A Winter Solstice Holiday

Posted on December 11, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

We’re still snow-free here in Massachusetts (after the remnants of the Halloween Snowpocalypse melted away) but it is, nevertheless, almost Christmas. It’s like it happens every year or something.

This week, my attention was particularly caught by one of the latest XKCD comics (I’m assuming most of you read XKCD – and if not, why not?), depicting the 20 most popular Christmas songs on American radio by decade of release (conclusion: it’s still the Baby Boomers’ fault, just like everything else.)

There’s a few notable things about it. Firstly, there are a whole lot of songs on there I don’t even recognise, let alone remember ever hearing. “Blue Christmas”? Christmas is pretty well colour-coded, and blue isn’t one of them. “Holly Jolly Christmas”? Are you actually serious? “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas”, for which I mysteriously know the tune to that one line but am totally blank on the rest of the song, if indeed there *is* a rest of the song. Etcetera.

Secondly, at least half these songs don’t get airtime during your regular New Zealand Christmas period. Some of these are for obvious reasons. Songs which are specifically winter-related, rather than Christmas related, just don’t work when it’s nearly the longest day of the year. (I would say “summer”, but as I believe most people back home right now can attest, New Zealand has very special weather patterns whereby it warms up nicely over November – there is a reason we had our wedding in mid-November – and then goes to crap sometime in early December, as if the weather is vainly struggling to conform to the Northern Hemisphere celebration we’re closing in on. This doesn’t happen every year or in every part of the country – Christmas 2009 was absolutely gorgeous, weather-wise – but it’s pretty regular. “Christmas on the Beach”, as a song, is not actually all that accurate.) Other songs are just not popular for whatever reason, whereas some Christmas songs which are quite popular in NZ (I’m thinking “Fairytale of New York”, although that might be less played here because of that one grating bit of homophobia in the middle of the song) don’t appear to be as popular in America, again for probably fairly random reasons.

But what really strikes me is how unrelentingly secular a playlist this is. I may just be mixing up memories of school Christmas concerts and so forth with songs on the radio, and am happy to be corrected, but I’m fairly sure I remember Christmas songs on the radio in NZ including at least some Christmas carols. I have no truck whatsoever with religion in general, let alone Christianity in particular, but I know a great many very religious carols and can and do sing them with gusto over the Christmas season, I think because I imprinted on them at too young an age to know about their connotations, resulting in a very special kind of compartmentalisation in my brain that allows me to sing and listen to them without considering the actual words. (This does lead to the odd awkward moment when I’m doing the dishes during December and belting out “O Holy Night” and stop and listen to what I’m singing, but whatever, I’m resigned to being contradictory.)

America, on the other hand, seems to have perfected the Christmas song, as separate from the Christmas carol – a sort of generic celebration of Christmas as a concept, or even just having fun with your family in wintertime as a concept, without actually touching the religious connotations of the holiday. There really are a mind-boggling number of Christmas-season songs that don’t even mention Christmas specifically; “Let It Snow”, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, “Winter Wonderland”, etcetera.

Let it never be said that I agree with Fox News on anything, but if I were, say, convinced that any celebration of Christmas which did not remind everyone that it had a history as a Christian holiday at every possible moment was an affront to my religion, I could kind of see where the bizarre “War on Christmas” meme came from. If I was an alien who’d just landed in America, I would have to be paying pretty close attention to realise that one particular religion had done its best to co-opt the winter solstice holiday gig in the Western world, Puritan complaints aside. This doesn’t make the complaining any less tedious or petulant, but it’s an interesting thought.

We have also acquired a real Christmas tree this year, and I am forced to admit that the Douglas fir is a far superior tree to dear old Pinus radiata when it comes to Christmas tree duty, primarily because it holds ornaments with its short stiff needles very well, in a way that P. radiata manifestly does not. The flipside being that, since artificial trees are largely modeled after this sort of conifer, when I’m not looking directly at our real tree it looks like our artificial one.

We also got a tree stand. I am ashamed we did not improvise, but it was easier than finding rocks and a bucket. (We do have buckets, but are rock-deficient.)

The whole getting-a-live-tree enterprise was the subject of much wrangling with Mike, who has never bought one and doesn’t understand why anyone would, and especially why anyone would tie one to the roof of their car, a practice he refused to believe was commonplace until the nice lady at the local garden centre offered to help us do so. (We managed to fit it in the boot, because the ceiling in our living room was sized for very small people and our tree just couldn’t be that tall. I had to measure to check what size tree we could get away with.) I had to promise faithfully to vacuum the car and the living room and do all the watering myself, sort of like getting a pet. A very short-term pet. Which I also have to get rid of myself. And that went to a weirdly gruesome place.

But that is for after Christmas, and right now it is before Christmas, so I will sit back, admire our definitely not artificial tree, put on some Christmas music of whatever sort iTunes comes up with, and try and work out where I can find a lamb shoulder for Christmas dinner.

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Tests of Patience

Posted on December 4, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

You may remember my feelings about the rigamarole the US puts drivers with foreign licences through in order for them to acquire US state licences. It is apparently based on the notion that for a year after arriving in the country foreign drivers are competent and safe, and then, on the 366th day, they forget everything they know and must be put through the same tests as American sixteen-year-olds in order to be allowed to drive again. Or leave the country, in which case the border crossing will spontaneously restore all knowledge to them. It’s like they think it’s magic. Maybe crossing the border is magic. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t done it yet.

