Well. Well, well. WHAT'S THIS ALL ABOUT THEN, HOLLY. Seems I fell off the old proverbial blogging horse, and entirely failed to get back on again.
UNTIL NOW.
Quite a
few things have happened in the last few months which have been all around rather interesting, and which I'd quite like to share with the friends and family that read this (or at least, who used to read this back when I was interesting and wrote things). As such I shall start writing here again. Prepare yourselves for....
A Brief Review of the Last Six Months of Holly:
October:
I broke my ankle ice-skating. Lessons learned: don't do conga lines on skates. And definitely, definitely, don't try to skate in the other direction when everyone is falling down. Your leg will get caught, and you will break it, and you will regret everything that has led to that point.
November: Sulked about my leg, got over myself, and learned to go up and down stairs on crutches (living on the third floor without an elevator helped with this accomplishment). Took a trip to the beautiful coastal town of La Rochelle with new friends. Had cast removed. Conducted field work for a behavioral ecology project, studying capuchin monkeys at the local zoo: we were observing whether they used certain foods (eg onion & garlic) for medicinal purposes, rather than eating them. Wild capuchins will use similar materials for anti-parasitic purposes and rub them on their fur; we wanted to test whether captive capuchins exhibited the same behavior. They do!
(Île de Ré, an island just off the coast of La Rochelle)
Leg free of cast (left); capuchin taking a break from eating and using onions as anti-parasitic medication (right)
December: Road trip to Lyon to see the beautiful Fête des Lumières, the Festival of Lights; slept on a mattress in the back of our van, and walked all night with lights and music and memories of my summer in Lyon doing field work on the Rhône for my undergraduate thesis. We came back to a week-long seminar with earthworm & soil scientist Patrick Lavelle, and were converted to the cult of earthworm. I met my mom in Paris after my last exam and we spent Christmas together in Bordeaux. We flew together to Chicago to bring in the New Year with my brothers, my sisters-in-law, and my nieces and nephews.
January-February: a whirlwind of work. We had a fantastic week-long course on Ecological Risk Assessment from professors Rui, Paulo & Matilde from the University of Coimbra, where I'll be doing my Masters specialization in September. Apart from that, the last weeks of our semester in Poitiers blurred into a mess of work and panic and deadlines and applications for housing & visas in Germany for the spring semester. All the while we marked an endless and exhilerating countdown, ticking off days until our field trip to........ ECUADOR (next several posts).
But meanwhile I'll leave you with this tasty pic of a French meal.
November: Sulked about my leg, got over myself, and learned to go up and down stairs on crutches (living on the third floor without an elevator helped with this accomplishment). Took a trip to the beautiful coastal town of La Rochelle with new friends. Had cast removed. Conducted field work for a behavioral ecology project, studying capuchin monkeys at the local zoo: we were observing whether they used certain foods (eg onion & garlic) for medicinal purposes, rather than eating them. Wild capuchins will use similar materials for anti-parasitic purposes and rub them on their fur; we wanted to test whether captive capuchins exhibited the same behavior. They do!
(Île de Ré, an island just off the coast of La Rochelle)
December: Road trip to Lyon to see the beautiful Fête des Lumières, the Festival of Lights; slept on a mattress in the back of our van, and walked all night with lights and music and memories of my summer in Lyon doing field work on the Rhône for my undergraduate thesis. We came back to a week-long seminar with earthworm & soil scientist Patrick Lavelle, and were converted to the cult of earthworm. I met my mom in Paris after my last exam and we spent Christmas together in Bordeaux. We flew together to Chicago to bring in the New Year with my brothers, my sisters-in-law, and my nieces and nephews.
January-February: a whirlwind of work. We had a fantastic week-long course on Ecological Risk Assessment from professors Rui, Paulo & Matilde from the University of Coimbra, where I'll be doing my Masters specialization in September. Apart from that, the last weeks of our semester in Poitiers blurred into a mess of work and panic and deadlines and applications for housing & visas in Germany for the spring semester. All the while we marked an endless and exhilerating countdown, ticking off days until our field trip to........ ECUADOR (next several posts).
But meanwhile I'll leave you with this tasty pic of a French meal.
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