Briana's Travels

Whoops, has it really been about 3 weeks since I wrote a post? I've just been working on fossils in the museum, nothing too exciting to report. Except that I have almost 55,000 fossils in my database. That's a *lot* of broken bits of bone. :) On the recommendation of a colleague who lives here, I found a great OB and had an appointment with her last week. She was very thorough and friendly. The next day I went for my gestational diabetes test (standard at this point in pregnancy - 25 weeks down, 15 to go!), which came back negative. Then the day after that I had a sonogram, as advice from the home docs was to have one every month of possible. (I have uterine fibroids and they just want to make sure the baby's not too crowded in there.) Sonograms are great - getting to see your baby moving around, hear that everything is normal (breathe a big sigh of relief), and getting to see a glimpse of what they actually look like. The doc remarked on his "prominent nose"...

No, the title doesn't refer to the fact that I had to check one of my carry-on bags on my way to Kenya this year because they actually weighed it and it was too heavy (whoops!), so I had three bags checked coming over... it refers to the little boy growing in my belly! Every year brings its own adventures, but this year will be especially different because I'm pregnant. I'll be in Kenya - and briefly, Ethiopia - between weeks 22 and 32. Here's a portrait of the Pumpkin, which is my current nickname for him since he's due in October (~10th), at 12 weeks: I'm being more cautious this trip, given that I have another life I'm entirely responsible for. Wow. This all also makes me miss my wonderful husband even more than usual. I've been in Kenya a week already, and I've been meaning to write a post for... a week already. But I've been much more tired than usual, so I just waited until I was feeling more energetic (sort of). Probably the jet lag, ...

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...

What do we talk about at the dinner table in the field every night? How do we come up with new topics of conversation, after spending weeks on end together, 24/7, especially without current events to fall back on (though some of us do check the news online fairly regularly)? Some of us have spent years  together, collectively, in this camp, 24/7.... We can basically divide our conversations into three catgeories: field stories, work, and food. Oh, and just getting-to-know-each-other kinds of conversations, especially with students/visitors/etc. Much of the time we tell and re-tell field adventure stories. Two of the scientists here, John and Alison (who are married), have spent years doing work in a variety of places in Africa (Congo, Botswana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania,  and more) since the 1970s. Kay and I have probably had the most time on game reserves with wild animals, including ones that could kill people with one well-placed foot (hippos), tusk (elephants), horn ...

I've spent most of this week doing preparations for the upcoming field season: making sure cars get repaired, supplies get bought, organizing fossils in the museum, etc. Today I had a bit of a "down" day, in a good way - just some time to myself. I went to a great morning yoga class at the gym at the Sarit Center (the nearby western-style mall), later I had lunch with some I've never met, a friend (Juliet) of a friend of my husband's (Susan). Susan introduced us over email since we were both going to be in Nairobi; it's always nice for me to meet people outside of prehistory research! The lunch was great; she does aid work in Somalia, including some education work, and we had a lot to talk about. The only negative part of the day was hearing a story of an American friend who'd recently had this encounter in Nairobi: Driver in old 4WD vehicle was stopped at a roundabout on the main highway through town. Policeman who was directing traffic approached drive...

As you may have gathered from my previous posts, my Land Cruiser has been a big part of my adventures in East Africa over the past (~8) years. It's saved my life from charging Cape buffalos and elephants. (I was a *little* too busy putting the pedal to the metal to snap and photos of those close encounters of the large mammal kind!) It's saved my life from bad Nairobi drivers - someone once hit the side of my car in a roundabout; it was slightly scratched, and her front bumper fell off. I've crossed country borders in it probably a dozen times. I've slept in it, eaten in it, observed countless wildlife, sunrises, sunsets, and starry nights in it. (Have I mentioned is has three roof hatches? Three! )   I've driven through some dusty  places in it. (Yeah, I know the car is brown, but it was absolutely covered in dust in this picture.) We've gotten each other out of being stuck in aardvark holes. Well, OK, maybe I did more of the rescuing in those ...

So this is my first Kenya post, but also my last Tanzania post, since it spans the day Brian, Kevin, Vince, Adam and I drove from Arusha to Nairobi after the Natron field season. We were all ready to get on to our next projects, I think - so ready that we forgot to pack any lunch for ourselves for the 7(ish) hour trip. Oops! Brian and Kevin were heading to Nairobi for a few days before going north to the Turkana region for more research; Vince and Adam were spending just a few days in Nairobi visiting a friend of Vince's before going back to Tanzania and flying back to the US. The trip went pretty smoothly; well, most of it. We crossed the Tanzania-Kenya border without much incident; if you bring a Kenyan vehicle to Tanzania you have to leave your original log book (= car title) on the border, which always makes me a bit queasy, but I've done it several times now and they always find it and return it to me without any issues. So: vehicle log book? check. exit stamps from Ta...