Nine months and not counting

 Late on a Friday afternoon, and the pre-retirement reflective mode has kicked in.  Resolved not to walk away from this office in less than 9 months time leaving piles of things committed to the garbage without inspection, I've started going through the boxes of slides and photographs that have been gathering dust since the digital camera was invented.   It's interesting that the images I find here don't quite match up in sharpness and resolution to those produced by my Canon G10, but they're certainly a whole bunch better than those of the middle era, when digital was new and cool and 250kb images would painlessly record history for evermore.  I still have to confront that part of the collection.    But what these ones, a couple of which I've inserted here, may lack in quality, they certainly make up for in layered memories.

Top, the  team of the Stress Ecology Research Programme, stationed at University of Cape Town (ca 1993) just prior to moving into the newly built Kirstenbosch Research Centre (see image in previous post for what it looks like now).  And the team? Back (l-r): Mike O'Callaghan; Mario Fritz, Stephanie Wand, Stanley Snyders, Charles Musil;  Middle: Guy Midgley, Mike Rutherford (team skipper), Debbie Hunter, Timm Hoffman; Front: Deryck de Witt, George Davis.   The three old codgers in that team are Charles, Mike and myself, and we all retire this year, 2012, the year of the Dragon!       Picture two (taken about 7 or 8 years earlier) shows that we made it out into the field sometimes, and that some of the team actually put their backs into it.  I thank Deryck (left) and De Wet Bosenberg (right) for substantial help with the soil pit at the Highlands research site,  I'm not sure how much of the physical labour was done by either Andrew Flynn (centre; where is he now?) or myself (behind camera).

A field trip that I remember well was an exploratory one to Namaqualand in about 1995, where Timm Hoffman set up a project that remains active to this day.  His subsequent work has been hugely influential in the way we now think about the role that botany, ecology and gritty determination play in rural development and the basis for a green economy.   In the bottom image,  Timm takes a photo of a fenceline contrast between communal and privately owned rangeland.

In these next 9 months I'll probably find many more photographs and memories about my 28 years in SANBI (ex-NBI (ex-BRI)) which I'll want to share with no-one in particular, but at least this blog is somewhere that I can think this stuff through without cluttering up my desk with scraps of paper and piles of unsortable photos.       Cheers.  G