It has been eighteen months – give or take a few days – since I left Christchurch, and it’s likely to be close on two years by the time I see the city again. That’s not actually a very long time, in the scheme of things. It feels like forever, because, of course, I cannot actually return to, in Emma Hart’s turn of phrase, Christchurch-that-was. In a million photos, I have seen it come crumbling down. Some days, from all the way on the other side of the world, it’s hard to tell what’s left. If there’s been a collection, somewhere, of pictures of the things that are still there, I haven’t seen it. I hope there is. It’d be a good thing to have.

It’s easy, here, to not think about Christchurch and what happened, what’s still happening; the majority of people I interact with only vaguely remember there was an earthquake, let alone that there was more than one. They have no reason to remember, of course. One or two unfortunate individuals have unwittingly reduced me to helpless fury (“oh, wasn’t there an earthquake or something?”.) Some have remembered to ask about how it’s going back there – in particular a Chilean colleague, who’s coming from the same place. (When’s the last time you thought about earthquake recovery in Chile?) Life goes on. I could have spent today without ever seeing a mention of Christchurch, if I’d wanted – without even deliberately avoiding anything.

The earthquake happened late enough, East Coast time – nine minutes to 7pm – that by the next morning it seemed like no-one else had heard about it. It hadn’t been on the nightly news or very prominent on the morning shows. By some stroke of coincidence, I was the first and only person in the lab I was then working in for some hours; so I sat at my desk, and refreshed the news pages and Twitter endlessly, and cried. Then people started coming in, and I worked on not crying, because – as I have discovered over and over again this year – there is no more awkward conversation to begin than one that opens with “Did you hear about the massive, deadly natural disaster that just happened in the city I came here from?”. Unless it’s the one that begins “Please politely ignore me crying at my desk about the photos of the ruins of the city I came here from, really, we’ll all be happier if you do.”

I don’t think I will ever fully get what it has meant to all of my friends and family in Christchurch, this last year; the sheer, slow scope of it all, the long tail of the sudden events. But I remember. Every time I look at a map, or the stupid tourist teatowel I bought to give to someone over here and ended up pinning on my wall, the one with the Cathedral on it; every time I think about visiting home. Every time I eat some food I had and remember a shop that’s been torn down, every time I look at old photos. Every damn time. Some days it makes me angry; fried rice should not be imbued with nostalgia. But it is.

I’ll go back, and I’ll see the damage; hopefully sometime this year. I’m pretty sure I still won’t get it, quite.

But I’ll remember Christchurch-that-was, the city I accidentally spent six years in, became an adult in, got married in; I’ll remember it all, the lovely masonry and the old spaces made new, the dull hot nor-westers, the cycle tracks along the railway lines and rivers, the icy July mornings when the gutters freeze, the tall crumbling cliffs down at Sumner, the long straight streets below the Port Hills, all the bits that are gone and that remain, and I’ll look forward to seeing it become something new, something good.

I love you, Christchurch.

This is, in fact, not the worst official ID photo I currently have. But it's possibly below the average. (It's a very low average.)

I got my permit back in December, but it’s taken this long to get my licence due to a number of factors involving a) winter b) the nefarious workings of the Massachusetts RMV c) the distance of every test-taking location from my home/university and d) the fact that taking a driving test after you’ve been driving for a decade is rather akin to that show “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?” (called “Are You Smarter Than A Ten-Year Old?” in New Zealand.)

Are you smarter than a ten-year old? Almost certainly. Have you spent the last five years going through the same schooling system as the ten-year-old? No. Similarly: after ten years of driving, are you an at least marginally competent driver? Probably. Do you indicate when you do a three-point turn (in three points, no more and no less)? Probably not. Can you be failed for this? Yes. Yes you can.

(In fairness, I feel compelled to note that every international student in the department has failed their first go at a driving test in the States, despite all holding licences from their home country. Or, let me rephrase: every female and/or non-white international student has. There are two things we could take away from this. I don’t imagine you need to guess which one we, as a group, take away.)

Conversation with other people in my position revealed that pretty much everyone who’d failed had had the same driving tester, at the same location. I took note of this and sensibly booked my test at a different location, some forty kilometres away from the first. I couldn’t re-book it for a month, due to point b), nefarious workings of the Massachusetts RMV, wherein one cannot re-book a driving test for at least two weeks after the first one but this information is not provided anywhere on their website, which just says is “please try again tomorrow”. I tried ringing. Turns out there is no way to speak to a live person on their phone help line. It’s like a special circle of hell. The one with the people who talk in the theatre.

