Look At Me Still Talking When There’s Science To Do

In Grand Rapids… thinking about Barrow (among other things)

Archive for the kids

Two blokes and a ****load of cutlery.

August 3, 2008 at 5:00 am · Filed under Research, atquasuk and tagged: , , ,

The official report read: Today the ground squirrel succumbed to high-velocity lead poisoning. I hope I am not stealing Jobby’s thunder here, as those are his words and his deed, but I do enjoy reporting things! Bob told us to shoot it if it was messing with the Science, and as it was seen digging up the graminoids and eating Jeanie’s bugs, some of us felt that it qualified for a special delivery bullet. “Some of us” are not vegetarians.

That’s about all there is to report. We are in Atqasuk. The kids came to visit… I tried to count, but cannot get a more accurate count than “14ish.” In other words, too many.

Speaking of killing the ground squirrel, we killed a few other things today. Plants. After point framing a 70 x70 cm square, we snipped them off at ground level and packed them into environmentally-unfriendly Ziploc bags. This is called “collecting biomass.” In the dry sites we refer to it as “making tundra cake,” and we get much pleasure from carefully removing delicious slices of inch-thick sod from the mighty tundra, but at the wet sites the act is more like a haircut, and the five-and-a-half inch blades of the kitchen knives we purchased from the trusty Stuakpaq are not nearly as useful as the bumble bee scissors.

I don’t know about my teammates, but I always feel a bit guilty desecrating the plants in this fashion. We also, at the request of Bob, are helping out some scientists that we’ve never met from across the country.  These people have asked us to do things like insert soil probes into our plots, probes which made a horrendous tearing sound as they sliced through the root structures of our science. The other audacious researcher told us to pick leaves from plants inside the plots- the very idea! However, we grimly did as we were told… weeping all the while.

I’d like to go back to Barrow, but I am getting work and sleeping done here, so what more can I ask for? I have my health. Well, I do now. There are little to no lingering effects of my illness of last week. I’m sure the bulk of the credit for my return to health should go to Hiroki, who kindly presented me with a water-resistant paper crane. I feel ever so much better. Well, my finger hurts a bit, but that has more to do with the fact that I cut it with the bumble bee scissors than with my general health.

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There’s some dangerous quote book stuff going on.

August 2, 2008 at 2:38 am · Filed under Barrow, atquasuk and tagged: , , ,

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!).

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I feel like I’m taking crazy pills!

June 26, 2008 at 1:47 am · Filed under atquasuk and tagged: ,

Wireless is down.

Loon people are here.

Kids have dogs now.

Mosquito bite on the inside of my pinky finger.

Ate spaghetti twice this week!

Pictures are here.

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Remember on LOST when they met the Others?

June 19, 2008 at 2:40 am · Filed under alaska, atquasuk and tagged: , , ,

The Kids, they said. Atqasuk is great except for The Kids.

Kids and I are not exactly strangers after two summers of day care and years of VBS crafts. Plus, I usually identify with the mentality. I didn’t care about getting older anymore after I turned eleven and had a mini-mid-life crisis at fifteen, so I am not uncomfortable with kids.

Kids are not the same as babies.

In any case, how bad could it be, right? The looks of apprehension on the faces of my experienced coworkers didn’t scare me, nor did the unconvincing “it’s not that bad”s they used to quickly amend the horror stories. So all the five-to-ten-year-old boys in the little town of Atqasuk (Population: 350ish) are out of school for the summer and have nothing to do all day. So they have free rein in the town and can get around easily on all manner of bikes and ATVs. So they’re up from noon to six a.m. So their parents don’t care what they do (and have yet to make an appearance… at all). So they chase the truck the second we come into town and have us surrounded before the front door is unlocked. So what?

We’re kind of hiding from them today, so they keep coming up and banging on the house. I can’t always tell the difference between the banging to get in and the banging that is a result of the rocks-and-bats game that is going on outside, but we covered up the windows as both a light and a children preventative measure.

They really aren’t that bad, but after a field day they are not ideal companions. Their favorite things about us so far are our radios, which make the most delightful beeping noises, and the gummy bears that Jeremy used today to bribe them to stay away. I found three of them in my right boot this morning. Gummy bears, not kids. We have yet to determine if this was a deliberate attack or a random act of mindless mischief.

One of the cleverer ones noticed my eyes right away and tried unsuccessfully to point out the peculiarity to the others. He had a long line of questioning for me, but refreshingly he stayed away from the “was your mom on crack when you were born?” route. I believe his name to be Edward.

So the gummy bear situation really could have been a hate crime. Maybe they have something against heterochromia. They do have something against white people, or their parents do, based on the colorful Inupiat racial slur their parents taught them. Of course, when they used it last year my coworkers had no idea what it meant until another white person told them, which I think is a quintessential example of the inanity of profanity. The kids didn’t really know it was bad, either. I don’t think they know much about the Inupiat language. They did throw rocks at a researcher one year, however, so you can’t be too careful.

We plan to bring popsicles back for them next time we are in Atqasuk.

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