Double whammy

This week you get a pictorial tour of my holiday to the North Island (minus the ones of me in my knitted swimsuit cos those just shouldn't ever be made public).

Lake Wakaremoana/iti nice. boots too small. nasty feet. whirinake gorgeous. boots too small. couldn't walk.

Rotorua fun. conference boring. best student talk. $500 cheque. tequila shot. vomit. nice.

the flight home from rotorua was not nice. hungover. cancelled flight. 3.5hr bus to auckland. lost bags (thankfully not mine). lost car (again thankfully not mine).

phd symposium the next day was a little stressful. changed timetable. still asleep and hour before my talk. best biodiversity talk. $100 cheque. no tequila!

Need holiday from holiday!

There was a canyon in whirinaki

Lake Waikaremoana

where there were swallows

and swans

and a cinabar moth

Lake Waikareiti was nice and sunny

and then it turned to custard!

mental note to self: buy bigger boots!!

ewww

holiday time

well almost...heading up to hamilton and te urewera national park tomorrow for a camping holiday before going to rotovegas for a conference. conference sahould be interesting - michelle and I have fashioned ourselves woollen bathing suits to wear to the dinner - very sexy and a tad itchy (and yes, the dinner is fancy dress and we are not just being weird). i should also add that there will be NO photos posted!!

Speaking of photos, I sort of accidentally ended up putting one of mine in an exhibition and it has been sold!! Twice!! how cool is that.

Speaking of selling things, Michelle and I have been getting into this screenprinting caper and have been wearing our shirts to uni (unfortunately usually the same ones on the same day) but people keep asking where we got them from and whether or not they can order some for xmas!! fun

i'll be back in two weeks or so with fun camping pics :o)

wrybill

black fronted terns

braided river birds

imagine getting paid $20/hr to jet boat 30 km up a river and then walk back down, counting birds. This has been my past week and next week hopefully as well!! the whole thing made much more exciting by having to launch oneself onto and off of a jetboat as it is drifting past in order to get to the next island. Amazingly, i have managed to do this without badly injuring myself (yet) - just a nice case of badly bruised jetboat knee.

looking up the waimak from bealey spur

moeraki boulders

lake pukaki

ship creek

whangamomona

it's been awhile and i know that i keep promising pics but to be honest, they are still on my camera and i'm too lazy to download them so you'll just have to wait.

Interesting points from the past few weeks

• my damselfly pic won another prize - 1st flora/fauna and 3rd overall in the local tramping club competition which netted me a pair of waterproof binos :o)
• i've started a veggie garden (much easier when you don't have to attempt to chipmunk-proof everything)

huh... i think that's it. not very exciting or revelatory really, is it. surely i must have done something else that's vaguely interesting .... but apparently not. Oh well...

for a relaxing time, make it a west coast time

yay for holidays - particularly when you end up on the we(s)t coast. here's a pictorial tour of my trip.

more to follow :o)

ship creek

knight's point kowhai

lake paringa

lake paringa

look out!

cameron flat

i'm in the money (sort of)

So this is going to be an expensive month. I'm flying to wellington for a friend's engagement party ($200 + food/booze) and then staying up there for a conference for the rest of the week ($270 registration + $150 accommodation + food/booze). Then driving to alex for another friend's birthday (petrol/food/booze), then onto queenstown/wanaka for a skiing holiday (skiing/petrol/accommodation/food/booze). Then it's home for a few days for a meeting (wof/petrol/food/booze) and then home via dunedin (petrol/food/booze). All in all, it's gonna play havoc with my visa balance. But it will hopefully balance a little better after managing to win a travel award and get my conference fees waived :o) Now I might actually be able to afford to go skiing.

creative urges

sometimes i get the urge to do something creative. but i can't draw or paint to save my life, particularly if it involves having to make something look like something - it just ain't gonna happen. which is where photography saves my arse - you can just point and shoot and after 200 digital shots, something is bound to come out right. Now i'm relatively practical and have delved into woodworking, or at least restoring old broken things in the past. I can sew and knit and have produced a few gems in my time but also a vast wardrobe of things that will never see the daylight. but to be honest, i'm really one of those people who sees something cool and then goes "I could so make that" and then never gets off my lazy arse to do it. I go through fads - last weekend it was mosiacing which got as far as smashing up a whole heap of tiles. I now have a boot filled with broken tiles that will no doubt stay there for the rest of the year. You might well wonder where this diatribe is going. Well....i've found a new fad that is fun, requires little artisitc talent if you have access to the internet and photoshop and turns out cool results. take a look for yourself.....

pingu

a pressie to go in mum's new house

(sorry about the crappy lighting)

titi

a slice of kiwiana

my favourite

spring has sprung (for now)

creative coronation

i found myself describing what i got up to last tuesday night to a friend and was suddenly horrified to find that my life recently seems to have revolved around sitting at home watching two-hour episodes of coronation and knitting while waiting for my bread to finish baking in the oven. i never thought that i would make good housewife material and i was naturally somewhat distraught.

