Drinkin’ drinkin’ drinkin’ drinkin’ Coca-Coca-Cola

July 6, 2010 at 1:24 am · Filed under alaska, atquasuk, summer 2010 and tagged: food, hiking, tundra

We went outside to take our chums to the plane this morning and the air had an icy bite to it.

Maybe I will make a patchwork quilt of a post.  Something big and warm that uses up all the scraps of stories I have floating around- or at least all the scraps I can find at the moment. We had a charming weekend, and though while it was going on I sat down and started to write a few times, the spaghetti wasn’t really sticking to the wall, if you will.

Patchwork quilt may have been a bad metaphor; I’ve already mixed some food in, and I suspect that food is becoming a theme. Now I’m just picturing a spaghetti-soiled quilt. Vomitrocious.

We had some food this weekend (Rob wrote all about it). Sorry, Bob. I apologize only because he was so careful to explain to us that we should eat plain popcorn and health bread and vegetables et cetera. Kelsey jokingly noted that “Apparently, Bob thinks that none of us have ever bought food before,” but perhaps he was right in thinking that we wouldn’t listen to him, because: this weekend, we ate candy.

Whatever, Bob, you drink one million Coca-Colas per day!

We also ate peanut butter pie. If the four of us research assistants on the AEP team are like a little family of foster children (and I sometimes describe us this way), then our foster-cousins are the members of the UTEP team (currently only three of them are around; more are coming). This makes sense if you consider Bob (our boss) and Craig (one of their bosses, the other being his wife, Vanessa) to be brothers.  Consider it.

Anyway, now that this tangent is too long, I felt that it was probably my turn to cook, and I made a dang peanut butter pie. Among other things. We and our foster-cousins have been taking turns cooking for the whole group of seven of us, so that that the cooking burden is spread out. This also keeps us from spending outlandish amounts of money buying sushi every day. It is difficult, however, to cook without measuring utensils, which we practically never have. Good thing peanut butter pie is hard to mess up. Good thing I never use a recipe when I make twice-baked potatoes anyway. And good thing I didn’t tell my team that I made up the recipe for the chicken until after we had tasted it and found it edible.

WE ALSO ATE BURGERS, YOU GUYS.

A cookout in Atqasuk should, to those with either first- or secondhand Atqasuk knowledge, sound like a dangerous mission. And it was. We sent Rob outside to brave the flames of the grill and the taunts of the children. He did a good job cooking our food, and he gave away 24 hotdogs. Once one child knew that food was available at the researchers’ house, the rest of the kids, like the Borg, knew as it well. They swarmed us. One of them was pretty cute. He was too young to ask if any of us were named Dickhead.

The point of this post should have been that we had a lovely weekend celebrating the birthdays of both America and Bob (and dear Auntie S!).  The fog that was keeping our friends on the ground in Barrow instead of here in Atqasuk with us, where they belong, was long gone by the time we all made it out to the field around 2:30 on Friday afternoon.  It was a lovely sunny day and a lovely sunny night and a lovely sunny Saturday and Saturday night. That’s why this post was about food.  I know more words about food than words about attractive scenery.

I rather like it that we spend all day in the field working, and then we go back outside after dinner, just for fun. And we hike around for hours. And we wear our field gear, and we walk in the river, and we talk about plants.

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