5 Minutes of Peace

When I was a kid we had this book called "Five Minutes of Peace". It's the story of a mother elephant with lots of kids and all she wants is five minutes of peace and quiet. Except everytime she sits down one of her kids comes because of something. Basically, as I understand this it's every Mom's story. In the end, she locks herself into the bathroom wearing a bathing cap, and her cup of tea.
Even though I'm not a Mom, I get it. Sometimes you just need a bit of quiet. Of course, growing up in a family in which everyone plays at least two instruments and we only ever practiced when other people were practicing gives you a different concept of "peace and quiet". I once slept through an entire afternoon in my bunk with my head against a metal wall that was being rust banged (which is exactly what it sounds like, pardon the pun).
But now I'm trying to study for my comprehensive exams (big deal. If I fail I won't exactly be kicked out of the program... yet, but probably strongly encouraged to re-think this phD-thingie). I need a good place to study, a little bit of peace and quiet and a chance to focus.
Not that easy when the temperatures are in the triple digits (that's the only good thing about Fahrenheit, you can express HOW INCREDIBLY HOT it is by saying "the temperatures were in the triple digits) and it's so humid it feels like you're in a sauna at all times. Reading my notes gets difficult when there's sweat dripping off my nose and messing them up.
I found a good spot in my room. This is also when I discovered that none of my neighbors do their own garden work. They all hire people to come. People who professionally mow lawns have BIG LOUD machines. I didn't realize how many neighbors I have until there was a constant lawn mowing, bush cutting, leave blowing and other annoying sound stuff going on.
I'm trying to remember why everyone in this area was so worried about the house being rented out to students. Oh that's right - because  we're so LOUD and constantly PARTY and NEVER study.
I guess if you don't mow your own lawn you don't understand you really don't have to do it every other day. I'm still wondering how the guy across the street who had somebody put a fence in managed to schedule it for the one day nobody was mowing their lawn. And why he didn't understand that people understand his instructions if he left his front door step.
The one day it rained I thought I'd be safe. But no - somebody decided to mow their OWN lawn. Now I know why people here don't do their own garden stuff. You can't mow a wet lawn. And you should realize this after an hour or two. There's no reason to continue ALL AFTERNOON.
Yeah, I tried moving to study in my office - but then they decided it would be a good day to finish construction on the roof. I tried going to the library. But they decided it was necessary to tear up the road.
So I did the natural thing one does when one wants 5 minutes of peace. I went fishing. One of my class mates is trying to catch white perch in order to tag them and.... yeah, I'll spare you the details, the important part was that we were going to spend the ENTIRE day on a REMOTE river in a WILDLIFE SANCTUARY on a BOAT. FISHING.
We tuckered out, threw in the anchor (this was my boating job that day, I'm really good at chucking anchors), baited our rods, tossed them out and settled in.
Then they decided to cut down trees with a chain saw.

Finally, after all these years...

When I was in my pre-teens, we used to drive to Poland once a year with a bunch of other families. It was a long drive and sometimes and even longer wait at the border.
In order to pass the time, one of the older girls used to hand out one or two sheets of paper for a road-trip scavenger hunt. There were a few items on the list that showed up every year and frankly, were near-impossible to find.
Over time (again, LOTS of time) we did find most of them: A car with more than three colors, a truck with an elephant on the side of it,... we even found the pyramids (those are surprisingly easy to find if you don't fall asleep during a certain part of the ride). But there was one item in paticular that we never did see.
Yesterday I was on my way to a rugby tournament (yes, were else do I go these days) in Pennsylvania. We took the route that takes us through two tunnels and right through the middle of "The City". As we were coming through the tunnel, I remarked: Hey, that truck lots funny, it looks like it's reversing through the tunnel.
Then I stopped. And looked. And blinked and looked again.
here it was, after all those years of waiting:
A tow truck being towed by a tow truck!

I guess sometimes art does imitate life

Having previously established why we love the French, here's a funny story from our crazy road trip...
Since I was coming from Konstanz and my sister and mother were coming from the Heidelberg area, we decided it would be best if we met up where the train line intercepted their "car line". I got there a bit early, but soon enough the two of them pulled up in my parents' obnoxiously orange car. What we hadn't realized was that Offenburg's main train station is a really bad place to meet up. Yes, it is right off the Autobahn... but the signage is really bad and not at all conducive towards getting back ON the Autobahn and into France.

My mother no longer has any patience for crazy car drivers (maybe this is one of the many traits I've inherited from my mother?!), my sister is a good navigator but not a very insistent one - and I just wasn't going to get involved. I've learned when to keep my mouth shut.
Our first attempt, which involved following the signs took us right back to the train station. Our second attempt which involved following my mother's gut instinct (which usually is a good compass to follow) plus the signs spun us in another circle - and we suddenly dead ended at the beginning of a pedestrian zone. Yes, one might have thought that there would be sort of indication that the street ends suddenly with no opportunity to turn around or anything, but maybe we were just too close to France.
So there we sat. When suddenly...
You know how in slap-sticky comedy flicks things get really crazy and people are chasing each other and running away and missing each other and there's complete chaos there's always a marching band that will come out of nowhere and add exponentially to the confusion? And every time you watch a movie like that, you think, riiiiiiiiiiiiight, like that would really happen. Every time. Who comes up with this stuff? Isn't art supposed to imitate life?
Well, either art does imitate life or sometimes life just imitates art, but just as we came to a complete stop and frustration hit it's high point -
yes, the marching band began to play. I couldn't help myself and started laughing: "Really?! Really?! A marching band?!". Ok, it wasn't actually marching toward us aiming to engulf us and slam it's cymbals through the window and the trumpet player did not walk up onto the roof of our car or anything - they were sitting in the town square playing peacefully (albeit loudly) but still - a marching band?!
We did make it out on our third attempt and were merrily on our way... once we were rolling towards France we all started giggling, seriously? a marching band?!

