On my way back to Edmonton last Friday, one of the voices in my head said, facetiously, “Isn’t it nice that you’ve spent the last four days testing the physical and mental limits of human endurance instead of sitting in your room listening to old George Michael albums?”

I told it to shut the hell up.

This is because I was heading back to Edmonton from one of the oddest experiences of my life, which was working as a field assistant for two grad students in the town of Kinsella, Alberta (pop. 80).
It wasn’t the work I minded so much – although hauling 75-pound, $35,000 equipment over 9-foot barbed-wire deer fences got a bit monotonous after a while. No, it was living out there that wacked me out. I could put up with the giant spiders sharing my trailer (after all, they were eating all the other bugs in the vicinity), and with my two companions swanning about shirtless, drinking herbal tea and talking about nitrogen cycling. I could put up with the raven who kept trying to open my bedroom window, and with the lack of human contact and television. I could put up with CBC talk radio 20 hours a day and five hours of sleep a night.

But it is really a lot to ask of someone to put up with all that after spending the entire day out in the field. I’d stagger into my trailer, half-blind with exhaustion, covered with bruises and scratches, and be confronted with all of the above plus, usually, a nasty case of dehydration and back spasms caused by lifting things that weighed two-thirds of what I did.

So yeah – the limits have been tested, and found to be further out than I thought. I’m interviewing for another job on Tuesday, though, so hopefully I won’t have to keep this up all summer. I wonder which God I should be praying to. Suggestions?

A friend of mine mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the science of biochemistry as we know it might come to an end in about twenty years. The reason? Because we’re depleting the helium mines. I thought he was on crack, but then I went and did my research. Helium does come from mines, and furthermore, it is not a renewable resource in the slightest.

OK, so helium makes balloons float and makes your voice squeaky, but it is also a wicked-ass coolant and they use it in NMR spectroscopy, which doesn’t mean a lot to most of you but is how biochemists study proteins. When we finally run out of helium, unless another coolant has been found, this incredibly important process will screech to a halt and civilization might come crashing down. (It might not, also. But… it might.)

I’m tempted to call up all my hippies and hold a rally: save the helium!!

Yeehaw!! I got my driver’s license! Yessir, passed that mofo first try. Puh-fect parallel park and everything.

And now… I can finally respond to the call of the open road.

STOP SNOWING!!!!!

So the second David Bowie concert was even better than the first, despite the Thin White Duke actually shaking his head at us when we held up Mandy’s heart-breakingly earnest sign, begging him to sign her t-shirt because it’s her birthday tomorrow. Oh… wait, that’s today now. Uhh, happy birthday, Mandy!

At any rate, after the concert was over, Ricky Rasura, a member of the opening band, The Polyphonic Spree, came up and started making small talk. We took him to be the outcast of the group (which seriously resembles some kind of white-robed cult), because he was a vegetarian, was wearing a silly shirt, and plays the harp – not the most useful of instruments. Anyway, Mandy started lovin’ him up because she thought she could get backstage and thereby meet Bowie, etc, so Ricky (whom we referred to for the rest of the night as ‘The Monophonic Spree’) invited us out for drinks. “But I just gotta get my stuff from the bus, OK?”

He turned his back on us for two minutes and we ran to the LRT station, and Mandy bitched all the way home about cute spaced-out harpists and how they couldn’t be trusted to find their arse with both hands.

Good times, folks.

TodayIFoundOutWhatHappensWhenYouSpillNailPolishOnYourKeyboard

All riiiiight! Summer job finally confirmed, I leave on the 20th. (I suppose I should get my license before then… I’m driving out all the scientific equipment and two research assistants… oh dear…) But yeah. A whole summer on the Kinsella Ranch! Well, shuck my corn and call me excited. My resident zombie says he’ll have to buy me a spittoon so I’ll ‘fit in.’ I told him that a scientific research ranch has very little to do with traditional ‘frontier’ stereotypes and anyway, we’re studying the effects of controlled burning and I’m sure I’ll be too busy nursing my singed eyebrows to worry about fitting in with said stereotypes. He said he’d at least buy me a string tie.

The moral of the story is, science is good and boys are stoopit. :-)