My first test had been marked by a number of inauspicious events, notably me mysteriously but irrevocably losing my permit somewhere in between getting in the car and arriving at the testing location; this was solvable but involved a lot of me running around like a mad thing, taking everything out of the car to look for it, and being frazzled. Also, it started to snow. After all of that I probably wasn’t in a fit mental state to be tested on my times-tables, let alone driving, but I’d taken half a day off work (see point c) about distance) and so had my colleague to “supervise” me, so I could hardly call it off.

For the second, I put all the necessary paperwork in the glovebox the night before, and it was sunny. Everything was going perfectly until I walked into the RMV (forty km away, remember) and laid eyes upon the exact same driving tester. I had precisely zero hope of him not remembering me, because you know how many New Zealanders there are in the Pioneer Valley? As far as I can tell: four. Counting my cat. And my husband.

Fortunately, he forwent commenting on my expression until after the test. And I managed to overcome my NZ-driving-induced-instincts (I, at least, had it drilled into me that the most important thing in a three-point-turn was that every part of your car stayed within the roadway at all times and did not go over the footpath or into someone’s driveway not even a little bit, whereas here they focus on the When We Say Three Points We Mean Three bit) enough to pass.

All up, it was probably marginally less hassle than taking a day-trip to Canada and letting the magic powers of an international border restore my driving skills, but, you know. Marginally. On the third hand: having US-issued photo ID makes people much happier, and lets you get into a bunch of pubs around Amherst (not to be confused with The Pub) which have not fully absorbed the legalities vis-a-vis foreign passports being an acceptable form of age ID. So I think I’ll call it a win.

American football may be slowly wending its way towards comprehension in my brain, but the American credit system is not. The gist of the matter is that the nice people offering a major-bank-affiliated-frequent-flyer credit card chose to give one to me when I applied for it. This is good because it means I can stop using my Kiwi credit card, except to keep that account going, and sock our New Zealand savings into an actual savings account which earns actual interest, not the grand 0.5% we could get in an American bank. (For various reasons I haven’t had much need to pay attention to interest rates for the last, oh, two years or so, having more of a need to spend money than leave it safely away, so this shocked me a bit.)

What’s ridiculous, though, is that I now have a credit card with a limit several times that of Mike’s. It’s not totally out of line with my credit history in New Zealand, where I’ve had a card for some years and paid it off responsibly, but a) they definitely didn’t check my New Zealand credit history and b) Mike earns several times as much as I do.  I actually can’t come up with any factor that should tell banks that I’m a better credit risk than he is, considering us as individuals. I don’t have a credit score because I only became a real person, as far as they’re concerned, in October; he achieved that much earlier. I’m a student; he’s gainfully employed. The bills in our respective names have been paid equally diligently. He’s two years older. If they had taken the time to check our NZ histories, his NZ score is significantly better than mine, essentially because of that extra two years.

The only logical reasoning I can come up with is that because I am (on my own) a relatively poor student (though, let’s face it, doing OK compared to the median wage) I’m a greater credit risk and therefore more worth having as a customer because they’ll make money off me (but not so risky that they think I won’t pay it off at all.) But that’s still poor reasoning.

Frankly, credit cards are a necessity not because of the credit they provide per se, though that’s often important or vital, but because – in this age of internet transactions – they provide a way to make large purchases safely. Put thousands of dollars into a checking account, and have your card stolen, anything you lose is probably gone; have a credit card, you can block and reverse transactions. Stay at a hotel; they want a credit card on file, even if you have the cash upfront for your stay, and the card has to be able to cover the full cost of your stay. You are often punished financially for not having access to credit. But the rules of access to credit are well-nigh impenetrable.

Yesterday I submitted our abstract for  AbSciCon, NASA’s biennial astrobiology science conference. Attendance is not a requirement of my fellowship, but it’s where everyone else doing similar research will be and it’s a great chance to present our (preliminary) data to the rest of the astrobiology community. There also seems to be a lot of effort to get early-career researchers and students to attend, which makes it just about perfect as a conference choice except for time of year, but not much to be done about that.

My work isn’t really at the point where I can tell a whole story about my research, it’s more of a “Watch This Space”, but we’ve got a solid foundation. I’m really excited about the chance to talk about it to people in the wider community – I have a pretty good sense that this is data people have been hoping will be gathered for a while now, but science is inherently about communities; there’s no point doing great experiments and getting good data to just sit in your lab and clutch it to your chest. (Unless it’s commercially sensitive, I suppose, but that’s a whole ‘nother can of beans.) And I want to see what other people are doing.