But then I took a step back and thought about the things that have come about because of my coronation street addiction and things came back into perspective. Now I'm not advocating that you all tune in to the dramas down at the rover but you might be surprised at what you can achieve.

pretty in pink

hoody #2 - moss green

15 months in the making but worth every second

wouldn't want my lady grey to get cold now, would we...

luxmoore grunt

hmmm....sometimes i wonder about my sanity. like right now for example. i just got up at 6:30am to enter in a running race in december! not just any running race but a 28km mountain run with a 800m smack bang in the middle. how is this a good idea?! admittedly i did do it last year and i did kick my sister's arse by 15 mins but she be on the ball this year, so i imagine the tables will turn. not to mention the fact that the last run i went on happened to be the said race lsat year!! of course, not helped by gammy knee which decided to dislocate itself midway through a river crossing out in the middle of nowhere while looking for ducks. but i suspect that this might be the thing needed to pull me out of this rut i have got myself bogged in. guess i should stop my early morning ramblings and go for a run....

lake rotoiti at dusk

glorious geekdom

it's great when you find something that really gets you going - something that lights your fire and makes you wanna sing it out to the world. i had one of those moments yesterday! it involved...ergh...writing coded population models and fiddling around with maps in gis. Everyone else talked about outside dirty things like catching ducks and banding things and jabbing birds with big needles while graeme and i hung out in the kitchen with imaginary numbers and beta distributions and geeked our little hearts out. It was so much fun and, the best bit, we have pretty much solved an entire chapter of my thesis already - i just have to plug in the numbers!!

presentation blues

another weekend wasted stressing about a presentation that i have to give in order to get funding for my phd. It's very pretty but i've been struggling to put the concepts in words that make sense without waffling on for half an hour. Had a practise run through today during which i didn't get slaughtered, so hopefully it should run smoothly tommorrow in St Arnaud.

Am driving up there tommorrow and give my talk and then hang around for a workshop on wednesday. thinking i might meander back on thursday and stop and play in the hills on the way, although the weather looks like it might be rubbish, so we'll see how that goes. should be a go trial of the waterproofness of my new tent either way. J&P have gone up to the north island for 10 days or so, so will have the house back to myself for a while again.

will post pretty pictures when i get back :o)

blah

Have been kinda stressed these last few weeks - lots to do at school, funding proposals to write and present, conference talk to write (for which i don't have the data), no guarantee i'm gonna get the funding for my project, $700 of my own money to fork out for the conference.....i could go on but whining about it ain't gonna help. had a bitchy weekend and am driving my poor sister (and no doubt, phil) up the wall.

I need to get out of the house and do something!!! start eating, sleeping, exercsing properly and generally stop sulking!

snow day

was the day when we all ran away from the lab to celebrate the joys of winter in the southern alps (and the fact that we only had one day left until our supervisor got back from Alaska). So it was almost 2.5 weeks ago that it snowed but there's still a good half a metre of snow on the other side of porter's pass - nice icy crust on the top that adds an extra element of ouch to snowball fights and taking a step means running the risk of falling thru up to your knees. Lake Linden was completely frozen over with at least of foot of ice for approx 20m from the edge - perfect for attempting to ice skate. Found a nice steep slope for sliding down, with just over a 10m runout before you hit the road. But remember kids ...

playing in the snow ...

can end badly

ummm...

I'm just gonna post something here because it's been awhile and i feel like i should but don't really have anything to say.

High/Lowpoints of the last "however-long it's been since i posted"

• I bought knee-high boots and they were free apart from the "selling my soul to marketing companies" bit
• and a super-cute wee black skirt (so turning into a girl)
• it snowed again and has been arse-cold all week
• but i got a pair of fleece pants from the ware-whare
• having flatmates again is driving me up the wall
• and i'm gonna become the "flatmate from hell" again if i'm not careful
• sin city, broken flowers, eyes wide shut and a clockwork orange are a weird combination of movies to watch in a weekend and result in strange looks in the tea room
• snow day on wednesday this week when we are all going to run away from uni and go play in the snow (I'll post pics and make you all insanely jealous - mwahahaha)
• i need to learn to spell in evil

my award winning photo!!

