ode to chris

hello chris,

yes you, frequent skimmer of the blogosphere,
while you are surfing from your office, i am here
tracking all who visit my site so that i can see
little strings of numbers in your address: i.p.
yours is: 128.138.152.179
you surf with mozilla to check sites: activethrust is mine
your screen resolution is 1680 X 1050
visitor statistic tracking is something quite nifty
sorry to have ditched you in colorado, that wonderful land
with a temporary stand-in roomate who is apparently quite bland
if i am smart and manage to return without getting bird-flu from a duck
i promise that upon my return we will throw another awesome beer-luck!

ok, so i wasn't super sneaky in finding out who exactly was looking at this blog almost as much as my mom, but i did have the help of the cu geology department sys-admin in confirming the ip address for me, as well as office mates who confirmed his actions... btw chris, joya says get back to work. all in all though, i can't blame anyone for using my blog as an excuse to procrastinate... i spend more time working on this than most people spend reading it.

i think i'm getting over this dumb cold. yeah, definitely a cold, not allergy. i got a lot of much needed sleep this weekend, something like 14 to 15 hours a day. i hate being sick in other countries, mostly because it's so damn hard to get the drugs you're used to. i went to a pharmacy here to try to find something like nyquil or just a general 'cold medicine', and when i described what my symptoms were, the pharmacist kept pulling out all these perscription allergy medications. 'no no no, not zyrtec, no not allegra, no thanks'. i ended up just going home and popping a couple of advils. i was also talked into taking propolis by my roomate... wow that stuff is n-a-s-t-y ! it tastes pretty much like what it is: the distilled essence of bee's puke. seriously. actually propolis in it's raw form is a brown waxy substance bees use to seal their combs... it is an extremely potent anti-microbial agent, which has been extensively researched as a usable anti-bacterial treatment. a couple dropper-fulls of that right down the gullet a day make a big difference. the taste does send you reeling for a minute...

back to work on this monday afternoon... getting some slope-maps done and some curvature analysis... all in the quest to find these somewhat elusive axial surfaces. i almost forgot that i've had a request for some 'interesting geologic information' about the island by some of the local bloggers... so perhaps i'll try to post some of that soon.

anyway, i'll leave you with a couple pics... one is just of a part of my room... thought some folks would like to know i'm doing quite well in tian-mu, and have just about every creature-comfort i could wish for. the other is just of the sea-walk in dan-shui by the coast.


~t