Too many choices?

Which one should it be today, Kauna'oa (aka Mauna Kea) or Hapuna?

Or should I play the eco-tourist and go take a look at some petroglyphs?

Ásmundur

Er það rétt sem ég heyrði þegar ég var leiðsögumaður, að höggmyndirnar hans Ásmundar Sveinssonar hafi verið uppáhaldsleiktæki krakkanna í hverfinu hans og að listamanninum hafi bara fundist gaman að vita af börnunum þarna að leik, prílandi upp um Sonatorrek og Móðurást og hvað þetta nú allt saman heitir?

A date and a dry riverbed

I almost have a date next week. Not bad, huh? Let me explain:

After several afternoons of pouring over maps of groundwater wells in Hawai'i I have pinned down those wells that I would like to sample. I then made some phonecalls to the people who run the wells (or to (people who might know)^n the people who run the wells), with limited success. I hardly got to talk to a soul, the golf course superintendents were all busy mowing the lawn, the farm offices were run temporarily by answering machines... you get the picture. One guy I talked to had to talk to someone else (and apparently got back to me while I was away on a short sampling trip) before he could give me the green light. Only one person agreed to let me sample his well, his only well. Good guy. I'm calling him back next week, to set up a date. I can't wait!!

After these early morning hours on the phone I set off for a sampling trip to the other side of this peninsula that I live on. The "main" river turned out to have dried out - all that was left was a stagnant pool of water. Great. Sampled it anyway. Found two other small streams along the way back and sampled those too. Not too much water in these parts, I tell you. But the views are pretty spectacular. And the small sleepy towns are so picturesque. But the mosquitoes inhabiting the riverbanks are by no means my favorite.

What else? Did I mention that I am looking forward to going back to Ithaca?? Did I mentiion that I spent nearly two hours on the phone with my favorite person in Ithaca this afternoon? Did I mention that I have to hurry back!?!?!

An almost unbearably exciting day

This has been such a wonderfully productive day. Or maybe not. Most of my samples from Kaua'i, meticulously filtered in the field (or so I thought), turned out to be full of dirt and crap. After some consulting with Ithaca I spent the bulk of the day re-filtering these bastards. Tremendously exciting.

While sitting at the kitchen table and pushing water through membranes with 0.45 micrometer pores I listened to my darling laptop. All these different songs sent me different places; back to the German Autobahn in mom's Benz of days long past, to the mining town of Barentsburg in the evening sun during a short stop on Nordstjernen, to my dad's spartan summerhouse on the shore of Lake Stíflisstaðavatn. How the songs related to these places I have no idea. Isn't memory odd?.

I have changed my plane tickets and will be returning to Ithaca from my exile a good week earlier than planned. Am happier about that than words can convey. Soon I will have reached the stage where the mere sight of a river makes me gag and in my remembrance all my friends in Ithaca have become probably ten times more beautiful and interesting than they really are. Can't wait to get back.

Back from Kaua'i

Kaua'i was great. It's so beautiful!! The hike into the canyon was pretty amazing (and strenuous), so was the hike along the Na Pali coast that Shan and I did on Saturday and Sunday. It's so much more fun to have company on hikes. Actually, being alone in the canyon was fine too, but there's too much time to ponder all the things that can (and usually won't) go wrong. I hardly slept the night I camped in the canyon, I was so busy worrying about whether I would die of dehydration or not. Isn't that sad, to waste so much time over silly things like that? I'm laughing at myself in retrospect. My water rationing was so effective that when I came out of the canyon, I still had almost half a gallon of water left, and had spent the last mile and a half trying to drink as much water as my body could possible take in. Maybe it would have been a good idea to just drink it in the night, when I was seriously thirsty... oh well.

As I said above, the island is amazing. I will have to go there again one day.

What a day!!

If I told you I was a prophet, that I had got this all figured out and all you needed to do to find peace was to do exactly like I told you, would you buy it?

I didn't think so. But apparently some people do. That's so weird. This revelation has left me somewhat baffled. I am, however, too caught up in my own joy to let it ruin my day.