Plus, this year’s AbSciCon is in Atlanta, which will be my first real chance to visit the South, if you discount New Orleans and Baltimore last year, which I think you can. I never considered any universities in the American South when I was applying to PhD programmes over here – for fairly obvious reasons involving the difference between culture shock and culture clash – but I figure it’s somewhere I need to visit at least once. It also, in a lovely piece of serendipity, means I can tack on some personal time at the end of my Atlanta visit and go to JordanCon, which I am very excited about (the Wheel of Time fandom was how I really got into this whole Internet thing, back in the early 2000s). So that’s going to be an awesome week.

Between now and AbSciCon in mid-April, though, I have to submit a renewal proposal for my fellowship in the 2012-2013 academic year, updating NASA on my progress and changes to our original research plan (which are few and mostly of the inevitable biological surprises variety), give a seminar to the rest of my department on my research, and start supervising the new undergraduate student I mentioned, who confusingly has the same first name as my PhD supervisor. (We’re working on nicknames that are acceptable to both of them, but it’s been an uphill battle, as most variants we’ve come up with involve things like “Young/Old”, “Junior/Senior”, and “Little/Big”, none of which are particularly flattering.)

After AbSciCon, I arrive back with two or three weeks to prepare for my preliminary PhD exams. One of the major differences between the American and Kiwi PhD systems is not just length – five years versus three – but gatekeeping. With the Kiwi system, once you’re in, you’re in, barring massive screwups or project failure. With the American system, after around eighteen months or two years you sit preliminary exams, which move you up from being a graduate student to a PhD candidate, if you pass them. In our department you’re required to submit a 20-ish page proposal on your research plan for the next three or four years (it doesn’t have to be your specific research, but it’s a bit silly not to) and give a talk on it, after which you are questioned by your committee. Generally people do pass, though not always the first time around – it’s not at all uncommon for the committee to require some adjustments or a resubmission after some period of time.

I’m in the process of asking people to be on my committee – you need three faculty, your supervisor just sits in. It’s the sort of thing one approaches with some trepidation even if you feel otherwise well-prepared, because your committee basically have free reign to ask you as many hard questions as they can. And Google is their friend, not yours. I think I’ll be okay by the time I get there, but this year is definitely divided into “before my prelim” and “after my prelim”.

And, before everything gets really crazy, Mike and I have planned a three-day trip to New York to do all the touristy stuff we didn’t get to do on last year’s twenty-two hour visit; museums, maybe a Broadway show, that sort of thing. And visit DUB Pies and have proper meat pies, of course. I’m stupidly excited about it – we haven’t actually had much of a chance since we came to America to just be tourists, together; we’ve done our trips to tourist places separately or not at all. I’m looking forward to being able to do a major tourist destination properly. Not that we can see everything in New York in three days, but it’s going to be the tail-end of winter; we can come back in summer for the outdoors stuff.

It’s going to be a pretty interesting few months, all in all. I’m just hoping to come out the other end in one piece.

*I could turn them off, but I’d have to wrestle for the remote and there’s always the hope that one of them will say something exceptionally stupid or try to crowd-surf or both.

What I find just as interesting as the politics, though – which isn’t hard because the politics are more a matter of entertainment than actual information, at this stage – is the advertisements which go along with them. I remember blogging about the sheer bulk of pharmaceutical ads in this country, and that’s still staggering. But there’s also a lot of other groups which simply don’t advertise on New Zealand television – because they’re American-specific, and/or because their New Zealand counterparts just don’t attempt popular support in the same way – that range from the bewildering to the extremely very slightly insidious.

“Bewildering” definitely covers all the various stock-investment ads. Having never had enough money at any one point to consider investing it in anything more than a high-interest savings account (for what passes as “high interest” in this economic climate – I sadly remember the days when I was getting eight percent on one of my Kiwibank accounts) the range of investment ads is both curious and unnerving. It’s not just companies seeking to manage people’s “401Ks” (basically the equivalent of Kiwisaver, but tied to employers rather than the government and a staple of retirement planning here); it’s things like iPad apps for when you just have to trade that stock right now, which seems like an incitement to losing your money except under very specific circumstances, but then, the people advertising them are interested in brokers’ fees, not your long term savings. They all appeal, I think, to the American drive for independence, to the idea that everyone owns their future, financial or otherwise. The idea that, despite everything that’s happened to the economy, your financial stability is something you can control. Maybe because of everything.