oh that stugeon's lucky it's endangered

So yes, after ranting about my cultural identity back to sturgeon... I will hopefully be seeing quite a bit of them over the next three years (me getting my PhD sorta depends on it). Google Atlantic Sturgeon, and you will find that they are big and ugly (and look a bit like they've escaped a Jurassic Park movie) and quite endangered - it seems people got greedy exploiting them for they're meat on the one hand (which apparently tastes quite good, I wouldn't know, I believe that fish are friends not food), and taviar on the other - really? Fish eggs? Whose brilliant idea was that?
Unfortunately for them, they're not a cute as seals or as charismatic as dolphins and whales (dooooooo youuuuuuuuuu speaaaaaaaaaakt whaaaaaaaaaaaales?! I picked some up conversing with the ones migrating down the East African Coast) so they haven't exactly gotten around to replacing Pandas as Greenpeace' new poster child. On the up side, New York and a couple of other States up here are currently working on management plans to help restore populations (this is also quite fortunate for me and my thesis...).
Part of the problem is that Atlantic Sturgeon need about 20 years to mature and reproduce, so we can't just stop fishing (which you're already not allowed to do, but they still get caught by accident) them for a few years and all will be well. Sturgeon's life cycle is similar to that of salmon, in that the females migrate up their natal river (i.e. the river they were born in) to lay their eggs... the young then migrate back towards the coast, usually live in estuaries for a few years and the spend their "juvenile/subadult" stage(s) in coastal aggregations- several studies have shown that protecting them at that stage will have the strongest effect re-establishing populations.
In order to protect them, it's kinda helpful to figure out where they can (still) be found, and what their fine scale migration patterns are. One of the guys I'm working closely with figures that out doing accustic tagging: We pull the sturgeon out of the water, make certain measurements and then surgically implant an acoustic tag (I'll get to this in a bit, that's the funny part of the story so if you don't want to know all the science-y stuff skip there....it starts with "okay, here's he funny story") and toss it back into the water.
So while he's figuring out where they're going, I'll figure out where their coming from. This is actually a kinda cool method - basically while the sturgeon are being measure and tagged, I'll snip off part of their fin, extract the DNA and sequence a little piece of their DNA. I'll be able to use this sequence as a sort of license plate: If you look at the combination of the first few letters on a German license plate you know what city/county the car is from. If you look at this sequence the combination of basepairs will tell you what river they're from. Kinda cool, huh?
Okay, so when we pull a sturgeon (hopefully more than one) out of the water trawling we weigh it (I think the heaviest one I laid eyes on til this point was about almost 30kg so over 60lbs), then we lift it on a measuring board and make some measurements (the longest one we got was 1,4m which is over 4 feet long - and remember, these aren't fully grown yet). Then we scan for a "pit tag" and inject one if it hasn't been tagged yet (that way, however else pulls it out during trawling surveys knows where else it's been), put in another tag We'd do this with three people, our "sturgeon hunter" (that's how he's labeled his gloves) would make the measurements and all that stuff, we had one person taking down all the data on the clipboard and I had the important job of watering the fish (you want to keep the stress levels as low as possible, we're trying to save these fish, not kill them) and holding the fish down the fish when it gets clipped for an ageing sample. These are powerful fish, basically all muscle, fast swimmers (remember, they can migrate UPstream!) and if you remember how tall/short I am and how much I weigh (yes, I know officially you don't know that since I'm a lady...) you'll understand why I view sturgeon wrestling as a completely acceptable alternative to rugby.
Keeping in mind, mine vs. the fish' measurements I was kinda surprised when I was told "Okay, Shannon just transfer the sturgeon to the trough while I get the accustic tags". Maybe because I play rugby with his girlfriend :-) Anyway, a common way of lifting them is grabbing the tail with one hand and supporting the head with the other, something about flipping them on their back/upside down makes them very docile. Unfortunately, I lack the arm span to that with the ones that are a bit larger, so I've developed my own method of cradling them to lift them into this V-shaped wooden trough we use to do "surgery" - getting them in there is als a bit difficult because it on top of a table and so the top rim is about at my should heigth.
Anyway, so we disinfect/locally anesthetize a bit the make an incision about 2 finger-breadths wide, pop in the tag and suture it shut. Yes, I'm writing this like it's the most normal thing to do, but I'll admit - I was surprised the first time I saw one of the accustic tags! They're a bit longer than my middle finger and thicker. It's less popping, more wedging and a little bit of swearing to get the d... f... &*!$## thing in.
(okay, here's the funny story).
On about the third fish we were tagging (this was before I had optimized all my lifting out, transporting etc. techniques), which was also one the larger ones, one of the other girls on the cruise was trying to lift the sturgeon out of the trough. Being my usualy helpful friendly self, upon seeing her struggles I asked if she needed a hand, then stoopd on my tip toes in order to get my hands under the sturgeon (which she was holding by the tail and had so far only managed to flip on it's side)... yes, of course the sturgeon chose that moment to snap up.
You should have seen the "oh crap"-faces on the two girls watching , as they're eyes widened when I took/staggered to steps back from the force of the sturgeon-head butt/sucker punch which caught me just above the chin.
Oh, that sturgeon is luck it's endangered - and my firm belief that fish are friends, not food :-)