Presumed dead but still alive and kicking!

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Hi all,

Last night I was made ridiculous by dear, darling Felix and Stephanie, because I have not paid any attention to my blog since the entries on Japan. So, hereby I dedicate this entry to you guys! I am sitting at the comp at seven in the morning on a sunday as an attempt to climb back up from my devastating fall from your grace... This 'd better be appreciated...

So now, what have I been up to lately, you wonder? Well, simply said work, work and more work (field work also counts as work, of course!) at the HortResearch institute in lovely Palmerston North (North Island, New Zealand). To give an impression of this city to the Dutchies, think: a cross-over between Wageningen and Lelystad (as some of you might know this is where my unfortunate roots lie). I guess I could honestly quote Spider Jeruzalem here and say: "I hate it here!". Hallelujah, praize the lord for the beauty of the rest of this country. Last weekend I went climbing Mount Egmont/ Taranaki and this was absolutely mind-blowing. Beautiful views and plenty of adventure!

Today I am leaving to Auckland for three days of field work (yes, work on Sunday) at a chicken farm (measuring infiltration rates in the soil). But next Thursday my holiday travels finally start. First a bit of the North Island and then on to the South Island. Mostly I will be hiking (or as the Kiwis say, tramping) in the national parks. Maybe a bit of whale watching or dolphin swimming in between, who knows, anything is possible here... (decisions, decisions)

I will no longer bore you with stories, have a look at the pics.

For my fellow nerds who are dying to know what exactly I have been working on, I pasted part of my proposal below:

*WARNING: The next passage contains boring stuff for most readers*
How quickly a dry soil attracts water from a surface into its porous network defines the soil’s sorptivity. For our sorptivity experiments we will use ethanol instead of water, since measurements with ethanol deliver an unbiased estimate of the characteristics of the pore network of a soil. The results of our experiments with ethanol will be compared to sorptivity measurements with pure water, which were carried out on the same soils for the earlier sited report by Aslam et al. (2007). The difference in measured sorptivity in these two tests will indicate whether, and possibly to what extent, the soils are water repellent or hydrophobic. The ratio of the surface tensions of ethanol and water is 1 : 1.95 (Tillman et al., 1989). In theory the ratio of the sorptivities of ethanol and water should scale in relation to the different surface tensions. In case of a hydrophobic soil the sorptivity ratio will be larger, as water sorptivity will be less.
We will use a solution of 98 % ethanol for our experiments. For the four different soils we will measure sorptivity on 3 replicas of ca. 20 g of aggregates, for four different aggregate size ranges. We will utilize a device that functions similarly to a tension-imbibition pressure plate apparatus. For further details on our methods to measure sorptivity we refer to the article by Gerke and Köhne on estimating hydraulic properties from sorptivity and water retention (Gerke and Köhne, 2002). We will calculate sorptivity according to the method proposed by White and Perroux in their article on estimating unsaturated hydraulic conductivity from field sorptivity measurements (White and Perroux, 1989).
*End boring stuff*

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Comments

[Stephanie]

Weel done!
And nice pics!Now I am waiting for the description of the Tongariro crossing, and most of all: the south island tour! Enjoy your time there, and see you in Europe, Steph