In principle, I hasten to add, I fully understand the requirement for the theoretical test; I just object to the period in between it and the road test during which I am required, if I drive, to be supervised by someone over 21. 21-year-olds are still undergraduates. I’m dubiously in favour of undergraduates being allowed to drive, period.

(There are ads on UMass buses proclaiming that “95% of UMass students use a sober driver!”. There are over 20,000 undergraduate students at UMass. I can do maths, so when I see that sign, I don’t think “Oh, how responsible,” or “Gosh, peer pressure indicates I should also not try and kill myself by driving drunk, how about that!” or even “Wow, people really are reluctant to be honest about their bad habits on surveys”, I think “Where are the ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE in this relatively small area not only driving drunk but so blase about it they admit to doing so, and how can I avoid them?”)

I also object to the road test on the principle that if I was going to kill someone driving around America I would have done it by now, and because it requires me to parallel park, and if I was running the world I would legislate such that no-one should ever have to undergo a road test of their parallel parking skills more than once in their life, and I already did it. Eight years ago. I may or may not have used the skill since.

Furthermore, the American RMV (or DMV, I believe, depending upon the state) is a place of despair and doom and very long queues which is only open 9-5 on weekdays, in a highly intelligent strategy to save the state money by making everyone take unpaid days off work (and yes, you need a full day) to register their cars and so forth. You take a number. You get in line. This is not a metaphor.

I took a number, I got in line, I waited. The closest RMV to us is in a gorgeous old factory building, with polished wooden floors and high brick walls – the towns around here are full of them, factories that boomed during the Industrial Revolution and are now dying, towns powered by waterwheels now defunct, farms gone to nothing more than tumbling stone walls in forests. New England is a study in a landscape abandoned for greener fields and lusher pastures, in the Midwest and beyond; colonised for proximity, then returned to forest. It’s sort of sad and sort of interestingly historical. The high poverty and crime rates in the towns that once depended upon these factories are more sort of depressing and/or horrifying, but that’s another blog post altogether.

The really terrifying thing about RMVs is the staff, who like interrogating you about why your visa is expired, despite not being responsible for immigration services (and my legal status in the country being, well, perfectly legal), and telling you that you can’t drive on your foreign licence (not true) when you’re in the middle of registering your new car.  This one upbraided me about handing her a folder full of paperwork because she “only needed to see the relevant documents”. The folder was, in fact, the relevant documents, but that was apparently so unlikely a scenario as to be ignored. I had a question for her, but forgot it in the haze of wanting to be done and onto the test as quickly as possible, and also being slightly afraid she’d actually just throw me out if I annoyed her.

The permit test itself is computerised (of which I approve – I still have a grudge about the question I “got wrong” on my learner’s licence test in NZ because there was a nick about the size of a grain of sand on an extra scratch-off panel, thus meaning I had “answered the question twice”). What’s weird, in my situation, is that it’s the same test given to sixteen-year-olds and thus full of questions like “what offence will you be convicted of if you drive without a parent/guardian after dark?” to which the answers that spring to mind – for me – are things like “nothing” and “Do you have any idea how far away my parents are?”, neither of which is correct.

Or ones like “How many Americans, over their lifetimes, will be seriously injured or killed in car accidents?” (Answer: “Lots, okay, I get it, dying is bad”.)

Out of twenty-five questions, maybe half tested my knowledge of road rules and signs; the others were things like “How long are drivers under 18 suspended from their licences for drag racing on the second offence?” (Answer: I’m not a lawyer, under 18, or the parent of a child under 18, manifestly NOT MY PROBLEM) and the classic “Is it safe to drive when you’ve been smoking marijuana?” (Answer: I really want to say yes to screw with you, but you’re a computer program, so I can’t.)

Fortunately Mike had warned me that the test was far more worried about my understanding of the penalties for doing stupid things while being under 18 than my understanding of the actual rules of the road, so I’d studied up on this stuff. I now know the reinstatement fines and suspension periods for a vast number of driving offences if committed while on a permit or licence under 18 or 21 respectively. I foresee no situation in which it’s ever going to be useful to me, but there you go. It wouldn’t be the first time I absorbed a bunch of information I had no intention of remembering to pass a test. It might very well be the last, though. (I only have one required class left in my PhD, and I’m not even sure it has tests per se.)

Next step: the road test (requires a over-21 Massachusetts-licence-holding maybe-for-a-year supervisor, a day off work, and the car, so will take some organising.) Then I’ll be all legal to drive again…just in time for winter. Oh, well.

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Originality

Posted on November 27, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

So I hear New Zealand had a general election the other day, which I did not cajole my American friends into staying up until 4am watching the results of and am not deeply depressed over. (On the other hand: Mike’s sudden thing about being able to make any cocktail he wants at home came in very, very handy.)

Because I am seriously just too furious-slash-apathetic over the whole thing to talk about it, instead I’m going to talk about one of the unintendedly hilarious spin-offs of a country with eleventy-billion cable channels: Original Movies.

Because you have to get fifty cable channels to get one, we now have approximately ninety-three-billion cable channels (that’s smaller than eleventy.) These channels run twenty-four hours a day, and thus must have content twenty-four hours a day. Because there are only so many reality show concepts in existence – though, believe me, every possible niche is exploited – and American TV channels are reluctant to stoop to showing things made in other countries (the odd British show works its way in, but mostly via BBC America) many channels turn to making what they call Original Movies, known in better days as made-for-TV.

And boy, oh boy, they’re bad.

