This Past Week

OK, well after finally putting up everything from semester break that brings me to the past week and a half or so, and oh what a great time it has been. School's getting busy, as we push into the last few weeks of the semester, but I'm still managing to have quite a bit of fun.

Last Wednesday was my friend Andrew's 18th birthday (an even bigger deal here as it's legal drinking), and his parents were generous enough to take a big group of us out to a nice Chinese restaurant, pay for dinner, and give us all several cases of wine to boot! All right for having awesome friends (and happy birthday Andrew!).

Thursday I started assisting with a research project, which I have to do at least two days of for my Wildlife Conservation class. The project I chose is a PhD project looking at the effects of climate and climate change on the behavior and potential movement/translocation/habitat selection of western swamp turtles, one of the rarest reptiles in the world (found only around Perth in a couple wetland reserves). As western swampies are so rare, Sophie was doing preliminary studies on oblong turtles, the common variety of turtle in W.A. She had 11 captured from a local lake held in this yard:

We took measurements on all 11, then chose 3 of the biggest ones to release, as she's only allowed to be holding eight at a time and wants smaller-sized animals (this is a test run for a smaller species in the western swamp turtle). So I got to go help release 3 oblong turtles back to the wild, which was pretty cool.

You can see where the oblong turtles get their name from; they have quite the neck!

Thursday night was Currie Hall Ball, which was a lot of fun and a lot of dancing. Friday I went to the beach for a bit with some guys, then that night I got to hang out, watch the Lion King with some people, and help Noam put the finishing touches on the Dance Down Under video.

Saturday I made the brilliant move of trying to jump over the Currie Hall tennis net and sprained my wrist in the process (as well as scraping up my knee). So other than getting than patched and healed (about 99.5% sure it's no big deal, been feeling better every day and x-ray results look good) and doing homework, nothing too exciting the past few days. And that brings up us to now.

I leave you with a couple new photos from international night, courtesy of Janan Loh:

Bollywood dance

...and the long awaited vision of me dressed as America, my best impression of a cowboy (thankfully you can't see I'm also wearing flip flops).