wahoo

Not only did I buy this yesterday for half price but I also got second prize in the open section of the school's photo competition. yay for me :D

Nothing planned for the weekend - looks like it's gonna be nasty outside!!

mount cook from the end of lake pukaki

sunset from the styx hut

whio habitat on the styx

fieldwork is like a holiday

at least it is when you work in conservation. headed over to the coast last wednesday to check out some whio habitat. managed to cruise up the sytx without getting the truck stuck or injuring myself in the river which, believe me, is quite an achievement!! Saw a few birds but it was a bit of a rushed mission.

cruised back down to franz josef to play glaciologist again but kinda got rained out, so skipped over to wanaka for the mountain film festival. crazy climbing/paragliding/basejumping bastards! kinda puts you off going outside for fear of falling off some steep-arse rockface (or being hit by someone else falling off a steep-arse rock face).

got dragged to the fairydown sale again and came away with a half-price pair of boots and very nearly a tent. will probably end up going again tomorrow to get that tent. yay for student allowance back-payments.

now i'm back in the lab and struggling to find the motivation to do work. tried sugar by enhaling a packet of winegums but that ain't helping. so procrastinating on the web instead. hence the long and rather rambling diatribe to which you have been submitted. sincere apologies :o)

how to waste an entire day

enter a work photo competition! By the time you "enhance" the photos in photoshop by sliding the wee saturation and hue bars up and down to find the optimum tone and then adjust the contrast and brightness, crop out the crap around the edges and then rotate them slightly to make sure that the horizon is straight, it's time for lunch. After lunch, head down to the pharmacy to get more than you are allowed to enter printed. Then proceed to spend several hours mulling over which ones to put in. ask everyone who walks past for their opinion - sure to be different and not at all helpful in making a decision. Finally decide on the final three but these need a bit more cropping, so go back to step one. Then fill out the entry form which requires some creative writing about how you acutally took the photo and a snazzy title. Then painstakingly stick the photos onto the mounting card, ensuring that they are on straight. Bingo - it's almost time to go home. To fill in those last few minutes, write in your blog about your new found method of procrastination. Brilliant!!

expensive toys

for cheap!!! managed to score myself a $800 sleeping bag for $300!!! yay for the fairydown sale. rated down to -22 degrees which was perhaps of a wee bit of an overkill in my flat last night but it is super cool - check it out

looking down the valley from up on the glacier

small crevasse

franz josef glacier

an icy challenge

there's nothing like being out in the hills to restore one's soul and hanging off the side of a glacier by the points of your crampons definitely brings about a new lease of life pretty quickly. damn fucking scary is what it is!! it's quite hard to convince your brain that, despite the fact that your feet are on a 45 degree angle on a slick sheet of ice and you are right on the edge of a 200m ice cliff above some enormous boulders, you're not actually going to fall off. fantastic experience!! looking down into a crevasse at that crazy blue ice is just so cool. can't wait to head back over there in a couple of weeks to do it all again.

bang

an interesting post-script to the bike tyre saga. Managed to scam a ride home, so was changing the tyre in my living room, as you do. Put the new tube in, grabbed my other bike pump and began pumping away, as you do. It was getting kinda hard but the gauge only read 30psi, so I kept on pumping, as you do. And kept on pumping and pumping until ... bang!! The damn thing exploded and almost blew the wall out of my tyre!! Much like jumping on a ballon, only about a million times louder. Good thing I owned more than one tube. Took a little more care the next time round!!

Heading over to Franz Josef glacier tonight with my cousin to play on the glacier for a few days. Something for her masters. Will post lovely west coast pics when i get back :op

punctures

for once this morning, I was vaguely organised and managed to get my arse out the door by 8:30 (which, for me, is a minor miracle). Cruising alongside the motorway, the whole pedalling thing started to get quite hard. look down and one dead flat tyre. Now I was a boy scout and, like all good scouts, I know how to be prepared. So i whip the bike upside-down, take off the wheel and remove the tube, replacing it with one that's in my saddle bag. So far, so good. Bust out the bike pump and discover to my horror that the tube has a presta valve which is something my trusty bike pump doesn't want to play with. It's got a thing for schraders. So after mucking about for 10 mins and being laughed at by the men at the tyre shop across the street, i have to pack up my shit and walk my sorry arse to school. Which puts me later to school than i normally am (but at least i had an excuse). The unfortunate thing is that i am now going to have to walk my way back home again and it's frosty out :o(

more pics...no post

okay, so i'm being lazy but what ya gonna do

catherdral cove

weird erosion patterns at catherdral cove

the coromandel walkway (before we got to the cows)