Then there’s the plethora of fossil-fuel ads. These are carefully disguised as appeals to “vote for jobs” and “vote for America”, but all end up at one place: the declaration that the only thing that can solve America’s myriad problems is a renewed dedication to the use of coal, and oil, and natural gas. They’ve been around for the eighteen months we’ve been here, but with the election machine gearing up they’ve gone into overdrive. Phrases like “clean coal” are used in a way that would have the ASA driven to drink by the number of complaints they would engender. The viewpoint is pounded on, constantly, that to be against the greater use of fossil fuels isn’t just economic suicide, it’s somehow anti-American. They are counterpointed, entertainingly, by BP’s attempts to emphasise that everything on the Gulf Coast is just fine and it’s like Deepwater Hor- uh, that thing, you know, it never even – what thing was that we were talking about? Anyway, the Gulf Coast is just amazing, and BP is still there. And is always going to be there. Aren’t you reassured?

The one thing there aren’t many – or any, really – of, yet, is actual direct pro-or-anti-political-candidate ads. A little early for that, except in primary states, and Massachusetts isn’t due for its Republican primaries for quite some time and – in any case – isn’t likely to be much of a battleground, because all three Republicans in Massachusetts will vote for Romney. (I jest. All six.)

But in some ways it seems like what people say on the actual political programmes – whether the Sunday interview shows, the MSNBC/Fox/CNN/etc-style talkshows, or the debates – is matched in importance by the advertising that surrounds them. The ads aren’t just about selling things to a certain demographic; they shape a narrative, together, the ads and the shows. It’s almost hypnotic. None of these ads are directly political, remember. They’re not telling you to vote for certain people. Or even parties. A lot of them aren’t even “vote for” ads, that’s mostly the NATURAL GAS IS YOUR BEST FRIEND JOBS JOBS JOBS ads. They’re just – deliberately, carefully – shaping how you hear those people and parties in the bits in between the ads.

The problem with American TV, in terms of politics, isn’t that you watch it and become less informed (unless all you watch is certain channels, and no, I don’t just mean Fox – if all people watched was MSNBC they’d be pretty under-informed.) It’s that you need to be pre-informed by other media to watch it, because there’s a meta-narrative going on that changes the direct messages of the main narrative, if you’re aware of it.

Frankly it’s all a bit exhausting. Much easier to just go read something.

We have also been upgraded to Really Expletive Cold (a.k.a Too Cold To Go Outside Unless You Have No Other Options.)

Our lab has expanded precipitously in the last six months; over the summer, when one of my labmates was away for six weeks, it was possible for me to go days at a time without actually talking to anyone else in the department, despite being in the lab during regular working hours every weekday, because I was the only person in the lab. Since then we’ve picked up an exchange student, a new (to our lab) PhD student, a postdoctoral researcher, last year’s two undergrads returned for the fall semester, and a new undergrad is going on trial this spring. (Working with me. You may all sympathise. With him.) It’s put something of a premium on desk space, but is otherwise working excellently.

What is remarkable, though, is that even with this expansion, and although I am living in the United States it is also quite possible for me to spend a day at work without talking to an American. (See, sure; have a conversation with, no, if the extent of seeing is “passing in the corridor”.) The undergraduate population of UMass is overwhelmingly domestic, but the graduate student population – especially in our department – is highly international.

This isn’t that surprising, because science is, inherently, an international field. Your research may be most similar to someone at an institution on another continent. Your research may be done somewhere far-flung from your institution, for that matter; I remember that one of the biology lecturers at Canterbury studied African forests, and our lab’s main field site is off the West Coast of the US, thousands of kilometres away. It’s certainly common to go a respectable distance when you’re studying, or teaching. I got grilled by my Honours supervisor about why I wanted to stay at Canterbury for another year instead of going somewhere else. When I finish my PhD and move to postdoctoral positions, they will almost certainly be outside New Zealand.

The flags of all the countries from which people have come to our lab (except for NZ, Sweden, and South Korea, because we're lazy and haven't put them up yet.)

Between seven people currently working in our lab, we cover five continents. Our department covers them all, except Antarctica. (And Australia, technically, since the sole Australian postdoc returned home, but I’m going to call it “Oceania” and say I cover it.)  The vast majority of the faculty and a solid majority of the students are American, but it’s pretty mixed.

The positive in this is that there is always someone up for a round of What Were They Thinking (most common theme: healthcare, followed by visas). It also means that I’m not just being exposed to American culture, but a whole number of them; I’ve learned about what sort of sweets Swedes make for Christmas (tasty ones), how often it snows in South Korea (about as much as NZ), and how expensive magazines are in Swaziland (very). And it makes for some seriously impressive spreads when we hold potluck lunches or dinners, across the department or within the lab.

