Conservation and Snowboarding! Temperature: 7C/44F

As promised - my update for last week.
Coming Soon - my first entry as a guest blogger on the Te Papa website; I'll be writing on the current conservation work that I've been doing on objects for the upcoming Te Papa exhibit 'Slice of Heaven: Early 20th Century New Zealand'.

First up though...SNOWBOARDING!!
So as I've said, I've managed to lure more people from the Conservation Labs into joining me for snowboarding adventures here in the great NZ. Seen in the picture here are fellow conservation intern, Hannah (Paintings Conservation), her boyfriend Laurence, and Textiles Conservator, Rangi (who is Maori - so she was teaching us the proper pronunciations of all the places and explained alot of the local/cultural traditions during the road trip).

All ready to go!! Got me Trapper Hat and all!! (actually, it was Rangi's, but it was too amazing NOT to wear!!)

So after a four hour car trip - we finally arrived at our weekend abode - a lovely cottage belonging to the friend of Rangi's sister - who VERY graciously allowed us to stay there free of charge. It was incredible and very close to two of the North Island's ski resorts, Turoa and Whakapapa, both on the slopes of Mt. Ruapehu, which happens to be an active volcano too =).

Getting all geared up the night before!

Laurence on the lookout for Abominable Snowmen? Or Rainbow Bright?

So on Saturday we hit up Turoa. The weather was...lets just say that if it was only slightly worse, they would have closed the mountain - half the lifts were down due to low visibility. Ultimately, these were the worst conditions I had ever snowboarded in - you couldn't see - we were soaking wet in minutes and it was freezing!!! We were on the slopes all day anyways!!! I couldn't get the others off the slopes - and it was their first times!

Driving towards Mt. Ruapehu for our 2nd day of snowboarding at Whakapapa

On Sunday we were just gonna chill at the house, clean up, pack our stuff and start the four hour drive back to Wellington...well, after waking up to glorious sunshine, we decided we couldn't possibly head home - so we went snowboarding again! Absolutely, an amazing day - I did intermediate and expert slopes - mostly successfully, I might add - and I've still got all my limbs attached!

Depending on finances and schedules, we're hoping to go back next weekend - provided I can move again by then! AYOYE! ;)

Our last view of Mt. Ruapehu as the sun set on Sunday night

Next up - Conservation!

Last week was an interesting week for me - I worked on all creatures great and small for an outgoing loan. These included two taxidermied rats, and one taxidermied lamb. One rat and the lamb had broken tails that needed mending or unbending. The poor little lamb needed to be vacuumed and fluffed - he was a dirty, dirty little lamb! As a last piece for this same loan, I wrote up a condition report on an entimological sample - in this case - a locust - yup, a real, dried and pinned to a piece of ethofoam locust. Big sucker too!

From the 20th Century exhibit I've been working on stabilising a piece of metal from the Rainbow Warrior - which I've mentioned briefly in a previous post. The mangled piece of tar-coated bronze deck plating comes from what was once the flagship for Greenpeace, which was blown up by the French Secret Service. So the piece has been subjected to a marine environment, on top of having been blown up - so we're talking corrosion, chlorides, bronze disease, stress fractures, brittleness - the whole shebang - plus, this piece is still court evidence from the original case - so any treatment can only be used to stabilise the object to the duration of the exhibit. So far, treatment has included mechanical removal of corrosion using a scalpel under the microscope, followed by scrubbing with a soft brush and a surfactant to degrease (the object has tar on it that is original, which happens to be soluble in both ethanol and acetone), and plunking it into a 0.5% BTA solution to continue desalination as well as act as a corrosion inhibitor. So far, after 5 days soaking, we've removed it to brush off chloride efflorescences twice and put it back in the tank. We hope to have it out by mid-week!

Well that's the update for now - next week we'll be talking Phar Lap!

ps. Wellington really is the windiest city in the world - I'm on the 6th floor of my building and the wind is howling so bad the whole building is shaking!! Crazy!