Look At Me Still Talking When There's Science To Do
If I keep thinking of words, I will keep writing them downArchive for July, 2010
Huh.
All I can think about during the last part of the walk out of the field is doing a triple jump and flying like Mario to the truck. I totally do it all the time (in dreams) but without a wing cap, because I don’t wear hats.
In Barrow we walk for about twenty minutes to get to the site, and again to get back to the truck. The hardest part of the walk is the last four minutes, when you’re so so so close but you have to keep walking- and you have too many coats on and you’re thinking about Mario and one of your feet is wet because your boot leaks. Oh yes.
What a laugh I just had when I read my last post from a couple weeks ago! No snow here. It is as hot as I ever care for it to be, the sun has been shining (literally) for days, and the mosquitoes are out (at about 1/10 of their Atqasuk intensity).
Rob and I have finished 75 of 98 plots. We are champions, but nothing worth mentioning compared to the Jenny-Jeremy team. Rob knows his place. Don’t worry about him.
Baby Stella seems to be a champion, too. I have yet to see her in action, but word on the street is that she can point-frame with the best of them (which, of course, is exactly what she’s doing).
A fifth point-framer joined the ranks today. For the past week our PolarTREC teacher has been here. Keri is a Spanish/special ed teacher in the Bronx- but right now she’s part researcher, and she’s learning and writing about what we do. She said that her job is to make us look good… so check out her blog and see if she’s succeeding…!
Like a barbarian princess
One of my American Lit professors said “People don’t hate poetry, they only say that because they don’t get it and they aren’t good at it.”
She was looking RIGHT AT ME. Maybe because I had just said that I don’t like poetry.
I proved her wrong by getting an A in her class and an A on the poetry analysis assignments and an A on every test. I even got an A for ROBERT FROST, who is WAY TOO CLEVER for anyone but American Lit profs to understand.
I proved her wrong again today, by writing a poem in honor of Kelsey’s birthday. Sometimes we call her Stella, because it is her middle name.
Hierochloe alpina
Arctagrostis latifolia
Polygonum bistorta
Potentilla hyparctica
Yellow Marsh Saxifrage
Betula nana
(Is a little HOBO)
Ranunculus nivalis
Trisetum spicatum
Hylocomnium splendens
Dupontia fisheri
Andromeda polifolia
Yes, yes indeed–
Stelllaria laeta
Thamnnolia subuliformis
Eriophorum vaginatum
Luzula arctica
Ledum palustre
ALL AROUND THE TOWN
Dead vag, 14.2
“Isn’t it fun when you come back in from the field and you blow your nose and it’s filled with dust and dirt?” I yelled to Jeremy from the bathroom as I was brushing bug spray and dust out of my hair.
He agreed that it is fun– super fun.
The house is much quieter when only Jeremy and I live here. We take fewer trips out on the ATV after dinner and say more things like, “I’m gonna go read… and probably fall asleep. See you later, maybe.” We sit around the table, each on our laptops chatting with friends and wives and cousins, and sometimes Jeremy will send me an instant message with an important piece of information like “BEAR ATTACK!” It is a pretty funny joke, and for two tundra-tired people who probably ate sleepy-pizza, it is a super-hilarious joke, and I jump three feet in the air and we laugh and laugh.
We encourage each other to write in our blogs, and then as soon as Jeremy’s done with his I’ll sit down and read it and he’ll ask me what I’m chuckling about. And vice-versa.
I’ve only been in Atqasuk for nine days, but being in Barrow seems much longer ago. Half of my days in Atqasuk have had Rob and Kelsey and Sergio in them to make them more interesting, but that seems like it was long ago, too. They all left Monday morning.
I guess it’s easy to fall into a routine, even when there is no routine. I won’t be in Atqasuk for much longer, because I’ve got to go to Barrow and teach Rob everything I know. Everything I know… about… point framing! (Which I don’t feel like explaining again.) Jeremy and I have spent the past two days becoming reacquainted with the point frame and the data sheets and the tags and the system. It wasn’t very hard. We were quite the efficient team back in aught eight. It was quite easy and natural for me to know to write down “hylspl” when he says “hylocomium” or “thasub” for “thamnolia.”
