We’ve started the real Science now, and we’re moving full-force into the hard work. It’s a bit difficult to describe without being long-winded and/or boring, but, having already presented the general idea of the plots and chambers, there is a good starting point.

Jeremy and I are in charge of the two sites in Atqasuk. Jeremy is in charge when The Boss is away. Barrow and Atqasuk both have a wet site and a dry site. This is exactly what it sounds like. The wet site has some standing water and is generally squishy. It is also chock-full of grasses and sedges which look almost the same, while the dry site is more of a plants-among-dirt setup.

I get the wet site. It is the best. Firstly and superficially, it is the best because it has the fewest species of all four sites, but that doesn’t mean it is that much easier, since the plants are more tangled and complicated than Jeremy’s. Secondly, the boardwalk is built most cleverly of all the boardwalks, meaning that the gap between the two boards is not big enough for a boot to slip through (How To Sprain An Ankle In The Arctic #1). Lastly, the folders for the ATK wet site are designated the color green, which clearly is superior to the red, yellow, and purple folders of my co-scientists.

If I were really going the PR route I would leave out the long walk to the wet site, the increased likelihood of mosquito activity, and the fact that some of my plants are nearly indistinguishable from each other- especially now when they are just poking out of the ground of the water, and Boss is still here to watch me get confused every time (it helps when I ask him a question and he considers for a few moments before saying “weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeell it’s probably dupontia, I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.”) As I am not scared of either hardship or extremely long sentences, I recorded that last bit. For honesty. For science. For posterity.

After a long day of bending, considering, guessing, measuring, and writing, I get to look forward to the long walk over the tundra. I don’t want to make any distance guesses, since I am horribly inaccurate at that kind of thing, but it’s a solid half hour of walking over what is essentially baseballs covered in different thicknesses of foam padding (How To Sprain An Ankle In The Arctic #2). Add grass and patches of water to wade through, and you get a good idea of what my daily cardio workout is going to look like.

We go through the complete cycle of data collection in Atqasuk once a week. Though the measuring part was finished today, the status-reporting and flower-counting has to be finished up tomorrow. Maybe it will get above fifty degrees?