Also, it's a holiday weekend, and while grad students don't strictly get holidays off (just as we don't strictly get weekends and evenings off... like when there's lab work to be done), I'm giving myself the morning off because I already slept in and putzed around too much to call it a full day anyway.
Onward!
January
For the third (and final) year, my January was strongly focused on getting ready for a field season in New Zealand. This year was a bit different because I'd managed to do something weird to my foot during AGU in December, and was freaking out that it was going to get suddenly, catastrophically worse the minute I started bumbling around on outcrops. We were scheduled to fly out at the very end of the month, so I spent basically all of January in a series of increasingly more annoying foot-related apparati - orthopedic wraps, to the ubiquitous skiing-accident-over-break, knee-high velcro boot, to a 'walking cast' that in a moment of pure hilarious irony was adhered to my leg the very day that I left for a friend's bachelorette weekend in Tahoe (didn't stop me from awkwardly partaking in morning yoga!). Ultimately I was given an ankle brace and instructed to wear only hiking boots, even when working on sandy beaches, which was a huge and unwelcome departure from my preferred barefootedness. So it goes.
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| January was also the test period for our research group's new quadcopter, whose maiden voyage was our New Zealand field season! Here, testing at Pigeon Point; the first of many copter selfies. |
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| Quadcopter photo of the Stanford quad. |
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| First day in New Zealand - exploring Wellington before meeting with collaborators at GNS. View from Mount Victoria. |
February
This being my last field season and sort of a wrap-up, we were only in my field area for about two weeks. It was so different from my previous seasons - I was comfortable with the area, knew some of the locals, and frankly had a lot less to do. This was especially noticeable during high tide times, when instead of rushing off to do inland exploring or sample collecting, we usually lazed around, went through photos and notes, had a hot meal or some tea (or who am I kidding, Tip Top ice cream cones), and prepped for the remaining days. This was also the first time my advisor made it out to my field area with me, which was both stressful and wonderful for all the obvious reasons.
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| Evening low tides can mean a shorter work window, but the sunset over the ocean makes it totally worthwhile. |
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| Prepping for our adventurous river crossing with an interested local hoping to tag along (we almost, almost let him). |
March
This was a bit of a crazy month. The first half I was still in New Zealand, field assisting for Nora - which mostly consisted of crouching over fins of rock on wave-cut platforms, measuring the strata centimeter by centimeter and drawing each sedimentary structure as accurately as possible. Over the four-ish weeks of Nora's field season, this went from "yay, I love drawing and never got to do this kind of work in my field area!" to "oh god, are we really going to do this for five more hours today?", and I'm not going to pretend we didn't both feel our motivation flagging at various intervals. But Nora works on some of the prettiest coastlines I've ever seen, and there is certainly a sense of satisfaction in having a tangible, pretty record of a day's work.
Still, we were both happy to head home when the time came (although this was dampened somewhat by staying our last two nights at our friend's incredible ocean-view house near Wellington, which is always difficult to leave). We arrived at SFO on the 17th, had our now-traditional lunch at a Mexican restaurant (Mexican food basically doesn't exist in NZ, as far as I can tell), and two days later I was back at the airport en route to El Paso for another field trip. This at least was a show-and-tell trip, not actual field work, but I had to reacquaint myself with right-side driving by getting behind the wheel of a large SUV with four or five passengers for a week of driving to remote areas of the West Texas and New Mexico desert.
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| Sunrise over the ocean at Castlepoint, east coast of New Zealand. |
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| Difficult field day (including crummy weather and a run-in with bees that had colonized our car while we worked) ended in this glorious rainbow over the Castlepoint lighthouse that greeted us when we got back to camp. |
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| Cross-bedding in glauconitic sand near El Paso (the greenish hue is from glauconite - which is basically the poop of mud-eating critters on the seafloor!). |
April
Spring quarter started fast and didn't slow down... at all. I had spend most of spring break on the El Paso trip, so it was a sudden transition from the world of field work to the world of classes and actual responsibilities. I was a TA for a reflection seismology interpretation class, which was a great review of a subject that is now very important to me but also a pretty significant time commitment. I was also spending a fair amount of time coordinating a field trip with a good friend from undergrad, who had arranged for my advisor to run his California convergent margins geology trip for some of the grad students in her research group. It was an awesome trip, as any field trip that throws geologists together in beautiful California is destined to be, but also a reminder of the importance of delegation, which is something I've never been particularly good at.
