My cheap Target watch knows the day of the week but not the date, probably due to the trickiness of 2008 being a leap year. Bob made fun of me for not knowing how to change it, but he’s the one who has us use Julian days instead of the Gregorian calendar, thus rendering the cheap watch’s calendar feature useless.

Julian days are just… counting. What a surprise, right? Counting. Today (Sunday) is 174.

I think Julian days are one of the proofs that we are Serious Researchers, the other being that the hotel we stay in says SCIENTISTS BLDG on it next to a very Serious picture of a polar bear. That’s how I know what I am. I read the building. I am a scientist. The other building, the one without a girls’ bathroom and the one that Rob and Jeremy are in, is decorated with a jovial walrus.

It’s not so much a hotel as it is a place for researchers (and SCIENTISTS) to stay. It is a work camp, dormitory style with a bathroom down the hall. Individuals are not allowed; all customers must be part of some group or other. In the sense that it is a building that people pay money to sleep in and have other people wash their sheets, however, it is indeed a hotel, but foundations like the NSF are likely to be footing the bill. And multiple pairs of muddy tundra boots are likely to line the hallway.

Across the street (so, about twenty-five feet away with a bit of dirt in between) is one of the Ilisagvuk College buildings. It houses labs and the cafeteria where we eat most of the time. Our lab isn’t in this building, however, it’s 500 yards away in the new building. The new building is nice, but the walk requires that we work extra hard not to forget anything in the hotel rooms and have to run back. We don’t have a vehicle yet and have to beg rides into town for groceries (and dinner, if we are back too late to catch the cafeteria) and out to the BEO… the land our sites are on. We hope to get a vehicle for our usage by the end of the weekend, since we are all kinds of tired of waiting for rides.

Friday we actually had to make our ride wait, because we took a very Science-y detour on the way back from the field. We looked at more plant species, vascular plants as well as lichens and mosses, some ice wedges, an owl nest, a jager nest, and the Arctic Ocean. It isn’t technically the ocean at this point, it’s a lagoon, but I think it counts. It’s a bunch of frozen salt water. We built a snow man and made snow angels.

I carried the gun the whole way, so I have very Science-y sore shoulders to go with my Science-y blister on the bottom of my foot and Science-y windburn on my face. It has fully replaced the sunburn, but results in the same reddish color and the same feverish skin. It goes well with my chapped nose. If I hate anything about Alaska, it is my nose running all the time.

My goal was to write frequent short posts so that I wouldn’t have any boring novels clogging up the speediness and short attention span of the internet, but I tend to be long-winded rather than concise. So much for that plan. This post does not follow the fairly rigid precedent of daily updates because the internet has been down, so this is my first chance to check emails and post in over 48 hours.

In an effort to not write tooooo much all at once, I’ll stop now with this post that I drafted just before the internet broke.  Even though my temporary internet silence was due to technical difficulties rather than time constraints, I have a whole weekend of adventuring that I’d like to write down. Tomorrow.