Yowza.
I actually forgot I had a blog until I saw myself as an associate of the Evil Cat of Hell. I think I stopped blogging because I got in trouble for mentioning people's actual names. Being naive, I assumed, "Oh, Jim won't care if everyone knows that he drank so much whiskey that he told the waitress he had a daughter when he didn't actually have one! He will think my witty recounting of the incident is hilarious!"
Well, now I live in Oakland. I got a Real Job with people who I've admired for ages. And the job is fantastic- uses my mind, uses my skills, feel comfortable with the people...everything one might desire. With a real salary and perks, like the ability to buy glasses with 2 earpieces rather than the single earpiece I've gotten rather used to over the years (like a monocle...but different). I also had lyme disease and recovered. My free time is spent getting my "place" in order. I try and fancy myself a hip urbanite living in 200 square feet, which generally means I spend my evenings reading modern design blogs and wishing I could have a place that cool. Actually this weekend was big, as I adopted an ungodly number of cacti and repotted them into white pots. I've always thought it somewhat evolutionary unsound to grow cacti, but perhaps Mt. Kilimanjaro was correct when she identified a latent longing for Southern California. Anyhow, they should be hard to kill.
Other than that, I maintain a long distance relationship and read about artists.

New Jersey's Unheralded Skill
Being the urbane, educated, culturally up-to-date couple that we are, we have spent the bulk of our weekends on the east coast in New Jersey. Once you pass the factories, the beaches are both relatively empty and beautiful, and the surf is better that expected, not to mention that you have an entirely justifiable excuse to listen to Bruce Springsteen for hours on end. Sure, conformists may go to New York City, with it's alleged museums and nightlife. But there is one phenomena that New Jersey boasts skills at that New York will never, ever beat- clever word use on commerical signage. In one short weekend I observed the following cleverness:
The local fishing supply store, Down and Trout
A candle shop, Wick-it Good Candles
The barber, New Hairizons
The mexican restaurant, Nacho Ordinary Eatery
and the breakfast menu, which offered Br'egg'fast and some off-the-wall 'Egg'speriments
I mean, what does "The Four Seasons" have on that?

If you're still reading this, you must love me enough to know what is actually going on in my life. Not that witty remarks lack content, but when you are simultanously stuck in a studio apartment in an army town and trying to figure out which side of the country to start your life on....well, witty remarks provide much needed solace.
I have been back to the Big City, and I have a multimillion dollar idea. Both pedestrians and cars push the limits of their legal rights when crossing streets or turning corners, and the drivers certainly don't let their car horns gather dust. So that's why I want to start sellings horns to pedestrians. They have as much of a right to express their semi-founded frustruation. And I can't imagine the city getting all that much louder.

Well, the squirrel has lurked back. This is mainly because I have spent the last few weeks in the companionship of the elite handful of people that read this this. However given the recent departure to yet another new and interesting locale, I have been asked (yes, by a blood relative) to give some updates while I get settled here.
I guess I should begin with the requsite weather report. Hurricaine Ernesto has been relatively mild, although the name "Ernesto" makes me think of a large Mexican man with a handlebar mustache that sneaks around corners. Besides occasional rain showers, it has been gloriously sunny and the stereotypical east coast mugginess has subsided. The weekend has consisted largely of getting settled, doing unglamourous things like grocery shopping. But yesterday we boarded the Metro North Railcar in for my first trip to the big city (this diatribe reminds me faintly of Jean Teasdale of "The Onion" fame- is anyone else getting that?). And despite the tourist/college kid-saturdated portions of the city I saw, I absolutely, completely, loved it. We had a plentiful Italian meal in (surprise!) light-bedecked Little Italy, where every restaurant had a big line full of jubilant people pouring out into the street (which I admit might eventually loose its luster). In the Village (which refers to Greenwich Village and not East Village, which I figured out after only minor haggles with the cab driver) we pulled middle-school pranks: K was salivating over hot wings, so I dared her to ask a guy for one off his plate (he acquiested, not surprisingly), and then told the guy playing live music that it was her birthday. Her eyes twinkled while said she proclaimed her hate for me loudly enough to be heard over the sound of 100 people drunkenly singing "Happy birthday dear K!". We bar hopped, agressively and largely unsucessfully pursuing music to dance to. We eventually made due with Whitesnake and Bon Jovi being played in a Western-themed establishment populated largely by people with what must have been fake I.D.'s or maybe I'm just old. We made our own fun, dragging other fun-desiring people into our loud and unselfconscious dance circle. As we whizzed back to K's hotel at 3am in a surprisingly cheap cab, people outside continued to party, languished over dinner, walked bikes, shopped, just like this city is supposed to. This morning, after spending an uncomfortable night on a hotel sofa bed, we navigated the subway back to Grand Central Station and found our train back north. We ate a breakfast of espresso, peaches, yoghurt, and muffins as the Hudson whizzed by, thus completing my first official evening in New York City. And I figure that if three bumbling tourists with a good attitude can make a night that enjoyable, I can only imagine actually knowing what to do and where to go.