One particularly egregious offender in these stakes is the SyFy channel, which in days gone by used to be called SciFi and, weirdly enough, made and showed science fiction. (In particular, the Stargate franchise was big for them.) Now their main reality show is called Ghost Hunters. This may give you some indication of where they’ve done (and why they changed the spelling, because SciFi was too intimidating or something.)

Now, any of my friends will tell you that I am an unashamed aficionado of disaster movies. A large American city is destroyed on film by the forces of nature? I’M THERE. I’m not sure what it says that this bad habit has survived the actual forces of nature, but it has. (I was kinda worried about that. The whole Christchurch/Extreme Weather Event Checklist thing has been sucky enough without it taking away a hobby.)

SyFy specialises in producing this sort of story. They do it by stripping away every possible resemblance the storyline could have to actual science or actual fiction and leaving a lurching, wailing monster of a 90-minute movie staffed by actors known better for other things. They have names like “Ice Twister” and “Storm War”. The formula seems to be: Totally Implausible Disaster + Paper-Thin Story About A Scientist Derided By His Colleagues + Bad Special Effects = Win. Imagine, oh, Twister, that mid-nineties OMG TORNADOES ARE BAD movie with Jodie Foster or whoever it was. Now imagine it worse. No, worse than that. No, I mean really, really bad. Yeah.

About there.

New Zealand viewers can only imagine the mind-numbing awfulness, because as far as I remember from when I lived in a house with Sky, the availability of programming from multiple countries allows some filtering out of the dreck. This is filler TV in all its terrible, terrible glory. The ninety-hundredth repeat of some mediocre action movie on Monday night cannot come close.

Sadly, this apparently works for them in terms of viewership, because here I am, on a Saturday night, watching something called “Stonehenge Apocalypse“(LINK). It has it all; actors I vaguely recognise from better, actual science fiction; a mish-mash of Disaster Concepts (“Say, uh, Stonehenge was really an ancient terraforming device, and it could, like, fry people with electromagnetic waves, because that’s scary and scientific, and it made volcanoes explode, oh, and there was a pyramid in – where do we wanna go on vacation this year? – oh, right, Maine. A pyramid in Maine. BEST THING EVER, amirite?”); very babbly technobabble; a map with lots of string on it, because maps with string on them are SCIENCE. Actors stumble around, mostly required only to stare in horror at green-screens or computer monitors. Scenes take place in totally implausible locations (as I speak, someone is being  interrogated in a school gymnasium, uh, just because, and delivering lines like “Don’t you know that Pyrodictium oxygenated the atmosphere?”, a line approximately as plausible as “Don’t you know that elephants burp up rainbows?”) It’s terrible, but in the way that a long, slow, trainwreck is terrible; you can’t help watching to see if it’s gonna go down the way you think it is.

Although that moment quoted above jumped the proverbial shark for me, insomuch as this aquatic-predator-leaping-show could do so once; I don’t work with Pyrodictium but I know people who do, and every single fact they stated about it was, as they say, not even close enough to be wrong, but not even in an entertaining way, like if they’d made into The Next Thing Worse Than Swine Flu or something. (Also when the only non-white characters turned out to be evil. I won’t even go into the multitude of fail that involves.)

In a way it’s kind of like Mills and Boone. No-one reads Mills and Boone (I presume, my closest exposure was my weekly mocking of the covers at Pak’N'Save checkouts) because they want a great and insightful story of romantic drama. They read it because they want a fill-in-the-blanks story, and/or porn. People watch these because they provide a fill-in-the-blanks story (Scientist Knows Stuff, They Say He’s Wrong (Yes, It’s Always a He), Stuff Blows Up, He’s Right, He Saves The World, He Kisses The Girl, The End) and/or disaster porn. In a way they’ve perfected it; they’ve stripped away all the useless bits where characters are made out to be actual human beings with people they care about (e.g. the whole family plot of The Day After Tomorrow – family drama, dull, massive ice storms, HELL YEAH.) It’s the junk food of a certain genre of movie.

But you know what? Bad as it is, it’s still a whole lot less depressing than the reality of three more years of John Key smiling, waving, and selling my country’s state assets.

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In The Dark

Posted on November 21, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

The only thing we can really be grateful for about the Great Halloween Power Outage is that it didn’t happen a week later, after the end of daylight savings. Because then we really would have been in trouble.

You see, aside from the whole thing where “standard time” only lasts four months of the year here (Peter Dunne, eat your heart out), Massachusetts’ location in the far east of our time zone leads to another problem: it gets dark ridiculously early. (I know, I know, people in Scandinavia and Alaska and over-wintering in Antarctica and so on are laughing at me right now, but we all have our #firstworldproblems, okay?)

Bear in mind, the shortest day here is some half-hour longer than the shortest day in Christchurch. Because New Zealand is the Land of the Long White Cloud, we have a significant day-length differential between Auckland and Invercargill (about an hour’s difference on the longest day, which I hadn’t realised), but there’s no particular difference between, say, Gisbourne and New Plymouth – when daylight saving comes to an end, the day ends at basically the same, quite reasonable, time. Five-ish. Five-ish is a good time for the day to end. It’s the beginning of the evening, for one thing. It’s a perfectly reasonable time to open an alcoholic beverage. That sort of thing.

