It's finally snowing!

Solstice was survived ok and the days are now getting longer. Yeah! Since I forgot to take my camera to the festivities I will go on to more interesting things. Like the toilet. This is a picture of a NZ toilet tank:
The left button empties only half of the tank and the right one empties the whole tank. Kind of like the yellow-mellow idea without having to let anything mellow. Nice. Now if the water keeps gushing out into the bowl and doesn't want to stop, the lid needs to be removed:
WHERE IS THE CHAIN? The chain that gets tangled up and needs to be untangled? How can there not be a chain? How am I going to fix this without having a chain in this tank? After the initial shock about the missing chain wore off I decided to poke and squeeze all the random parts in there and after a little while the water actually stopped. Phew.

On a more positive note we finally got snow! And since I know some of you might not believe this I took a picture (the white stuff in there is the snow):
Luckily, a lot more snow fell in the mountains on the other side of the island and so I am in the process of getting my snowboard assembled for next weekend.

Meanwhile, a little update on office stuff (since that is what I came here for). First and foremost: our office has a window! With a nice view:
And here is the actual office with a computer called ICECREAM (brilliant Chris!)
And this is my adviser Pat Langhorne with outgoing grad student Daisuke:
My absolutely favorite thing though is the bike parking in the basement:
And my landlady is teaching me Enzed pronunciation: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." "Brown" and "lazy" are not going so well yet. "Over" isn't either. But I am working on it.