It’s always fun to get good news from friends and family back home when you’re in the field! (Unlike in 1999, when I found out my maternal grandmother had passed away while I was working at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Do you ever just get the sense that you should call your mother? Well back then cell phones hadn’t yet arrived in East Africa, so I never really called back home – to do so was expensive and inconvenient. But for some reason, when I got back to Kenya from Tanzania in August of that year, I decided to call my mom, and she gave me the sad news.) But let’s get back to the good news. Fire is engaged! That sentence may seem strange, until you find out that I have a very good friend (nick)named Fire. (If I told you her real name she’d probably un-friend me, and I don’t mean on facebook, since she’s one of my only friends not on facebook, so I won’t.) She was a post-doctoral fellow at the museum a few years ago, and we really hit it off – so much that she was one of my bride...
My travel adventures. Read at your own risk -- of wanting to join me. Details (names, institutions) are real and true, but usually left purposefully vague.