Here in the US it’s a bit different – time zones cover great swathes of continent that people actually inhabit, and the Eastern Standard Time zone stretches from Massachusetts to the western border of Indiana, which is nearly the length of New Zealand, or, in an obvious piece of logic: equivalent to a one-hour difference in sunset/sunrise. What this means, in practice, is that while the end of daylight savings brings sunrise to a reasonable hour for the good people of Indiana – at around 8am on the shortest day of the year, much like most of New Zealand -  it puts our Massachusetts sunset, even now, a month out from the shortest day – at around four-thirty pm. It will get earlier. This, not to put too fine a point on it, is stupid. Four-thirty is, like, the middle of the afternoon. (Yes, by my prior logic, the beginning and middle of the afternoon are a lot longer than the end of it. That’s just how it is.)

I had not ascertained the full extent of this stupidity last year because I was catching the bus. Now I’m biking, it’s suddenly bleedingly obvious that having to leave by 4pm in order to bike home safely – or earlier if it’s cloudy – is really not the best possible state of affairs. The day length is actually about fifteen minutes longer than it is in Christchurch, and about the same as Wellington, but that half-hour sunset/sunrise timeshift makes all the difference.

On the other hand, I could get up early and arrive at work before 8am and then go home early, but, well, in two weeks Mike’s starting working from home and the smugness if I’m leaving the house before he’s even out of bed will be unbearable, so, no. (Turns out you can Earn $$$ Working In Your Own Home, you just need a postgraduate degree in a highly technical, computer-related, and under-serviced field to do so. Funny how that works.)

This problem is not just due to the light levels, of course. The road I go down to get from home to uni – at least for a large section – is unlit, narrow, and rich with potholes. If potholes were a form of currency, this road would be wearing a suit, sipping a latte, and complaining about how it used to eat lunch in Zuccotti Park before all those jobless people showed up to ruin it. Frankly it can be a bit dodgy at midday on a bike, or even in a car at night. On a bike in the dark it doesn’t bear thinking about. This is of course the reality of semi-rural living – and of a very, very active road degradation environment – but I’d forgotten just how aggravating it is to have to pack up and dash to make a bus schedule instead of hopping on my bike, especially since I’d got it stuck in my head that the only thing standing between me and a year-round efficient fitness strategy (travel time stays the same, daily exercise achieved instantly!) was snow, and the aforesaid Great Halloween Mayhem aside, we shouldn’t be getting any big, bike-endangering dumps of snow for at least another few weeks.

All of which is to say: come this time of year, this survey result on drinking rates in New England is very, very understandable.

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Talking Turkey

Posted on November 13, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

Last weekend, we went to the supermarket. There was a sale on turkeys. This is not particularly surprising, it being three weeks before Thanksgiving (our Thanksgiving plans do not include turkey, because the person probably doing the cooking laughed very hard at the idea).

“Let’s get a turkey,” Mike said.

I inquired why this was a good idea.

“Because it’s on sale and we have to try cooking one at least once.”

I wondered what the two of us were going to do with an eight kilo bird.

“Eat turkey for a really long time.”

We bought the turkey, on the strict understanding that since Mike had proposed the venture, Mike was doing the cooking. I might rouse myself to chop a potato or two. If I felt like it.

On Thursday, after the turkey had defrosted, Mike started musing about when “we” should cook it – Saturday or Sunday.

I said “It takes four hours to cook, and you are cooking it. Not “we”. I’m going to be watching. Probably with alcohol.”

He said “Why am I cooking it again?”

“Because it was your idea.”

“Oh.”

"Why does this have to be documented in pictures, again?"

The art of successfully cooking a turkey takes up a big part of the American psyche. There is even a help-line. I wasn’t sure why, because it’s basically just a big chicken, and all the instructions on various websites boil down to “rub with oil, stick in the oven, cover with foil, cook for AGES AND AGES, take foil off, remove, carve, be laughed at when you carve it badly, eat.” Which is, basically, how you cook a chicken, only longer and with more potential for schadenfreude. I guess that could be a cause of panic.

I mean, look at it. Big chicken. All the same antibiotics and growth hormones included!

So, basically, Mike followed the instructions. (For a sample, see these ones.)

And, five hours later, there was turkey.

I understand a more even browning is preferable but I'm pretty easy as long as it's, you know, cooked.

Of course, we still had to figure out how to get it out of the pan.

Not as easy as it sounds.

And then I got landed with carving the thing, on the principle that the person who cooks it does not have to carve it, which is news to me since I’ve had to carve every single chicken roast I have ever cooked in this household, but I suppose it’s nice to have my superior knife-wielding skills acknowledged.

Sizing it up.

Okay, I admit, once I'd got the legs off I just said "screw it" and carved enough breast for the pair of us.

After we’d eaten all the turkey we could possibly want (and potatoes, and gravy, and, okay, I’m finally coming around to that whole idea of cooking the stuffing outside the bird it’s allegedly meant to go in because it tastes better) I stripped the carcass down for all the meat we hadn’t eaten (i.e. almost all of it.) We are going to be eating turkey in things for a month.

Everything in the pyrex dish is edible meat. Actually, at $10 for the whole bird, this makes the whole enterprise an extremely economical way to feed ourselves, discounting the effort involved in cooking the thing.

In the end, it wasn’t much more effort than cooking a roast chicken, just longer. (I believe the bird we bought was pre-brined, or at least had had some sort of solution injected into it, which would have helped it stay tender – it was very juicy and not at all stringy.)

This leads me to three conclusions as to why the art of turkey cooking is such a Thing:

1) It’s competitive. In the “sure, you cooked a turkey, but I cooked it WHILE HANGING OFF A MOUNTAIN” sort of way.