Why so happy? Well, a nice tropical island (another one) awaiting. A gorgeous canyon (which you're all fed up with by now), some time on my own and a seriously promising weekend all coming up.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Rockstar retires

Well, should have bragged more about the abominable hike up Mauna Loa. We blew it off, or, to be more precise, I decided not to go (and then, for some obscure reason, noone went, which makes me rather sad). The reason: I was handed several hundred pages of reports and stuff about groundwater wells on the Big Island on Friday afternoon, and all this stuff needed to be read/skimmed through and photocopied by Monday. And the chem lab needed to be packed. All this before going to Kaua'i, on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to Kaua'i. A lot!

So, the Xerox here and I got well acquainted yesterday. Also spent some quality time in the chemistry lab, where mosquitoes were out in force and made an honest attempt to eat me alive. Watched Supervolcano on Discovery channel last night and couldn't quite decide whether to laugh or cry. Did both.

Am now, finally, going to the beach to try out my new bikini.

Major achievement:

Bought.... no, invested in a new bikini today.

Plus, met an Icelander in town. It's a small world.

Did I say idiots??

Idiot, and the consequences of idiocy.

Canyons and volcanoes

Am headed for the island of Kaua'i sometime early next week. While in Kaua'i, I plan to make my way into the heart of the Waimea Canyon for some water samples from the stream and its tributaries, and also to drive around the island and gather water from some of the major streams on the island. All in the name of science. Life is hard.

On Kaua'i, I also plan to recover from the coming weekend. The students have a long weekend now (the ones still in the house have been sipping rum and coke since lunch and we all went to this beach in the afternoon) and two of them are planning to hike up Mauna Loa on Saturday and Sunday. I'm going to go with them. It's not a trivial undertaking, actually, the mountain is the biggest volcano in the world and, when measured from sea level, is higher than Everest. I'm not sure we're starting our hike that far down its slopes... actually we are going to drive up to the observatories up there and hike the last few thousand feet to the summit. On the summit there is a huge caldera (scroll down the page to see the ML caldera) that the small geologist inside me just can't wait to see.

Life is hard indeed.

A big smile

has not left my face all day :) I'm getting a visit! Yay!!

Game over

The course is over!! The students are absolutely bursting with relief, so much so that right now most of them are drunk and shrieking in the living room right next to my bedroom. It's nice to hear them have a good time, apparently having survived a course of this caliber is enough to make friends of former foes and whatnot. Wonderful :) Think I might have to go and join them. Someone's being taught to dance and the girls are having a great time cheering him on. Have to take a look.

R.I.P.

BIOGEOrge blew a fuse in the field today. I couldn't help almost pissing myself with laughter. Everything breaks here. EVERYTHING!!

On the carpet

My dad's wife, Sigga Hanna, opened her first (to my knowledge) solo exhibition today, Saturday. Congratulations, Sigga, I'm so proud of you!

Tough, tougher, toughest

This will be hard. Me and homework.

More trenches in cowboy country

or should I call them soil pits??

We spent the day digging more holes, in addition to the ones we had already dug on the Kohala Ranch on Monday. Today we dug at the Kahua Ranch, kept company to the cows and enjoyed wonderful weather pretty much the entire day. Like I told you yesterday, there's nothing like rolling around in the mud and getting all dirty. Wonderful. A tiny stream, flowing under the open sky for approximately 4 meters, was also discovered and, as a rare thing in these places where all water is instantly soaked up by the rocks, it was immediately sampled. So, my sample stock is slowly but surely increasing. One day they'll be part of my thesis. Yay, that's nice to know.

Last night we watched Closer. None of us has quite figured out yet what to make of it. And for the first time Jude Law totally failed to impress me. Hmmm... I think the movie might just have been crap.

Tonight: A sushi place in Hawi.

Yoga, Gaia and Bjerrum

One of the students took me to a yogaclass last night. After five-hundred downward-facing dogs and quite a lot of warriors, plus some other more obscure stuff, I was totally hammered and so totally relaxed that I almost fell asleep on the floor of the studio. Today, my lower back has been reminding me of the class... which is good, I guess.

