Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do
In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)Archive for food
Just press ‘2′ for a while.
August 22, 2008 at 3:57 am · Filed under Barrow, Research, atquasuk, travel and tagged: airports, food, lemmings
As usual, I have spent the past few days composing paragraphs in my head. They are usually bloggy paragraphs, using my bloggy voice and my bloggy point of view for reporting the cold hard facts. As UNusual, the past few days have been exceedingly time consuming- and not filled with familiar events (otherwise it would be quite usual; we are always busy). Therefore I have neglected my typing.
It’s moderately surprising that the typing is still possible after the summer that my hands have had. Currently I have approximately six OTC wounds and one chamber base injury. Also my cuticles are quite disappointing, and I’ve duly canceled my watch-modeling appointment for next week. Will I never learn to moisturize?
My hands have good reason to be looking abused. We have worked hard this week. It was not apparent to me just how hyperactively we were working during the marathon Atqasuk weekend until we attempted to accomplish the same tasks in Barrow and it took twice as long. The scampering just wasn’t there, maybe in part because we weren’t trying to catch a plane, but also in part because site-teardown and thaw-depth measurements are kind of rough. Rougher the second time around. I managed to bang my knees all up as well, slithering over the boardwalk and remarking the site labels with a beautiful giant chisel-tipped Sharpie.
Tearing down the site (the chambers and the Crazy Tent) seemed an awful lot like putting the summer in rewind. Other efforts in removing evidence of the summer included shaving for Papasaurus (who we dearly hope will enjoy middle school this coming fall) and cleaning out the huts and lab. Some members of ITEX (not the vegetarian or the… English major) chose to further eradicate the lemming population, as if the ermine , owls, and the jaegers weren’t doing a perfectly adequate job. We are bringing five (or six?) frozen (and DROWNED, at the hands of MEAN JOBBY) lemmings back to Michigan. You know. For science.
Papasaurus is famously a non-violent vegetarian, and he nobly vowed to have no part in the slaughter. So noble were his efforts that he held his head high as he stepped his first step onto the tundra on that last fateful field day. So high was his head that he could never have noticed the adolescent lemming that scuttled right underneath his powerfully waterproof tundra boot. Lemmings, upon having their skulls smashed, twitch in a most unsightly fashion.
Readers-in-the-know were aware that my flight from Anchorage to Minneapolis is going on… now. There may not be many readers-in-the-know, so I’ll clue you in: Anchorage to Minneapolis from 9:30 pm to 6 am, and then in Grand Rapids by 9:22! In the morning! Nextly, our NWA flight is not sophisticated enough for weblog-updates. Result: ta-da! Not on the plane. Overbooking struck again, and in the spirit of community service, I volunteered when they asked for… volunteers. To stay until tomorrow. I figure I can put my new domestic flight voucher to good use somehow.
This wasn’t exactly what I intended when I annoyed my coworkers with my wishes that the summer adventure were not at an end, but, in the spirit of adventure, I am quite enjoying my solo detour. It is nothing more than a re-booking, a shuttle ride and a check-in at the Puffin Inn, but it is an adventure nonetheless. I’ve hopped onto the wireless from the neighboring Wendy’s, and this Inn bed is more of a bed than anything I’ve slept on lately. I am both comfortable and disoriented. (Air mattresses actually aren’t that bad.)
One of the events of the week that most seemed to put the summer in reverse was Wednesday’s dinner at Northern Lights. Our first night in Barrow included dinner at Northern Lights, with many of the same people. Only a different (and decidedly pleasanter) dynamic between the groups distinguished the two nights. That, and the nostalgia- we were saying goodbye to UTEP that night and some people are disgustingly sentimental in that way. (Me.)
Despite the fact that her presence was due to some botched and frustrating travel plans, the members of ITEX were exceedingly happy to reconnect with Gilda in Anchorage today. We enjoyed some seafood, beer, and bookstores. Yay Alaska.
I’m going to leave off writing and go to sleep now. Show of hands for who is worried that Jenny will not make it to the airport in time in the morning…
I just want to eat some butter.