2) If you’re not practiced and comfortable with cooking roasts in general, it’s a really difficult way to start. Mike has cooked plenty of roasts, and so have I. We knew where we were starting and what to look for and think about. (We also bought a meat thermometer.) As the Sunday roast does not seem to be a traditional part of the American diet, this is probably a contributor – imagine that you’ve just moved out of home, people are coming over, you have to cook this enormous bird…PANIC. I’d panic. I have screwed up plenty of roasts in the past, they were just about eight times smaller so it wasn’t as big a deal. Nor did screwing those up generally involve:

3) The performance aspect. You could not pay me to carve one of those in front of an audience (aside from Mike and the cat, they mock me on a daily basis anyway and vice-versa, it doesn’t count.) Imagine trying to cook the bird AND a whole lot of side-dishes AND have the house ready for guests AND make it the Perfect Family Holiday…in that context, there are so many opportunities for things to go wrong, and probably people ready to judge you when they do. It’s not cooking a turkey that’s a Thing, it’s cooking a Thanksgiving turkey.

Conclusion: turkey’s not bad if you need to feed a rugby team, chicken is easier, I am really quite glad I am from a country where the major holidays involve barbequing.

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Recovery

Posted on November 7, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

We got power back last Tuesday evening, just as I was eating a cold dinner by candlelight (the combination of the noises I made when the power returned and the sudden appearance of light everywhere sent the cat under the couch for quite some time.) The local buses are running again, I can safely bike to university (not without some caution, but the roads I use are open in both lanes), and the snow is almost all melted, just over a week after it fell. Through some efficient use of snow, a chilly bin, and fast cooking on Tuesday night, I even managed to salvage all the meat from our freezer. (We’ll be eating curry and chili for weeks, but that’s survivable.) We’re pretty much back to normal. Sort of.

That’s only somewhat the case for the rest of the valley, though. The first question everyone asked all last week when they saw someone was “Do you have power yet?”. While Western Massachusetts is essentially all online, about a hundred thousand households in Connecticut are still without power – the towns where the roads are still one-lane, where telephone poles and downed power lines are everywhere, and they don’t have water or heat, either. With temperatures dipping well below freezing almost every night – we’ve had a hard frost every morning – it’s not good. All the local schools are closed; Mike’s employers set up unofficial day-care facilities on-site because it’s find a way to entertain a lot of school-age children, or lose their staff for the rest of the week. Even up here, a lot of schools are still closed while they tidy up the last of the damage. Between this and Hurricane Irene, they’ve used up all the scheduled snow days before winter even begins – some poor kids are going to be stuck in class well beyond the regular end of the school year, come next June. (The system here seems to be that no matter what the disaster, schools must be open 180 full days a year, even if that means staying open well past the scheduled end-of-year. I don’t remember that being the case in NZ, else we’d have been open a lot later my fourth and fifth form years, with all the strikes.)

UMass Amherst stepped up to the plate for students living off-campus last week, with buildings open twenty-four hours, free meals for the rest of the week, and the showers at the gym open eight hours a day, but students are of course a relatively small proportion of the people who lost power for a significant length of time. I feel incredibly lucky that we got it back as fast as we did, and that our only real damage was the tropical fishtank (in the balance between keeping the house warm enough for the fish to definitely survive and keeping it cool enough that we didn’t swelter and everything in the fridge didn’t rot, the fish lost out. Most of the tank had been wiped out by a parasite infection a couple of months back brought in by new fish, but it’s still a bit depressing.)

The damage to trees is spectacular, as the snow melts, and really has to be seen to be believed – forget branches down, trees just aren’t interesting if they’re not split down the middle three or four ways, or fallen entirely. This storm will thin the tree canopy around here for years to come, with a lot of large and old trees falling to the snow.

Trees are knocked clean over...

...split spectacularly in half...

...or just looking a bit sad and de-branched.

This episode reminds me, yet again, of how “natural” disasters are in so many ways not natural at all; like the buildings in Christchurch that experienced ground shaking beyond what might have been expected, but still shouldn’t have failed so dramatically, the power grid in this area has suffered immense damage beyond the normal ravages of winter, but was vulnerable because of the choice to keep nearly all power-lines above ground and, as far as I can tell, a total lack of any sort of regulations around keeping trees clear of lines. Western Massachusetts certainly has hilly areas, at least by the standards of the north-eastern US (Wellington’s Mount Victoria would be an un-ironic mountain here) but most of the Connecticut River Valley is gently rolling, if that.

Underground power lines are both possible and practical, but are never going to happen, because of the massive expense involved and the complex network of power companies serving the region, which provides little actual competition or consumer choice, but means no one company has the impetus to fix the problem. Ultimately a storm like this would still cause severe damage – there are plenty of areas where above-ground lines are the only option, or where lines have to go through forested areas, that including 60% of Massachusetts – but it might not have plunged most of the valley into a black-out for the better part of a week or more, in late autumn. I assumed – wrongly – that heating sources up here weren’t mostly electricity-dependent; turns out we’re in the minority with propane gas heating, because even oil furnaces, which are common, require an electric arc to work. Most people, without power, are in the cold. The effort by both the electricity companies and the Massachusetts National Guard to get the roads clear and power on has been impressive and considerable, when I think about the amount of damage I saw in a very small area, but it’s still been a very long week. It was a long week by the end of last Monday.

Christchurch taught me that the other thing about natural disasters is the way they go on, and on, and on. (I watched the CERA video of the Red Zone bus tour, over the weekend. It was…hard.)

