From the Dungeon to the Sewers

This past week I worked like a nut. I have been driven by the anxiety that I would have to leave with my goals 95% accomplished — a lot of work done but it would be incomplete until I could find a way to come back and finish it. What a perfect waste of a summer that would be! Fortunately, that kind of fear is a powerful motivator, and I have made very good progress.

During the first half of my Paris adventure, when I was going through the Anodonta specimens, the going was slow. Not sure how things were arranged, what I would find, what kind of information I wanted to gather and how I would ultimately present it, I went through and inventoried every specimen in that part of the Locard Collection. By the time that I found all the Anodonta types, I had a pretty good handle on the nature of the collections. I had also developed a handy database interface to speed up data capture. By the time I started working on Unio the week before last, I only needed to worry about the specimens in which I was interested, and there was no confusion about what I wanted from them. I was able to do in a week what had previously taken three!

I spent Monday through Thursday last week freezing in the dungeon of the zootheque from 9:00-5:00 (the only hours of access), finding and setting aside the Unio types in the Locard Collection. I also spent my mornings from 7:30-9:00 in the MNHN library digging data as necessary. On Friday, I brought the rest of the types from the general collection in the zootheque to be with their cousins across the Jardin des Plantes in the Malacologie Department type collection. And, I photographed them all. I appreciate that all this might not sound all that interesting or entertaining, but Friday afternoon, when I was finished, I was positively euphoric. I just wondered around the department telling the few people that were there (and not on holiday) that I was done. All that remains of my work here in Paris is a bit more library work and to write up a detailed account of what I did to their collection.

Besides going to work everyday, I also managed to get out for a little tourism. Nancy and Daphne have done positively EVERYTHING, so we are running out of landmarks to visit. Last Saturday, we visited the Sewers (you read that right, the Paris Sewers). It smelled like a sewer and was so loud that Nancy and I had to take turns scream-reading the various exhibits to Daphne. We took the opportunity of that excursion to tape the first episode of The Daphne Show.

On Sunday, we took the Metro out to Père Lachaise Cemetery to hunt for Jim Morrison’s grave. That was a fun walk through a beautiful cemetery but quite a disappointment. All the graffiti, empty bottles, evidence of midnight orgies and even his famous bust have been removed. Now a fence has been erected and the spot is under constant video surveillance. There is no longer anything noteworthy about Morrison’s grave except that in it is interred one of the most over-rated hippies of the Rock and Roll Era. On the bright side, we had lunch at a delightful cafe with the best service in Paris. When we ordered our hamburger à cheval, our waiter made sure that we understood that it would come with a fried egg rather an a bun. He even drew a picture to make sure we would be satisfied with our order.

And so, we have come to our last week (5 days, really) in France. It’s time to start cleaning up and make sure we haven’t forgotten anything. I am looking forward to going home and getting a haircut.