Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for alaska
Do not hesitate to contact him, you will generally find him quite friendly and receptive.
Job recently reminded me that we have a website with profiles and everything. Some video footage is available there as well, so that we can scare away entice future recruits to the program.
http://faculty.gvsu.edu/hollistr/Index.html
I didn’t write my own blurb, or to my recollection pick out my own profile photo, but I don’t reckon I could have done better.
The exhaust pipe is ON
Bob’s three year old son was happy to be the entertainment of Friday evening. Jobby tried to distract the guests with his “pictures” and “videos” of the summer and the “adventures,” but the small child had a stuffed animal collection to rival the real animal collection of the zoo I worked at in 2007, and the energy of a thousand Jobbys. (This is impressive, since, on an average day, one Jobby has the energy of ten Jennys… though I’ve been known to catch up.)
I was playing eleventh wheel to the four couples that were the dinner guests of Bob and his wife. Though the two members of the team from 2007 who did not return for 2008 were able to make it with their respective fiances, darling Jean Marie was unable to attend. I don’t know if anyone else noticed that the seating arrangement ended up that everyone else was perched in twosomes on the furniture while I lounged on the floor with three penguins, a walrus, a caterpillar, a snowy owl, a pair of caribou, a loon, two snakes, a polar bear, and Barney the dinosaur, but the three year old explaining to me that ALL the animals needed to be petted didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t mind either, and I got a terrific complementary chin-buffing out of the deal.
(When I told Papasaurus earlier in the week that no, I wasn’t bringing anyone and added, because I am such a Jokester, that I could just find a date there, I’m sure he didn’t believe me for a minute. “Oh, that Jenny,” he thought. “Mustn’t forget that she is a Jokester.”)
My “date” had a fabulous orange blankie and an incredibly useful flashlight, and I do hope that my dear roommate, (who of course also attended the party since she of course is Job’s “steady date,” as the kids say), isn’t too jealous that I got to spend so much time with the little tyke. She was quite enamored of him. I think we might steal him. Our apartment has several closets.
Our party favor was a CD with the combined pictures from all the various cameras that went to Barrow this summer, excepting the video camera (whose ten hours of footage have yet to be properly edited into an amusing short documentary). Now I have considerably more pictures than the few dozen I’ve been meaning to sort and selectively post, which should make the albums that I will eventually post that much more interesting, in theory. I may be the only person (well, to be fair, only one of three or four persons) willing to pay attention to hundreds of photos and ten hours of footage.
To be very fair, all the party guests and hosts have a fabulous attention span. After the Reminiscing and the Photo Viewing (and after the Entertainment and his baby sister went to bed), the whole lot of us played over an entire box worth of Apples to Apples.
And all this science… I don’t understand.
Being the responsible persons that we are, Rob and I not only got ourselves down to the lab on Saturday in time to rescue our posters and personal effects, we also managed to be at the conference location in time to do 14 laps around the Van Andel Institute in our efforts to find the (wrong) parking garage to park in.
I expected that the only rewarding thing about a conference was socializing with other people who you’d want to see anyway… and maybe the free food, because how bad could it be? I was then pleasantly surprised to be enjoying both presenting my poster and talking with the other students who had posters to present. Our conversations were pleasant, informative, and exciting. I was inspired to continue investigating the topic of my poster, since the preliminary data that ended up on the poster only scratched the surface.
I didn’t mean to imply, when I wrote last week, that I did not understand my own research when I confessed that I didn’t have the title committed to memory. I knew very well what I put on that poster, because I put every bit of it there (nevermind that once it was there Bob was wont to move it around and change this word for that word… in fact, the large pictures were his idea: “Put a giant picture in the middle so people will want to look at it”).
Using the Atqasuk pointframe data and zonation schemes established by other people, I labeled each species of vascular plant that we found at the site as either “high arctic” or “low arctic,” referring to latitude. High arctic plants can also be found in low arctic zones, but the low arctic species will not be present in high arctic zones.
What we expected to find was that the point frame data would indicate more cover from the low arctic plants in the OTCs. We were looking for evidence that climate change and warming would catalyse these species in spreading northward. What the data told us was that in the dry site of Atqasuk, there was less cover inside the OTCs, and at the wet site, there was actually an increase in cover for HIGH arctic species.
Because this was unexpected, there are now a hundred more questions to ask, and there are always more data to analyse. We only used the point fram data from Atqasuk 2007, so the Barrow data that Papasaurus and I collected (and that I entered into spreadsheets!) wasn’t used yet, nor was the data from past years. Once those spreadsheets are run, we can compare them individually and to each other. I might start looking at specific plots and their change over time, rather than lumping all the hits for all high arctic species in all dry control plots together, for example.
Besides THAT, I have been getting more of the books and articles I requested from the library, and I will use them to find other zonation schemes that I can use to classify our species. The classification system we used is relative and somewhat subjective, so it could be that a different zonation scheme will yield different results!
The West Michigan Regional Undergraduate Science Research Conference has the worst acronym of all time, apart maybe from any acronyms that spell out unfortuate words. However, clumsy acronym or no clumsy acronym, I thought it a great success.
I also really love bread.
What kind of a weirdo walks into a public restroom, looks someone in the eye as they are coming out of a stall and then deliberately enters the stall that was just vacated even though all four other stalls are clearly unoccupied?
