Rain, rain, go away...

Hello all,

We finished up part of our leaf/bug collecting yesterday. It rained most of the time, and it was pretty cold, so I must confess that I was very miserable. At one point, we were in Cantaburry Park looking for plants and we came up to a plank for crossing the mini-river. So, we're crossing this slippery board, that was only about a foot wide, and has a handrail on only one side (I must note that it wasn't even a REAL handrail, it was a piece of thick wire, that's all), and when we make it across we find ourselves in someones backyard, and have to turn around. That was my adventure for the day, although the whole day was basically a drizzly adventure within itself.

The good news was, Lincoln's cafe, Mrs.O's, has delightful hot chocolate, with marshmallows included, so that saved the day.

Another story related to Mrs.O's: Lincoln University held a Texas Hold'em tournament, and some of us Americans played, not me of course, I played hearts with the other not-so-skilled poker players. Moral of the tale is Jane won! So, I thought it was pretty exciting that she beat a bunch of tough kiwi guys.

Today we did some computer analysis of our leaves. We traced the leaves several times to figure out how much herbivory each leaf experienced. It's quite a tedious process, but today we also got to listen to the department head talk about biogeography of NZ (basically what lives on NZ and why and when did it get here, etc. etc.), and it was quite interesting.

Tomorrow I belive we're doing my computer analysis and then visiting Lincoln's organic farm, so I thought that might be pretty neat, especially if it's sunny = )

For now,
Hilary