I decided about five seconds ago to call today “Sandwich Day” because we went out in the field twice with a delicious filling of lunch and last-Nalukataq-of-the-season in town.

Then I remembered that I didn’t actually go out in the field two times as much as I sat in the lab and did data entry in the afternoon while Jeremy and Jean finished a flower count, but the Sandwich Day thing is so darn catchy that it’s staying.

The flower counts got done and I’ve just finished updating Jean’s books with the information that Jeremy and I collected and recorded in the unofficial field journal location. I only counted two species myself. Some of the plots had numbers in the six-hundreds for a single species, and there are forty-eight plots, so NO, I wasn’t being lazy. Good thing Cassiope’s an attractive little thing or we’d hate it for sure!

Lunch was Japanese food served in a barn, but our first course was served at the Nalukataq in styrofoam cups. We didn’t get whale meat or blubber because of scheduling conflicts, but the goose neck soup was pretty delicious.

My new spelling of Nalukataq has the ‘q’ at the end, though I’m not sure whether there is a middle ‘q’ as well. The spelling update comes from my new knowledge of whale hunting, courtesy of the largest exhibit at the Heritage Center. Now I can report with a slightly firmer degree of certainty that Nalukataq, however it is spelled, means “blanket toss,” though the other parts of the celebration have other names that I don’t know.

We didn’t go to the blanket toss part of the day today because during that time we were at Stauqpak, a word with an unknown meaning, though I am very sure of the spelling. When asked, Bob told us that Stauqpak means “big warehouse with food inside,” but everyone knows you can’t trust anything your professors say.

We were at the “Bizarro World Family Fare” to get some emergency Benedryl and lotion for Jean, who has a mysterious rash on her back. Our professional SCIENTIST diagnosis was that the bar of soap in the hotel shower is disagreeing with her skin, so we prescribed a Superly Natural Bar of Soap or some such thing. It was green and wrapped in paper but not plastic, making this a very eco-friendly decision.
The part of the whale celebration that we did see was the beginning, at noon. Between Psalm 23 and the soup announcement in the opening remarks lineup, we got to hear a few words from special guest Alaska State Governor Sarah Palin. She seemed very nice, despite having a red coat, which is my least favorite color of coat.