Welcome to the Petri Dish

Are you ever in one of those situations where you feel like you are a bug in a petri dish being subjected to various viruses and infections, tested for survival of the fittest? I think school teachers fall into this category, as well as Xanterra employees working at the National Parks. Since we are working in different departments, Alex and I can watch the various flues enter the department, get passed from one employee to another, then transfer to another department. Our dorm living and communal dining in the Employee Dining Room (EDR) mean there's no avoiding exposure. With worldwide travellers passing through the park, hotels, and dining facilities, we have no idea where these bugs are coming from. Do we pass them onto the guests? Let's hope, "no."

So far, Alex and I have managed to catch one of 2 colds travelling around (maybe both, at this point). We have skirted around the pink eye, although this seems to be sticking mainly to the 20-somethings. I may have solved this mystery while travelling back from a brief excursion to Bozeman, MT with a car full of 20 to 22 year olds. M said to N, "My right eye itches (scratch, scratch, rub, rub). I hope I'm not getting the crud! Can I use your eye drops?" To which I said, "No!" perhaps a bit too emphatically. Realizing that I am, in fact, old enough to be the mother of a 2o year old, I thought I'd better share the knowledge that sharing eye drops is a good way to share conjunctivitis. Ah, youth. :-)

So, what do we do? We work, we sleep, we spend long meals in the EDR, drinking hot tea. We try to avoid the crud. We have no TV and none of the extracurricular activities of our regular life in the Real World that keep us so busy all of the time, so really, we sleep. I'm hoping when the weather improves, it will dry out all of the bugs and we can get on with what we came here to do (hiking, wildlife watching). Meanwhile, we're still waiting for the elk to calve. For the past 2 weeks, we've been told it will be any day now.

Alex has some good stories from work and bear watching. I'm trying to get him to write for the blog, so maybe you'll see a new writer soon! Any encouragement you can send him is welcome.