Big forest, tiny house

We have two houses in the forest, Hans' house and Marina's house... I've never met Hans, but I hear he is a lovely and elderly German ornithologist who makes the occasional visit to the forest. When he's away (i.e. usually) 1-3 of my supervisor's students live in his house - like me! Thank you, Hans! Here you can see the inside of our kitchen/office/dry lab/bedroom/common area. The tacit point here is that space is limited. The white thing on the left is our recently installed solar freezer where I store all fecal and urine samples collected from the monkeys.

The back room is a designated bedroom. Maressa's bed is on the left and mine (momentarily sans mos-net) is on the right. The desk was moved from the kofficebedlabroom when the freezer arrived. On the other side of the desk's wall is our shower-closet where we take bucket baths. At the foot of Maressa's bed and underneath both beds are where we store our clothes and extra equipment. I hope you're getting the idea... getting along with housemates and timing your farts appropriately is really important here.

 Here is a picture of the full summer crew at Hans' house for dinner. Clockwise from the photographer's left is Maressa, Megan, Lauren, Taylor, Alan, Darcy, and my supervisor Marina. Most of these people have now left and a few new ones have come. Maressa and Lauren are still here with me.

For dinner, we each take turns cooking for everyone else. Typical foods on our menu are curried vegetables, rice, pasta, and the occasional treat such as homemade pumpkin gnocchi (huzzah!) which Megan makes so well. We also take regular turns cleaning the house. As you might guess, we don't have a basement for laundry nor a weekly trash collector. Being at the end of the line in terms of waste management makes one very conscious about the quantity of waste produced. We have an organics pit for compost, but we burn plastics and paper. Yes, the photo below-left is one of the Ozone screaming, to quote my friend Chase Nuñez. Nevertheless, I find staring into undulating flames of the burning trash to be very therapeutic. Do you have great alternatives for trash burning? Let me know. For now, I just reduce, reuse and recycle like I'm going for a Girl Scout badge. Sorry to my housemates in New York City, who have to experience my stickler habits of trash sorting which are difficult to drop.

Therapeutic trash fire and its fumes wafting into our drying laundry.

Maressa and Megan processing plant samples outside Hans' house.

Good internet is difficult to come by, so don't be surprised if I'm only posting here about twice per month! Feel free to comment or follow the blog for alerts of new posts ;).

Lots of love,

Nicole