Field appetite

You'd think that I'd eat a lot more food when I'm doing field work than when I'm sitting in front of my computer all day, but you'd be wrong. By a lot. A typical day of field work involves getting up around 7:00 and starting work around 8:00. On days that we fly up on the glacier there tends to be very little time for lunch since its expensive to have the helicopter sitting around doing nothing. That doesn't bother me too much, as long as I can get a few bites of chocolate and an apple. If we don't have the helicopter we are at camp tending to our instruments. Setting up the instruments requires hauling heavy batteries and solar panels around. (Once, while doing field work in southeast Alaska, I even hauled loads of rocks up the glacier. Seemed kind of pointless, since the glacier would just carry them back to its terminus...) On those days lunch becomes a little more important, but I still don't eat any more than I do at home. Dinner tends to be around 7:00 or 7:30 and is followed by a game of cards. Some days - especially if the weather is nice - we work after dinner though we usually try to avoid doing so.

Let's compare that to what I do when I'm in Fairbanks. I get up around 8:00 and am at work by 9:00 or 9:30. We have a coffee break at 10:30, which is occasionally accompanied by some sort of cake or chocolate. If not, then I'm hungry by 11:00. I usually make it until noon before diving into my lunch, which today consisted of a fairly large salad, and apple, and a couple of sandwiches. By 3:00 I was already thinking about dinner. I made it until 7:00 without eating anything else, but I had to snack on some munchies while I was cooking dinner in order to have the energy to cook. Its now 8:30 and I feel fine, but I'm pretty sure that a big bowl of ice cream will hit the spot in about an hour.

The only explanation that I can come up with is that my computer needs more than 4 GB of RAM to do all the work that I ask it to. It is forced to suck energy from me to complete all of its tasks.