GIS conference and Holomua

So I managed to survive my first conference as a speaker. And with all things that you are nervous about, it went so quickly that I don't even remember much of what I said. I just looked at my screen and told people exactly how to make my map. And if you would like to see what all the hoopla was about, heres my map below.


View Larger Map
If you click on the colored dots you can see all the data about the trees!

I am so grateful that I was encouraged to speak at this conference. It was such a good learning experience and allowed me to take a big step forward in my career. From here, I can only improve and find myself ahead of the curve in the future.

Once I managed to survive that my week went straight into preparing for Holomua. My hula halau has been participating in Merrie Monarch, the biggest hula competition in the world, for over 30 years. Holomua is when the group performing at Merrie Monarch gets to do a trial run and get out any jitters before performing next month. My kumu (teacher) is the main Kumu's daughter and so we got to perform one song at the show. I was so excited to be back performing, but was unprepared for how much work needed to go into the preparation. We had extra rehearsals, one of which was in front of Aunty Mapu, the matriarch of our halau. Thankfully, she just told us to keep smiling and we would be ok. Then there was creating our skirt for the show. This halau is fantastic because we have workshops every month to learn how to make something for our hula. This month was learning to make ti leaf lei and the month before was making ti leaf skirt. But I have to tell you, combing the neighborhood for ti leaves that are long enough for a skirt and flawless can be a lot of work, plus making the skirt, then stripping it to small pieces, I think I was busier preparing for this show then I was at my full time job!

My costume!
But once the show arrived, it was completely worth it. It was amazing to be performing again and just be up there under the lights with all my hula sisters. It was also fantastic to know that I had the privilege to perform a song that was once performed at Merrie Monarch. I can't wait until the Kamehameha Competition in the summer!

Outside of the theater

The stage I performed on

Fighting the Lorax and planting some trees

This week has been a whirlwind. I guess you can expect that from a week containing leap day. I began the week fighting the Lorax. Yes, you read that correctly, this environmental lady had to go against the famous environmentalist Dr. Seuss book. My boss came in on Monday morning, shocked by the fact that IHOP was giving out Lorax bookmarks with seeds in them. Thus, my next steps involved finding out what type of seeds they were and if they were being released at the local IHOPs. Turns out they were Blue Spruce and Canadian pine, definitely not welcome trees in our great state. And that they were giving them out in Hawaii. This resulted in contacting our invasive weeds group and having them take the next steps of contacting IHOP and saying while we appreciate your attempt to have more trees planted and advertise this environmental movie, we do not want those seeds in Hawaii. Then the conversation spread to the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and pretty much any where not in the continental US that had an IHOP on how to shut this down. Turns out so far, all the IHOP restaurants agreed to not pass them out anymore.

But this isn't over, rather than making IHOP feel terrible about this, we wanted to create a teaching moment. We LOVE the Lorax in our office, so much so that its everyones first assignment upon arrival as a new employee to read the book (it sits in my cubicle bookshelf), so we wanted to use the movie's momentum to do some good. I think what will happen next is, we hope to create new lorax bookmarks and attach Ohia seeds (which have blossoms that do look like truffala trees) and carry this on till Earth Day next month. I predict some time in the next weeks I will find myself stapling ohia seed baggies to bookmarks...

So after that insanity, I needed to get out of the office and a fantastic opportunity to dart off for a day of out planting at Paohole Natural Area Reserve (NAR) appeared. After a long drive through the Hawaiian countryside (yes it exists) we got to the NAR and assembled our team. I was really excited because there were 4 other KUPU interns so it was fun to get to hang out with some of my friends. We gathered our tools and hiked 45 minutes in and got to the site. Fortunately they had already dug the holes, and all our plants and larger items were getting helicoptered in. Seeing that helicopter with a giant box hanging down full of plants was a new site and just crazy that thats the only option in a place like Hawaii with such steep cliff areas. We spent the day planting trees, building a catchment system and taking in the view which was awesome. Overall it was a great day to go out and enjoy some sunshine, do some manual labor, and basically avoid all the other things I had to do back at the office.

Once I had to return to reality, it was time for me to do my office presentation of my talk I'm doing at a GIS conference on Monday. I am presenting how I used ArcGIS online to map our Big Trees. Basically I am doing a tutorial in front of experts, for 20 minutes. To say that I am terrified would be an understatement. I will be spending my weekend memorizing my slides and trying to completely eliminate the words "um" "soooo" "ya" "like" and "things" from my vocabulary. Not likely. But I guess we will see how Monday goes. Thankfully after that, I will be able to relax a little, before I have to start on my next two assignments, sleuthing on the underground black market cost of Hawaii Sandalwood, and researching how to change the USDA Farm Bill, a process usually requiring far more time than I have. Guess I can only keep charging forward and attempting to do my best!