The usual destruction/malfunction mode of our class was traded today for some constructive volunteering work. We were all sent out to this wildlife sanctuary, where no cattle or wild pigs (not very popular around here, since non-native) are allowed access, to plant some saplings of endangered Hawai'ian trees. It was very nice to bury one's fingers in the soil and get all dirty. Loved it!

Now: Help some students with the homework. Bjerrum-plots and redox equations, here we come!!

Take a deep breath

Had just written a long email about an afternoon off. The computer ate it.

I want

candy

Report from the trenches

The biogeochemistry class is turning into a survival issue for most of the gadgets we brought out here. I don't know what it is, the weather or my hairdo or what, but for some reason or other this stuff is all dying.

Today's near-death experience was alloted to BIOGEOrge, a small green guy who measures photosynthesis in leaves and breathing in soils. BIOGEOrge is a really cool guy. However, it was not very cool when my advisor and I were out in the field today. Actually, it started emitting smoke and some pretty awful smell. Why? Heaven knows. Maybe it was so tired from pumping the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels down from their current 370 ppm to the 60 ppm we read on the screen. And maybe it was just my hairdo.

Fortunately, however, BIOGEOrge survived. So did we.

Tuesday night beer

this time: Not available at the Chapter House.

Auf Englisch, bitte

In the interest of the common good, I will henceforth and for a little while, say 7 or so weeks, blog in English. Enjoy while it lasts!

Our course is finally taking off, after a somewhat stumbling (as in, nothing works) start. It chose the day to do so, too, the first day since I arrived here that I haven't, at any point during the morning, afternoon or evening, been rained heavily upon. Instead we had the most glorious view of four volcanoes (and lots of cattle) while doing our fieldwork, and the 30+ sunblock I smeared all over me could only barely keep up with the UV-ray bombardment.

Mauna Kea was rather terrific in the setting sun. I never realised before how immense it is. Trust me, it's big. It's so big that it fills out the floor-to-ceiling window in the dining hall. It's so big that even Greek Peak looks small by comparison, Shan. And you can ski it! It's the real thing. And you can go there to gaze at the stars through fancy telescopes, some of which can be seen from below looking like petrified giants. Will most definitely have to do that.

As you all can see, life as a grad student on the Big Island is obviously tougher than I ever imagined it would be. The toughest part of today has to be when we went to the beach after completing our field work. How - and I mean HOW - can anyone be expected to live with this?!?! Give me rain, give me fog, give me Ithaca weather! Now!!

Ýmis konar snilld

Í dag keypti ég mér nýjan geisladisk. Maðurinn er snillingur, þetta er alveg agalega fallegt :)

Þessa dagana er Stóra Eyjan undirlögð af hátíðahöldum. Við í prógramminu mínu fórum á miðvikudaginn og sáum fyrstu danssýninguna. Í kvöld og annað kvöld fer svo sjálf hula-keppnin fram, í kvöld er það hefðbundinn hula-dans og á morgun nútíma hula. Þessu er öllu saman sjónvarpað beint og hún Nona, einn nemendanna í prógramminu okkar, hefur setið alveg frá sér numin af hrifningu að horfa á snilldina, og lýsa henni fyrir hverjum sem heyra vill, í allt kvöld.

Kúrsinn "minn" ætlar að fara eitthvað brösuglega af stað. Jarðvegshitamælirinn sem grafinn var í jörð hér nálægt er orðinn vatnssósa, hættur að mæla hita og næst ekki upp. Jónaskiljan okkar, sem kostar 40 þúsund dollara og var send með ærinni fyrirhöfn og tilkostnaði frá Íþöku svo greina mætti nokkur vatnssýni, virkar ekki sem skyldi. Okkur hefur ekki einu sinni tekist að fá einföldustu títrun (á menntaskólalevel) til að virka. Við erum auðsýnilega snillingar, bara í öfuga átt. Það eina sem ekki er bilað og/eða með stæla er litla jónagræjan sem ég fékk skipt fyrir nokkrum vikum. Ef hún myndi ekki virka heldur... allamalla.