Rainy Season Part Two

My last blog was about the rainy season and how frustrating it is to get out of the car, realize it’s raining too hard to do anything, sit around for 1/2 hour and then go home. On Wednesday, we got up, got dressed, got in the car and drove for 2 minutes before the rain started. What’s really frustrating is a) our field house, which is only a 5 minute drive from the study site in the Park, doesn’t get rain even when the Park does so we don’t know that it’s raining in the park until we get there, and b) it doesn’t often rain right AT dawn, it rains until 3am, then stops from 3-5 and starts again. Meaning: it’s not raining JUST exactly when we wake up, so we get ready and head out into the park, only to be shut down by the rain. Fortunately, this morning it was raining at 4am, so we just didn’t get out of bed. That’s much more tolerable. AND I got to sleep in until 6am, woohoo! Which is good, because I was awake most of the night listening to rain on the tin roof. Speaking of, our roof is leaking. There’s a leak over the toilet, a leak near our shoes, and a rotten spot of roof above my bed that occasionally drops wood chips and other random junk onto my mosquito net. I moved my bed the other day to avoid more random crap being dropped on my feet. Now I’m closer to the window, which means I get splashed with rain when it’s really heavy and the wind is strong. Classy accommodations :)

Even though the rain is frustrating, we took advantage of the time “off” to paint and clean the house. Steph and Dan have been painting one room a year since they acquired this house, and there was only one room left to paint this year: the study/office. Painting here is a bit of an ordeal, because we have to sweep the walls for cobwebs, dust, and insect leftovers and then we have to wash the wails to get rid of accumulated dirt, etc. BUT it was really rewarding because it’s clean and bright in here and I know we cleaned out most of the spiders, for now. I have a desk in the study, so it’s nice to have it clean and bright (walls are nearly white). We had some leftover paint and decided to touch up the walls in the rest of the living space (kitchen and dining room), which cascaded into us sweeping and washing THOSE walls, and now the whole place is clean and bright. I found a decorative sarong that we’re putting up in the dining room for a splash of colour. It makes me happy.

Work room before:



Work room after:
Living room Before:


Living room After:



Alrighty, it’s now June 1 and we had ANOTHER rain day today. Today was the frustrating kind; we got up, got dressed, and drove to the park. I had just turned my recorder (I record bird song from 5-6am) and it started to rain. Then it started to rain harder. What makes matters worse is I didn’t know the shortcut to get back to the main road (which is where I’d be picked up), so I bushwacked up a cliff of sorts, dodging acacia trees and stepping in puddles. What an adventure.

Back at the house, we decided to take further advantage of our time off, and we tiled the kitchen sink. Now, this sounds like a decently easy job, but Stephanie and I worked on it all day today. Yesterday we prepped the area by peeling paint and applying the Plasterbond (whatever that is). Today we did the actual tiling part... and it took us just under 12 hours. What an ordeal. We didn’t know how thick to make the “bondex” mortor stuff, and then it kept making a mess, and the tiles didn’t want to stay on vertically... Anyways, at about 4:30 we placed the last tile and cleaned up. Tomorrow is grout day. Then we have to apply caulking and then it’ll be finally done!!! We should have started this project on the first rain day. I’ll post photos of that project when we’re finished the whole shebang.

That’s pretty much all I have to say for now... it’s pretty boring when we don’t go out into the field!!!