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| California poppies and lupine along a roadside in the Napa Valley area. |
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| Beautiful discoloration of outcrop by water staining (and probably some microbial growth?) in the Sierra Nevada mountains. |
May
This month continued the trend of busy-ness with two field trips: the first to New Idria, in the San Joaquin valley of central California, for an extended weekend of data collection for a group research project; the second to Wyoming for a structural geology-esque field trip run by an oil company as part of their recruitment strategy. The New Idria trip was, for me, a nostalgic weekend tromping around the outcrops that had helped me fall in love with both geology and teaching. The Wyoming trip was something I had long been hoping to get invited to, and although it was different from what I expected, it did not disappoint. It was also nicely timed with my reading of John McPhee's Rising from the Plains, a very convincing account of how Wyoming's geology can blow your mind.
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| Sand-shale stratigraphy at the New Idria field site, with a peek of the Vallecitos syncline in the background. |
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| I'll be honest, the goal here was looking at fracture sets, but I was much more intrigued by the incredible landscape and rare exposures of cross-bedded sandstone. Wyoming. |
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| Mind-blowingly beautiful eolian dune cross-bedding truncated by foundering at the front of the dune (the messed up, non-stripey part on the left). Wyoming. |
June
This month started off with the beautiful wedding of two friends at a winery in Sonoma. I couldn't have been happier with the weekend - Sam and I went up a day early so we could have dinner and beers at the Lagunitas brewery, where my hands-down favorite beer is made; the wedding was an impressive mix of stunningly gorgeous and low-key, and timed so that we got to enjoy the transition from sunny California afternoon to cool, mellow evening, and the low light that does incredible things to the topography of those iconic grassy hills. On the less idyllic end of the spectrum, the end of the quarter meant I had time to acknowledge the fact that my foot was still not back to normal, so I spent some more time with the podiatrist, who ultimately determined that he didn't really know what was wrong but maybe I should see a rheumatologist because who knows, it could be early arthritis. At that point I became fed up with paying $20 copay for each five-minute visit and decided to go with my gut instinct of "ignore it until it goes away or becomes impossible to ignore" (and yes, I'm still following that regimen).
June was also the end of an era, of sorts. Before the month was half over, Sam and I had packed all of our possessions out of our beautiful, charming (old, overpriced) little bungalow on Crane Street and put it in storage for the summer. On the 13th, we headed for Texas, where I would spend the summer in Houston, he in Austin, for oil industry internships. It was surprisingly anti-climactic to drive away from the house on that last day. It had been such an ordeal to get packed up (the bulk of which was accomplished in a few long days, with help from his parents) and clean everything in time to leave for Texas, that when we finally did drive off I was just so glad we had gotten it all done.
I suppose we have pictures somewhere from that final cleaning stage, but those are probably sad an uninteresting; and other than that, I have not a single photo from all of June!
July
I'll be upfront about this: I don't have any photos from July, either. I'm going to go ahead and try to blame this on the fact that I had planned to start off my summer by finally upgrading to an iPhone, from the early model Droid (with slide out keyboard!) that had been my first and only smart phone and was finally giving up the goat. Really, I wanted an iPhone because I thought it would be fun to have a decent camera on hand all the time, and I was ready to admit that I wanted to try out some trendy apps that would have driven my poor Droid into the ground. This, I thought, was the perfect way to make up for spending another summer in Houston (sorry, Houstonians, I do love you but I am a desert rat to my core and will never adapt to that level of humidity) and would give me some fun little excuses to get me out of the apartment on weekends (like, I don't know, logging my beer intake and photographing things... I didn't really think this through). What actually happened was that my brother's phone bit the dust and I let him use my upgrade, because I'm such a heroic, self-sacrificing sister, and therefore had to wait till October to fulfill my dreams of joining the world of new(ish) tech.