August 11, 2008 at 4:16 am · Filed under Barrow and tagged: biomass, food, science juice, wet site
One team member is throwing up, one team member gets dizzy when looking too hard at something, one team member is getting a virtual haircut, and one team member is not sleeping more than six hours a night on average because there are too many things to like about Barrow.
There are still 16 plots of point framing left, along with Total Season measurements, the mere mention of which made our veteran team members twitch and make weird noises. I don’t think we’re going crazy, exactly, but there have been saner times.
The science juice turned out to be as delicious as everyone expected (because we are so great at science). It was a perfect compliment to the science cheese and science midnight-veggie-burgers that some people so enjoy around here.
No, I don’t eat veggie burgers, how absurd! I don’t really eat breakfast, either, because I have better things to do and I really love it when Jobby pounds on my door in the morning because he has some ants in his pants that seem to be encouraging him to go out to the field.
Who would want to eat anything, really, with such amounts of dirt underneath the fingernails? The Barrow wet site biomass proved to be especially dirty and obnoxious- just like some bloggers I could mention!
There’s some dangerous quote book stuff going on.
August 2, 2008 at 2:38 am · Filed under Barrow, atquasuk and tagged: birthdays, food, the kids, weather
Evidently, being in the lab all day instead of the field makes it harder to find time and material to post. The weather that boded-not-well earlier this week caused us to miss three field days in a row, and therefore we were to sit in the lab and enter data.
Somehow, though, three days worth of data did not get entered (though one-and-a-half days did), and I cannot for the life of me remember what it was that I was occupying myself with that was not a). data entry or b.) blogging.
I actually enjoyed the weather, miserable though it was. This morning Rob and I agreed that the light snow and the temperature were quite Thanksgivingish, or week-after-Thanksgivingish. As this applies to mid- and lower-Michigan, I’m not sure how it translates for other states or countries. The snow was much more of a novelty, for example, for our comrades from Texas, Florida, and California. The snow also iced up all the trucks and took out the power in the hut last night.
Lab time equals crazy time, and though there is little that is memorable enough to report, Jobby was frequently pulling out his quote book to document small tastes of the cabin fever that set in fairly quickly. Sandra and Gilda can vouch for some of this, too… they caught Rob and I patrolling a back hallway, “disguised” as velociraptors. They were amused but unsurprised at this turn of events.
Lab time also means lunch in the cafeteria. This gets mixed reviews. The food is passable, even, at times, quite good, but not if consumed at too high a frequency. Plus, we are fairly surprised that Jeremy, the Hippie Vegetarian, has not yet shriveled up and died because of the lack of suitable vegetarian-friendly choices. His meals are usually: shady salad, overcooked vegetables, boring rice, boringer potatoes. And yesterday, Santonu from UTEP found a mysterious wire in his macaroni and cheese, so the health benefits continue to decrease. The cafeteria staff were actually quite proud of him for this find, and declared that if he hadn’t said anything they would never have even NOTICED that their mesh spoon was disintegrating, by golly!
We are in Atqasuk now, which presently is only minimally warmer than Barrow. Only a very few of The Kids came in today, and they helped us celebrate our Jeanie’s birthday- her real birthday- by eating a ton of candy. She said it was her best birthday in the arctic circle ever!
Back to Barrow on Monday, though I hope to post again before then. I have been forced to wrestle with the internet this entire evening (but I was getting work done at the same time!).
It seemed like a good idea at the time.
July 15, 2008 at 5:04 am · Filed under Barrow, Research and tagged: biomass, food, polartrec
No matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, it is never enough. Despite being the best point frame partner the world has ever seen, able to hold five pieces of data error-free in my head while writing the plot points that SOMEONE neglected to put on the data sheet, Jeremy insists on treating me in an abominable fashion. The latest torture is the BIOMASS PROJECT.
