When your body tells you: you should perhaps slow down a little

This past week has been relatively hectic - spring is a funny time. The weather is seemingly all over the place: last Friday it snowed, yesterday it was balmy, only to be overcast and quite cool today. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. For some reason my body is quite sensitive to those changes and not only does my skin feel particularly dry and my hair all static-ey, but all I feel like doing is sleeping!!! This is accompanied by series of weird dreams - my subconscious quite seriously puzzles me sometimes!
I think part of why I feel quite exhausted is not only the amount of work I am coping with at the moment, but also the fact that I sprained both my ankle and my wrist - after 2 weeks of pretending it was no big deal, I finally gave in to the fact that ok! ok! I am no youngster anymore, I take a little longer to heal, and in this particular instance perhaps I should go see a professional ‘healer’! I am glad I did - I was advised to rest ;o) It's OK to do so when the doctor says so right?
Joke aside - I've postponed climbing and am taking it easy --- my body, I think, is thanking me for it, yet my mind feels restless.

I am tackling chapter 4 still these days - have derived most of my basic estimates. Am thus now working on developing a diet matrix. A tricky component of the modelling process. It takes time to compile, and I feel like I need to devote quite a bit of attention to it. Yet it also is the first place you go to when attempting to balance the model. Hence difficult to determine ahead of time just how many hours you should spend on figuring out the intricacies of diets in the first place! It makes sense though that it would be one of the most flexible pieces of the puzzle as it were - what a bird eats in the winter versus the summer for example varies, so the average throughout the year for a group of them may be hard to determine as it will be based on the (temporal) nature of the sampling regimes and how thorough those were. Not only that, but for some of the species I am looking at, I have no data for Hawaii proper so I am importing data from Malaysia, Japan, yet in all likelihood my beasties in my park don't eat those same things in the same proportions, if at all. Ahhh the joys of modelling - it feels at times like it is such an inexact science. Yet I guess part of the trick (and learning experience) is to gain sufficient confidence in it all to be able to determine just what parameters can easily be tweaked without compromising the "real-ness" of the model. Ultimately, it also helps to pinpoint gaps in current understanding, help refine existing datasets so as to get a more focused, integrated view of the whole ecosystem.
I like it - it just takes time and the learning curve is steep!
I just need to keep at it, attempt to keep the weather anomalies in the background, and ride the waves peacefully :o)

I was just reading through the BBC websites - one article that caught my eye was the following: Species loss 'bad for our health'. I believe this is an important headline - it is only when people truly feel that their personal dimension is at risk that they spring to action. I venture to say that people are more likely to reduce their consumption of tuna because eating too much tuna leads to potentially unsafe mercury levels in our bodies - than because stocks are crashing, dolphins are potentially killed or any other suite of 'natural' disasters caused by overfishing.

Talking of selfishness of characters – go see the movie “There will be blood” if you haven’t yet. The character development in that movie is remarkable; Daniel Day Lewis’ performance extraordinary. His role gave me shivers, and not of the good kind – frightens me to think what people will be driven to when fighting over dwindling resources (rather than in the rush to wealth because of apparent overabundance in the early days of discovery).

the trouble with biofuels ... and the thesis that isn't writing itself

It's time for an update - seems like the last ten days have gone by in a flash... yet it also seems as though I just wrote an update yesterday!!! Definitely feel in some sort of time warp these days.

Let's deal with the thesis end of things first! I am happy to report that I've been working hard AND making progress... yes AND as it often feels that I am working hard but 'running to stand still' or actually move backwards even! Progress is slow - isn't it always when we're talking of a thesis?! - but we're moving in the right direction. My main challenges in the past 10 days have been to try to ascertain the biomass, productivity and consumption rate of coral (yep, they do eat, small floating plankton), a whole variety of urchins and crown of thorn starfish. Doesn't sound all that dramatic, but believe you me it has involved quite the intense literature trawls - to come up with not always very satisfying bits of info. It has certainly involved LOTS no LOOOOOOOTTTSSS of conversions -- for example from wet weights of urchins to joules!!!, I frowned and looked at the equations three times: who on earth thinks of weight in joules!!?
So after much fact checking and paper reading I think I need to be ok with my values (or mad ranges of values) and move on. This is all only to give me starting points anyways - the real tricky stuff starts once I have to 'balance' my model, i.e., make sure that the system as I define it can sustain itself.
What's next on the agenda - algae, all the little critters that live in the benthos, zooplankton, and phytoplankton. I need to be done with these this week, otherwise I am going to start lagging behind my scheduled outline for the year ... and we don't want to go there.

So now on to what's happening in the world at large. The word definitely seems to be a rather troubled sphere... Two topics caught my eye this week: biofuels and the fact that seas may rise much more than has been predicted so far. I've been reading a few articles about the food riots that have been taking place in Haiti and the Philippines for e.g.; very distressing.... to think we're diverting food to fuel cars?? That's right very disturbing, madness.... as George Monbiot suggests: one step forward is to eat less meat (and travel less). In the same vein, but as a friend of mine pointed out, perhaps more 'grounded' is an article by Paul Krugman. He points to the Chinese eating meat, rising fuel prices and biofuels as the culprits for rising food prices.
... and to add insult to injury, some of the nations that already suffer among the highest poverty rates (e.g. Bangladesh) are now threatened with increased loss of land due to rising seas of up to 1.5m!!!!

All certainly puts the pains of thesis writing in perspective .... that and the news that a friend of mine who holds a very special place in my heart recently had a car accident that very nearly killed him.
Life *is* short:

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~Abraham Lincoln

We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance. ~Japanese Proverb

Digesta retention times and spring

weird sort of title eh? Well those are very much the two things that are on my mind these days. It's honestly time for spring - i need, want warmth, and sunshine.... and we *did* have a week of absolute gorgeous blue skies! after getting CRAZY hail last weekend... followed by madness rain, mixed with hail this weekend. At least we're helping to fill the water reservoirs I suppose...

As for digesta retention times (DRTs) - well i needed to know those, so I could calculate the consumption rates of my green turtles scooting around in my National park in Hawaii. It became quite the crazy affair, as I did find a paper that gave me intake rates, however to make it relevant in the context of my model, I needed to have individual turtles' weights from which the DRTs were derived... which weren't listed... so I sought out to calculate those... 'nyways, needless to say, proves to show, when you think something is going to take you about 1 day, it often ends up being about 2! Then again, I did get info for my reef fish groups relatively easily, so let's hope that when I now move on to invertebrates (e.g., urchins and crustaceans) it won't be too much of a nightmare. Fingers crossed. I am dreading having to think about how to convert algal cover into estimates of biomass, especially given how different algae can be: short and stout, long and spindly, long and tufty; like hair really!...

...but it's good, my head is into work these days. Thought a lot about comments my supervisor gave me on my second chapter, and that's pretty much wrapped up for good now :o) - at least 'til I hear back from the journal.

The highlight of my past two weeks were performances at the Vancouver Symphony as part of the Beethoven festival. On the 28th I went to see Lang Lang - it was incredible. Even more so because I was accompanied by my lovely friend Leigh, and we truly had a wonderful time.
Then this past Friday I had the incredible fortune of experiencing a performance by the great Anne Sophie Mutter - there are hardly words to describe what it felt like to see her play: transporting, raw, touching your soul in soft yet powerful ways. She just is absolutely formidable - playing some notes so quietly, yet so distinctly; other parts with such incredible vigour. All infused with so much passion and grace. Unforgettable.
...hmm, still dreaming!