Anyway, I spent July interning in Houston with a few long weekends visiting Sam in Austin. It was, to my disappointment, still hot and humid in Austin (yes, somehow this came as a surprise to me the first time I stepped out of my car there).
August
I feel sort of bad for skimming over my Texas days, because I did have a good time there. I really enjoyed the work I was doing and the people I got to see every day at work, and the bad geology movie nights and watching Chopped and King of the Hill with my roommate. But there were also things I really didn't enjoy. I've never spent so much time in a car on a daily basis, which made me appreciate how rare and wonderful it is that I've been able to commute strictly by bike since the late 2000's. Having all that commute time was nice at first, because I got to listen to the news and felt more connected with the world than I ever had - but this was also a summer of really, really bad news, and it was at times incredibly depressing to start off (or finish) the day with more reports of violence by ISIS or deaths from Ebola. I know these things are still happening, and things like this have always happened and will unfortunately continue to happen because the world is a complicated and distressing place, but I don't feel guilty about not being inundated with that information on a daily basis anymore. Sam and I do listen to NPR most mornings while we get ready, but it's in the background, I'm distracted by other things, I only get the gist of what's being said and typically tune out the details. I want to be aware of what's going on in the world around me, but there are absolutely no benefits to being stressed and upset about things I can't control or change.
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| A good roommate buys beer. A great roommate buys beer coozies. |
September
My internship ended at the very end of August, but Sam continued working for another two weeks after that, so I vacated my Houston apartment and spent those two weeks in Austin with him. I've already written about this time in a previous post; now that it's in the slightly more distant past, I'll just say that the highlight is still the amount of time I got to spend doing art, yoga, and exploring Austin either by myself or with Sam. It felt like a vacation and reminded me that even thought I travel more than I have any real right to, and have the most flexible work schedule I'll probably ever have in my life, I haven't taken a proper vacation in a long time.
In mid-September we left Texas and drove back to Menlo Park, just in time to move into our new place and get a little bit settled before the quarter started (which for me, as always, meant the annual research group meeting with our industry consortium, this year in Oregon). Having spent three months elsewhere, and being on a bit of a tight schedule, definitely took some of the weirdness and sadness out of the moving process, which I appreciated. We (ahem, Sam) nearly broke one of our couches trying to fit it around an awkward turn in a hallway, and I nearly threw away a tiny piece of pottery that had gotten lost in the slightly ridiculous amounts of crumpled newspaper I had used to pack everything away, but overall the move went very smoothly and quicker than we'd expected. Then, suddenly, we were back at school and trying to come to grips with the idea of being fourth-year PhD students (still haven't fully accepted that).
To make up for the lack of June-July photos, here's a boatload from September.
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| More art from my Austin days. |
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| Starting to pile stuff into the new bedroom! |
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| Living room full of boxes and furniture. Hard to believe we ever got past this point. |
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| The POD, nearly empty, and the aforementioned couch. |
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| Green, green Oregon. Like most tourists, we got to enjoy the greenery while mostly avoiding the rain. |
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| Wildlife overlook in Oregon somewhere. There were elk off to the right but this view doesn't have power lines running through it. so it wins. |
October
I got back from the Oregon trip with two immediate deadlines: I had three days to make an outreach-type poster for a workshop called Science Teaching through Art, and two weeks to make a scientific poster for the GSA annual convention in Vancouver, BC. There was also a field trip weekend squeezed in there, helping a friend teach non-geologist grad students how to collect data and measure section in the field. Amazingly, despite making the two posters back to back, I totally failed at applying the lessons from the STAr program to my GSA poster (i.e., using compelling visuals rather than text to tell your story). I was convinced other people were overreacting to how much text I had on my GSA poster, until it came time to actually present it and I realized how many other photos I wished I had (and how little attention anyone paid to the blocks of text). Oh, well. Vancouver was way prettier than I expected, and so, so much cleaner than San Francisco, so the conference was still a blast. This was also the month that I got my iPhone, and semi-obsessively took photos with it, which I will spare you the full brunt of.