It also lends itself to a curious sort of banding together; we may have backgrounds less similar to one another than we are individually to Americans, but we share the experience of being Not From Around Here (actually, on that score, the Americans in my lab are in a strict sense Not From Around Here, but that’s not quite the same thing.) And if you want to look at it another way, it takes a certain level of socio-economic privilege to be able to come to America for a PhD or Master’s degree; we also all share the experience of being, relatively, in the top something-very-small-percent of the world’s population. Wherever we’re from.

Ultimately, I think, this is a good thing for America, in terms of the cultural dominance it achieves by being a centre of scientific research and training; we may be coming together from a whole range of countries and occasionally bonding over not being Americans, but we’re interacting through American culture – and, obviously, with American students as well as fellow international students. There are no more than two or three students in our department from any one country; day-to-day, we can’t retreat to our own cultures even if we want to.

I like this part of scientific culture, of being a student of science. Even if I wasn’t part of the Fulbright program – which obviously encourages and entails a lot of cross-cultural interaction – the international nature of science would still be part of my life. To go on to graduate study in the sciences, you have to have at least some innate curiosity about the world. When you’re headfirst in research, it can be easy to let that shrink to whatever small part of it you’re studying. (Because we rarely have time to read even the work that’s relevant to our studies, let alone other areas.) Working with people who differ from you in fundamental cultural ways keeps you paying attention to the greater world. And I like that, a lot.

You might remember that back in October it looked like this outside in Western Massachusetts (and large stretches of the Northeast):

Admittedly it didn't still look like this the afternoon of the day I took this picture, but two feet of snow did fall.

Well, it’s the first week of January – the coldest part of the year, normally, and by “coldest” I mean “generally doesn’t get above freezing for weeks at a time” – and not only does it not look like it did this time last year…

So technically this picture is from early February, but trust me when I say it's a good approximation.

…it looks like this.

Really. Like this. The blue sky isn't even cunningly deceptive. Some days have been actually genuinely warm.

There has been one day this winter when it has failed to climb above freezing. The lowest low has been about -13C. Last year it was around -30C. I’m still biking to university – no ice, no snow, and as long as it’s -5C or above it’s a perfectly pleasant ride. Nor is it just Massachusetts; high-temperature records are falling all over America, and ski resorts are barely keeping the slopes open, so little snow has fallen. Admittedly, there’s still a good three months left to go of potential winter weather, so panic is not yet due, but compared to last year’s record snowfall it’s bizarre.

It isn’t even that snow is falling and then melting; it isn’t falling at all. When it precipitates, it rains. This is somewhat vexing in that the great swath of newly-dumped dirt outside our front door which got trekked muddily into our house all autumn, instead of freezing and then being snowed over, is bringing forward the anticipated spring mud by about four months. Except without the possibility of grass growing on it. It’s like eternal late November. Thanksgiving aside, I’m not so thrilled with late November when it is late November. Late November all winter seems a bit much.

There’s also the bit when it is below -5C and I go to put my bike on the bus at the main road and discover the pull-down bike racks have frozen to the bus, which is not so much fun and especially not so much fun when it’s winter break and the buses are on the reduced forty-minute schedule. I could take a can of CRC (WD-40 to Americans) with me, but a) I’m not sure it’d work and b) I’m not sure how the bus people would feel about me oiling their racks. (And that doesn’t sound weirdly euphemistic at all. Right.)

Mostly, everyone has the thoroughly illogical but nevertheless creeping feeling that sooner or later we’re going to get a whole winter’s worth of snow all at once. I have an abstract due to a conference at the end of January and more than one experiment to do before I hand it in; if the snow could hold off until then, that would be brilliant. You hear me, weather? NO SNOW. NONE.

(Reverse psychology works on continental weather systems, right?)

But, bittersweetly, 2011 has, on a purely personal level, been one of the best and most successful years of my life, and I think of Mike’s, too. It’s been the year we settled in to our lives over here, the year in which, in so many ways, we got everything we could possibly have wanted – financial security, professional validation and achievement, new experiences. We transitioned from near-poverty studenthood to a secure existence; we visited, between us, many of America’s great cities; we made friends; we did good work. Mike turned his technical expertise into a job he loves, and I got a NASA fellowship for my research, something I’ve been working at, in some ways, for half my life. For all the small (and not-so-small) frustrations, America has been good to us in 2011.

And yet. Drunk on the cheap subscriptions here (The Economist, $70 a year!), we get half a dozen political and financial magazines, more than we can read, honestly; they pile up around the house in guilt-inducing drifts. I’d demand we get them in online format only,  but that’s either not possible or more expensive than getting the hard copies as well.

