Zen and the Art of Curry Sauce

I'm sleepy because I have been up all night soaking in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence by Robert Pirsig. I found a copy at the library that has been in the library's circulation since April 14th, 1993. It wears its age well.

The book is part travel journey and part philosophical ramblings:  not much different from my own life, but addicting in its articulate complexity.  It really gets my wheels rolling.

I finally made it the farmers market with my roommates!  We planned to leave at 9, but didn't get out of the house until ten owing to a purring fluff machine of a kitty who decided we were to adopt him. 

We named him Sparkle Jones. It took us ~12 hours to begrudgingly call the phone number on his collar.

The farmers market was great.  I felt a little sore missing the deals all my local farmers give me on produce,  but ended up with a beautiful haul of early autumnal veggies.

NZ Queen apples, yum. And carrots taste magical here. Sweet and crunchy. 

 As I write,  a thick pan of saag simmers on the stove top. It will taste so good with brown rice, yum! (ingredients: ginger,  garlic,  curry powder and paste,  boiled spinach and coconut milk)

Soggy Saag, made with farmers market spinach.

The main difference I noticed (it seems that a great percentage of my mental capacity is dedicated to comparison and contrasts) is that this farmers market was bustling with a huge variety of artisan products like cakes,  beads,  cheeses,  honeys, cured meats, hummuses (?Word?), scones,  teas,  etc.  whereas the Taos farmers market is predominantly produce.  The produce here was fairly pricey,  but not entirely out of college student budget expensive. 

This stall wins presentation hands down. Look at the flowers on those cakes!

Bustling Christchurch / Canterbury farmers market.

This cutie selling raspberries had raspberry colored cheeks!

Enjoying a fresh-picked apple by the Avon river

Bamboo shade on a prodigal saturday

Speaking of college budget: I am pleased to inform you of my university's apparently new and pretty effective marketing campaign. It seems that kiwi advertisers are finally getting savvy to the fact that sex sells.  This handsome fellow was staring back at me from bus billboard.

I didn't realize until after I crossed the Pacific ocean that this fellow doesn't accurately reflect the average uni population

Tonight is my last night before classes get rolling again.  It'll be back to the daily routine for another 6 weeks.  Keeping a positive mindset and staying integrated with my experience is my highest intention right now.  I'm keeping faith that the answers I seek will follow. 

Positive psychology works:  using adjectives like these help me maintain an attitude of gratitude.

Doodle of Disco.  I want to add a flower in there, too. Free time is the best.

Two drawings on tracing paper come together for a spooky but soothing effect.

the Neverending Fall Break

The neverending fall break.  We still have 5 more days off before classes start again!  My mind is boggled but I will not complain.    

I have spent a good portion of this break studying and getting ahead for 2nd term which will undoubtedly start up at 120mph. I guess since we are using the metric system here, it's more accurate to say ~240kmph. 

I'm nearly finished with the longest, most interesting science lab report of my life.  Basically in the lab we isolated the gene that makes jellyfish fluorescent and cloned it into e.coli bacteria so they glowed, too.  After mushing up those poor glowing bacteria like little mashed potatoes, we used a pretty new age machine that read out the bacteria's gene sequence .  That information came out as 760 letter long chain of just G, C, A, and T's.   I put that info into the BLAST, which is a sweet online algorithm tool pioneered in the 1990s by a few brilliant mathematicians who worked for the National Institute of Health.  The algorithm searches super, super, super long DNA sequences just like the one I got from the lab readout (but hundreds of thousands, even millions of letters long),  and helps to find matches.  Unsurprisingly, the gene that we cloned into the bacteria had dna sequence matches with pars of the Victoria jellyfish genome.

We made e.coli glow like this! http://cam.facilities.northwestern.edu/588-2/green-fluorescent-protein

Now that i'm nearly finished with the lab I feel very proud of my accomplishment!  The whole process did not seem simple at all,  and I had to do a lot of problem solving to understand the mechanisms involved. Honestly,  for a solid few weeks I had no idea what we were even doing.  So it feels good to now be able to put it in my own words.

Besides working on school things,  I have been chipping away at the mountain of to-dos for my physicians assistant school applications.  Research,  writing essays, applying for financial aid, and securing letters of recommendation are just a few of the balls I'm juggling.  The respite from classes is beyond welcomed! 

I'm my favorite personal chef. Today it was garlicky broccoli with tomato, tofu, and rice. 

Words to live by. 

I'm wishing friends and family days of love.  I hope that we all can see the sunshine coming through our deep being.

land unlocked

Hi

Lilies by the beach

Oh boy, oh boy.  I am finally coming to understand why all my coastally raised friends balk when I tell them of my land-locked upbringing. 

Luckily in NZ you are never far from mountain or ocean!

I had been back from the great roadtrip for about three days before the yearning to go to the ocean became overwhelming. I made sure to get a solid breakfast in my belly before throwing on my winter coat and hopping onto my bike. What is this yearning!  Be Still my heart! 

What even is this?! On campus. No wonder I yearn to escape.

I tried to bargain for a nice riverside spot that wouldn't require the daunting hour long ride,  but Nay said my steadfast heart.  It made a good compromise where it became still, along with my treadmill mind, only upon reaching the  beach.  

