Kia Ora!

Haere mai, or Welcome!  You've found Holly's pseudo-travelogue chronicling her adventures abroad as she conducts Ph.D. Thesis research in New Zealand.

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Because I'll be simultaneously filling my family in on mundane details (like my awesome orange-and-black bedroom) and explaining my research in bits and pieces, I also welcome any and all comments (you can post them at the end of any of my entries) and questions you'd like to post.  And if you're sick of hearing about trees and fungi all the time, check out my weekly columns in the Stanford Daily, yet another mass of non-work writing I love doing!

A Case of the (Missing) Mondays

Last month, when I boarded a plane to Canada for a math conference, I thought affectionately that I was glad that the last stamp in my passport, which expires in October, would be from my beloved Northern neighbor.

I didn't expect to be headed to New Zealand for another stamp before I sent my passport off for renewal. But, as those of you who saw me in my most frantic moments at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting this week know, sometimes surprises happen.

 This time, the surprise came on Monday: an email from a colleague who'd been kindly keeping an eye on my seedlings in New Zealand. "There's a fungus among us," he wrote -- or something of the sort. Or, to use another trite turn of phrase, "Houston, we have a problem."

Back to Aotearoa!

For those of you who don't know, when I left New Zealand last March, I'd just set up a greenhouse full of 264 soil-stuffed pieces of piping.

The effort represented several weeks of dragging J and K out into the field, breaking our hands hammering the white PVC segments into the ground, and breaking our backs hauling the intact soil cores back to the lab. (In actual fact? We had a ton of fun!)

The end result: Neatly nested little soil cores, waiting to be
planted up with Douglas-fir seedlings before I left last March.

Two-Month Summary

Obviously I've been rather lax in posting these summary statistics, but with two months down and two weeks to go, here are some entertaining figures drawn mostly from J. and my trip to Nelson Lakes in search of more field sites.

Distance driven on the "wrong side" of the road in the last three days: 1200 km (~750 miles)
Number of American-style (i.e. counter-clockwise) "open space U-turns" (i.e., in parking lots or grassy areas): 2
Number of Kiwi (i.e. clockwise) U-turns: 3
Number of mp3 files that will fit on a standard CD: 140
Do two such mp3-packed CDs fill a 1200 km journey: No

Lake temperature in St. Arnaud: 45 F
Number of eels seen post-swim: 8
Length of largest eel observed: 4 ft
Number of one-legged ducks spotted: 2 (out of 30+)
Number of stories about ducklings being eaten by eels heard: 1

Ocean temperature in Kaikoura: 60 F
Number of frightening creatures seen in ocean: 0
Moral of this story: Salty >>> Fresh

Number of insect bites currently being ignored: 13 (plus the 3 I won't feel until I wake up scratching them)
Number of field sites obtained and sampled: 2
Number of field sites expected: 5

Desire to do future work in insect-free, ocean-full Antarctic: 50,000,000
Relative scale of this desire: Unknown

Above Water

When I left California, it was in the midst of the driest winter in twenty years -- so dry that when my friend Luke and I went to Yosemite last December, every single road was open.  (On my previous trip there, Dad and I arrived in May to find most of the roads still closed.)

I wrote about the state of Californian affairs in my weekly Seeing Green column (water has, so far, been making an annual appearance, as it also graced my first-ever piece for the Stanford Daily), and then hopped on a plane to New Zealand, where I've been enjoying plenty of clouds and the occasional bout of precipitation.

Though I greet any kind of overcast weather with unabated delight (ever since a summer in Juneau, I've preferred clouds to sunshine), I was particularly ecstatic to go for a run in the rain during my first week in Christchurch because, as my landlords had just informed me, this is the dry season here in New Zealand.  Although the place seems unbelievably wet compared to California, at this time of year, water restrictions are tightened.  This is especially true in the wake of infrastructure-damaging earthquakes, which have compromised water delivery in the metropolitan area.

I've never been the best at conserving water -- I don't drink very much of it, but I sure do take long showers.  I'm trying to get better, though, especially after experience with a shower timer in Death Valley and military-style showers shipboard a few years ago.

To my great delight, I also received the following set of great tips from a Seeing Green reader:

1. Collect rainwater in buckets for outdoor use.  My landlords do this!  But note that such things are not permitted in all areas.  For example, Colorado residents need permits to capture their own runoff, because the legal system there believes that rainfall belongs to the downstream recipient.
2. Flush toilets with shower water.  (Did you know that if you pour a bucket of water rapidly into a toilet, it will flush?  This is a great trick Dad told me about when I was little, just in case...)
3. Xeriscape (i.e., plant drought-tolerant ornamentals; landscape to eliminate the need for supplementary water).  Very important in dry places like California.  Plus, the best plant choices tend to be natives.
4. Capture the first, cold wash of shower water in a bucket.  This is my absolute personal favorite.  I have to confess, even with the shower timer, I never flip the hourglass until the water is tolerably warm.  Now, I have a way to partially alleviate my guilt!