The storm took two days; the cleanup is going to be a lot, lot longer. At least we’ve got a patch of good weather for the next couple of weeks, and it’s unlikely we’ll get serious snow again before the end of the month. Mostly, I’m just hoping the rest of the winter is a little less, er, eventful.

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Powerless

Posted on November 1, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

Last winter was a record-setter for the northeastern United States – winter snowfall records were broken just about everywhere – so when the forecast indicated we’d be getting six to ten inches of snow on Saturday evening, even though it was unusually early – two months before the big Boxing Day storm that kicked off snow season in 2010 – we figured we’d pretty much be all right. We knew what snow meant.

Before.

Saturday morning, we were scheduled to help a friend move out of her apartment. The snow was due about 7pm, with a couple of hours of rain beforehand, so we went ahead with it. About one-thirty, as we were unloading furniture into her storage unit, a first few flakes started to fall. We shrugged, and hurried it up. It seemed likely we could get one more load shifted.

Probability was not on our side.

Twenty minutes later, visibility was down to less than a hundred metres and the roads – unable to be pre-treated because of the forecast rain – were treacherous. We made it home, slowly and carefully, and settled in for a long snowy evening. I woke up briefly about three am; the power was out. They’d said there might be some power cuts, so I went back to sleep. It’d probably be back on in the morning.

This is what the world looked like in the morning.

A Halloween wonderland.

With lots of lovely *almost* breaking tree branches.

Okay, it was kind of awesome for about ten minutes there.

The snow melted from the trees quickly enough, but we were out of power, internet, cellphone service, and (soon enough) hot water. Even the local radio stations were down – we had literally no way to know how bad it was around us. We could see we’d had at least a foot, maybe closer to two feet of snow. When the radio and cellphone coverage came back Sunday afternoon, it revealed a much worse picture; over half of the Connecticut River Valley was powerless, the worst outages ever recorded, and it was going to be at least a week to restore everyone. Maybe longer.

Turns out you can do bacon and eggs on a gas heater, it just takes a while.

I have never seen so many barbeques in direct conjunction with snow before.

Sunday was long, and very, very boring. We had heat – unlike everyone else on the property – but it turned out our emergency kit was optimised for survival rather than comfort, and we quickly devised a list of a few things we needed to stock up on. (A better method of cooking; lamps, instead of just torches; something not requiring electricity to do that wasn’t reading or playing cards.) We saw linesmen, but the power stayed off.

They're getting line crews in from Kansas and Missouri. For those of you not familiar with American geography, that'd be like getting people in from Perth. It's a Long Way.

The university was closed Monday, though Mike made it in to work, but when I got in this morning I saw some of the damage. Trees had huge branches hanging off; my PhD supervisor told me that some out near his house were literally split in half from the weight of snow, like a bomb had gone off. When we drove down a nearby road, we saw leaning power poles every twenty to fifty metres, and tree branches down on lines more frequently than that.

Lots of little stuff down...

...and lots of big stuff. Imagine this on every third or fourth tree. For kilometres.

It’s midday Tuesday, and the nice Army man who came by to do a “wellness check” on Monday afternoon told us power would be “less than a week”. I practically hugged my computer in our lab when it powered up and showed an internet connection. Then the kettle, when it boiled and I could make a proper cup of tea. (We can boil water on the gas heater, it just takes about two hours and you have to heat up the whole house to do it.) It’s not even the lack of electricity and internet that’s the real problem; it’s the grinding tedium, the late sunrise and early sunset restricting what we can do to torch-carrying-friendly activities, the inability to do even the simplest chores around the house, to shower, to cook, to stop a fridge and freezer full of food slowly going off. (We did make a delicious roast on the little charcoal barbeque, but it took four hours.) It’s the way your life grinds to a halt and you don’t know when it will start again, and then you go into work and everything’s normal, except everyone is a little more tired and a little less clean and going quietly mad.

Almost everyone is in the same boat, with well over half the region out. It’s going to be a long, long week.

(I think it says something about this year that “natural disasters” is very nearly the most-used tag on this blog. SERIOUSLY, NATURE, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?)

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What Winning Feels Like

Posted on October 24, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

Our Rugby World Cup, in this corner of the globe where they don’t care much for rugby at all, if they recognise it as anything other than the distant ancestor of American Football, turned – much to my surprise, I have to admit – into a regular social event. Over six weeks we laughed, we cheered, we screamed at the top of our lungs, we made a fair bit of progress into the mumble-dozen bottles of Steinlager we managed to get our hands on (it was cheap, okay, we had to stock up), and we had two Americans decrying, outraged, referees who were penalising “us” for something that was clearly not our fault. It was a beautiful piece of cultural exchange.

I mean that in the most serious way. Mike’s never been much for rugby, having I think been exposed to a bit too much of it while attending a provincial all-male college – there is such a thing as taking the First XV too seriously – but my father took me to my first test match when I was four years old (Maori All Blacks vs. Wales, top of the Millard Stand at Athletic Park) and I’ve been a bit attached to it ever since. The endless parade of rugby matches these days leaves me a bit mentally exhausted to follow every nuance of the game – that, and I’m still a Wellington supporter, which is mentally exhausting enough for a lifetime. (For those unfamiliar with the fine Wellington sporting tradition, at one point the official rugby team motto was “Expect the Unexpected”, because whatever they did one week, they’d do something else the next. One time it involved eyeliner. Wellington are Special.)

