Well, we made it. I won’t say that we made it in one piece, since the four person team was only a three person team for the celebratory midnight dinner in town. I hope we didn’t break Jean’s spirit.

The 25+ gallons of tundra from the Barrow dry plots are all safely sorted into neatly labeled bags. They await weighing and drying, which will commence tomorrow. We wanted to get the sorting done tonight because now we can set up the drying tables tomorrow morning before we fly to Atqasuk. This is why I said that we “made it.” I work better with a deadline.

This work, of course, was only for one-quarter of the biomass plots. We’ll have six more plots each for Atqasuk dry and the respective wet sites. Jeremy thinks we shall begin to go faster, but he is an impossible optimist. He is also endlessly excited about going to Atqasuk again. (This is particularly evident in his blog, which is conveniently linked on the far right of this page.) If I didn’t know better, I would be expecting a vacation palace and all the free time in the world. There is reason to be excited, though. Rob and Jean are coming to Atqasuk this time. Now I won’t be stuck in a house alone with a vegetarian.

The vegetarian ordered a veggie burger without pickles for midnight dinner that turned out to be a regular burger with pickles. I tried my darnedest to convince him to eat it, but no such luck. Burger? Good. Pickles? Good. Midnight dinner? Very good. It was sent back to the kitchen and replaced with tomato, avocado, and lettuce on a bun. Even with the sauteed mushrooms and onions that virtually volcanoed through the top of the bun, I feel that this is a silly excuse for a dinner, never mind that volcanoes of any sort are almost impossible to eat. A burger it was not. Also, it still contained the offending pickles. Which I commandeered. Thereby nearly becoming an onion-volcano casualty.

I get to sleep in tomorrow! Don’t tell our professor. Flight at four. Don’t tell the fog. It may try to hinder our journey.