All of them had end-of-year summaries, forecasts for 2012. They didn’t mention Christchurch, or gave it only a single line. I had a conversation, two or three months ago, with an American scientist who has traveled frequently through Christchurch to Antarctica, which included the sentence “Wasn’t there an earthquake or something?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that. The quake fundamentally shapes everything that has happened in New Zealand this year, almost every conversation I have about home. Over here, it might as well have never happened – but it has changed New Zealand forever. (Don’t even bother asking about the Rugby World Cup. That didn’t happen either.)

In light of that, I finally went back and looked at my notes from a course I took in my first year at university, 2005: Environmental Geohazards. It focused, naturally, on Christchurch and its environs. I threw out the accompanying booklet when I left Christchurch, certain I’d never need a map of Christchurch’s liquefaction potential, or any of my other accumulated notes from five years of university. I was wrong, as it happens, but fortunately, in 2005 I was young and mad enough to type up all the hand-written notes I took in class. (This was – be shocked – before it was quite acceptable to take laptops to class, though only by about a year.) And so I know what I was told, six years before the quake, about what might happen to Christchurch. It makes for interesting reading.

“The greatest hazard to Christchurch City is the hazard of an earthquake. The Canterbury region is riddled with faults (Figure 4) and the return time for a magnitude VI quake in the region – shaking severe enough to cause minor damage to most buildings – is just ten to twenty years (Figure 2). A MM VII-VIII earthquake, which has a very high probability of occurring in the next century, would completely knock out most of the city’s infrastructure, causing subsidence, landslides, liquefaction, and possibly a tsunami, not to mention damage across large parts of the entire South Island. This will only occur once, but will be devastating when it does.”

I’m not sure whether “MM” refers to the Moment Magnitude (what most people still think of as the “Richter” scale, the absolute magnitude of earthquakes) or the Modified Mercalli scale, that of impact, but I think it’s the latter. The “damage across large parts of the South Island” part was wrong, because this summary referred to the possibility of an Alpine Fault earthquake, but the rest was quite accurate.

“Liquefaction: this is very important in Christchurch, associated with sand and coarse silt. It causes settling and ‘sand volcanoes’, as well as deformation. It happens over geologically recent estuaries and coastal deposits, and is highly linked to the length of shaking. Longer, more liquefaction. Overlying caps of clay can break. Water is expelled for a more stable packing formation. There are engineering issues with settling – buildings can fall over, and these days are built with foundations 30 or 40 m deep. This is spectacular but not too dangerous….Christchurch has high liquefaction potential throughout most of the central city, due to the high groundwater table. But potential does not equal reality. The worst is near estuaries and near the river. There is a low groundwater table but the potential is much reduced: it is more central and near to the Avon and Heathcote due to lateral spreading.”

This is my summary of the lecturer’s words. It captures the possibility, but misses entirely the recurrence of liquefaction, and the back-breaking work of cleaning it up; dangerous it might not be, but from this distance it seems like one of the most psychologically damaging things about the earthquakes, the repeated clean-up, the dust and mud. The academic idea of it never made that clear.

“Vulnerability to shaking: the worst for buildings is when the frequency created is the same as the building’s natural frequency, or about 10 storeys is the WORST in Christchurch. Tilt-slab buildings are bad, and some soft storey buildings can pancake in on themselves. Modern buildings often collapsed. In Kobe 1995 local shaking made the motorway fall over.”

I don’t remember how high the CTV building was, but not ten stories, I think? Pancaking, of course, foreruns the PGC building. I don’t think I realised, when I took those notes, how many buildings in Christchurch this paragraph was applicable to.

“A local quake at less than 20 km would be M 5 to 5.5, like June 4 1869, which had an epicentre in the city, and less than 15 km deep, with 5 to 10 seconds of shaking, and MM 7 in the centre city rapidly decreasing and very localised. There would be some minor liquefaction, relatively minor damage, rockfalls and landslides in Sumner and the Port Hills, and M 4-4.5 aftershocks.

I don’t know where seismology went between 2005 and 2010, but this is patently not what happened. The quake was local, but the Darfield quake was a 7, and the February quake a 6.3; andthe damage was not minor. I haven’t quoted all my notes summarising the earthquake risk to Christchurch, but it focused largely on the Alpine Fault and others in the foothills; local faults were barely mentioned, apart from here.