I was held hostage in the lab for 48 hours this weekend, receiving only the occasional bathroom break or Rice Krispe Treat (of which we have fifty-four). My task: to take 25 one-gallon Ziploc bags filled with tundra and sort the vegetation while also removing roots, rocks and dirt (all below-ground materials). One pile of mosses, one pile of lichens, one pile for each species of vascular plant (maybe a dozen or so), one pile of leaf litter, and one pile of poop (all sorts), all suitable for weighing, drying, and then weighing again. Big Shot Jeremy decided to do twenty-four 70 cm x 70cm plots instead of the usual 10-25 cm size. He expects such perfection that we are at times driven to tears (for which there is no acceptable pile).
…that’s what I would report if Jeremy actually were that mean, and he is not. Not quite. We did get sleeping time and eating time, including a delightful team-bonding dinner at Sam and Lee’s, one of the few restaurants that we had not yet visited. It was, drumroll… Asian-American Cuisine. However, the appetizer tray actually included fire, and good times were had by all.
The vegetation is a pain in the you-know-what to sort, but we are getting slightly lazier better at it. A mere six-and-three-quarters gallons remain! Sometimes we pass the time by listening to comedians, sometimes we watch Arrested Development, sometimes Jeanie plays her Marilyn Manson tunes, and sometimes we just play the Full Circle Game, the rules of which I will not detail here. (Rob is losing. Or maybe he’s winning? It’s impossible to tell.)
Other times we talk. The rules of talking include: laughing with one’s face pointed over one’s shoulder so to not scatter the piles with enthusiastic bursts of air from one’s nostrils. Better yet, don’t laugh. Don’t make your team members laugh. There is no room for levity in Earnest Science (the opposite of Lazy Science).
Our recruitment efforts succeeded in gaining only one helper for Sunday afternoon, but he was enthusiastic (and a new person to talk to). Frank is another PolarTREC teacher, like Elizabeth (to whom we said goodbye on Saturday!), and he is working with the archeology team out on the point. They are doing Lazy Science. Or Lazy Archelogy, same concept. You can tell because they have Sundays off.
Presently I am enjoying a working internet connection and a little investigative Googling in lieu of sleep. This is certainly a bad idea, but I will sleep when I’m dead. Or maybe in September. No lazy science here.
…do math…
July 1, 2008 at 3:51 am · Filed under Barrow, Research and tagged: food, nalukatuk
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.
Having fun isn’t hard…
June 27, 2008 at 10:27 pm · Filed under Barrow and tagged: food, library
Today I got the most perfect souvenir that I could possibly ask for. Better than a keychain, better than a spoon, better than an ulu, and better than the pictures which I usually decide not to take (and thereby ruin the moment by digging out the camera).
The clue is: I also picked up two books that are due in 30 days.
My Barrow library card (!!!!) is for the Tuzzy Consortium Library at the Inupiat Heritage Center. The library is adorable and very nice looking. It contains all manner of books and videos (and happiness).
We also went out to eat at Pepe’s again. It is confusing in there. You walk in after having driven past the ice-filled ocean, and the room is thoroughly decked out in Mexican decor. This week the tables and ceiling are draped in red-white-and-blue for the upcoming Independence Day, and of course Hello Kitty oversees the whole thing from her perch at the top of a display of Japanese collectibles. All themes welcome.
The afternoon was spent attending to touristy pursuits. We learned about whaling and arctic birds at the Heritage Center and went to pet the furs at the fur shop (even the resident vegetarian).
Now I have a shower to take, a new book to read, and a nap to be awakened from when it’s time to watch Jurassic Park later.
Look! A corn puff!
June 27, 2008 at 3:49 am · Filed under Barrow, atquasuk, travel and tagged: airplanes, food, loon people, wainwright
The internet wasn’t broken yesterday, but the wireless was, meaning that the only place we could get internet access was the hundred year old PC in Jeremy’s room.
It was Jeremy and Matt’s room yesterday, because six persons arrived to stay at the house. It’s not our house, it is a house that is rented in Atqasuk for the use of researchers. No one stayed with me, probably because I smell so bad.