Well, the squirrel has lurked back. This is mainly because I have spent the last few weeks in the companionship of the elite handful of people that read this this. However given the recent departure to yet another new and interesting locale, I have been asked (yes, by a blood relative) to give some updates while I get settled here.
I guess I should begin with the requsite weather report. Hurricaine Ernesto has been relatively mild, although the name "Ernesto" makes me think of a large Mexican man with a handlebar mustache that sneaks around corners. Besides occasional rain showers, it has been gloriously sunny and the stereotypical east coast mugginess has subsided. The weekend has consisted largely of getting settled, doing unglamourous things like grocery shopping. But yesterday we boarded the Metro North Railcar in for my first trip to the big city (this diatribe reminds me faintly of Jean Teasdale of "The Onion" fame- is anyone else getting that?). And despite the tourist/college kid-saturdated portions of the city I saw, I absolutely, completely, loved it. We had a plentiful Italian meal in (surprise!) light-bedecked Little Italy, where every restaurant had a big line full of jubilant people pouring out into the street (which I admit might eventually loose its luster). In the Village (which refers to Greenwich Village and not East Village, which I figured out after only minor haggles with the cab driver) we pulled middle-school pranks: K was salivating over hot wings, so I dared her to ask a guy for one off his plate (he acquiested, not surprisingly), and then told the guy playing live music that it was her birthday. Her eyes twinkled while said she proclaimed her hate for me loudly enough to be heard over the sound of 100 people drunkenly singing "Happy birthday dear K!". We bar hopped, agressively and largely unsucessfully pursuing music to dance to. We eventually made due with Whitesnake and Bon Jovi being played in a Western-themed establishment populated largely by people with what must have been fake I.D.'s or maybe I'm just old. We made our own fun, dragging other fun-desiring people into our loud and unselfconscious dance circle. As we whizzed back to K's hotel at 3am in a surprisingly cheap cab, people outside continued to party, languished over dinner, walked bikes, shopped, just like this city is supposed to. This morning, after spending an uncomfortable night on a hotel sofa bed, we navigated the subway back to Grand Central Station and found our train back north. We ate a breakfast of espresso, peaches, yoghurt, and muffins as the Hudson whizzed by, thus completing my first official evening in New York City. And I figure that if three bumbling tourists with a good attitude can make a night that enjoyable, I can only imagine actually knowing what to do and where to go.

There were 3 stunning back-to-back minutes of KBRW this morning.
Minute 1- Classifieds. Someone is avaliable to babysit, 9-5, 7 days a week.
Minute 2- Classifieds. Someone needs a babysitter, next Monday, from 9-11 am.
Minute 3- The macarena.

Now that I'm an office weenie, I have taken to listening to KBRW out of Barrow. It is a strange hodgepodge of NPR, local news, eclectic music, and the famed 'birthday show', where every evening the inhabitants of Barrow call in to wish one another Happy Birthday, congratulations, Happy Anniversary, etc. This morning the community bulletin consisted of how to register your child for pre-school, a the time and location of the meeting about hospital zoning, and when everyone would get together to butcher bearded seals to cover the whale-bone "skin boats" in preparation for the upcoming whaling season. You know, normal stuff.

There's an old story the Inupiak tell about a group of scientists studying bowhead whale migration at a camp near Barrow. Like all scientists working out in the field in the arctic, they hired Inupiaks to help them navigate, procure food, assess the ice conditions, etc. Every morning, one of the Inupiak men would take a 15-20 minute walk along the ice, come back, and tell the men in camp what the weather would be for the day. He was consistently accurate in his predictions. The scientists were amazed at his ability. One day one of the scientists asked the Inupiak man if he could accompany him on his walk to see how we managed to predict the weather so accurately. "Oh," said the man, "I'm just walking down the road to listen to the weather report on KBRW."

hello friends and family (okay, friend and family),
I guess I'm going to be a cautious blogger and start disguising people's identities. I've always thought that no one would care about my life enough to trace my geographical comings and goings, but I will entertain a delusion of grandeur and use initials. Be prepared to be totally mystified by the actual identities of my cohorts.

Yesterday was my last day in the field for the season. After copious helicopter confusion, the boss and I finally got flying around noon. The weather was wicked- while not freezing, the rain was uncharacteristically persistent, the temperature chilly, and the wind blew aggressively. Our goal was to transect and fish two lakes. While transecting is relatively straightforward (buzz the zodiac along the lake and collect depth findings), fishing is a bit more energy intensive. To find out whether there are "real" fish in the lake (i.e. not stickleback, which could survive a nuclear explosion), we throw out gill nets, a 60 foot net made of different sized mesh with a leadline on the bottom and floats on either end. The fish swim through one direction, and get caught in the (surprise!) gills, after which we pull the nets and count and measure them. Because the likelihood of survival is low, we try to fish the nets just long enough to catch the minimal number of fish. This, however, is sometimes difficult due to the fact that we are casting the nets precisely because we don't know the fish presence. I have been told other methods would be less effective and immensely more time consuming, and as "James Audubon" as it might be, it is what my company does.
It was wicked out there, and we were quickly had numb toes and semi-functional fingers. While the first net caught 2 Least Ciscos, the second net was a tragedy. Large fish after large fish flopped in the boat, blood pouring from its gills, as it thrashed to survive. My boss untangled the fish as deftly as possible, but it was of little use. The measuring board was covered in slime, blood, and scales. Fish floated away from the boat, mouths gaping, bodies still, with little hope of survival. I rationalized the death like I rationalize being an environmental consultant- it's not a matter of saving all beings. It's a matter of screwing them up as little as possible. These fishes habitat will be changed regardless, and the fish we counted unknowingly gave their lives for their species as a whole. When I came in, I felt like I had worked 24 hours on end, and it took me hours before I had fully warmed up.
In the comfort of the office today, I heard a story about Tibetan refugees learning to use the internet. "Being ignorant of technology was one of the reasons we lost our country," said a Tibetan spokesperson for the project. Their situation reminded me of yesterday's ghost fish. How much sacrifice does a group accept for the larger goal of survival? And how does one group end deciding upon the standard, while the other group is left choosing how to adapt?