“Impacts: Christchurch could be potentially affected by active faults within 200 km. The Hope and Alpine faults are the most active at 135 and 100-300 repeat times respectively. There is a probability of 65% of a quake in the next 50 years. Damage likely to cover most of the region including infrastructure and lifelines.
…Major concerns are the immediate destruction with no effective warning, evacuation, casualty treatment and loss of services. There is a long time-frame for recovery and normality, months or years. Christchurch has 150 year return cycle for a MM 7.5 to 8 quake and 1000 years fro a MM 9 quake.
…There will be lots of superficial damage to houses so you stay inside and under cover. Houses should remain standing though. There are services issues with water (leading to fires, like in Napier 1931), switchyards have been redesigned to cope with the shaking, and there will be large rock avalanches which will lead to long distance problems and aggregate on the floodplains, disrupting farming. Roads will be blocked, brick buildings badly damaged such as many in the city centre, and any tows on faults like Hamner will be devastated. Ruptures will take out roads. “

Again, this is all predicated on the idea that a major, destructive Christchurch quake would be an Alpine Fault quake, but it’s not inaccurate about the results in the city. If MM *is* Modified Mercalli, many areas of the east did experience MMIX-X shaking (see these GeoNet maps of peak ground acceleration.)

But this is the sentence that was absolutely right:

There is a long time-frame for recovery and normality, months or years.

When I learned about earthquakes, six years ago, I learned about the instant damage. Not the recovery. Last week’s aftershocks only emphasise how long that is.

Having gotten everything I could have asked for in 2011 – for myself, if not for anyone else – this is what I want for 2012: recovery, for Christchurch, for New Zealand, for everyone. Let it be the start of something better.

The cat, realising she was not the centre of attention for once, endeavoured to reposition herself in it.

The main obstacle to the Christmas I envisioned was getting my hands on the cut of lamb I wanted. My knowledge of American lamb-eating habits was formed, before I came here, largely by the memory of protests against tariffs imposed on Australian and New Zealand lamb imports back around the turn of the millennium – at the time, I walked past the American embassy to school every day, so news about people protesting outside it (they generally didn’t do so before eight in the morning, when I was passing by) caught my attention. The American embassy is notable in Wellington for being the only embassy you’d need an army to get into, built in the high Cold War Bunker style of architecture. Other embassies range from “high-class hotel security” to “a quick jump over the nominal fence”, making razor-wire-topped three-metre-high-fences and a mad scientist’s worth of satellite dishes rather noticeable.

I assumed, naturally, that lamb was something Americans actually ate. As it turns out, however, the tariffs appear to have been imposed because American lamb farmers were fighting for a very small market indeed. According to the USDA, most Americans eat no lamb at all. The average consumption is 0.74 pounds per person per year, which is basically one or two chops, or would be if they regularly sold chops, which they don’t. This is reflected in our local supermarket, which generally has  a few whole legs of (largely Australian) lamb, frenched racks, the occasional cheap packet of neck chops, and very rarely some horrendously expensive leg chops. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is significantly more turkey than lamb. And there’s no mutton whatsoever (though rabbit quite often makes an appearance, and trout, which isn’t even legal to sell in supermarkets back home if I recall correctly, so there you go.)

Up until we got here, I hadn’t actually realised how much I liked lamb. It’s customary in New Zealand to complain often about how expensive lamb is and how it’s all sent overseas and we can’t afford to ever eat it, not like in the Good Old Days (which has a lot of truth to it; I’ve seen New Zealand lamb in Britain cheaper, on a cost-of-living basis, than in New Zealand supermarkets, and according to the USDA fact page above we export 80% of our lamb.) But we still eat a lot more of it than Americans; the latest firm statistic I could find was for 2001, in which we ate, on average, about 10kg of lamb and 7kg of mutton each a year. Leaving aside the mutton, that’s nearly thirty times more lamb than the average American. I don’t think I ate that much lamb, and I definitely wasn’t eating that much mutton, but between mince and stewed neck chops and the odd barbeque and very occasionally a roast, we were consuming a respectable quantity. I’d just not noticed.

Now I can’t actually get lamb, unless I want to eat very large quantities of it or I’m lucky enough to find it when they have more reasonably-sized cuts (we’ve actually ended up buying a whole leg and chopping it into two-person-sized quantities ourselves, because it’s the only semi-economical way to go about things) I miss it. Naturally, this meant I determined I would cook an old family favourite recipe for Christmas which called for a butterflied lamb shoulder. I went looking; I figured that the supermarket might be deficient, but there had to be somewhere stocking it.