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| Moon over submarine canyon fill, California. |
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| View from the balcony of our AirBnB rental in Vancouver. |
November
From the looks of my calendar, I spent most of this month sitting in front of a computer, clicking away at my seismic interpretation project. I made good progress but also had my first experience with a repetitive stress injury, which was basically my body telling me "hey, you're old now, you can't just sit in front of a computer clicking a mouse a thousand times an hour, then go home and sit in front of a laptop scrolling through Buzzfeed, then play Candy Crush on your phone, and not expect anything unpleasant to come of it." Happily, no matter what else happens, November always ends in enormous amounts of food, and this year was no exception. I had a particularly nice Thanksgiving break, which started out with a little trip to Big Sur with friends to tour a lighthouse and camp, and ended with a few days in Reno where my family and Sam's had Thanksgiving dinner together for the first time.
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| Day hike at Windy Hill, California. |
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| View of Big Sur coastline from Point Sur, below the lighthouse. |
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| Inside the Point Sur lighthouse. |
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| Sunset at a beach near our campground. |
December
This month started with a short visit from a good friend of ours who recently moved to Houston (and whose old apartment, incidentally, we now occupy). Then it was the usual crush of AGU preparations (my poster had a lot less text on it this time around) and holiday travel (which, admittedly, is minor for us since we don't have to fly anywhere). Christmas itself wasn't as much in the forefront for me this year, in part because my family celebrated early but mostly, I think, because we departed in many ways from our typical family traditions for reasons I'll mention later. But it was a relaxing holiday and felt long, since we gave ourselves a full week back in Menlo to fully relax before winter quarter started. We had intended to spend this time in Sacramento working on a coffee table project we started with Sam's dad, but the wood needed more time to dry so we cut it short and spent a lot of quality time on the couch instead, which is really how winter holidays should be.
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| No tree this year, but a festive dining room table courtesy of Trader Joe's. In retrospect I should have scaled the number of ornaments to the size of the wreath. |
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| Octopus-esque breakfast pastry with cinnamon, cranberries, walnuts... mmm. |
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| Shavings from the coffee-table-to-be planks (leaning at right). |
That's the sum of my year, and part of me thinks I should just leave it at that, because this is the internet and while there are some things I'd like my friends to know about, that doesn't mean they need to be broadcast to the world at large. But it feels incomplete and even disrespectful or dishonest not to mention these last things, because they were a big part of my life this year and were with me through everything I've written about. There were four deaths in my extended family this year, all of them men, all of them meaningful to me in different ways.
My dear grandpa died the day after his 94th birthday, which was the day I arrived in New Zealand for my final field season. For the last three years I've always missed his birthday because of that poor timing, and this year I'd felt especially bad about it because I knew his health was declining, but no part of me expected that I would get a call from my mom on my first day in the field telling me to find a private place because she had some sad news. I was in college when my other grandparents died, and went to their funerals and cried, but my grandpa was special to me and it just felt so, so wrong to be in this gorgeous place that I loved while all my family were gathering together halfway around the world to grieve. I'm so fortunate to have had Nora with me, because I don't think anyone else but Sam could have helped me through that time so well.
In early April, one of my uncles died. He had been struggling with a lung condition and had had a double lung transplant at Stanford a few years ago. He was an uncle by marriage, but so much a part of my family that it's hard to believe there was a time before we knew him. In November, I lost another uncle, who had married into my family when some of my aunts were still children, and was the kind of man who filled a room with love and laughter. Then, just a month ago, when I was deep in the world of AGU, an uncle from the other side of my extended family passed away. Technically he was the husband of my mother's cousin, but I've always called them aunt and uncle for the roles they've played in my life.
That's an awfully depressing way to end this post, but it does sometimes feel like when I think back about my life last year, I see it in two distinct ways: the rush and stress and joy of a busy schedule, and the shock of loss, one after the other, fitting in and around my 'regular' life without my having any control over it. 2014 was a difficult year, but also a good one, and those don't have to be contradictions.
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| Panorama from near the Windy Hill summit, California |
