Finally I have gotten out of a horrid living situation, into a wonderfully pleasant one.
My old roommate lost what was left of her marbles last week, made herself look mentally instable to the right people, and I got to move out of there ASAP. Her mental instability all centered around a small fan. To make what could be a long story of she-said-I-said short, I turned off her fan any time she left the room for hours at a time, as I didn't want it on and there was no point in wasting the electricity. She went bonkers over me touching her stuff. And then went into a rant about how horrible I've been (and here I was actually trying to be nice and not telling her all the horrible things I wanted to). She screamed at me, cried hysterically, and demanded an "intervention meeting". I was like, oh yeah, bring it. The right people were brought in, she looked totally insane and childish, and they were like "lets get you moved out Now". Hooray for me. I didn't lose my temper once, and was acting like a super big adult ;)
It took a week full of glares meant to be threatening and a peaceful silence, both on her behalf, before they finally got me a new room. Several new rooms in fact. I got to meet all the girls and take my pick. My choice: Valerie. She's an English major, gaming bookworm just like myself, who also happens to have a twin sister that lives next door. Match made in heaven! Its only been a few days, but things are looking wonderful so far (as opposed to the instant hatred I had for the old roomie).
And that has been my drama for the week. Nothing too exciting going on.....Except for the SNOW! It has finally made its presence known in Fairbanks. For a few days its been coming in fitful bursts that quickly disappear, but last night laid on a thick enough layer so its sticking around. This morning upon leaving the dorm I was overcome by an intense desire to ruin the perfection of that fresh blanket of snow. I contained the mad dash and squealing I wanted to do with a dignified tromp through it (I can't look like too much of an idiot). But I was sure to leave as big of an impression in it as I could. And I squealed on the inside :)
This next week will have more snow (surprise) and some activities outside for a few of my classes. I've got a GPS lab for ecology where we get to tromp around campus on a hunt type survey thing tomorrow. That evening I also get training for duck handling! This weekend I will be helping with a duck banding survey on the Chena River, and I will become a certified duck handler. I should be able to age, sex, and generally guess on the overall health of the duck by the end of the session. Fun fun!
That's it for now, I love you all, enjoy the rest of your week. Until next time!
Monday, October 11, 2010
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Oodles of fun past week...
Hello all.
The past week has been a mixture of the good and the bad, luckily no ugly (unless you count my roommate....ooo...way mean, I'm sorry..kinda)
First, I went to the eye doctor on Wednesday. I showed up early, and my doctor was running late....so my appointment was an hour later than scheduled. That was way fun. Not. Good thing he was super nice and knowledgeable, else I might have kicked him in the shins. I haven't been feeling too terribly charitable the past week. Anywho, eye exam went fine. Turns out I have pingueculitis, a not uncommon condition of the eyes due to overexposure to UV light. Its a bit unusual to see it in someone as young as myself, more common in people who have spend a considerable portion of their life in the sun, but its not totally unheard of. I will have it forever, but it will usually only show as a yellow spot on the whites of my eyes. I have three spots with this condition. They tend to make your eyes easier to get irritated, and once that happens they will turn red and get imflamed and become an unsightly and slightly painful lump. It becomes painful because the lump disrupts the tear/fluid film that usually covers your eyes every time you blink. It basically breaks the surface tension, makes my eyes dry, and thus makes blinking ouchy. The use of artificial tears and steroid eyedrops will make the swelling go down and hydrate the eyes back to normal, and tada! back to yellow spot. As long as I take care of my eyes, wear my sunglasses everytime I go out, I should be fine and they shouldn't grow. In some rare cases, the growth can become big enough to either interrupt blinking, or even cause vision problems. At that point doctors recommend eye surgery, where they remove the lump and graft new eye tissue onto your eyes. Some doctors actually use stitches, which I was amazed at. Its constantly in your field of view, how annoying! Other docs use a type of glue so there isn't that problem. Luckily, I don't need this. I really liked my doc and he was super patient with all my questions, and the receptionist even gave me a ride back to school as I was going to be late to class if I had to walk. Alaskans tend to be uber nice people...all the crappy people here are out of towners like myself from the lower 48. The eyedrops prescribed to me are working just fine and the swelling is gone, but they have a tendency to sting a bit and make my vision blurry for a bit since its a milky colored fluid. It also makes the back of my throat tasty super gross (it drips from the back of my eyeballs through my sinuses and into my nasal passage from where it drips down the back of my throat. It's so gross how all of that is connected!).
My other bit of bad for the week is that I broke my phone :( Ultra saddening, I use that thing sooooo much, its my best connection to home. I've dropped it a million times on hard surfaces...and here I drop it on carpet and it breaks the connection to the LCD (I think). Basically the screen doesn't work, but it still responds to touch and the backlight comes on. So I can accept calls and turn on my flashlight, but as I don't have a perfect mixture of tactile and photographic memory, I can't do anything else. Verizon doesn't exist in Alaska, which is the Mega Ultra saddening part.....so there is no store to take it into to have it switched out with a new one. Sigh. I'm currently in the process of communicating with Verizon (idiots keep telling me to call them and I keep telling them they are idiots, I can't, duh, hence my problem) and thats just a whole bucket o fun. Bleh.
