Seals and Dead Stoats

Last Friday we took a short trip south of Wellington to a suburb called Island Bay. Here are some photos from the journey.

At the beginning of the walk.

I like the horizontality of this one.

"Red"

So many seals sunbathing.

For the LOTR readers out there, this is where right outside the Black Gate was filmed... when Sam slipped down the slope and Frodo had to cover him with his rock cloak thing. At least we're pretty sure this is where that was filmed.

Big big big big water.

OOH candid

Take a hop off these rocks and keep on swimming until you're in Antarctica!

Happy Devon

If I make this picture any bigger it kind of goes off the page, but click on it if you want to get the full effect.

This is a dead stoat that I almost stepped on. Part of the joke is that some of the policy work I do is on pest management in New Zealand. Stoats are pests here, and this one seems to have died (probably from poison). So +1 Devon! I must be doing something right.

A Really Fabulous Seal

Ok so all of these seal posts makes it kind of clear that we saw seals this weekend. Tomorrow the full story will be revealed...

By the way, what you are seeing above is my first GIF! Made from two pictures that my sister took.

A Seal in Wellington

A Sheep in Auckland

Sticky Buddy

Whoever sat at this desk before me definitely had a cat or something because there are white hairs everywhere.

Somebody needs a Sticky Buddy.

Things Aren't Going Wrong

I’ve been feeling comfortable at my work in New Zealand… too comfortable. It’s calm. And it feels a little off to me. Don’t get me wrong, things going smoothly and as-planned is a good thing! I’m just not used to the lack of chaos and activeness in what I do, so perhaps that’s why I feel a little sedated.

My boss and I meet every week for a formal check-up and review of the work I have done during the past several days. He acknowledged that, yeah, a lot of the work done by the office is done in front of a computer and that it can sometimes seem a little unvaried. He is very correct in this.

In my job last summer and in my academics, which is either very on-your-feet or very let’s-talk-about-it, there is little time to let the mind settle into a state of what I like to call mental cruise control. And it is interesting to compare the work I do with the Society to other parts of my life. But before I go all “I NEED TO BE ACTIVE”, I have to ask myself: is this “mental cruise control” appropriate for the task at hand? And I think the answer is yes. As my boss said, the very nature of the work is sit-down-and-concentrate.

Figuring out what stimulates my mind as I reach the end of week 5/12, what method of driving (so to speak) best suits my personality, is something positive that I will definitely take away from this experience. It’s also bettering my ability to cruise control because let’s face it, I like to talk. I can be quiet (though my sister would beg to differ), but most of the time I find that learning and work gets done by speaking. As for my work here… there might be some days where I speak only 10 words during work hours, and they’re almost all pleasantries. But hey, it gets work done.

Really, things aren’t going wrong. There aren’t things for me to fix and there aren’t moments where I am forced to problem-solve, which I would say I’m already good at. Instead, there are things for me to find. And “fix” and “find” aren’t even on the same spectrum; I can’t see a way to compare the two words. So this is definitely something new… something different… and I’m simply trying to figure out how finding can help me fix things in my future endeavours.

So that’s sort of what is going on in the back of my mind as I read about New Zealand researchers conducting Antarctic ice sheet studies and making volcanic activity hypotheses. Because while I can see what I am doing immediately and the effects it has now (words being written in a document), I also need to stay focussed on what all of this is doing for me in the future.

Mushrooms!

Ok, I’m picking up with my blogging this week. Here in New Zealand, the Queen’s Birthday is celebrated on the first Monday in June, so long weekend for us! I’ll get to what we did over the long weekend later this week though. First I want to go back a couple weekends to when my sister and I climbed Mount Victoria in Wellington. It is part of the city’s greenbelt. It is also where the Hobbit’s Hideaway in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was filmed. For those of you who don’t know, it’s the bit right after Frodo and Sam run into Merry and Pippin after they’ve “been into Farmer Maggot’s crop!” Then they roll down that big ol’ hill and a carrot breaks and then Pippin sees mushrooms and then Frodo yells about getting off the road and then they almost get caught by the dark rider and then they go to the Buckleberry Ferry. Back up to the mushrooms. Whenever I see mushrooms in the wild now, I always quote Pippin.

I thought that this would be the MOST appropriate time to quote this line seeing as we were ON the path on which the scene was filmed and there were mushrooms there so of course I got onto the ground.

Here’s a view of where we think that big old log that the hobbits hide behind was. We think that we remember the special features DVD mentioning that the tree was a set piece, and this divot in the ground is the perfect place for it.

I’ll put one more picture of the path below as I sign off from another LOTR-based blog. After we finish up our LOTR adventures in July, I am going to write a blog post on this… phenomenon (?) as I see it.