Planning The Wedding

12.12.12. There will not be another date in my lifetime with repeated day, month, year numbers (unless I live up to 119 years old). Fun fact aside, it is exactly a month until JQ and my wedding day!

What is the purpose of a wedding? Celebration! Getting to know our families and friends. A reason to dress up. But mostly, a fun night with family and close friends. I had wanted it to be a fusion between a Western and traditional Peranakan wedding but my parents are pretty untraditional (at least in this case) so decided to keep it simple with several important essence of our family tradition.

1. Country: Malaysia! We knew we wanted a wedding back home as soon as JQ proposed. When I think of my wedding, my ahmah is the first one who came to mind. I always wanted a wedding where I can serve tea to my grandparents. Even with only my ahmah left to witness this event, there is no way I am having my wedding without her or without my aunts, uncles and cousins. JQ's family is also excited to celebrate with us in Malaysia. It will be a great opportunity for JQ's family to meet my family, to experience Malaysian culture and simply to visit my home country. 

2. A small wedding. Growing up, dad reminds me again and again not to over spend on wedding, invite only people who matters and not the entire village. That advice was repeated over and over that it got stuck in mind. Being away from M'sia for so long, I lost touch with several friends. But there are a handful who are dear to me, who influenced my life in some way, who I would like JQ to meet. With short trips back to M'sia, I also wanted this event to be like a mini-reunion, getting to know my friends again. I wanted to be able to tell JQ a story of every person who come to the wedding instead of 'I am not exactly sure who this person is'. Definitely a small, intimate wedding. 

3. Reasonable. We dream of wedding up in the Rockies, somewhere in the middle of the Amazon forest. But realistically, we can't afford that and we won't have any guests! Our first choice was at hotel gardens but the few places we looked at had a minimum of 100 guests. While it would be easy to invite 100 people, the cost was outrageous, and comes in package where refusing some items do not make it cheaper. With both of us coming close to a change in career, we also have to prepare for moving costs and temporary unemployment in the near future. 

4. Garden wedding. There is no way we are going to have our wedding in an indoor ballroom or function room. It has to be outdoor or partially outdoor (mosquitoes or not aside). Mom suggests the garden of my uncle's apartment. That would have been a perfect location - garden wedding by the pool! Unfortunately, we could not secure any florist to help us design the location (this is another story to tell some other time). Then we found the Tropical Spice Garden. I loved it when I went there almost 5 years ago and they have a lovely eco theme wedding package. So that is how we decided to have it at the TSG.  

5. Food. This was a challenging subject for us. We wanted traditional Nyonya cuisine. My family are strict critics when it comes to Nyonya cuisine. Nothing tastes better than my gee kim's cooking. No way we are going to make gee kim cook for 80 people on my wedding day. My parents favored catered food over hotel food. So the hunt for caterers began until they found Bamboo Catering. 

The most challenging on the major planning is communications with the different vendors in Penang. From our experience so far, Penang businesses rarely reply to emails, take months to respond to our enquiries and do no like to share their prices until you agree to their service. Lucky for us, my parents are retired and can help us hunt these people down. Yet, they still had a hard time getting quotes or finding a florist. With only one month left and the plans in place, we can only hope that these places deliver as they promised. 

White-Lined Sphinx Caterpillar

When I first came to Arizona, I loved the heat...that was in late September when we went hiking at Apache Trails. After living here for a year, I realized that summer is really not meant for outdoor activities when you are in the southwest desert. The weather have been unbearably hot since I got back from Mexico in July.

This weekend, the morning temperature loom below 90^oF, at approximately 35^oC. We decided to go for a short hike at South Mountain, Phoenix. South Mountain has lots of short trails and a lovely view of the city of Phoenix. It is also only a short distance away from Tempe so we didn't have to drive too far.

We hiked the Mormon Trail this time, which is a rocky trail with several valleys and peaks along the trail. Halfway through the trail, we started seeing lots of yellow caterpillar. It became quite a creepy trail after a while when you stop to look around and these caterpillar is all around you (at least for me lah). They are about 2-3 inches long and is as fat as my index finger. The worst is climbing up a rock and looking up into a big fat one. Eeeeck!!