The constancy of the slate gray waves crashing again and again across the shores,  eroding,  cleaning,  making noise just for the sake of making noise.  I like to look out and imagine that I can telescope all the way across the pacific, to the shores of San Francisco, right into my sister's life. It's funny how a big thing like the ocean can seem so little.  especially after I've been making mountains out of mole hills  .

Mole hill? Mountain?

This is one of those mountainsi was really sad to not be seeing every day. Milford sound. 

You can say I'm tapering off of vacation.  I've spent a solid 20 hours perusing the intranets (perusing might not be the right word.  What I'm doing is slightly more obsessive) researching just about everything motorcycle.  I've loved motorized vehicles from knee high to a grasshopper.  I remember begging my mom to bring me to the go kart tracks when I was 9; then looking in the newspaper for a 50 cc dirt bike when I was 12. And more recently,  I had saved up $500 for a sweet little '79 Honda CB360 right after I graduated college, yet ended up with a hand crafted oak horse carriage from the farm auction instead. . I digress.  I have even gone so far as to stalk the bikes at the local Yamaha dealership. And I also feel best when I pretend that my (sturdy,  awesome,  loveable,  but not motorized) bicycle is actually an undercover motorcycle. 

As you can tell,  my rationalization powers are chugging away at full force.  Let's just say it's between this and being a cat lady. 

Other than being slave to my inner mermaid and being myopically obsessed with two wheels and a motor,  I have made a very delicious roasted beet and warmed chickpea salad with feta and herbs (yum),    given more henna tattoos,  learned to drive on the kiwi side of the road (no metaphor), composed my own ukelele song,  and learned that season 2 of orange is the new black gives me nightmares,  so I have to stop it now.

Irish rorschach love henna

I also practiced my photoshop skillz. In the future I don't have to ever go anywhere or do anything;  i will just manipulate a photo to give the impression!

I have been so blessed to receive emails from a few friends back home.  All the little stories and photos are great medicine for the homesickness.  I'm so grateful!    Please send me little notes if anything strikes your fancy ; they're so special to me! 

Xoxo

Back from Spring (Fall) Break!

Apologies for keeping this blog in the dark for a few weeks now!  Blogging is kind of like keeping a garden and planting mint: if you don't keep up with it, the more time that passes, the more and more behind you get!

I like to keep these short on words and heavy on pictures, so although much has transpired in the last 2 weeks, I'll sum it up as this:

3 weeks' break from school! Yay! 7 of us gals have had a week-long trip plann in the works since early March. As stressful as it was to decide so far ahead of time what exactly our route would be, book hotels and car rentals, it was definitely worth the effort. The trip went pretty much without any major bumps-- no nights of hobohood, nor day transportationless.

I was surprised how easily 7 of us fit in a regular old Toyota van. That thing was a trooper! It was definitely working hard as it chugged up and over Arthur's Pass, and I was worried about the brakes going out on us as we careened down towards Queenstown, but it was a little rebel and it hung in there like a pro!

Our route was this:  Christchurch--->Hokatika --> Fox Glacier (prounounced glay-shee-uhr, btw)---> Franz Josef Glaysheeuhr ---> Lake Wanaka ---> Queenstown ---> Milford Sound ---> back home to Christchurch under the starry skies.

If google maps told us our route would be a 3 hour drive, we could expect it to take us 5.  That's a good thing!-- a group of like-minded A.D.D folk wanna stop for just about every snail on the side of the road.

It was so great to get out of the scholarly brain fog.  Between the cozy, winding mountain roads and my newest acquisiton, TinkerBill (an angelic ukelele), anxiety dreams about missing school assignments/ failing / etc disappeared after only 2 nights!  Talk about some potent medicine.

The Mark Twain quote is pertinent:  “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” – Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

Luckily I found that I liked my travel companions.  Yet 8 days was plenty!  Also, there is a quote floating around somewhere about how the unfortunate part about traveling is that you still bring you along! It stands in contrast to that fantasy of total escapism.  Lots of days, especially the cloudy / cold ones, felt like I was wallowing around in my shadow wondering what the heck, why were all of my imperfections tagging along for the ride!

So, I'm proud to say that I learned a lot in those 8 short days. I hope to find a moment to recount a few of my favorite experiences in another post:
-somehow still commiting to skydiving over Queenstown after watching one of the skydive "masters" trying to figure out a malfunctioning electric sliding glass door
-sitting at Lake Wanaka feeling like living in a dream
-Sheffield's meat pie song
-giving travel companion Rachel a haircut using eyebrow scissors (and it turned out BEAUTIFULLY!)
-making friends with a duck who loved the sounds of my ukelele
-a bright orange moss lining the river rocks in Milford Sound was so illuminous that it looked like the whole riverside was spraypainted construction orange
-Wille Nelson On the Road Again lyrics: "On the road again… going places I have never been.. seeing things that I may never see again… I just can't wait to get on the road again."
-school anxiety dreams replaced by dreaming in mountains

I miss home, the creature comforts and the familiarity. But the wise words of my friend Nathalie echo in my head: "home will always be there waiting for you."  And those of my momma who ponders about feeling at home inside ones self, regardless of the pillow you're resting your head on.

xoxoxox