On to better things. We had what counts as a heat spell here for the past week. Last week the weather reports all said to expect snow and rain and all kinds of annoying cold weather......and instead it raised up to almost 60 degrees all week! Crazy Alaskans all broke out the flipflops and short shorts for the last hoorah of summer. I opted for a change to a light jacket :) I've acclimated, but not that well. The rise in temperature didn't happen quite fast enough for my stream ecology lab to be warm. We wore these super stylish waders and broke through the ice to get things done.
The scenery was beautiful, of course. We drove to North Pole (the city that happens to be South of us), hiked down to a river, and did our stuff. My group was in charge of measuring the flow rate of different sections of the 60' transect we measured out. How to do this? Rather fun actually. With our waders on and good to go, we broke through the ice and tromped across the river with a measuring tape. We staked out a 60' section of the river, measure the distance across it in three sections and marked those with string, and then......orange races! We plopped an orange (which was starting to freeze through) and used a stopwatch to see how long it took to go from start to finish along the transect in three places equidistant across the river. Simple and fun. My feet started to get clumsy from the cold and I couldn't feel em for most of the time we were in the river, which makes for super awkward walking, and rather precarious too. Being the graceful person I am (hah) I almost got a faceful of frigid water several times. Oh man. Other groups measured the oxygen content, temperature (which stayed around 0.5 degrees Celsius), pH, and identified the flora and fauna living in the river. Mostly, it was bugs and leeches. Gross. We hiked back to the school vans, my feet getting clumsier by the second. Upon taking off the waders, I discovered I got the ONLY leaky set for the whole class. It was warmer under the water than out of it, which was why I didn't noticed it. My pants were soaked from the knee down. God Bless woolen underclothes and socks. I was able to ditch the jeans and dry out in my longjohns on the car ride home. This is as close as I ever want to get to joining the Polar Bear Club (Google it if you don't know, you'll be amused). The rest of my week was pretty tame and dry, thankfully :)
Saturday was a mix of homework, phone breaking, and uber exciting visit from a owl handler and trip for my Wildlife 101 class. We met in the evening for an owl survey, and got a surprise visit from Earl Gray, the Great Gray Owl. He and his handler gave us an hour long lecture on owls and their habits/habitats and info on keeping an owl. Owning an owl require a permit in the states (as opposed to the UK where you can actually keep 'em as pets...Harry Potter wasn't that far off with the whole owl thing!) and the handler had an education permit that requires he to make 12 visits a year in presentations of different sorts. This paricular handler does over 30, and Earl is a great specimen! He is huge. Probably a good two to two and a half feet tall, super fluffy, and only weighs 2 pounds.
Replica of his skull here...actual size! He was all fluff.
After the presentation we hiked out to the back of campus and started our owl call-back survey. Super simple, with results that are typical of animal tracking. We played the call of four different owls (boreal, hawk owl, great gray, and great horned) and waited five minutes between to see if we'd get a response. This was done at various locations in the 1000 acre wood. Standing still for 20 minutes at a time got real cold, real quick. As soon as that sun went down, it got frigid. No owls responded, but since I got to see Earl, I didn't feel cheated out.
Today was fun as well. The Wildlife Society (which I joined two weeks ago) had a hike scheduled today at Angel Rocks. Originally we had a camping trip scheduled at Denali for this weekend, but it was cancelled since Denali closed it roads in expectation of the snow we never got. It would have been great to go, but I would have missed out on Earl, and the hike was fun anyways. It was a relatively short hike of 3 miles, and easy going for the most part. It was a gorgeous day to be out, so we hiked to the top and ate lunch with a great view.
This was a lovely end to week 4, just ten and a half left to go!
