back from the big city

yup, just got back from the Hawai'i Conservation Conference, which was awesome. Here's a picture from the convention center there. the conference was great, but they kept trying to feed us these wax apples in our lunches. the first day nobody ate them, so the second day the organizers made an "Unwanted Fruit" table. since there were about 900 attendees, there were about 899 apples on that table. shoulda took a picture of that. they were absolutely inedible.

but anyway. there were cool presentations on monk seals foraging (with nat'l geographic video, awesome), baby sea turtles, spinner dolphins.... oh and stuff i'm doing too, bugs and plants and everything. it was all really cool and i got to get a larger view of the kinds of conservation issues HI is facing. the challenges are many, and the obstacles pretty much boil down to a lack of money/interest from the State and Federal governments. huh. fancy that.

oh, and we took a Lexus taxi to the airport with a large and colorful assortment of little buddha figurines on the dash. there were tv screens on the seats in front of us, and the driver talked on her phone nonstop in vietnamese the whole ride.

i've been a very poor blogger lately. this whole work thing really cuts into my blogging time. i'll have to discuss that with my boss. oh wait, but he's gone to FIJI for two weeks. yeah. fiji. bastard. meanwhile, the rest of us are fixing to get back into fieldwork and set up the plots for my project. so i should be losing about 10 pounds in the next month or so. unless i make up for them in mai-tais.

that's it for now. i'll try to be a better blogger, but the problem i think is how infernally boring i've become. i'll work on that too....