a melange of trips

first, one last bit from new zealand... i spent my last weekend of the trip with jen, grant, and sofia. the chinese new year lantern festival was on in auckland that weekend so jen and i snuck away for a night out. the lanterns came in all shapes and sizes. there were a few thousand too many people for my liking, but it was very cool nonetheless.

 traditional lanterns

 lighted display with maori lanterns in the background

the sky tower in red to celebrate chinese new year

i arrived home from new zealand on 24 february (nine hours before i left NZ - thanks international date line!) and immediately jumped back in to crazy! one conference started on wednesday...fortunately it was in monterey. i didn't feel like i had met my talk quota for the month so i added one more to the list for that conference. on friday i left at 3:30 in the morning for eugene, oregon, for an environmental law conference. fortunately we had lovely weather in oregon because just about everything else that could have gone wrong with our panel did go wrong. but we survived, did a lot of quick planning on the fly, and somehow managed to pull the whole thing off.

 my lovely coworkers ashley and erin - aka "the triplets"

after eugene i headed up to seattle for a night with tish, morgan and melina. melina has grown a lot since november when we saw her last and had all sorts of new tricks to show me. i think the next time we see them melina will have two doctors for parents - go morgan!

melina saying - 'melissa let me down! i have so many fun things to do!

after seattle i headed to port angeles, washington, for a week of field work with my new coworkers at the u.s. geological survey. the bonus of this trip - i got to see pete (you know, that guy i'm married to)! i was helping with the beach topography work - essentially creating a map of the beach so we can tell how much it has changed in the last year. it didn't take hours of walking and a fancy gps to tell us that things had changed...a lot! this will be my field site for the next two years...

 sad little barnacles and mussels being buried aive

 an epic amount of woody debris on the beach from the river

 new life pushing through the thick layer of new sediment

some very cool mushrooms

and finally - home! last weekend we were supposed to go to the symphony with pete's family but the performance was cancelled due to a musician strike. we had fun anyway and enjoyed a beautiful day at tilden botanical garden in the berkeley hills.

 dutchman's pipe

 skunk cabbage
(this was very exciting to me - i hadn't seen it since i lived in oregon!)

sibling fun

it is nice to be home...but it won't be for long. a month here and then i'm off again on other adventures!