The rain abates

It rained for three days at the beginning of the week, and life in my bungalow kind of began to resemble fieldwork, in a giant wooden tent. My burner is outside on the balcony, connected to a giant metal canister of butane, and for Monday and Tuesday it was too windy for a flame to stay lit outside, and too drafty inside for it to be anywhere near safe if I brought the burner inside. I do, thankfully, have a rice cooker. One night I ate rice with kimchi and canned tuna, which, if I remember correctly, is what I ate every day over the spring break I stayed in the dorms at college. The path up to my bungalow has been pretty muddy. If it starts raining it turns into a stream in places.

But things got better on Wednesday. I rediscovered my Swiss Army knife, which I had lost five days earlier. This was really exciting. But Wednesday afternoon mail arrived from home, containing DVDs of my e-mail and the photos I had lost when my computer died. On Thursday, exactly one month after my computer died, I finally had everything back up and running and installed the way it used to be. Thanks to Dad for burning and sending these.

Not a whole lot is going on otherwise. I have been reading a lot. During the day it's John Thompson's The Geographic Mosaic of Coevolution, and the user's manual for the Digital SLR I bought back in July but have never really learned how to use. At night, I am alternating between 10 pages of Du côté de chez Swann and 100 pages of Barbara Kingsolver's The Prodigal Summer (discovered on the dorm bookshelf; lots of moth references, I approve). I recently finished Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (from the dorm) and Anne Hébert's Les fous de Bassan (from a bookstore in Papeete). Also I have been making my way through the BBC Blue Planet series.

I went snorkeling this afternoon off the station; thanks to the past week of rain, the water was really murky, but there were a fair amount of fish.

Pictures from the Austral Islands way back in September (which I never got around to blogging about) have finally been posted on my Picasaweb site.