Oh, the Mondays

Some of you (Hal!) may have noticed one stray post claiming to be from the future (a.k.a. 2013) constantly hovering on the top of my blog.  It's not actually from the future -- it's just pretending to be, so that there's a constant introduction to the site for new visitors.

Now for something from the present:  It's Monday here in New Zealand, so while the rest of you have been preparing to watch epic football* games, or going looking for amphibians, or sleeping late, I've loaded up a backpack, hopped on a loaner bicycle, and pedaled 14km (about 8.7 miles) into work to start my day.

Inspired by my Stanford labmate Rachel, and my very dear friend and former roommate Li Ling, I've decided that real scientists bike at least 5 miles to work every day.  (Actually, this new method of transport was really inspired by a scheduling conflict with my landlord, Hugh, with whom I usually carpool in to work at Landcare Research.)

It's quite the pleasant ride -- when you're not worried about getting lost, that is!  I can see myself getting quite accustomed to it over the next few days -- hopefully so accustomed that I remember to stop for pictures to show you all!  All in all, it's just part of the transformation of Holly, from soft-and-lazy desk worker to hard-core field biologist!  (Yeah, we'll see how long this lasts... probably until the first time I encounter a steep slope or a wasp's nest in the field, and run away screaming.)


*A note on sports:  Here in New Zealand, the big ones are cricket and rugby.  My landlords (Hugh and Robyn) are tremendous sports fans, and have been slowly teaching me the rules of cricket.  When rugby season starts next month, I'm sure I'll learn all about that, too!

As most of us know, there's general confusion between Americans and the rest of the world about what "football" means.  I've learned to specify "American football" in most cases, but here in NZ, it's called "gridiron."  All right, that's well and good.  So does "football" mean soccer?  Nope!  Here's the jargon, as best I can map it:

Gridiron -- American Football
Soccer -- Plain old black-and-white ball soccer (but the uncool term for it)
Football -- Used to mean rugby, but slowly coming to mean soccer.  Except that there's some complication Hugh was trying to explain to me about several different kinds of football in Australia and.... oh well.