Journal of a Sabbatical

August 7, 1999

numerical order and wax bean soup

Bird Sightings
Budakeszi

1 great spotted woodpecker
2 long-tailed tits 

István with the mother of all pine cones - and he claims he had other girlfriends before he fell in love with conifers!

It's humid. I'm sweating up a storm - make that a flood. We were supposed to work only a half day today but we kept on until nearly 6:00 PM fearing we would never be done checking the Taiwan specimens.

There were more packages with acorns falling out but I recognized the "hulló makkok !!!" warning so avoided spilling them. I taped them down onto the paper with masking tape. István can glue them back on when he does the final mounting.We were done by 6:00 and all that's left to do is put the entire Taiwan collection in numerical order. That'll have to wait 'til Monday as we're going on a tour of the parliament building tomorrow.

Marti cooked dinner for us tonight, a soup made with wax beans and paprika and served with some kind of sausage and accompanied by pickles and some traditional Hungarian desserts. It's a challenge to cook in the little kitchen/dining room in the herbarium, especially since the little toaster oven/hot plate thing is on the floor. Nothing is arranged well for cooking. But Marti did a great job.

After dinner, István showed us the slides from the Taiwan expedition. It was good to see what the trees we'd been working with pressed parts of actually looked like in the wild. I got excited seeing the oak tree whose acorns I'd spent so much time with this afternoon.

István and Marti passed around a small album with some of their wedding pictures (they got married in June). They look beautiful together but it is weird to see István all dressed up in a suit wearing "flowers and ribbons" (as he put it). We are so used to seeing him in the field, collecting in his jeans and LL Bean Polartec pullover.