This weekend I went and helped my friend Tim do his field research. He has the most beautiful field area EVER. It is on a beach that is probably 20 miles long and then back into farmland and ferny hills. I saw seals and dolphins. There were also some of the sketchiest cows I have ever met. They just stared at me and then made the worst mooing noise. They seemed quite ill-intentioned. I was very afraid. There was awesome geology. Tim is looking at an alluvial fan and sedimentary geology and looking at the age and the movement of the faults in the area to try to determine the tsunami danger. It was his first weekend out so we had to go around to farms in the area to let people know he will be in the area and make sure it is okay to be on their property. Most of the people were nice one guy let us bottle-feed his lambs. There was one lady who was a massive wench. She said Tim couldn’t come onto her property until at least the new year and didn’t see the reason why he needed to; she had been in the area a long time and the rocks hadn’t changed one bit. Smile, nod, be pleasant, no comments about her looking as old as the hills, back away slowly. It was full moon, so one night we got take away pizza and sat on the beach and watched the moon on the waves. It was beautiful. From the beach we could see both the entire bay and snow capped mountains in the background. Not a romantic friendship despite what this situation sounds like. We are just a lot alike. He is one of the few guys I know who will admit to seeing the beauty in the world. We walked out and looked at tide pools and a seal colony on Sunday morning. Seals smell horrendously. We had waded out and on the way back the tide had come in so instead of being thigh high the water was over my navel. All of the tourists were looking at us strangely, as though it was odd that we were half way submerged in the incoming tide laughing hysterically because we were so cold. The water is still quite cold and I came out all red. We drove back to chch but decided that we really didn’t want to go home yet and since the moon was almost full we decided to go down to the Moeraki boulders and see the moon on them. It is three hours away. We got there about 11. The full moon had made the tide extra low so we were able to see boulders not normally exposed. There were about 40 of them. It was quite surreal in the moonlight. Got home yesterday at 10 am.