There are a lot of good critiques that can be and have been made about New Zealand’s national attachment to rugby as a game, our erasure of people who don’t care for it, the violence that can and does surround it, and the ultimate futility of basing our national self-esteem around something that 99.999% of us have not a whit of control over. And yet, I grew up with rugby; it’s a part of my personal and national identity. It matters. That’s culture for you.

And it did astound me, again and again over the last six weeks, how much you can learn about New Zealand culture just by watching World Cup games. In particular, the emphasis on Maori traditions – the welcomes onto the pitch, the Maori half of the national anthem, the strong Maori and Pasifika presence on the All Blacks and in the crowds, and of course the haka – seemed to reveal something about New Zealand to my American friends that hadn’t been obvious before. We are taught, in New Zealand, to think of ourselves as a bicultural nation, New Zealand/Aotearoa, but the face we present to the world – and especially to America – is very often monocultural, when viewed broadly. Sheep and hobbits are European imports, after all. The first time “E ihoa atua” rang out across the pitch, people were confused; why weren’t we singing in English? What was this other language? “Aotearoa” is, on these far shores, a meaningless word, even though it means home to me.

All this led, of course, to us sitting on the couch on Sunday morning, brunch in hand – reminiscent of my last Sunday-morning-Rugby-World-Cup brunch, a very depressing meal of pancakes four years ago – and hearts in our mouths. We managed to avoid being spoiled for the game by dint of just not turning our computers or phones on at all when we woke up on Sunday, except for queueing up the match, and I was glad we did. Well, mostly glad, except for a point half-way through the second half when Mike was pointing out that if I died of heart failure he’d only have thirty days to leave the country, which wouldn’t be very considerate of me at all, and I was instructing him that if I did so expire he was, upon returning directly to New Zealand, to go directly to Piri Weepu’s house and have words with him about it. (There was likely to be a queue, I added, but I was sure Mike could think of some way of jumping it.)

When the final whistle blew, we all slumped back in astounded, disbelieving relief – much like that look on Richie McCaw’s face in that second when he turned to another player, I think Ali Williams, and they just gaped at each other before embracing. It didn’t seem quite possible it was over. I’ve had a very long time, also known as my entire life, to practice bearing disappointment at Rugby World Cups. This “winning” experience is novel.

Then we broke out the champagne.

HELL YEAH. Also, Ma'a's shoes = the best thing ever.

I would have liked to be in New Zealand for this; I think we did miss out on something by being so far from home for an event that encompassed so much of the country. But it was good, too, to have that six weeks of turning on the TV and seeing New Zealand, seeing New Zealanders, seeing the familiar rhythms and accents. Even if you don’t like rugby, even if you don’t like what it says about us as a country, you can’t deny that it says something about us, that it’s a part of our culture and a meaningful one.

And then there was, afterwards, this.

They're just so CUTE. (And I even mostly mean that in a platonic way.)

It’s been good. Let’s do it again sometime.

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Low Cuisine

Posted on October 18, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

Lately I’ve been trying to work out what came first: the electric kettle or powdered foods.

This is because it is becoming evident to me that the main reason they don’t have electric kettles in America is that they have cunningly eliminated all drink and food that relies on it. (Well, not quite, but.) Tea is a rarity. Powdered chocolate drinks exist, but they’re not a Thing like Milo is. Packet soup comes in two flavours: chicken noodle and french onion. (In mid-winter, this is tragic, because there’s nothing quite like a nice cup of soup which, and this is important, you don’t have to cart to work in tins on a cold afternoon.) Stock cubes exist, but they’re sort of awful. Liquid stock (or “broth”) is much more common.

This is clearly not because Americans are against pre-prepared food, an excuse that, say, the French might have. Pre-prepared frozen meals take up an entire aisle at the supermarket. You can buy everything up to and including frozen french toast and orange juice. (Orange juice concentrate, to be more accurate, but. Still. Orange juice. In a freezer.) Half another aisle is dedicated to the many and inventive sauces and salad dressings deemed necessary to meals, although to my untrained eye they can be divided into three categories: 1) mayonnaise with funny names* 2) tomato sauce 3) hot sauce. Most of what I would refer to as the “baking aisle” is not flour and sugar, as you might expect, but a really surprising variety of packet cakes, biscuits, muffins, and frostings. A country that loves its pumpkin pie might sell a lot of pumpkin, you’d think; it does, but primarly to people who put it in cans and then sell it to consumers. Canned pumpkin is a Thing. Canned sweet potato is also a Thing. Canned regular potato is a thing. If it can be processed, America will find a way.

It’s in recipes, too. Whenever I go searching for cake recipes on internet sites – speaking of which, the iPad + a variety of recipe finder apps = the best thing to happen to cooking since they invented the electric oven – approximately half of them will start with packet cake. This is all very well and I would be the last to criticize the availability of things like these, most especially because I have eaten far more packet Ghiradelli Double Chocolate brownie than is good for me, but when I’m searching because what I have are butter and egg and flour and cherries and sugar and I’d like to make some sort of cake involving cherries and 80% of the recipes start with maraschino cherries and a packet of yellow cake mix, it makes me a little sad. And sends me back to the soothing embrace of Edmond’s, which has an answer for everything (that does not involve Funny Foreign Cooking, anyway.)

