The week ahead.

Its lunch time, so I'm taking a short break from my gruelling mental gymnastics for a few minutes to update you on how everything is going at the moment.

I was really looking forward to this week. All last week, I just couldn't wait for it to be Friday so that I could go home to my little shoebox of a flat in Hobart and not have to leave again for an entire week. Well, I would have to leave everyday, but the point is I could come back again every night. I was really looking forward to having a nice relaxing weekend, too. While Sunday was nice and relaxing despite being overtired and having a headache all day, Saturday really wasn't. I spent over 10 hours of my Saturday in my office at uni working on the research proposal, which, despite my best efforts, has been taking a ridiculous amount of time to finish. I just keep hitting road block after road block with it. Thankfully, all that remains to be done now is to put all the scattered sections into one coherent document and email it to my supervisors for their feedback. I fully expected to have it emailed off by the end of the day today.

Once that is done, I have to organise field equipment and do some paperwork so that I can spend the rest of the week doing far more interesting stuff. This week, I'm taking a break from my usual observations and focusing on some slightly different areas of my research project. One of these areas is a block of intensive invertebrate sampling covering two of my study beaches. Due to the intensiveness of this sampling, its not something I can do by myself so it is given me a great excuse to have some fun with my family and friends while working. Tomorrow, Mum and Dad are helping me in Bicheno and on Wednesday I'm bringing a car load of friends for a road trip up to Freycinet National Park to help me sample there. While there is quite a bit of work to be done, I'm really hoping that we manage to get it done quickly enough to fit in some fun on the beach as well. Hopefully, there will be some photos of said fun on the beach that I can upload later in the week.

Thursday will be spent in Hobart at uni, staring down a microscope all day to sort the samples that we've collected (not fun but at least its something different and I get to stay in Hobart another day).

Then on Friday, if everything falls into place, I get to sleep all day and work all night. I've been having a bit of trouble getting my hands on one of the pairs of night vision binoculars owned by the school, but I should be able to get them soon. Once I know whether I can have the binoculars on Friday night, I'll know for sure what I'm doing on Friday. I'm quite excited about doing nocturnal observation because no one actually knows what my birds do at night. There is a general consensus that they expect them to forage at night as well as during the day, but no one has actually seen them do it. Plus (and this is a very big plus) I can get a full nights observations and not have to worry about sunscreen or a hat or anything. I like it! The problem will be trying to figure when to eat and what to eat and how much coffee we have to take with us to be able to drive back home from Orford on Saturday morning.

I suppose I should get back to work now.