Why are they all over the place?? What are these yellow caterpillar?

These caterpillars are called white-lined sphinx caterpillar (Hyles lineata). They are quite pretty with bright yellow color and black lines/spots (when I don't have to be hopping around avoiding them lah). They all seems to be moving towards the same direction - North but I don't think it is an organized colony migration, rather individual migration that appears like colony migration because there are so many of them!! It is unclear why they are migrating. The two hypotheses on why they are migrating at this time are:
1) It is time for them to pupate and they need to burrow into moist soil. Desert mountain soil has high clay content and are hard to dig into for burrowing.
2) With lack of rain in the summer, they are starting to run out of their food source = desert weed plants, and so they migrate to search for food. You might find them in your backyard!

Hopefully they will find a safe place to pupate and in a few weeks, we'll see the white-lined sphinx moth!

Volcanic pumice...a potential new habitat.

In early January, I had the opportunity to participate in a research project that explores the effects of volcanic pumice on deep oligotrophic (low nutrient) lakes in Argentina. Back in June 2011, some of us might remember hearing of a volcano eruption in Chile that had affected airports in several cities in South America AND Australia. This volcano was part of the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic complex. The last time it erupted was about fifty years ago, back in 1960s. During the eruption, a large amount of pumice and ashes spurt out from the volcano landed in the small tourist town of Bariloche and various lakes in Argentina, in the Patagonian region. In addition to causing thousands of people to run for their lives during the eruption, the volcano's ash deposition on nearby parks and lakes became a major perturbation to the ecosystem. Until today, there are still ashes coming out from the volcano and occasionally, when the wind blows the 'wrong' way, Bariloche looks like it is going to drown in ashes.

The video above was taken by Dr. Esteban Balseiro at Bariloche, looking out Lago Nahuel Huapi. 

Dried volcanic pumice

Volcanic pumice looks like rocks but are extremely porous, causing it to float on water instead of sinking to the sediment. It is not very nutritious (<1% C and undetectable N) but we have found that pumice releases a large amount of phosphorus. The availability of the released phosphorus is still under investigation. A more concerning issue is that the pumice have significantly reduced the amount of light that goes through the water column for light-dependent bacteria in the water. This is especially an issue for small lakes, such as Lago Pire, where the pumice have covered almost the entire lake. The picture below was taken on February 8, 2012, nine months after the eruption. The pumice does not seem to be going anywhere...

Lago Pire, February 8, 2012

Floating pumice

In Patagonia, the larger lakes such as Lake Nahuel Huapi are very deep (> 400m) and the microbes such as ciliates and photosynthetic bacteria are found to be mostly 30-40m deep. Mind you, a lot of these are light-dependent microbes. The water is so clear that light penetrates deep with high amount of UV radiation at the surface. In fact, from the amount of light measured by our collaborators in Universidad Nacional del Comahue at Bariloche, there are more light at 30m deep in the lake than there is on his desk!! But now...the pumice have turned the lights off for the bacteria.

Lago Nahuel Huapi

My goal for this research project is to determine if bacteria takes up residence on this P releasing pumice. If it is too dark under the pumice, maybe it will be better to stay on the pumice? Or will the pumice cause the light-dependent bacteria to starve and eventually the entire microbial community to crash? (the heterotrophic bacteria, which are dependent on the phototrophs may also run out of food source). So I joined Dr. Esteban Balseiro and Dr. Beatrice Modenutti's lab in several sampling trips to collect pumice from several lakes around Bariloche, along with the water to determine if the pumice colonizers are dependent on the 'inoculum' (the community the pumice is exposed to) or only a few types of bacteria will grow on the pumice, no matter where the pumice is collected from. Dr. B and Dr. M had also collected pumice from the 2 most disturbed lakes (by the pumice) over time since the deposition in June 2010. We want to see if there is a succession of bacterial community colonizing the pumice. As for now, we know that some of the pumice are high in microbial biomass (based on amount of DNA/g pumice) while some barely have any microbes on it. In addition to that, our Argentinian colleagues (and a Chilean group) have found that diatoms community increases in abundance and are found colonizing the pumice. Why? …stay tune until I process all the samples.