Rob has yet to learn how fun these things are. So has Kelsey, who will switch places with me to learn from Point Frame Master Jeremy. I will be the lucky one who gets to point frame the most plots (we have about 96 to do both in Barrow and in Atqasuk), and I will be the lucky one to who teaches Rob about the fun. It really is fun. Even when we are plagued with dusty snot and bugs.
Drinkin’ drinkin’ drinkin’ drinkin’ Coca-Coca-Cola
We went outside to take our chums to the plane this morning and the air had an icy bite to it.
Maybe I will make a patchwork quilt of a post. Something big and warm that uses up all the scraps of stories I have floating around- or at least all the scraps I can find at the moment. We had a charming weekend, and though while it was going on I sat down and started to write a few times, the spaghetti wasn’t really sticking to the wall, if you will.
Patchwork quilt may have been a bad metaphor; I’ve already mixed some food in, and I suspect that food is becoming a theme. Now I’m just picturing a spaghetti-soiled quilt. Vomitrocious.
We had some food this weekend (Rob wrote all about it). Sorry, Bob. I apologize only because he was so careful to explain to us that we should eat plain popcorn and health bread and vegetables et cetera. Kelsey jokingly noted that “Apparently, Bob thinks that none of us have ever bought food before,” but perhaps he was right in thinking that we wouldn’t listen to him, because: this weekend, we ate candy.
Whatever, Bob, you drink one million Coca-Colas per day!
We also ate peanut butter pie. If the four of us research assistants on the AEP team are like a little family of foster children (and I sometimes describe us this way), then our foster-cousins are the members of the UTEP team (currently only three of them are around; more are coming). This makes sense if you consider Bob (our boss) and Craig (one of their bosses, the other being his wife, Vanessa) to be brothers. Consider it.
Anyway, now that this tangent is too long, I felt that it was probably my turn to cook, and I made a dang peanut butter pie. Among other things. We and our foster-cousins have been taking turns cooking for the whole group of seven of us, so that that the cooking burden is spread out. This also keeps us from spending outlandish amounts of money buying sushi every day. It is difficult, however, to cook without measuring utensils, which we practically never have. Good thing peanut butter pie is hard to mess up. Good thing I never use a recipe when I make twice-baked potatoes anyway. And good thing I didn’t tell my team that I made up the recipe for the chicken until after we had tasted it and found it edible.
WE ALSO ATE BURGERS, YOU GUYS.
A cookout in Atqasuk should, to those with either first- or secondhand Atqasuk knowledge, sound like a dangerous mission. And it was. We sent Rob outside to brave the flames of the grill and the taunts of the children. He did a good job cooking our food, and he gave away 24 hotdogs. Once one child knew that food was available at the researchers’ house, the rest of the kids, like the Borg, knew as it well. They swarmed us. One of them was pretty cute. He was too young to ask if any of us were named Dickhead.
The point of this post should have been that we had a lovely weekend celebrating the birthdays of both America and Bob (and dear Auntie S!). The fog that was keeping our friends on the ground in Barrow instead of here in Atqasuk with us, where they belong, was long gone by the time we all made it out to the field around 2:30 on Friday afternoon. It was a lovely sunny day and a lovely sunny night and a lovely sunny Saturday and Saturday night. That’s why this post was about food. I know more words about food than words about attractive scenery.
I rather like it that we spend all day in the field working, and then we go back outside after dinner, just for fun. And we hike around for hours. And we wear our field gear, and we walk in the river, and we talk about plants.
It’s fun to watch the airport appear and disappear.
