stats, trivers, and the room with no door

so it's just after 6 am here, and "how did i get to the internet so early?" you ask? WELL, me and Laoora and K actually stayed here at the Hacienda Merida (the hostel with the internet) last night because TODAY WE ARE HIKING UP VOLCANO MADERAS!!! WOOT WOOT!!! we leave in about an hour so that is why we had to stay here last night, to meet our guide and be ready on time today. we got here kinda late and tried to explain that our prof had made reservations for us. Laoora's spanish is pretty good so we managed. there was a heated discussion between the hacienda staff for a while, all that we could make out was "pero no ai puerta"..... which didn't make sense at the time.... then they took us to our room. half of an old barn, with four bunk beds in it, three of them made up nicely waiting for us. and as the kid who took us there was leaving, he casually mentioned "lo siento, pero no ai puerta"... "sorry, but there is no door".
what a night.
it was pretty great actually.
nice to be in a hostel again, it's been too long.
but lots of bugs and dreams about huge taurantuals coming in through the open garage-door-sized doorway and crawling over me during the night. no big deal though. basically hilarious.
then we met our "bilingual" guide and quickly realized that "bilingual" here means "can speak spanish slowly".... greeeeeeeeeat. (actually, it should be noted that this is the first spanish-speaking local (aside from Leonel) who i've met that actually DOES speak spanish slowly when speaking to english people.... usually they just continue to talk at hiper spead and then wave me off with something along the live of "es de estados unidos, si?" at which point i proudly annouce "NO! SOY DE CANADA!" and they laugh and ask me if it's an independent country.... oh boy) our guide informed us about the many impending perils of our trip up the volcano and then asked if we would like pollo or queso for lunch tomorrow. queso please. definetly queso. no me gusta carne. soy vegetariana.

so right now i am mentally gearing up for a grueling four hour hike up the side of the mountain that is right behind the compound where we live. i am hoping to find a magical place with capuchins and cloud forest but probably i'll be hallucinating and in need of oxygen most of the time, so even if we pass that, i won't notice. it's fine though, it should be good. i'm stoked.

right now i am done taking my data for my project and i'm into the number crunching stage. Chi-Squared Tests, Mann-Whitney U Tests, non parametric, parametric, anova AAAAAAAAAAAAA.... mostly the worst part is going through 41 hours of number and letter codes and counting all the instances of everything under this condition and that condition and blah blah blah.

also, the originality and applicability of my entire project depends on me getting my hands on Triver's 1972 article "Parental Investment and Sexual Selection".... which I cannot find anywhere. cept for in one place but it's in a protected format so i can only access the first page and no more. seriously? seriously. baaaaaaaaad. so now i should go and get on that.

things are good here, but i can't believe that it's almost over!
three days until my presentation! five days until we leave for Granada! then three days there and I come back here to TA the next session of the class.(which i am totally unqualified to do, and therefore nervous about.) then i have a whole 'nother month of rice and beans and monos. i'm pretty stoked. I might scrap my study, cause it's a dead end, and instead continue on with my friend J's study. Her's is super neat but she needs about 50hours on a control group to make it publishable, so if i could get that data, we'd be set. it will, however, involve sweet talking some locals to let me onto their property everyday, since the best control group situation is not on property owned by the field station... so we'll see bout that.

ooooo also - i saw a coral snake two days ago! a coral snake! yes! so colourful. so poisonous. so deadly 100% of the time. but according to our prof, if you got bitten, you'd have ten minutes to call your momma before the delirium sets in and you die. let's hope that it doesn't come to that. i wear pants in the forest now. coral snakes are rear fang biters (or something like that) so apparently being bitten through pants means you might not die. here's to hoping!

anyways
i MUST go now
track down that Trivers article. must must must.
wish me luck up the volcano.
i have no idea what to expect... should be good though. for sure.

adios amigos