You’d think, then, that with all this intrepid determination to make cooking as simple as possible, things that could be made by Just Adding Boiling Water – and devices to boil said water – would be a hit. But clearly, they’re not. This was actually put to me by Americans before I came over here; I commented on this alleged lack of electric kettles and they said, but what do you even need electric kettles for, you can make tea in the coffee maker and they don’t do anything else useful. And from the perspective of the American consumer, it is so. (The electric kettle is still extremely useful, but mostly because I drink a lot of tea and also tea made in coffee makers is crap, okay, cultural issues aside if that’s how people make tea over here that’s got to be a very high-ranking reason why it’s not popular.)

Mostly? I just want a nice mug of probably-mostly-cornstarch-but-allegedly-tomato soup.

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Twenty Years And Counting

Posted on October 11, 2011 by newenglandkiwi

One of the major, if not the major, differences between the US and NZ postgraduate educational systems (apart from the fact that Americans call it the “graduate” system and we call it the “postgraduate” system) is that you can be twenty-five years old and still taking exams. Essentially, a NZ PhD is two years shorter than an American one because you only do a research-based thesis – learning about the stuff you need to support it is done on your own time – while an American PhD involves two years, more or less, of classes you must do well in to “qualify” to do the research part. In NZ you do classes of an equivalent level, but a) only a year of them and b) as part of your Honours, Master’s, or Postgraduate Diploma of Science (PgDipSci, or Honours without the research).

Because I took nearly a year off between Honours and starting my PhD over here (I spent the summer of 2009-2010 doing research, and the rest of 2010 working) I kind of forgot how my love for education had been starting to fray around the edges a little by the end of 2009. The courses I took over the last year were all pretty much discussion-based – read a paper, talk about a paper – and more importantly involved subjects I didn’t know a lot about, but found interesting (Geochemistry! Yeast genetics!), so I trotted along to them and enjoyed myself.

This semester, I sat down in the class I need to take – one where I know, guesstimating, 40% of the material already because it’s actually relevant to my research, and one that’s taught by my PhD supervisor, so I do sort of have to show up – and felt the maw of a great, sucking lack of impetus looming behind me.

Counting Montessori preschool – you can take it or leave it, but those are the years I learned to read, understand the decimal system, sing the continents, and make scones, so I’m going to take it – I have been in some sort of education for, basically, a little over two decades of my life. My life at this point is not very long. To put it another way: I am incapable of remembering a year in which I did not participate in some sort of formal class structure, because the last of those years was somewhere around or before 1991 and I don’t even remember who knocked us out of the Rugby World Cup that year, that’s how little I remember about 1991. (I’m gonna blame…France, though. It’s always the French. Somehow. Except the time it was Suzy the Waitress, but she was probably French too.)

And it turns out that the end of 2011 is the point at which I have stopped being capable of really caring about formal class structures. I know I should. If nothing else, I need to get do well enough in this class to qualify in it, so I can get on to the whole Actually Interesting Research part of my PhD. I’m familiar with a large segment of the material. It shouldn’t be hard to pay attention.

But it is, for a variety of reasons; because I do know some of this stuff, so it’s hard to tune in for the bits I don’t; because I resent having to spend time in a classroom instead of the lab; because, at the end of it, I sat down for the first test last Thursday, looked at it, thought about all the other things that are priorities in my life right now (finishing a set of experiments; finally getting paid; sorting out whether we’re going somewhere over the winter holidays; applying for my driver’s licence; getting an extra duvet for winter; cleaning the bath) and realised that answering a set of specific questions about the electron transport chain was….clocking in somewhere around the same point as “cleaning the bath”, and between you and me, I’ve been putting that off for months weeks.

The last time I felt this disenchanted about studying for something, I was having a flaming row with my best friends, participating in a high-stress sports tournament, and a very good friend of my partner’s had just died. Those things are all really not the case right now. But the issue of priorities is the same. For probably nineteen of the twenty-odd years I’ve been doing this education thing, I loved it. I lived and died by how well I did on tests. I had a really pretty embarrassing breakdown over not being in the top however many in the country for three, instead of two, subjects in my final year at high school. I cared. I was the poster child for the modern educational system working effectively. I learned stuff and I liked doing it.

And for nineteen of those twenty-odd years, because I was fairly well-off and aiming to go into graduate education, doing really well academically was genuinely one of, if not my top, priorities. It could be, because I didn’t have to worry about much else, really. Now, I have Actual Grown-Up Worries, and my future career is, let’s face it, massively not dependent on whether I get a B+ or an A- in a particular class. At this point, it’s about things like doing good research for my PhD, getting a good postdoc, getting grants and fellowships. And grants are largely dependent, from hereon in, on the research you do, not the grades you get. There is a sudden lack of reason to care.

I think this is a genuine problem with the American PhD structure, because short of those people who Go Directly To PhD, Do Not Pass Go from their undergrad degree, most people doing PhDs will be in their mid-twenties; will have partners, pets, money worries; will be interested in the research, but a bit burned out on the whole “explain briefly how X affects Y” thing. It’s also the point at which they’ve decided (hopefully) they want to do a postgrad degree because they love research and learning and discussion, and then they’re sat back down in a classroom to listen to someone talk. After two decades, it’s no longer a particularly inspiring a way to learn – primarily because I’m now used to the idea that everyone in the room should have something to contribute. (I’m also having a heavy dose of “oh, so this is what everyone who skipped class at college felt like.”)

I’m not sorry I’m working through the American PhD system, because a lot of the courses I have taken and will take are going to expand my abilities in ways I probably wouldn’t have with a research-only PhD. I knew there would be two more years of classes involved going in. It is work worth doing. I just wish I hadn’t reached the point where it feels so much like, well, work.

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