Our local area is – oddly enough – devoid of specialist butchers (or greengrocers, come to that), and even the more specialist-organic-hippie places like Trader Joe’s have very little lamb indeed (I didn’t check Whole Foods, but that’s because Mike refuses to set foot in the place after our first visit, an attitude I have some sympathy with.)

We even drove down to a Mad Butcher-style place in the Springfield area; no dice. They had even less lamb than the supermarket. Lamb, at least in this area, is just not a goer. I ended up settling for what did show up in the supermarket a week before Christmas – a butterflied lamb leg, which to be honest cooked up just as well as the shoulder would have. And it was delicious.

The problem is – it’s the holiday season, the time of year (weather aside) that we’d normally be having barbeques…now I have a terrible craving for chops. One more reason to make plans to visit home, I think. (Or possibly the western US, where they farm all the lamb. Surely there’s some out there.)

Generally, up until this point, I’ve wandered in, looked at all the microbrewery beer, looked at the selection of reliably drinkable European beer with which I am familiar, and bought a reliably drinkable European beer. Or hit our cupboard for a Steinlager, after we bought mumblety-dozen that one time they appeared in the local store. I think we’re never going to run out. Possibly they’re breeding. I haven’t dug far enough back in the cupboard to tell. At any rate, if I do want a slightly-boring-but-perfectly-adequate-lager, it’s there.

This has largely also been my approach to wine-buying, as there is enough New Zealand wine over here to drown in as long as – and this is something of a caveat – you are happy to drink nothing but Marlborough savignon blanc, or very occasionally chardonnay. As far as I can tell Massachusetts liquor stores have not worked out that New Zealand produces red wine (with the noble exception of 2011 Oyster Bay Merlot.) Or anything that’s not savignon blanc.  Of course, the alternative – trying to work out what Californian wine I’d drink – runs up against the same problem as the beer: so many wines, so little time (and money, and, let’s be honest, capacity for alcohol, mixed with a reluctance to throw out wine I have paid for even if it’s frankly pretty awful.)

Last weekend, however, we went on an official Microbiology Graduate Student Group trip (because brewing uses yeast and yeast is a microorganism and in fact we have one whole lab in the department working on yeast genetics so it’s totally relevant, yes?) to the Berkshire Brewing Company . This is a Western Massachusetts microbrewery which has been around for going on twenty years, mostly selling in southern New England – that’s the other thing about American microbreweries, they’re very regional, because the country is just so damn big.

They took us on a detailed tour of the entire facility, from where they bring in and mill the grain, right to bottling. It was made rather merrier by the fact that they offer free samples. What I hadn’t realised before I went on the tour was that “free samples” meant “three full cups of beer”, which, if you take them up on it, is an awful lot of merriment for 1pm on a Saturday afternoon, especially if one happens to not be driving and can take them up on it. (My road test is scheduled for the first week of January; I can’t work out whether I’m looking forward more to being able to drive myself around or not having to take my passport whenever I want to purchase or publicly consume alcohol. It’s like being nineteen ALL OVER AGAIN, except, oh, wait, at age nineteen my learner’s licence constituted legal ID and my Massachusetts learner’s permit is a piece of paper which doesn’t constitute anything legal except permission to drive with a supervisor, grumble.)

The tour was informative – I did, in the long-ago mists of my bachelor’s degree, learn about the process of making beer, so I could basically follow along the biochemical processes – and interesting to see industrial microbiology at play. I spend so much time in my day-to-day lab work trying to coax organisms from volcanoes at the bottom of the sea to grow in test-tubes that I tend to get a bit divorced from the fascinating concept of things that grow at room temperature, on actual human-type food. I doubt I’m ever going to end up working for a brewery, but it’s frankly a more relevant part of microbiology to people’s daily lives than my whole extremophiles and astrobiology bit. Also tastier.

Most of my tank pictures came out blurry and unusable, but if you've ever wondered what they brew beer in, this is it.

These are the whiskey barrels they age some of the beer in. Interesting idea - I'd never heard of it before, but apparently they do it for several varieties.

I'm not sure how the chilly bins aid in the bottling process, but they look awesomely No-8-wired.

The "sampling" room demonstrates that these people are very serious about their beer memorabilia.

In any event, it turns out that the BBC (we had a lot of fun in the days leading up to the trip when someone would turn around and ask “but where is the BBC?” and a bunch of other people would say “…London?”) makes some very good beer. I wasn’t sure about the one aged in whiskey barrels, which was a bit sour, but their lager and porter were very tasty, as well as their seasonal winter beer. And they sell it in entertaining-night-in-sized bottles. What more could you want, really?

An entertaining night in for two to three people, I hasten to add.