Nothing ever runs smoothly

Oh problems....

First, for those that have mentioned it-- this blog website does not let you copy and paste from Word. Yes, I have thought about typing up my entries ahead of time when not connected to the internet and then just pasting them in to save my internet time, but it does not work. Apparently there is some circuitous way to go from Word to Notepad to trying to paste it in this site... but I don't really want to take the time to figure that out. So I will just stick with typing directly here, even though it takes time and means I make fewer posts.

And now on to other problems. So Thursday night (after we got back from town) my cell phone stopped working. It just shut itself off even though I thought it still had battery. Oh well, the battery must be dead- I'll just charge it. Well I plug it in and it won't charge. I try Lisa's charger, since we have the same phone-- still nothing. Great- I bet the part inside my phone where the charge plugs in is not making a good connection. My next idea: since we have the same phone, lets put my battery in Lisa's phone to charge it, then we can put it back in mine so I will at least be able to use it until we can manage to get into town and have it looked at. So we do this, I put it back in my phone, turn it on, it says it has full battery, but almost immediately shuts itself off again. I turn it back on, it shuts itself off again. There is definitely something wrong here. It won't even stay on long enough for me to hit send to make a call. Which means if my car breaks down in the field I am stuck with no way to call for help. We will need to go into town to the place I bought the phone and ask for a replacement. We can't take my car, because it is missing one headlight and that is illegal to drive in town. So we will take the red car Blair was driving, that Lisa is now driving since Blair left on Friday.
Well... yesterday afternoon as Lisa was out in the field, she couldn't get the car to start. Luckily her cell phone is still working so she called control to come rescue her. 2 hours later... they finally send someone. Apparently they had a car available to go get her, but no one who could drive it. They had to wait and find a guy to come drive the car to go pick her up. It seems there is something wrong with the exhaust and the car will not start. So we need to get them to tow it to Kamok to be repaired-- but today is Sunday and no one will be around. They all go to church on Sunday. So we will have to wait til Monday for them to work on it.

In the meantime, Lisa and I will just drive around together... which actually works out well because I have a working car (for now) and she has a working cell phone. Hopefully the car will be fixed by Tuesday morning and we can drive it into town to get my phone fixed. My car also has problems- it has been making a weird noise that sounds like there is something wrong with the exhaust on it too- so I also hope it does not die before we can get Lisa's car back. We we pick up hers, we can drop mine off to be looked at.

So that is the state of things at the moment. Both of us driving around together means we get less work done, but at least we will be together if something else goes wrong. It is just Lisa and I here at the research center right now. Everyone else has left. But tomorrow a bunch of Earthwatch volunteers come for 2 weeks, so it will be quite busy soon enough. Because they are short on space, they are putting a second bed in one of the really big bandas and Lisa and I will move in together to free up our two rooms for earthwatch people. There is also a guy named Chayant coming in a couple weeks. He is one of Dr. Rubenstein's collaborator's students in Illinois somewhere that is coming to work out a computer barcode system for identifying all the zebra. He may or may not be sharing our banda as well, haha. But it is only for 5 days or so.