjoying the Chicago flagship lounge.

We got into London around noon. The business class seats on American are quite comfortable, as is the whole business class experience (food, drinks, movies, all of it). Unfortunately, flights to heathrow are pretty short, only about 6 hours, which isn't enough time to properly enjoy it all, and get sleep too. So we all took a short nap at a hotel near the airport after arrival. Then we hopped on the tube and went downtown to meet up with our friends Renny & Bill, who moved to London from San Francisco about six months ago. They played tour guide for us as we walked around in the rain, looking for a good place for dinner (see the picture, above right). After rejecting an italian place, a middle eastern place, and a tavern (and there were no indian curry houses to be found in that part of town), we sent our advance scouts (Bill & Dominique) ahead without us to battle the rain and find a good restaurant which had space for eight. They succeeded in their quest, and we had a very nice meal at a Thai restaurant, lots of conversation, and then finally headed back to our hotel to catch some bed-ridden shut-eye before our next long flight on Monday.

Tomorrow, the journey continues...