I’ve written before about the uncertainties of North Slope airplane travel, but I don’t think Jeremy and I have ever before had to wait four hours for the weather hold to be lifted. We expected to pick up Rob and Kelsey from the airport around 8:30 this morning, but here it is five after one and we have yet to get our day started. It’s foggy! Only about 45 minutes ago could we see the airport from the window of the house for the first time today.
Jeremy is sitting backwards on a dining room chair, eyes glued to the window. “Now it’s time for my favorite activity,” he said. “Watching the airport.”
He’s only being a little bit sarcastic. We spend a lot of time airport-watching. Usually we can see it easily, even through mild fog. An unexpected plane, a larger than usual plane, or a line of cars driving out to the airport is sure to catch our attention, and may even be the highlight of a quiet Atqasuk evening.
Jeremy is giving us earnest and constant updates on how well he can see the airport. Currently, it’s gone again.
Rob and Kelsey are on their way from Barrow to join us in Atqasuk for the 4th of July weekend. If I say it like that, it sounds like we’ve planned a vacation; in reality, we of course have work to do, and at first were puzzled at Bob’s decision to have us out of town during the only holiday weekend of the summer. Last time we were here we enjoyed the festivities in town. This year, we will have to enjoy the festivities in a much smaller town. And we will make our own fun- after, of course, we get our work done.
Jeremy and Sergio (our friend from UTEP who arrived in Atqasuk on the last flight yesterday) and I have probably been enjoying the fog wait more than our companions in Barrow, since we’ve been sitting around eating and watching Jackie Brown. But now the movie is over and Jeremy is getting antsy. I imagine that any minute now I’ll hear a familiar cry of “plane’s on the ground!” and we’ll scramble around to grab shoes and coats and jump in the truck to go meet them…
I don’t care if I never climb another mountain.
I am out of practice.
So, let’s see, let’s see… a year since I posted. I think some stuff happened since then.
I’m, uh, in Barrow again. That’s a lie, actually. I’m in Atqasuk, but based in Barrow, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks. I was tipped off by a couple friends back in August that a large grant had gone through and I could probably maybe keep working with Bob on the ITEX project. At the time I was sitting around with no job and a degree I didn’t particularly want. I showed up in Bob’s office and he said “So… you’re good for two more summers?”
Yes.
That’s only August. September through May all have stories to go with them, too, but by golly if I can’t think of any of ‘em right now.
I am out of practice!
Rob and Kelsey and I took advantage of having plane tickets to Alaska and spent the week before work started driving around southern Alaska. We wanted to see mountains, we wanted to camp, we wanted to eat burgers, we wanted to hike. To hike.
I love hikes, but rarely in my life have I hiked the kind of hikes where somewhere in the middle, love turns to hate and I have to convince myself to take every step. We had more than one hike like this during our week-long vacation, and it wasn’t until the last one that I turned to Kelsey and said, “I don’t care if I never climb another mountain.”
Rob was somewhere ahead of us, probably a good quarter-mile or so, because he has the energy and the strength of at least ten Jennys. He didn’t hear me.
Writing sentences is like climbing up a mountain! But I do love mountains, and sentences, so I will keep writing sentences and I will probably keep climbing mountains, even tiny little ones. We only climbed tiny little ones, and still I hurt like a little baby.
OUT
OF
PRACTICE
Today’s the day, and tomorrow is another day!
The title is meant to be sung. Not because I feel like singing, but because it’s a quote, and the original utterance was sung. By me. (Because I finally figured out where to make a cotton-pickin’ left turn in cotton-pickin’ Anchorage- ask Rob or Kelsey.)
There are a few too many stories to tell. (Since last… June? Yeah, no kidding.) I will get going on them, NOT BECAUSE SEVERAL AUNTS AND ROOMMATES HAVE TOLD ME TO, but because I just frickin feel like it, gosh.
I will get going on them tomorrow. I’ve had to force myself to take every step that got me to the point where I could write this post. This post, this was the hard part. It’s all downhill from here. I can probably think of a thousand words to write, or a million, or somewhere in between.
Tomorrow is really the day.