So these loon people show up and I had to try to remember the names of Debbie, Ken, Matt, Sarah, Jeff, and Joel all at once. It didn’t help that I had been about five minutes away from a two hour nap and Jeremy was nowhere to be seen, since he’d gone fishing with some old turkey lunchmeat and an As Seen On TV! travel fishing pole.
Then the kids materialized and brought a puppy named Princess and stayed until midnight, lurking around the house with ladders since we wouldn’t let them inside. We have been pretty nice to them this week. They loved the popcorn and popsicles. Lest you think we are trying to fatten them up, we also offered them carrots and they accepted quite happily. They also kicked my butt at war (leaving me with only a king, an ace, a two and a six after one round), but were astoundingly less successful at Trivial Pursuit. I even tried to pick easy questions, but apparently they’ve never heard of Gordie Howe.
All I had time for on the internet was posting six sentences yesterday so I could post the link to the pictures. It was a tough fight. I will try to put up more pictures of more consequential things soon.
Today we got done in the field early and raced to the airport dirt-road landing strip with our bags to see if they would let us on a flight we didn’t have tickets for. They did so without question. No IDs, no bag searches, no metal detectors (ha), no credit card numbers, just a once-over and a “sure, hop on.” And me with my pocket knife and a full bottle of water in my carry-on!
We were not in a rush to get to Barrow, only in a rush to get out of Atqasuk, having been in the way of the loon people long enough. They were very nice but one of them was sick and they were preparing for two weeks of camping in the tundra and catching loons. This involved, for whatever reason, many many boxes of Jell-o.
Speaking of processed foods, it was appropriate that we were not in a rush to get to Barrow, since our flight to Barrow was by way of Wainwright. There we dropped off one passenger and two dozen boxes of beef jerky, otter pops and Wonder Bread (“2,000 Miles Fresher! Baked in Alaska!”). It appeared to be a normal coastal village, sort of an Atqasuk and Barrow hybrid.
We also were in a rush to get back and surprise Jean, and we were not disappointed by her excitement at our return (which was not supposed to be until tomorrow morning). We immediately went out to eat at Osaka with some other researchers and racked up a $361 bill for sushi and Japanese food for fourteen people. Dessert was on the house, since we sang happy birthday to a member of our party who had no real reason to commemorate his age. The dessert was a red-bean ice cream pop. This is exactly what it sounds like. It looked like a Fudgesicle with berries in it. It was sick. Jean loved it. What a day she had!
But my lips hurt real bad!
June 15, 2008 at 4:04 am · Filed under Barrow, alaska and tagged: albedo, food, weather
I am sunburned already, and we didn’t even leave Barrow yet. Barrow is supposed to be a dreary, foggy land (I always imagine dementors), yet we were out on the tundra for the past two days under very clear skies. Today there was almost no wind, and we were in shirtsleeves. Standing in the snow is even warmer, what with the albedo and all.
The word of the day is albedo. It refers to the amount of reflection of sun radiation off the surface of the earth. Ice caps reflect more than ocean. If there is warming and subsequent melting of polar ice, then less reflection and more absorption is the result- causing more warming, then more melting, etc.
Anyway the sun has been shining since we got here, even at night, hence the sun-blocking aluminum foil window covers that most people choose. I don’t mind sleeping during the light- I do it all the time. In fact, the 8-to-midnight days that we have been having are slightly easier because in Michigan that is noon to 4. Quite manageable indeed.
Today our day would have been shorter if we hadn’t driven into town to buy groceries. The grand total for about one shopping cart full of pop, canned food and dry goods was $647.25. If we had to pay for our own food, we would be coming out behind, money-wise, even with the decent pay we are making. Three meals a day at the cafeteria in Barrow amounts to $60-$75 per person. In Atqasuk (we head there Monday at 8:15) we have to cook our own food, but we have to buy it in Barrow.
Everyone says that the clear weather won’t last, and the clouds did start to roll in today. Yesterday there was not a cloud in sight. Once the sea ice breaks up the fog will come in, and from what they say, the snow melt started on the eighth and it is leaving fast.
