Flying Buddha and the Quixotic Autumn

Hi guys and gals!

Hoping that the spring most of you are enjoying feels refreshing and smells delicious!   It's been rainy here too,  but without the promise of hot summer days ahead.  My body doesn't get it.  

The days are getting shorter, yet the flowers continue to bloom. No comprende. 

I'm looking ahead to only three more weeks of classes,  then finals,  then pretty much straight away headed back to the states! 

May is NZ music month.  Check out any of these guys! 

It's probably a little to early to start waxing poetic about how this experience has been,  so I'll save or for a later blog.  In the mean time I'll take note of a few things of varying interestingness.
In my " Maori health perspectives" class I'm learning about the deep importance of family as am aspect of health.  We watched a fantastic documentary about a Maori family with a genetic disorder.  Through very pressing times,  whanau (Pronounced:pheynow) are the well of strength. 

I'm coming to enjoy statistics more every day.  It doesn't come easy to me,  but the examples we use in classes come from real life scenarios,  which is very cool.  I imagine all the ways I could use stats in my own life. 

As always,  food is a favorite subject for discussion.  Purple cabbage is my choice pick veggie right now.  Oh yeah,  I forgot to mention that carrots are very tasty here: always sweet,  never with that bitter taste.  

Is this paleo?! *flexes arm muscle*

I've been taking action to get stronger.  The Rec center offers a variety of free classes every day,  so despite my urge to hermit away,  I just can't pass up the opportunity for free motivation.  Aside from fitness classes,  I went to a Buddhist meditation and also am acrobatic yoga workshop last week. They were both refreshing and interesting!

Proud to announce I was climbing across the wall race champion! 

The only thing better than doing yoga, is having someone else do yoga for you! Heheheh

Flying buddha! 

Wishing you health and wellness in the most robust sense of the term. 
Love,
Darwin

On Climbing Mountains

I am so inspired by this quote from Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance.  

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you’re no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.” P199 - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

October 2013 Trip to Jackson, WY for some backcountry snowboarding

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.

kaikoura

                     Unsurprisingly my blogging gusto is falling under the universal law of entropy.    It is not that I have had fewer thoughts and experiences I want to share,  just a simple matter of school squeezing quite tightly my time budget.

Even tasty,  homemade meals are becoming more rare as the semester gains momentum.

Molecular genetics continues to threaten to explode my brain.  On top of the difficult subject matter is the learning what expectations are for learning methods and outcomes.  Only one of my four classes provided a syllabus,  so each week it is important for me to set aside some time to comb through the class Web pages to see what to expect.  This is one of the more notable adjustments I have had to make in this experience of studying abroad.  The other is that classes do not provide study guides to outline what is expected knowledge on tests. This makes studying the appropriate
Material somewhat of a shot in the dark.

Fusing a nature find with a drawing and some Samsung galaxy photo editing to relieve the brain squish of threatening squareness. All work and no play =  no thank you.

You can imagine how wide open my arms were to a bit of escape when the weekend hit!   The plan was to rent a car with 3 of my 4 roommates and cruise north for about 3 hours until we reached the coastal town of kaikora.

My roommates pose in front of our budget clown car

The road wound through sheep filled foothills.  I would feel like I was in Colorado for aboot 2 seconds,  with the dry,  grassy hills dotted with pines,  and then I would notice a massive and mystical eucalyptus tree, and that whole feeling would go out the window.

Somewhat familiar scenery

Stopping for a pee break it was a lucky coincidence that we found ourselves in the parking lot of the local community's weekly farmers market.  The market is on year round and has lots of crafts,  baked goods,  meats and cheeses in addition to the expected veggies.  I treated myself to a caramel latte and a bacon+cream cheese bagel for breakfast.  Yolo!

Patron saint of the hot cross bun

Yumyumyum yumyumyum

Someone was selling second hand children's toys.  This resourcefulness was most reminiscent of Taos. 

Kaikora was a further 2 hours of beautiful mountainous driving.  Although we were traveling northbound along the coast,  much of the time the sea was hidden behind rolling hills.  The trees are just beginning to fade out of green and show a tinge of yellow.    

It's beginning to look a little like autumn

We made it or of the winding foothills and emerged onto the rocky western coast of new zealand south island

                 
          Kaikora is a great touristy destination with lots of options for activities.  Go swim with dolphins,  or kayak amongst the seals!  We decided instead to just walk or onto the extensive stone slab of a peninsula and sun ourselves next to the crashing waves,  as if we were the seals.

Luckily we woke up from our sun baked oblivion just in time to get off of the some slab as the tide was roosting and threatening to separate us from the land mass.  I am not exaggerating when I say it was a very close call!    By the time we got near the parking lot we had to cross a rising rover ride up to our knees,  and quickly rising.  It was very Into The Wild of us.

Enengulfed! Yay!

Drive home was equally beautiful and even more comfortable due to finally getting used to sitting in what is usually the driver's seat with no pedals or steering wheel.

Honing in on the rare Armenian mermaid

I hope the sound clip attaches to this image to give a better feel for the road trip!

Good jams and serene scenery.  I see some similarities of NZ <---> NM vibes the more rural I travel.

Cheers!