Field trippin'

kia ora koutou!
ka mihi au ki a koutou katoa!

I'm just back from my second field trip of December, visiting Mataroa Frew and James 'de Cat' Scott and doing a road trip from Otorohanga to Taranaki via the Forgotten World Highway and back through Mokau. This follows a trip the week before when I met with Linda Robinson of ERMA, Nick and co. at Massey, then on to a conference at the Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), Taradale (where I went to high school in the fucking eighties!). I've been offline dealing with, among other things, a formal complaint I've laid at LU (actually concerning the CoRE) and finishing MAST 319 (Maori Resource Management) admin details (which i did for free, 'cos I'm an idiot). I've also ended up Postgraduate Officer at Lincoln for 2005 (thanks Sean...). Evidently comes with a $3,000 honorarium which I have voiced an interest in utilising as a slush fund (I swear that buying pints for postgrads in Mrs O's on a Friday avo is the best way to get feedback).

I've put in five draft chapters of my thesis, a load off although John F. has already shredded bits of it...not going past chapter 1 actually. And he's right: there's a lot of writing to be done yet. It's occured to me that I am in violation of my MEA (that's an entire story I need to talk about too) whereby Team Leader clears all media releases. As no one (other than Mataroa!) reads all this, I can't see a problem. Yet.