I encountered that weirdo today, obviously. She looked right at me. She bored holes into my skull with her laser eyes. It was weird. O.
I would have been more worried about it if I weren’t sick, which I am, and if I didn’t have to write a dumb paper, which I did. Of course then I had to go to a dumb class to turn in the dumb paper, except we didn’t turn it in, we peer-edited it, which is code for “wasted time.”
Instead of writing the paper yesterday, I should have written in my blog like my dream told me to do. In my dream I composed a beautiful and thoughtful post and vowed to remember it until morning, but alas, all I remembered was the dramatic closing line, “I also really love bread.” The dream featured me drinking glass after glass of delightfully chilled water, which perhaps I should also have done in real life, but now I am sick and if I don’t drink that much water I can’t even talk properly. Talk about delightful.
I was writing my literacy autobiography, which was meant to be about how literacy reveals clever insights about my gender, social class, religion and ethnicity. We were expressly warned not to copy any of the examples our teacher gave, which was super easy since all she wrote about was her life as a white middle class Protestant born to college educated parents. We watched a digital representation of her story, set to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (my third least-favorite song); the surprise ending involved some pictures of her with NOT white people, shocker, and then I ran to the bathroom to take care of my nose-faucet.
Bathrooms are weird anyway. Best to ignore them, and not think about how strange people find it appropriate to write the names of their significant others on the wall as they sit on the toilet.
“I was thinking about you today, darling!”
“Oh yeah, when was that?”
“Oh you know, while I was peeing.”
“Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.”
In the stalls of art kid bathrooms they write inspirational quotes, poetry, and song lyrics- did you know?
I am thankful to art for helping me to choose Grand Valley, where I was in the Honors College, which threw a party at Lake Michigan where I met my friend Rebecca who brought me to movie night at which I met Jobby who introduced me to Bob who took me to Alaska, which will, I am confident, cause other interesting dominoes to fall in the future. Maybe I should write that on the wall in an art kid bathroom.
Go on until you come to the end
All those days that we were out in the field this summer we were armed with colorful folders containing pages and pages of spreadsheet printouts to fill in. All those days I recorded point framing data I was charged with the care of a two-inch three ring binder that simply could not hold any more pages if you put a gun to its head, er… spine. Our madcap total season days produced four completely new folders in the space of thirty hours, not counting the four folders that the Barrow team toiled over.
We ran all these folders through the copier before we left; one oughtn’t to leave such things to chance, and any number of scenarios could have separated the folders from the trusty research assistants who transported them in their carry-on luggage. Then what would we have to show for our ten weeks away?
What, indeed. The actual copying took forever, since weeks of tundra exposure left even the all-weather paper curled and cranky. In the case of the Atqasuk folders, the copy machine would only accept so many dead mosquitoes before it became cross and finicky. In the end, however, we had a delightful pile of shiny white data, suitable to shipping back to the lab in Michigan.
The point is that the data is more or less useless in binder form, and the computer has been hungrily accepting the efforts of the ITEX team as we try to transfer everything into the electronic versions of the spreadsheets. This takes much more time and patience than one might imagine, and is the reason that I haven’t unpacked everything in my apartment as satisfactorily as I might…
So be good for goodness’s sake!
My sources say that when a little Atqasuk child is naughty his little Atqasuk grandmother will warn him that his punishment will be to come back as a caribou in his next life. Caribou are feasted on by mosquitoes in the summer and are forced to eat nasty lichens in the winter. No one wants to be a caribou.
If I ever get out of this prickly bush, I’ll never get in it no more.
Things I missed about home:
Pub burgers
pickles
macaroni and cheese
having a decent pair of jeans and more than 5 t-shirts
Lake Michigan
my dog
Cousin Weekend
Family Reunion
Summer Movie Night
Rosie’s graduation party
the people 
Things I miss about Barrow:
science
the sun!
the ocean
the point
KBRW
yellow curry at Arctic Thai
point framing!
Osaka (don’t tell Jean!)
Stauqpak
Crazy Tent
Ernie
owls
shenanigans with Rob
being ridiculed by Papasaurus
Jean Marie’s cooking
hanging out with UTEP
my favorite walk
spaceship toilet
white pickup trucks
the cafeteria… haha
not being hot
science juice
Hiroki san eating all our gummy bears
the huts
airplane rides
catching (but not killing!) lemmings
“Good morning good morning” on the radios
tundra!
the people
What shall we do while we’re waiting?
Of COURSE I got up in time to eat two pastries and have a glass of cranberry juice in the lobby of the Puffin Inn. Of course I made it onto the shuttle that I’d signed up for last night, and of course I got to the airport in plenty of time to sit and wait before the 8:45 boarding time. It was plentier of time than I’d originally thought. Last night they told me that I could skip check-in because they had my boarding passes all ready, but I was still expecting a line at security. Silly Jenny, of course there are no lines at security for valued customers who have been bumped up to first class!
Having a bed last night was lovely, though I suspect I will still be able to sleep on the plane. I hope that the rest of my team- none of whom were interested in volunteering to stay with me- was able to sleep well enough. I’ve already spoken to Jobby, and they even delivered my luggage to the new apartment!
Oops. They’re boarding first class. Peace out.
