Island Food

Work progresses as usual, we are well into the slog it out and try desperately to collect enough data (I only have 3.5 weeks left) phase of this field season. We are hampered every so often by exciting events like a tsunami warning due to the Solomon Islands earthquake, that prompted us all to go sit on a rock on high ground with a good view of the sea and eat an apple each whilst listening to the radio. It was quite a bizarre event, all the research station staff and volunteers and researchers (at the time, a grand total of eight) suspending normal activities to go sit on a rock. At any rate there wasn't even a ripple in our area and we went out as usual in the afternoon having been told that the threat had passed.

So in answer to "am I sick of maggi mee yet", the answer is actually no because I only brought four packets of Maggi Mee with me from Cairns and I've only eaten three of them. We order in food from a supermarket in Cairns (barge day -- every second Wednesday -- is rather like a fortnightly Christmas), and cook all our meals in very well appointed kitchens in our houses. I am vaguely sick of spaghetti aglio olio e pepperoncino which is what I always make for a quick lunch (or sometimes when I am very hungry I have a ham sandwich instead, which is even quicker); but we have also had both red and green curry, once I made a rather improvised hainan chicken rice, every Thursday (our day off) we have pancakes for breakfast, every Saturday evening which is the weekly barbecue night we have a gigantic steak each, and it is truly amazing what one will find in the "free food" cupboards (food left over from other groups which have left). Free food had provided us with pizza bases, popping corn (for our movie nights in the library), huge bottles of supermarket home brand bright green lime flavoured cordial that I have discovered is actually made of apples and lots of chemicals and which we have fondly christened our "detergent" drink, more bread than one could ever eat, proper Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce, a whole array of spices, and etc. As is usual when one is diving a lot we eat like pigs, the Tim Tams (Aussie chocolate biscuits with a chocolate filling and chocolate covering, hmm why does this make me think of certain college folks...) get wolfed down as soon as they appear on barge day. But the sheer amount of physical work this whole marine biology thing is turning out to be means that I think I am actually burning it all off as fast as I can eat it.

Which all means that I feel no guilt in baking up the Cadbury's chocolate cake mix that I impulsively ordered on the latest barge cycle, it is Easter this weekend after all!

P/S Fish in the last post was a female, also fondly known in my books as individual A8_3... (I don't give them names, firstly I am looking at close to 50 fish and I'm not that creative, secondly I don't really think you are supposed to according to some points of view -- not anthropomorphising them and all that). Don't worry, they always recover pretty quickly from the stress of being caught and in five or ten minutes they are usually swimming about and eating happily again -- though they do get very paranoid about divers which is a bit of a pain when you are trying to watch them still!