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).