The past week has been a mixture of the good and the bad, luckily no ugly (unless you count my roommate....ooo...way mean, I'm sorry..kinda)
First, I went to the eye doctor on Wednesday. I showed up early, and my doctor was running late....so my appointment was an hour later than scheduled. That was way fun. Not. Good thing he was super nice and knowledgeable, else I might have kicked him in the shins. I haven't been feeling too terribly charitable the past week. Anywho, eye exam went fine. Turns out I have pingueculitis, a not uncommon condition of the eyes due to overexposure to UV light. Its a bit unusual to see it in someone as young as myself, more common in people who have spend a considerable portion of their life in the sun, but its not totally unheard of. I will have it forever, but it will usually only show as a yellow spot on the whites of my eyes. I have three spots with this condition. They tend to make your eyes easier to get irritated, and once that happens they will turn red and get imflamed and become an unsightly and slightly painful lump. It becomes painful because the lump disrupts the tear/fluid film that usually covers your eyes every time you blink. It basically breaks the surface tension, makes my eyes dry, and thus makes blinking ouchy. The use of artificial tears and steroid eyedrops will make the swelling go down and hydrate the eyes back to normal, and tada! back to yellow spot. As long as I take care of my eyes, wear my sunglasses everytime I go out, I should be fine and they shouldn't grow. In some rare cases, the growth can become big enough to either interrupt blinking, or even cause vision problems. At that point doctors recommend eye surgery, where they remove the lump and graft new eye tissue onto your eyes. Some doctors actually use stitches, which I was amazed at. Its constantly in your field of view, how annoying! Other docs use a type of glue so there isn't that problem. Luckily, I don't need this. I really liked my doc and he was super patient with all my questions, and the receptionist even gave me a ride back to school as I was going to be late to class if I had to walk. Alaskans tend to be uber nice people...all the crappy people here are out of towners like myself from the lower 48. The eyedrops prescribed to me are working just fine and the swelling is gone, but they have a tendency to sting a bit and make my vision blurry for a bit since its a milky colored fluid. It also makes the back of my throat tasty super gross (it drips from the back of my eyeballs through my sinuses and into my nasal passage from where it drips down the back of my throat. It's so gross how all of that is connected!).
My other bit of bad for the week is that I broke my phone :( Ultra saddening, I use that thing sooooo much, its my best connection to home. I've dropped it a million times on hard surfaces...and here I drop it on carpet and it breaks the connection to the LCD (I think). Basically the screen doesn't work, but it still responds to touch and the backlight comes on. So I can accept calls and turn on my flashlight, but as I don't have a perfect mixture of tactile and photographic memory, I can't do anything else. Verizon doesn't exist in Alaska, which is the Mega Ultra saddening part.....so there is no store to take it into to have it switched out with a new one. Sigh. I'm currently in the process of communicating with Verizon (idiots keep telling me to call them and I keep telling them they are idiots, I can't, duh, hence my problem) and thats just a whole bucket o fun. Bleh.
On to better things. We had what counts as a heat spell here for the past week. Last week the weather reports all said to expect snow and rain and all kinds of annoying cold weather......and instead it raised up to almost 60 degrees all week! Crazy Alaskans all broke out the flipflops and short shorts for the last hoorah of summer. I opted for a change to a light jacket :) I've acclimated, but not that well. The rise in temperature didn't happen quite fast enough for my stream ecology lab to be warm. We wore these super stylish waders and broke through the ice to get things done.
The scenery was beautiful, of course. We drove to North Pole (the city that happens to be South of us), hiked down to a river, and did our stuff. My group was in charge of measuring the flow rate of different sections of the 60' transect we measured out. How to do this? Rather fun actually. With our waders on and good to go, we broke through the ice and tromped across the river with a measuring tape. We staked out a 60' section of the river, measure the distance across it in three sections and marked those with string, and then......orange races! We plopped an orange (which was starting to freeze through) and used a stopwatch to see how long it took to go from start to finish along the transect in three places equidistant across the river. Simple and fun. My feet started to get clumsy from the cold and I couldn't feel em for most of the time we were in the river, which makes for super awkward walking, and rather precarious too. Being the graceful person I am (hah) I almost got a faceful of frigid water several times. Oh man. Other groups measured the oxygen content, temperature (which stayed around 0.5 degrees Celsius), pH, and identified the flora and fauna living in the river. Mostly, it was bugs and leeches. Gross. We hiked back to the school vans, my feet getting clumsier by the second. Upon taking off the waders, I discovered I got the ONLY leaky set for the whole class. It was warmer under the water than out of it, which was why I didn't noticed it. My pants were soaked from the knee down. God Bless woolen underclothes and socks. I was able to ditch the jeans and dry out in my longjohns on the car ride home. This is as close as I ever want to get to joining the Polar Bear Club (Google it if you don't know, you'll be amused). The rest of my week was pretty tame and dry, thankfully :)
Replica of his skull here...actual size! He was all fluff.
After the presentation we hiked out to the back of campus and started our owl call-back survey. Super simple, with results that are typical of animal tracking. We played the call of four different owls (boreal, hawk owl, great gray, and great horned) and waited five minutes between to see if we'd get a response. This was done at various locations in the 1000 acre wood. Standing still for 20 minutes at a time got real cold, real quick. As soon as that sun went down, it got frigid. No owls responded, but since I got to see Earl, I didn't feel cheated out.
Today was fun as well. The Wildlife Society (which I joined two weeks ago) had a hike scheduled today at Angel Rocks. Originally we had a camping trip scheduled at Denali for this weekend, but it was cancelled since Denali closed it roads in expectation of the snow we never got. It would have been great to go, but I would have missed out on Earl, and the hike was fun anyways. It was a relatively short hike of 3 miles, and easy going for the most part. It was a gorgeous day to be out, so we hiked to the top and ate lunch with a great view.
This was a lovely end to week 4, just ten and a half left to go!
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