St. Patty's Day!

Why yes, Kiwi's generally are of Scottish, not Irish descent, but this fact is largely ignored when it comes to St. Patty's day. Any chance to drink will be taken advantage of. In the society of alcoholics I live in it doesn't matter what your nationality is- as long as some ethnic group is celebrating something, we all celebrate (by drinking Speights, of course)! What a sophisticated multinational place we are.

In other news, it seems that school has actually started. Yesterday I wrote the first draft of a critique of Singer's "The moral status of the embryo" for bioethics and I need to write a lab report for Marine Ecology and another one for Microbiology, neither of which I have really started yet, so I guess I'd best be getting a move on. Oh and get this, I was the first person to map my the Ampicillin resistance gene on transposon Tn5:lambda and where it inserted into the plasmid pBR322 when treated with a suicide vector by restriction with HindIII and SalI in my entire class and so my prof gave me a chocolate fish! At the same time I wondered how old we were, but then didn't complain. Chocolate fish are fish-shaped candies with caramel and marshmallow clearly covered with chocolate.

Oh and in Marine Ecology, we were supposed to go and collect plankton, but there was a red tide bloom in the last few days! This is horrible ecologically but also very interesting. In certain conditions the Dinoflagellates go crazy and produce neurotoxins in vast quantities and the sea actually turns red! Anyway the Marine science department needed our boats for more sampling. (Isn't it awesome that there is a Marine Ecology department here and they have boats!) I guess its not too often that your lab gets cancelled for a Red Tide! I was sad though about not being able to go and see it until my prof said that they needed help on the boats with all the sampling they're doing, so I will be going out researching next week!

Last night I went to a pot-luck and met a bunch of my friend Alex's friends friends. If you followed that then you'll get that he brought me because he only knew a few of them. The guy who's flat it was teaches Sorock- which I think is just fancy jiving- to old school music, and apparently its huge here. So a few bottles of wine later and food gone next thing I know the entire flat is cleared and he's paired us all up and is giving lessons! The most random things happen here, let me tell you.

I'm a little sad that I didn't go on either the kayak trip to Wanaka or on the tramping trip to the Fjordlands this weekend, but I have to do a somewhat "manditory" rugby thing on Sunday- when they'll decide for sure which position I'll play, and with the homework I think it'll be good to you know, maybe do it.

Alright that's the last few days in a nutshell. I hope you enjoyed. Did you know? You can comment by clicking the comment button and then writing something that is witty and PG in response to this!!

And these are random pictures are of myself! a) in a church tower in Dunedin b) with a lot of sunburn and c) out on the Otago Peninsula.