Summer continues here in Christchurch. The weather has been unsettled - at least to my Canadian eye - but generally warm and sunny. Shelley is knee-deep in bumblebees (as she teases apart how the relationships between plants, flowers, and their pollinators will be affected by global environmental change), I am getting bleary-eyed from staring at my laptop (as I grind through a decade of data that I've ignored and experiments I've been less-than-loyal to, in an effort to wrest scientific papers forth), and Aya and Rowan are simply enjoying the summer and each other's company (it is nice to seem them playing together, inventing all kinds of things, living the spontaneously imaginative and proximate lives of young children). Good times, for the most part.
We've moved house. This was largely inspired by the children's book "Mouse Moves House". It looked so fun, when Mack the Mouse packed up his books, his blue-and-white dishes, and his beautifully framed paintings of cheese into cunning wooden crates, and moved across the hallway using the back of his friend Fat Cat as a sort of furry lorry. Sadly, the reality is somewhat more pedestrian. We're now settled into our new house which is, luckily, very close to the university and Rowan and Aya's daycare.
As such, do not mail anything to our old address. Email me for our new address if you are planning on either mailing us a parcel or visiting.
I am hoping to get to the beach this weekend. I'd like to go swimming, but it hasn't happened much this summer.
Well, back to work. I need to email my (incredibly) young friend Tracy N. this afternoon. I am hoping that she is interested in co-authoring a paper on the role that riparian leave strips play in maintaining understory riparian vegetation in coastal temperate rain forests. I'm hoping she says 'yes'. I'm going to offer to do almost all the work (detailed outlines for introduction and discussion, the methods completely written, the results completely written (including analyses and figures)). Tracy knows more about understory vegetation than I ever will, though, so the paper would benefit greatly from her writing. I will even offer to let her be the first author. We'll see if I am persuasive enough.
Lately I have been missing all my climbing friends. Especially - but certainly not limited to - Laurie S., Greg T., Marco L., and Brad T. It's hard to climb a lot without people to inspire you. My hat is off to you!
Finally, does ANYONE know where I can find a good toque / tuque? A nice, Canadian toque? Long enough to roll up the bottom edge, a nicely-sized pom-pom, knit from acrylic (or wool, even)? If you look, you will see that this, the most quintessential of all Canadian garments (well, one of them, anyways, if you include the anorak, the amauti, the coureur de bois sash, the cree beaded moccasin), is being largely supplanted in our retail establishments by American-style 'beanies', which are mass-produced in China. A disgrace, really.
Take care!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment