constellationist

Jobs I've almost had

2011-11-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

To continue from last week's ruminations on working at the cannery, here's another half written job adventure from my past. In theory, I have better career options now...

    This is how I almost went deaf in one year: I walked into the Westin Bayshore approximately eight minutes too late to attend an info session and become a customer service rep for Alaska Airlines. The woman packing up the registration table told me there would be another in a few weeks; I thanked her and walked back out onto the Seattle streets, slick and gray with the ambient humidity so prevalent in the city.
    I'd been looking for a job for the last month and a half, and had racked up a pretty dismal record. Even the coffee shops didn't bother to call me back.
    Since I was already downtown, I decided I might as well as try and find the office for Princess Cruises, where I had forgotten to go to an interview the day before, and offer my apologies for being a space cadet in person. A fifteen minute walk took me to Belltown, and an elevator took me to the fourth floor, where there happened to be an information session starting shortly. I chatted with a number of women hanging around to provide information, took a test to prove that I could type what I heard on a headset, and that I was able to competently use a calculator. A few days later, while I was on the phone with a my alma mater's career resource center trying to figure out how to network myself into employment, I got another call, offering me a job. The next training class would start in two and a half weeks, just after I got back from visiting relatives for Thanksgiving. Happy to be able to pay rent, I said yes.

    Bright and early, at eight am on November thirtieth, I stepped off the elevator and joined my fellow trainees in a small conference room. The Seattle office, I'd been informed, was a smaller sattelite of the main Princess operation in Santa Clarita, California. They were Princess Cruises, we were to become a part of Princess Cruises & Tours, which handled the addition of land packages to the actual cruising. During the training period, if we were late more than twice, or if our average test score dropped below eighty-five percent, we could continue our employment search elsewhere. Here was the paperwork to fill out, and here was the employee handbook.
    The Princess dresscode dictates "business casual," which means no logos, no t-shirts, no jeans, no facial piercings, and no sandals or sneakers. Jeans, t-shirts and sneakers may be permissible on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, which are designated "casual" days. On the occasion that a Seattle team may be playing, it is permissible to wear a team jersey for the Seattle teams. Jerseys for teams opposing Seattle shall be frowned upon.
    Lest you think this strict, the dresscode for Northwest Airlines customer service agents dictates the ways in which an agent is allowed to wear the different company issued pieces of the Northwest ensemble. The red sweater is not to be worn over the polo shirt. Except for skycaps working the curb, the sweater may not be worn with shorts. Skirts must be knee-length, no longer, no shorter. The red scarf is to be worn around the neck. It is not to be worn around the waist (see below for acceptable belts), nor is it to be worn in the hair. And let's not even start on the regulations for footwear, which cover color and heel height.
    The training period was mainly memorization of codes. We started with airport codes. Hartford - BDL. Toronto - YYZ. Seattle - SEA. Portland - PDX. Washington-Dulles - IAD. Orlanda - MCO. Since the hurricanes, the code for New Orleans seemed ironically appropriate - MSY, messy. We remembered Louisville, SDF, as "southern deep fry." After the first morning, we started at 7 am, and I called my boyfriend during our first break, when he was usually on his way to work. 'What about Portland, Maine?' he'd interject into conversation, picking random cities we hadn't been tested on and I didn't know.
    After the airports, it was the specs on the ships, each of which can be referred to by a two letter code, or by a single number or letter, which don't neccessarily correspond to the two letter or the name of the ship. The Grand Princess, AP, or merely A. When searching for sailings, you put in AP. When you find it, the voyage number starts with A, as in A615. The 6 is for 2006, and the 15 for the fifteenth voyage the ship has made that year. A615, specifically, would be a seven-day itinerary in the Caribbean out of Galveston, Texas, but that part I only learned with later experience.
    The ships not only have reference codes, they have deck plans, and tonnage, and year when built. Random semi-famous person who was on hand to christen the ship. Even numbered cabins are on the port side, which is also the left side. Starboard is the opposite. Cabins are divided into four types. Insides have no windows. Outsides have windows, but there's a difference between obstructed and unobstructed oceanview. Some cabins may have a lifeboat in front of the window. Balconies have balconies, and suites have sitting rooms.
    We progressed further, watched powerpoints on the destinations, and began to make practice bookings in the training version of the computer system. Various celebrities, friends and relatives were scheduled to go on the most exotic itineraries, and didn't even know it. We ran out of made up names and booked Mr A Passenger, traveling with his wife Mrs B Passenger, or the Jetson family, the Bradies, the Simpsons... One girl, the trainer told us, had always booked herself travelling with Brad Pitt. I booked Che and Castro, Lenin and Stalin, Bush and Kerry, Bush and Blair. When we practiced removing passengers and adding new ones, Bill Clinton decided to travel with Monica instead of Hillary, and then Chelsea didn't want to go at all. Since they were in an inside cabin on the bottom of the ship, I can't blame her.

    Then training receded into an impenetrable blur of worksheets and early mornings, followed by the first heart-stopping afternoon on the phones. They moved us all down onto the floor, set us up in two "pods" worth of cubicles. The phones were agonizingly slow. We waited, headsets adjusted and readjusted, sweaty palms gripping pens. For five, ten, fifteen agonizing minutes no calls reached my pod. Talk was hushed, as we waited to see who would get the first call. 'Beep beep,' the warning prompt in your ear, and suddenly a live travel agent on the other end, assuming that you would have the answers to her questions. Suddenly they were upon us. First one voice broke off conversation, then another, echoing each other like a corporate version of 'row, row, row your boat.'
    'Hello and thank you for calling Princess Cruises and Tours, this is Hello and thank you for calling Princess and Hello and thank you for calling Princess may I help you today? help you with today? today?'

My first salmon job

2011-11-15T06:00:00.000-08:00

Another half written essay while I'm doing NaNoWriMo.

I started working atthe cannery the summer after I turned 16. My parents insisted that I find ajob, and I tried hard. I hated talking on the telephone, but I made a list ofall the places in town I thought would be decent to work at, and called them all.Plant nurseries, book stores… The woman who owned the bookstore hired mebriefly to touch up the paint on the outside of the building. From menstrualblood red, she'd painted it pumpkin orange. Or maybe the other way round--inany case it started out a wild color, and ended up another wild color, and nojob inside the building was offered. In retrospect, it was probably for thebest -- if I couldn't handle calling people on the phone, how would I deal withcustomers? For all my love of reading, I didn't know enough to recommend anyoneanything.

Off to the cannery Iwent, over my parents' protests. Well, I suppose my mother didn't protest; shewas glad I'd be occupied. My father, however, didn't understand why I wouldstoop to such a job. When he moved to Juneau in the seventies, he told me, he hadpledged to himself that no matter how bad it was, he would never work in acannery. For me, I had made my own promise to never ever work at a fast foodrestaurant.

To become a fishprocessor, the main qualification is being a warm body, at least to begin with.Standing in water and handling mostly frozen fish, you didn't stay warm verylong. I got a parental release, filled out my very first IRS forms and joinedthe day shift. The foreman was named Jeannie Day, appropriately enough. She wasa middle aged woman who was motherly enough to look at me, still painfully shyand awkward, and set me to an appropriate task: roe.

Another young workerferried me in sky blue plastic baskets, covered in blood and slime, filled withfish guts. I stood at a table covered with a huge white block of plastic, likethe cutting boards we had at home, only five feet long and three or four feetwide and sorted salmon roe from the rest of the guts. A basket full of just roewas rinsed in a big vat of salt water brine, drained, and measured into fivegallon buckets. A bucket containing forty pounds of roe got a lid, and thenwent onto a pallet, and the pallet went away with a forklift to a truck andthen to a larger plant, where Japanese technicians did something else to it. Ididn't know what, but one of the forklift drivers quoted me an outrageous perpound price that roe was sold for at a Japanese holiday. I counted buckets oneday, and estimated that, during a twelve hour shift, I handled enough roe topay for a house.

I was paid $6.25 anhour, which seemed like a lot, but also pitiful compared to the value of theroe. Later, I learned that the roe was what made the money - often processingthe salmon flesh was done at a loss. If there were too many fish waiting, male fishwould be the first to be discarded.

I learned a lotabout fish that summer, mostly about their insides. The roe, called ikura inJapan, was beautiful, and I learned to tell the different species apart fromthe variation of the eggs. A salmon is not simply a salmon--there are fivespecies of Pacific salmon, each with two names. The biggest are kings, orchinooks, which never came through the line. Reds, or sockeye, have a tightskein of eggs, in a red color which matches the flesh of the fish. Silvers, orcoho, are very similar to reds, though the eggs are perhaps a little paler incolor. Pink salmon, also known as humpies for their distorted spawned outbodies, have roe of an almost yellow cast. Where the skeins of the reds werecompact, the pinks' skeins were loose and voluptuous, with colors thatshimmered even under the fluorescent lights. They are the most highly prized,along with the roe of chum, or dog, salmon. Chum roe was opalescent like pinkroe, but bigger, and orange and would be the most beautiful if chum salmondidn't seem to have more parasites than any of the other species of salmon.Because of the parasites, or because of a tendency towards grayish flesh, chumsalmon are the least appealing to the Alaskan palate. As the moniker dog salmonimplies, they are often used to feed sled dog teams.

My second summer atthe cannery, I started to branch out a little from the roe, and spent some timeas a grader -- looking at filets of salmon as deciding if it was an"A," "B," or "musher" as quickly as possible. Oh, and weighing themas well. If the line was backed up and the fish had gotten warm waiting forattention, they would get red splotches on their white stomachs, a phenomenonreferred to as "belly burn." This affected the quality, or at leastthe saleability of the fish. Bite marks and bruises from run-ins with seals orother predatory marine life also affected the appearance of a fish. An obviousbite mark, and that's a musher.

Jeannie Day wasgone, the whole operation had moved to a different plant, rented from anothercompany which was contracting, and the night foreman had become the onlyforeman. With only one shift working, we weren't limited to a twelve hour workday. During the high point of the salmon run, in July, there was a week of twoof fifteen hour days. This produced conflicting feelings in me -- a fifteenhour day was better than a ten or twelve hour day, because it meant more hoursof overtime paid at 150% of my normal hourly rate, but it also mean longer timestanding, elbow deep in slime and blood, watching fish go by, pulling roe fromintestines.

Growing up with local foods

2011-11-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

Last week was the Sitka Wild Foods potluck, put on by my employers, the Sitka Conservation Society. I already transferred my meager stash of wild food to my freezer in Seattle where I can nostagically eat salmon and huckleberries over the winter, so I didn't have anything to contribute. But, to the topic of wild and local food, here's a half written essay on what I ate as a kid, inspired by a question from former supervisor (who is also active on the interwebs!). One thing I see now is that this essay doesn't mention that my diet as a childhood diverged from the average American diet on account of living in Alaska, as well as having food allergies.

"I want to know what you ate" saidMike, who'd been supervising me for a summer internship. "What was on thetable?" I realize now that I should have made a crack about spam, sinceMike's from Hawaii.

I had food allergiesas a child, so perhaps my diet diverged particularly far from the averageAmerican. The main things off-limits were wheat, eggs and chocolate, but I wason an opt-in plan, and went to sleep-overs with a list of allowable foods. IfMike was looking for tales of a subsistence lifestyle, there were three main foods we ate "offthe land" and that I still feel strange about buying in the grocery store-- fish, rhubarb and blueberries.

Rhubarb grew in theyard of our house, near where we had a garden some years. Several starts hadbeen given to my mother by a neighbor, and something about the soil made itvery happy. Those rhubarb plants arehappily and abundantly growing to this day.

Our yard also had afew blueberry bushes, but not enough to feed the family. For that we made ayearly pilgrimage across the Bay to Seldovia in the late summer. In the woods near the head of Seldovia Bay,the blueberries grew thick and sweet in the understory of the spruce forest. Wefilled five gallon buckets with berries and motored home with purple fingers.The berries would sit in the buckets, with water, for a day to drown out anybugs, then there was endless inspection to remove twigs and leaves before theberries were frozen in the full size freezer in the basement.

Fishing was mainlyundertaken by my father. He had the magic touch, the siren call that fish couldnot resist. Or perhaps he enjoyed it more than my mother, and my sister and Iwere too young to compete. In any case, he was the provider of salmon, Dolly Varden,rainbow trout and so on. Occasionally we also went halibut fishing, which ispure torture as a kid.

Here, we're going to spend all day sitting onthe boat, and we want you to do nothing but hold onto this fishing pole andwaggle it up and down slowly. Tell us if you feel anything. Oh, and every sooften you may reel up two hundred feet of line with a lead sinker attached tocheck if there is still a third of a herring on the hook for bait. There areexciting stories about halibut fishing - if you catch one big enough, you haveto shoot it in order to kill it and keep it from thrashing apart your boat. Thetrick is to shoot it while it's still in the water - but, by and large, halibutfishing is a terrible bore.

The only thing thatkept me interested enough to participate was the knowledge that halibut is amilder taste than salmon. That's right - I didn't like salmon. It tasted funny.Now I am happy to get salmon, but when I was eight salmon was yucky, but halibutwas pretty good. My favorite halibut dish? Cut in chunks and fried in cornmeal,eaten with ketchup and mustard.

Occasionally we hadother proteins. We went clamming , although my mother is allergic to shellfishand couldn't eat any. Clamming was much more interesting than fishing. You gotto muck around on the beach, and find all sorts of creatures under rocks. Weclammed at Big Jakalof, where there was a dock, and sometimes moored thereovernight. Once there was a diver there, who brought up a huge sunflower star,blue and slimy with half a million legs, to the kids who were playing on thedock. Another time we found a wee little octopus and took him back to town forthe display at the Pratt Museum.

When I was verysmall, I remember getting crabs and shrimp, but I think later the fishery forthose was closed. There were a number of pots, made of rebar and mesh, slowlyrusting behind the chicken coop in the yard. I suppose it's neither fish norberry, but we kept chickens as well, and collected eggs from them. Most yearswe got a pair of baby turkeys in the spring and named them Christmas andThanksgiving. My parents never wanted to dispatch the turkeys in front of thechildren. One year our husky got loose and took care of it for them. Anotheryear I came home from a slumber party to see nooses draped over the swing set;the turkeys had been executed.

I don't think I wasever very upset about the turkeys, though, as I was never very attached tothem. My mother tells me that when I was a year and a half old, they had abatch a leghorns chickens, which roamed loose in the yard rather than beingcooped, and were supposed to be able to defend themselves somewhat. One day therooster attacked me, scratching up my back with his leghorns. He was boiled up,and I've never been a big fan of birds.

Let the record state

2011-11-03T12:52:00.000-07:00

...that on November 2 and November 3, it was clear and sunny in Sitka. This is after it rained so hard one night earlier this week that the noise of it woke me up at 3 am. And on Tuesday it pretty much rained an inch before lunch. So I am loving this sunbreak, and hoping it lasts.

I took a little time off work this morning and walked down to the harbor near the Forest Service office (just one of five harbors in this island town) and did not slip on the frost covered dock.

This crow was very impressed by my capable surefootedness.

Just kidding. This crow stood still long enough to see that I wasn't going to toss it anything edible, and then left the scene.

Fishing boats on the dock are much more patient subjects, though.

Mmmm... sun....

Those are pretty much all trollers, with their, umm, troll poles up. Here's one leaving the harbor, will poles extended.

There are baited lines hanging off those extended poles, which drag behind the boat as it slowly trolls through the water. A troll boat is crewed by one or two people, who immediately bleed and ice the salmon they catch, mostly coho and Chinook (also known as silvers and kings). This is your highest quality fish because it gets personal attention.

I could tell you how much of the commercial catch for the different salmon species is allocated to the troll fleet, because I'm spending my professional time on the ever growing Tongass Salmon Fact~~sheet~~book, but I won't. (Although I will send you a copy of the facts if you want.) Then there's the Fisheries and Watersheds report to do. And I'm devoting my free time in November to NaNoWriMo. Nothing too literary, really, more of a sci fi pulp sort of novel, but the exciting thing is the hope of finishing a writing project!

The rough storyline is that a photographer is hired by an environmental group to publicize some cute little animals whose habitat is threatened by Big Bad Business of some sort, however it turns out that the environmentalists are actually more interested in the plant that the animals eat because it can be made into an expensive drug, the sale of which is funding their organization and its work. By the end the photographer will probably hook up with a drug enforcement agent, or a conflicted environmentalist...

Anyway, this is all to say that there may not be too much in the way of new Alaska adventures up on the blog for a bit. However, I have a plentiful stash of half-written things from years past on my hard drive, some of which amuse me and I will share with you. Check back on Monday for the first one!

P.S. I went to the pointy top of that mountain before it snowed.

Stormy Weather

2011-10-31T16:36:00.000-07:00

I went across the street this weekend to see how the beach was doing with the fall storms. The windy weather has certainly whipped up the waves, and the waves have seriously rearranged the rocks. I will have to go back with voice recorder to capture one of the most striking things about the beach in the storm: as a wave pulls back there is a gurgling, grinding noise of the cobbles of the beach settle back after being pushed up by the water. It doesn't come out in pictures if you're not familiar with the beach, but big piles of rocks, up to softball size, have been pushed up toward the high tide line.

I was hoping to find lots of fabulous new treasures on the beach, and I did find one cool thing: a license plate from 1961!

I took a bunch of pictures of the waves, but it's hard to capture them as photos when what makes them cool is the whole sensory experience - the sound of crashing water (and the rocks!), the feel of the ocean spray and the wind, watching the water rolling in and in and in...

Want to know how waves work? All the particles of the water are moving forward together, pushed by the wind, then as it reaches the beach the lowest layers catch against the bottom. Meanwhile the top layers are still going full bore ahead, and they run out into space without the base of the wave to hold them up. Foom, the wave breaks!

It's like if you are running and trip--your feet suddenly stop, but the rest of you is still moving. A wave is the ocean falling on its face, over and over.

So here's a bit of Sitka Sound tripping onto the beach. If you look close, you can see some black spots in the water off the point.

This picture is pretty good because there was a sunbreak.

Here, we can look closer together. I took a zoomed picture. Hint: not seabirds!

Sitting in the swells.

Both Saturday and Sunday there were hardy folks out in wetsuits, appreciating the waves in an up close and personal way. Now you can tell everyone that yes, people do go surfing in Alaska.

Surf's up!

Halloween Death Heads

2011-10-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

I've been in Seattle for three weeks - I got married and then left my husband in the Lower 48 for safekeeping. Now I'm back to Sitka for my last month as Tongass Salmon Forest Resident and Southeast Alaska is about the same as I left it - gray and damp, and ten degrees cooler than Western Washington.

It's almost Halloween, and I saved these photos out of my earlier posts on spawning salmon for their, umm, seasonal appeal.

We're a little short on pumpkin patches in Southeast Alaska, but the tail end of the salmon season provides plenty of ghoulish remains to get you in the Halloween mood.

Salmon Skellington

Empty eye sockets - the sea gulls make sure of that.

Yep, the skin is just rotting of the flesh here.


Those are some gnarly teeth!

I'm also looking forward to the Stardust Ball, which is how Sitka (at least a certain subset of the adults) celebrates Halloween. It includes a lip-synch and costume contest, and if this video from last year is anything to go on, will be a hoot.

Here's hoping my planned costume (Carmen Sandiego) will be up to Stardust standards!

Shooting salmon

2011-09-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

As you can see, I went back and was more successful in my photographic pursuit of salmon.

It was sunny over the weekend, so I spent quite a bit of time at the beach and in the creek, trying to get as up close and personal with the salmon as possible, without actually touching them.

The live ones would flee from my shadow, desperately thrashing upstream if they sensed my approach. The dead ones were much easier to work with, but that's a post for another day. Still, after 700 and some photos, I got a handful that I really like.

It's easiest, of course, to successfully see the fish and focus on it if you can catch it partly out of the water. However, I'm pretty happy with some of the pictures I got with the fish entirely underwater.

Then there are some of the ones with only a selected bit of the fish out of the water, like a tail or a back.

Definitely worth standing in a creek for an hour or two!

Salmon at Sunset

2011-09-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I suddenly realized there was some beautiful color in the clouds, so I grabbed my camera and went across the street to the beach. (Yeah, I live across the street from the beach.)

The colors were reflected on the water and it was very pretty.

The clouds were pretty fearsome in the gathering dusk.

While my eyes were appreciating the sunset, my other senses were letting me know what else was going on on the beach. There was the noise from the seagulls, and the smell from what they were feeding on - pink salmon making their way up Cascade Creek, which reaches the ocean right there.

Pink at Sunset

Not all of the fish make it. In fact, the high tideline and the area around the stream is littered with dead fish. Sure, it's no dead whale, but it is a bit a stink.

In the fading light, I walked over to the stream mouth and waded in to try and capture - visually - some of the salmon.

See their tails sticking up?

I tried to take some close up shots, but it was pretty dark and I couldn't really get anything. I gotta get back next time it is halfway sunny, if that ever happens again....

That dark smudge is a salmon, I swear.

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 2

2011-09-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

The first thing to do after a blast is to make sure you still have all your fingers!

Visiting Canadian blaster counts his fingers.

Or maybe he's just doing a conversion from metric?

Just kidding! The first thing to do after a blast is to wait a minute for everything that went up in the sky to come back down to earth. Then the Blaster In Charge goes up to the blasting site to do a safety check, looking for unexploded explosives, large rocks and/or logs precariously balanced in trees, deaf bears traveling at high speeds, that sort of thing. The rest of the crew follows when the 'all clear' is given over the radio.

Foreground: Blaster. Background: Cautious approach by crew.

Returning to the first blasting sites was definitely a bit shocking. We're in a (coastal temperate) rainforest, everything is lush and green and there are trees and the whole roadbed is overgrown to the point that if you wanted to bring any sort of heavy equipment in you'd have to rebuild the whole thing, and then...

Oh! Hi, muddy brown trench that we just created.

The parting of the road bed

From green to brown in 60 seconds or less. Actually, it's probably more like 60 milliseconds or less. And that's a good thing -- one split-second boom, a few seconds of thunder rolling in the hills, and the work is done. It's quick, it's cheap, and it's green.

The alternative to explosives is, actually, to rebuild the road so that excavators (you know, the sort of yellow digging machines that little kids like to play with in the sandbox) can get up the end of the road and then start back, digging out the culverts as it goes. That would take a barge to bring in the equipment, fuel and oil to keep it running. Blasting brings the explosives in by helicopter, drops them where they're needed, and the crew walks in and sets them off. After the blast, the explosives, and anything right next to them, have vaporized and disperses into the atmosphere. There's no residue of any sort left in the forest - compare that to the inevitable grease trail left by heavy machinery.

Watershed coordinator contemplating stream bed.

After the blast, the main remnant was hunks of culvert. However, since they've been exposed to the explosives, the galvanization which was keeping them intact is gone. The crew made sure to remove the leftover culvert bits from the stream bed, but left them in the forest to rust away.

Removing the end of a culvert from the steam.

While more explosives would probably vaporize all of the culvert, the blaster in charge of the project, Rob Miller (also the Master Blaster for all the Forest Service's operations in Alaska) has spent a fair of time and calculation to work out what is the minimum amount of explosive needed to get the job done. Many of the culverts are removed with $100-$200 worth of explosives - pretty cheap! More explosives could make a bigger hole, sure, but a big hole isn't the point - the point is to make sure that instead of a narrow passageway under a road that could get plugged with rocks and dirt or possibly cave in, there is instead a free flowing stream bed that will be able to flow naturally and do its part for ecosystem function, and support the bigger streams downhill where there are salmon.

Run free, little stream, run free!

In the pouring rain, the mud washed away quickly, and the water turned clear. In another month, part of the crew will return to the sites to see how they're doing. Next summer they'll be back to take out the second half of the road. It's probably a long shot, but I hope I'll be able to go, too!

Blowing **** up in the woods, Part 1

2011-09-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Explosives look like sausages. Sausages that come in fifty pound boxes and convert sections of road into little valleys for streams to run through. Sausages that are not filled with meat, but something that looks a bit like vanilla frosting. Sausages that are used, as one of the blasters said, to kill culverts.

First, you get your explosives a few miles up an overgrown ex-logging road. This involves a helicopter. Then you get yourself up there, too. This involves your legs, but might involve an ATV to carry your backpack partway.

Then, at your site, you lay out your string of sausages, like so.


Mmm, sausages...

Then, you tape them together with detonating cord (the purple stuff you see on the spool above). Each sausage, aka 'chub,' needs to have intimate contact with either the det cord or another chub, to make sure it all explodes together.

Taping up chubs

Once that's set, you move on to the next site. For efficiency, you set up 3-6 shots to go off at the same time.

The blasters keep careful notes on each shot.

Then, you go back and load each string into the culverts. The culverts range from 18 to 48 inches in diameter. For the smaller ones, you can send a rope through and then pull the string. For a 24 inch culvert, you can send in an intern.

Elizabeast! My fearless intern.

For a 48 inch culvert, even a fish and wildlife biologist will fit.

A full grown biologist can be over 6 feet tall!

Then a passle of people wrassle this python like conglomeration of explosives into one end of the culvert while someone at the other end pulls on the rope to coax it through.

Feeding python into the pipe.

When there are a few shots all set up, the blasters string them together with a thin yellow plastic tubing coated inside with an explosive powder. The tubing is called shock cord, and they unspool 1200 feet of it, to make sure they're setting the explosions off from a safe distance. To be doubly safe, everyone takes cover behind the larger trees.

Just so you know, this is what the road looks like before anything explodes.

Tune in next time for the after view....

Wildlife in the Field

2011-08-29T11:29:00.000-07:00

Now, you already saw Cappy the Blasting Bear, but here's some of the other wildlife from the field.

Of course there were bears. Not too far up the road from the camp was a bridge over a stream, where you are pretty much guaranteed to see bears this time of year. I went out there the first night, and we saw three brown bears, fishing for pink salmon. It was pretty dark for the camera equipment I've got, but here's a picture of one of the bears.

Brown bear fishing for pinks

We also had the awesome experience of watching a group of humpback whales bubble feed. This is a technique (perhaps unique to southeast Alaska?) where the whales blow a string of bubbles underwater, creating the illusion of a wall in the water. The fish think they can't swim through it, are confused, and thus can be trapped in a net of bubbles. So the whales make a shrinking net of bubbles to get the fish (probably herring in this case) all together, and then -- whoosh! -- they come reverse diving up through the school of fish, mouth first. It's like bobbing for apples, except that they're underneath the surface. After the whales come up, they seem to spend a few minutes catching their breath before diving again. They are down for 4-5 minutes making the bubble net, and then appear without warning at the surface, so I didn't manage to catch that part, but here's video of them catching their breath before going down for another round.

Then there were the Sitka pythons. The biologists swore up and down that we needed to watch out for these creatures, which apparently live on the west side of Baranof Island and the east side of Chichagof. Or was it the other way around?

In any case, they told us, Sitka pythons feed once a year on large mammals, and the culverts we were blowing up were just the sort of place that a python might like to den.

So of course we sent my intern into a culvert at the very first blasting site, or 'shot,' as they like to call it.

Fearless intern enters culvert!

She survived this test and was renamed Elizabeast.

As the trip continued, we didn't see any pythons, unless perhaps you count the long snaky lines of explosives we were making up and sticking into the culverts.

Sitka python waits to enter culvert

I'll explain more about these explosive pythons and the rest of the blasting process next time!

I have not been blasted

2011-08-24T18:21:00.000-07:00

I am back from the trip to blow up culverts. We went 1200 feet away from all the explosives before setting them off, so I have all my limbs and digits, but no exciting explosion pictures. That's okay, because I like all my limbs and digits as they are, i.e. attached to me.

Cappy the Blasting Bear

Here's Cappy the Blasting Bear. He's made out of used shot cord, which attaches to detonating cord which attaches to the actual bombs and explody bits. The shot cord makes up most of the 1200 feet separating people from the blasts, so there's lots of it left over for art projects.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning for Prince of Wales, where I'll be for about 36 hours, I'll update more after that trip.

Food to feed an army

2011-08-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

Your tax dollars at work at local businesses

Let me show where your tax dollars go. They go directly towards supporting local businesses, and to feeding hungry hungry crews of government employees doing field work. We went shopping this morning for food to feed 10 people for 8 or 9 days. Multiply people-days by a per diem, and we had $2670 to spend. That makes about seven shopping carts, and took about two hours of 6 people circling the grocery store.

Not pictured: the carts containing food for vegetarians,
gatorade and pop, dinner for the crew going up today

Us vegetarians got a lot of nuts for protein and fats. The meat-eating majority got a lot of meat. About $800 worth of meat. We got some portabella mushrooms and corn to grill when they are eating steak and burgers.

Upcoming Adventures

2011-08-16T13:54:00.000-07:00

On Thursday I'm leaving for what will probably be my last field trip this year. The fireweed blossoms are near the top and the end of the Alaskan summer is near. The summer intern who's been working with me has less than two weeks before she heads back to college. (FYI, you can read her summer blog, too.)

However, we're ending the summer with a bang. Literally.

The purpose of this trip is to remove culverts and bridges from an old logging road, leaving streams and salmon to move freely. This involves dynamite. Lots and lots of dynamite. $10,000 of dynamite, or 18,000 pounds of dynamite--that's the numbers I've heard tossed around.

We'll be out for 8 days, with 10 people, and remove 50 structures.

I still don't know exactly what this will be like, but I've had discussions with a number of the people who be involved. First, the guy in charge, the main blaster, is a big guy. One of the fish biologists described him to me as someone who could cross the Mississippi in hip boots. Now that I've met him, he definitely has a Paul Bunyan thing going on.

One of the main forms of entertainment and bonding here is telling stories about coworkers. The story on Paul Bunyan the Blaster is that he is a meat eater, and really should not be allowed to shop for the food for these trips without supervision. On a previous trip he famously purchased, in addition to meat, one bag of red delicious apples, one head of iceberg lettuce, and a large quantity of Pringles. Varying reports have said that there were enough for each person on the trip to have a can with every meal, that it was 30 cans, that there are still cans of Pringles in the warehouse somewhere. Apparently they were on sale.

My intern and I, both being mostly vegetarian, will be meeting him at the grocery store tomorrow morning to help with the shopping for this trip. As he said to me, if we don't help him, we'll probably hate him for what he buys.

In addition, there is another blaster coming in from Canada to help with this project. They refer to him as "Daisy." I don't even know what to say at this point. I'll just have to report back after the trip.

Anyway, I had a conversation with some of the fish techs about this trip--of the ten or so participants, the intern and I will be the only girls--and said that I didn't know what the stereotypes about blasters were, but I could probably come up with some real quick. Later, I realized that I do actually have an image of a blaster in my mind: Edgar from the Red Green Show. If you're not familiar with this marvel of Canadian television, you've been missing out.

Here's Edgar. I'll report back on the trip at the end of the month--I'm sure it'll be a blast!

Weekend Adventures

2011-08-15T11:18:00.000-07:00

We had a beautiful, cloudless Saturday, so I went up Gavan Hill. I hadn't been in a few weeks, so it stretched out my calves pretty well. I also went directly after lunch, which made me a bit slower than I had hoped - 57:45 to get up to the lookout. I forgot to take a picture of the view, but I did take a couple of the stairs. That's the main thing you see on the trail, anyway!

Yep, it's some stairs.

On Sunday the sun was gone and the wind was warning of a weather change. I had made some tentative plans to visit one of the islands near town to pick berries, but I decided I'd rather stick near home and avoid unnecessary boat trips. As it turns out, there were some berry bushes behind the bunkhouse. I found a few blueberries, but lots of red huckleberries. I'm glad I kept exploring, because eventually I found a few bushes that were loaded down with berries. I spent over an hour climbing around in the woods (and singing to myself in case of bears) and picked about a quart of berries. Then I found the mother lode, picked a little longer, and went in. A few hours later I came back and spent another hour picking just off one bush!

Part of the mother lode!

Roly poly fish eyes

2011-08-09T14:51:00.000-07:00

Warning: If you are squeamish about slimy insides of fish, don't read this post!

This weekend I went out on a kayak fishing expedition. This involved getting up at 5:30 am (although in an Alaskan summer this was not before dawn), paddling for an hour, and then spending 8 hours fishing before paddling back. Although my companions caught a number of rockfish and even a little halibut, I didn't catch anything.

Well, that's not true. I did catch something that felt like the mother of all halibut, or possibly a nuclear submarine, but eventually I cut the line because we all concluded it was actually the bottom. Dangit.

When we got back, the fellow we rented the kayaks from was there with his wife and 5 year old son. We got to chatting, and the son, like any good Alaskan child, wanted to see the fish. So we showed them to him, of course, and had a chat about fish he has caught - three herring this spring, apparently.

Then it turned out that, actually, what he was most interested in was the fish eyes. He was poking at them with his fingers, and he wanted them.

My compatriots began to edge away and become very engrossed in the conversation with his parents, so I took a knife and helped him extract the eyes from a rockfish and a halibut. He stuck his fingers right in there until it was loosened up and then I cut through the nerve cord holding it in. I also cut through a membrane layer that covered the whole eye - fish may not have eyelids, but their eyes are covered and secure, not so ready to pop out as ours are.

One of the rockfish eyeballs we sliced open so he could remove a particular small nodule of something hard inside. I'm not real up on my eyeball anatomy, so I couldn't say exactly what it was, but it was also round, and he regarded it as the true ball of the eye.

His mother fetched a plastic bag for the eyes, and explained that they already have some salmon eyes at home in the freezer, and these will join them.

We actually did an interview with the dad a few weeks ago, and he told us

I love watching my kid play with salmon. He’s fascinated by salmon – he’ll even pick up the dead ones. Pick them apart and try to see what they’re made of and what’s inside of them, what’s in the gut and what they’ve been eating. You know I didn’t teach him that but he’s just fascinated with the whole thing and the fact that they’re half rotten doesn’t bother him at all.

I've been thinking about it for the last day or two. Is a fascination with fish an integral part of being a kid in a fishing community, or does it point to some sort of scientific leaning?

I believe both theories are probably true - given the right circumstances most kids are very interested in how things around them work, and circumstances in Alaska provide a lot of fish as part of the things around you. Earlier this summer I worked an art booth at a kid's fishing derby. We had a bunch of silicone casts of fish that kids could slather paint on and then slap onto paper to make fish prints. Most of the kids over 4 could identify most of the fish species. I also had a conversation two weeks ago with a ten year old boy about pink salmon returns and fishing tactics. He was more on top of it than me.

I know that my sister and I probably spent a fair amount of time dissecting fish as children. I certainly remember watching my dad gut fish, and we also used to check inside the stomach to see what they'd been eating. In high school, I spent a few summers working in a cannery. We didn't actually put salmon in cans, but I spent 10-15 hour days with salmon guts, sorting the eggs, or roe, from the other slimy bits. (And yes, I got permeated with salmon, myself. If you ever take such a job, pick one set of clothes to wear to work every day, and throw them out at the end of the season.)

Salmon hearts have little valves on them that look like teeth, human molars, the type that you see on posters about dental hygiene. The intestines make a stringy mass like a mop, or seaweed. And the eggs, glistening inside a membrane sac, are gorgeous. The prettiest are chum salmon eggs, which are globular, orange, opalescent. They are full of fats and nutrients, of course, to feed the next generation of salmon, and maybe it is the oils that makes them so lovely, like bath beads or tiny glass marbles.

I realize it's a very odd thing to wax nostalgic about, fish eggs, but my point is that I learned to appreciate the internal beauty of the fish, and I didn't stop checking out their insides when I grew up.

When I was a kayak guide we occasionally found fish. Once I dissected a good sized sculpin with a family who had two boys age 8 and 10 or so. It had two little rock crabs in its stomach, and was definitely the highlight of their day. Another time I had an adult guest who came back down to the dock after the trip to watch me hack open the head of a pacific cod we had found (it was missing its tail and was probably discarded by a seal). We found the tiny brain inside, which resembled nothing more than a loogie, and the ear bones, called otoliths.

All of which is to say that I didn't mind cutting up fish eyes at all. It was pretty fun. I haven't paid for renting the kayak yet and I got an email from the little boy's dad that if I don't pay, he's going to send me a bag of frozen fish eyes. I'm going to pay him today, but not because I'm afraid of fish eyes!

Edit/update: here's a picture of the eyeless fish. Just because!

Mushrooms and Moon Dolphins

2011-08-05T16:20:00.000-07:00

Mushrooms growing on the shores of Redoubt Lake

While we were visiting the weir crew at Redoubt Lake, they took us up to the north end of the lake where there is a recreational use cabin. We flipped through the log book in the cabin, and found some interesting entries. This one was so fabulous, that I copied it down, and can share it with you.

3/21/11

Wow, what a cosmic experience. I mean - waking up to a supermoon setting over a lake full of multi-colored dolphins. This'll blow your mind bro. The dolphins were flying. For real. We all saw it. I think they were moon dolphins. Last night we were attacked by a tussock, but luckily our fearless border collie scared it away with her fierce barking. About 23 times. I think Redoubt Lake might be, like, an energy vortex or something.

Had an excellent dinner of omelets we made from eggs stolen out of a bald eagle nest, and passed the evening by throwing molotov cocktails at imaginary dolphins.

Hope you all enjoy this place as much as we did.

Artistic rendering of moon dolphins

Whether the writer had been partaking of the local fungi or was just being silly, I don't know, but it sure provided us with a lot of entertainment. If you're ever calling me on a radio, my handle is "moon dolphin."

What's a weir?

2011-08-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

In the first photos I posted from our trip to Redoubt Lake, I included this one of Mama Bear, leading her cubs over one of the fish weirs.

Now, I suppose that not everyone knows what a "weir" is. I didn't really have much of an idea when I started this job, although I did get excited because I saw a reference to a "vortex weir" which sounds like something totally awesome. I still don't know what a vortex weir is, but the one you see above is a "picket weir." Essentially, it is a picket fence in the water.

The back side of the weir is supported by big wooden tripods. The front side is metal poles, or pickets, which are threaded through two or three layers of framing to hold them in place. Since they hold up with bears walking across them, you can see that it's a pretty sturdy structure.

Weir from the backside.
Orange-pink bits below the weir in the foreground
are salmon carcasses discarded by the bears.

The advantage of the pickets, since they slide up and down, is that they can follow the contours of the bottom of the stream. The bottom of the pickets are covered with sandbags, which hold them down and cover any gaps, making it "fish-tight."

Since all the returning salmon want to go upstream, or, at Redoubt Lake, up the falls and into the lake, they get backed up behind the weir. (That's why the bears are there.) The Forest Service staff who are spending the summer working at the weir pull up the pickets to create gaps and let the fish through, counting every one.

Jon counting fish as they pass through the weir

Most of the fish get through with no hassle, but 10% of the fish that go through find themselves inside a fish trap, and become research subjects.

Laura nets a fish in the trap.

Since the bears are sloshing around in the water by the weir, and the water is always pushing to get through and down the falls, they check the weir to make sure it is still fish-tight.

Not a corpse - just Joe in a drysuit,
snorkeling along the weir and checking the sandbags.

It turns out to be pretty hard to take a picture of someone snorkeling in which they don't look like dead body, so you might get a better idea from some of the video taken by Elizabeth, the intern working with me.

We're talking and making noise so that the bears know where are while we're sitting on the weir and counting fish. On the right you can see Jon standing on top of a log; he's looking around the corner at the second weir, and then blowing an airhorn to tell the bears they can't start fishing over there because we're still around. In the background noise, first I am translating a Russian folksong which I've just finished singing, and then later starting to sing the only other Russian song I know. Not captured on this video is my exciting rendition of Angel from Montgomery.

Dead Whale Tales

2011-07-27T16:05:00.000-07:00

On our way to Redoubt Lake, we made a little detour to check out this dead whale. It was a gray whale, which died and washed up in March or so. It originally washed up closer to the town of Sitka, but was towed to this location, further from people's houses.

As you can tell, it has been dead for some time and is an advanced state of decomposition. Large portions of it had melted into piles of goo. As you might imagine, it smelled terrible!

But if you think that's gross, imagine this image. The fellow we were with said when they cut it open for the necropsy, they unleashed a veritable river of blood. And one of my Forest Service supervisors told me he was once involved in towing a whale corpse from one location to another. When they approached that one in the boat, first, he said you started gagging a quarter of a mile away, and, second, they could see bubbles in the water, from gases escaping out of the blowhole. Yum!

Since it's a giant smelly pile of meat, maybe you guessed that a whale carcass is a the sort of thing that attracts bears. In fact, the attraction is so well know that earlier in the year there were hunters who came out and shot a brown bear. You can see the bear's skeleton in the foreground; the hunters only took the head with them. You can also see that Joe's carrying his rifle in case any other bears come by for a snack.

Perhaps that unlucky bear was the one spotted in June by folks who went on a boat tour with the Sitka Conservation Society.

2011-07-25T19:05:00.000-07:00

This weekend I saw dead whales, live bears, and a couple thousand salmon. Details later, here's a few pictures though!

Mama bear, leading her cubs over the fish weir.

This whale has been dead since March or so...

Jon caught a pink salmon.

2011-07-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a briefing sheet about a stream restoration project. Why am I getting paid to do this when the Forest Service already has briefing sheets on these projects?

Well, the briefing sheet on this particular watershed describes it thus:

Watershed condition indicators reflect concern for long term health and function of Aquatic Habitat and Riparian Vegetation. A high percentage of riparian area associated with alluvial wood-dependent channels has been harvested or roaded. Two condition indicators addressing In-stream Large Wood and Channel Shape/Function rate in the Class 3 range. Riparian Vegetation indicator also rates Class 3, due to historic riparian harvest level of 30%. The watershed hydrologic and fish habitat integrity is at risk due to high percentage (77%) of roads proximal to streams, which resulted in a Class 3 rating for this indicator.

Have you got all that?

After reading this and a few other source documents, I got down to business and wrote a few different chunks of text, including a timeline for work in the watershed, and sent it around to get feedback.

Let's look at an example from the timeline.

I wrote:

Landslides change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

After comments from a nonprofit partner, I changed it to:

Landslides from clearcut slopes change the course of Fubar Creek and cut off spawning grounds

And I've just received the suggestion from a Forest Service scientist to change it to

Numerous landslides aggraded Fubar Creek and the high volume of gravel sediments caused the stream to find an alternate route beneath the Hydaburg highway, essentially cutting off traditional fish spawning habitat.

Many scientists are able to communicate clearly with the general public, but there are enough who haven't got the time or inclination to develop the skills to explain their work to people outside their own field. And then you need to hire people like me to translate from Science to General Public.

Also, bonus points if you can use "aggrade" in a sentence, besides the one above.

2011-07-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

The town of Sitka is spread along the flat coastal edge of Baranof Island, so directly behind town are the mountains, and a couple trails that go straight up. Gavan Hill is one of them, and I've now been up it three Sundays in a row.

You walk through a muskeg meadow, but once you get into the woods the stairs start. At first they are pretty mild.

But it doesn't take long before they get more serious.

Part way up there is a little lookout platform. It's at maybe 1400 feet. The first time up the trail my taller half was visiting and we went all the way up to the alpine area above the treeline, another 1000 feet up. The next day, I was had sore calves and a sore back. That made it personal - I went back the next week to prove that I could. My lovely intern came with me, and we got up to the lookout in 59:34. This Sunday, I went up again in 50:02. I guess I'm faster with no one to talk to!

The view from the lookout

Coming back down

Because it's a small town and I've been here for more than a month, I saw four people I knew on the trail, including my supervisor from the Forest Service. Next weekend we'll be out in the field, and the weekend after that I'm back in Seattle for a quick visit, so I'll won't get up Gavan again for a bit, but I hope I can keep improving my time, along with my calf muscles!

2011-07-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

When we were driving out long gravel roads to field sites on Prince of Wales Island last month, there were Sitka black-tailed deer everywhere. Each time we surprised one with the truck, they would freeze and stare, swiveling their oversized ears at us, but they were reluctant to leave the clear space of the road for the thick underbrush. We would slow to a crawl, and they bounded before us for long minutes before disappearing into the bushes.

We saw several does with tiny fawns, including this guy. It was running after its mother and a sibling when suddenly it just flat fell over! I thought perhaps the mother had somehow carelessly kicked it in the head, so sudden was its drop, but my boss (and veteran deer hunter) said it's a defense mechanism: playing dead.

If it was in deep grass or in the brush, I could see that working. On a gravel road, though, not so much!

You'll never find me!

From the soil scientist and hydrologists we were staying with at the Craig Ranger District, we learned a game called “Build a Herd,” which is what they play from driving from field site to field site on POW.

Every deer spotted on your side of the road is added to your herd, but if you see an eagle it carries off one of your deer. A bear kills them all, and if you’re on the radio when you see a deer, it gets cancer and dies. The largest herd at the end of the trip wins.

It turns out that I’m no good at building a herd. My boss, the accomplished hunter, spotted every deer as soon as they entered his field of vision. He pointed them out on both sides of the road, and half the time noticed new antlers sprouting on the bucks while I was still looking for the animal he was talking about.

Here's the winning strategy, though: don't sit on the side of the truck that will be the water side on the way back to town. In the evening he was on the beach side of the road where all the eagles are staring into the water for fish. Half his herd was carried off, and my side of the truck won, 21 to 13.

2011-07-10T14:55:00.001-07:00

Stop the presses!

Sun in Sitka!

After a couple weeks of rain, drizzle, aggressive misting, rain and more rain, it started to clear up yesterday afternoon and today has been super beautiful and sunny. It could have done this last week, for the holiday weekend, but I'm glad it's here now. I went partway up Gavan Hill to a little lookout. Gavan Hill is all stairs, it took us 59:34 to the lookout and now I have a time to beat next time I go up.

We met some good dogs on the trail, and also a squirrel.

2011-07-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

This week I spent some more time in the field, this time ~~helping~~ watching some folks put trees, a.k.a. large woody debris, into a stream. This makes for good habitat for baby salmon. Although it involved a lot of tromping around in the rain and a lot of no-see-ums who wanted to chew on me, it was fun because I had the right gear to be waterproof and I got to see what is involved in the restoration process.

All the trees added to the stream were red alders, a quick growing tree that takes advantage of disturbed ground in places where there were logging roads, or river bottoms that large logs were dragged through.

Red alders are tall and have white bark, and if I went by the minimal tree knowledge I had coming into this job with the Forest Service (where I have learned much about salmon, and a little about trees) I would have tried to tell you that they were birch trees.

However, once they cut a few red alders down and dragged them around, scraping off the bark, it became obvious that the inner layer of the bark is the color of a nosebleed, hence the "red" of red alder. And I don't think you see that in a birch...

I thought it was pretty, so I took a bunch of pictures of it. In fact, I was photographing some scraped bark when they started calling my name, and suggested I leave when everyone else was walking off, so as not to leave me alone in bear country.

For the record, there was a bear spotted, but it ran off the trail before anyone but one guy saw it. I saw the tracks, but they weren't super big.

2011-06-30T10:38:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I went to check out the lowest tide of the month. It happened to be at 8:06 am, so I took the morning off to go to the beach!

The low lying rocks were absolutely covered with long ribbons of kelp, which made it kind of treacherous to walk through. It also had a stronger rotting stench than I remember from other beaches. But once I got down there, and starting moving the kelp aside, I found some cool things underneath.

For instance, this pink crab! Pink!

I've never seen a crab like this little guy before. He's well disguised to look like a rock covered with coralline algae, except that rocks don't move around. He skittered a bit, so I saw him and got him and got a couple pictures before he walked himself off the rock where I set him and into a deep crevice, where I couldn't even see him.

It's a little bit blurry, but look at his funny little face! He's so cute. It's like if Tove Jansson designed a crab, this is what it would look like. I don't think you can tell, but he has a little nose like Little My. If you're not familiar with Little My, she's the one with her hair in a bun.

I'd never seen a crab like that before, in color or in shape. I asked around and got the email for someone at the Alaska Department of Fish & Game who is into the intertidal critters. I sent him the pictures and he wrote back to say that it is a Cryptolithodes sitchensis, commonly called an umbrella crab. Wikipedia mentions that it is also called a Sitka crab, so how fitting that I should find my first one on a beach in Sitka. Check out the wikipedia page, they come in a wide range of colors. Very cool critters!

2011-06-27T09:48:00.000-07:00

Here's some of the pictures from the flightseeing trip I got to sit in on earlier this month. In the last couple weeks things have suddenly been real busy, and I have a couple more sets of pictures in the pipeline.

This flightseeing trip was with some folks from the Alaska regional office of The Wilderness Society, who were showing their Senior Vice President of Conservation around the state, to see how awesome it is. TWS contributed funding for my position, so I got to go along for a bit.

We took off in a floatplane (a De Havilland Beaver, I believe) and headed west from Sitka towards Mount Edgecombe, which is picturesque, except that it was shrouded in clouds. Although we couldn't see much of the high elevation sights, there was plenty to look at on the lower levels. For instance, here's what happens on the land that is disturbed by logging roads and such.

All the rounded green texture is red alder, which moves in along the logging roads. It grows fast, and isn't as commercially valuable as the spruce, hemlock or cedar. Below you can see the line of a road along the left side, then yellow green is new conifers growing back. On the right side you can see some uncut forest. It is speckled with gray - that's yellow cedars which died up to eighty years ago, but which stay standing. When I first flew into Sitka, I assumed the dead trees were victims of the spruce bark beetle, which wreaked havoc in my home region, the Kenai Peninsula, but that's the not the case at all. As the post glacial landscape here continues to evolve, or because of climate change, or because of the natural lifespan of a yellow cedar, they die. The wood is exceptionally resistant to decay and bugs (think cedar shavings, cedar chests, cedar homes), so it takes decades for the trunks to fall over.

In addition to flying over old and young growth forests, we flew over a lot of muskeg and a lot of coastline. From above, this beach looks about like places I saw on the Big Island in Hawaii last month, unless you can see its a conifer forest, not a jungle. Colder water, too!

Although the Tongass National Forest is well known for its trees, half of it is not forested at all. There are mountains and muskegs and rivers and lakes, but now that I'm here I see that a dominant characteristic is shoreline. Geographically, this area is the Alexander Archipelago, made up of thousands of islands.

The above group of islands is appropriately called the Myriads. I'm told the ones on the outside edge host a sea lion colony, which makes a ton of noise if you're camping nearby.

Below is another important piece of the coastal ecosystem - an estuary. Where a freshwater river runs out into the sea, spreading out sediments, making new land for lots of green things to grow on. In the spring and early summer (i.e. now) the bears come down to these areas to eat grasses in the estuaries. Later in the year the bears will be back to these areas, of course, when the salmon arrive and start heading upstream.

When we were in Hawaii, driving through the lush tropical jungle, there was a place where the guidebook claimed we would see shades of green we'd never seen before. Seeing these estuaries, I don't think Hawaii has a monopoly on vivid greens.

We flew up the coast of West Chichagof and Yakobi Islands, a big chunk of which is a Wilderness Area, and counted about five boats. Then we cut across West Chichagof to Chichagof proper and stopped at a spot called Sitkoh Lake, which will be a restoration area soon. There are two Forest Service cabins on the lake, and we stopped by one of them and took a little walk in the marshy area at the head of the lake.

There were a lot of deer tracks in the mud, including some from a fawn that were absolutely tiny - about an inch long! We mucked about in the fen, and I decided that definitely needed to get on it and buy a pair of extra tuffs, the ubiquitious brown rubber boots that are called Sitka slippers if you're in Sitka, or Ketchikan slippers if you're in Ketchikan and probably Juneau slippers, Petersburg slippers, Kodiak slippers, too.

I saw a bit of movement down in the vegetation and found a toad, which everyone else took pictures of. He was two or three inches long, and had some yellow spots on his feet, but I couldn't take a picture, because I was holding him, so here's a wildflower that likes wet areas, called a shooting star, instead. Imagine the toad sitting underneath it, telling stories to his grandkids about the time he was captured by giant monsters with dry skin and flashing lights.

Back in the plane, they all insisted that I should sit in the front, so I got a good view. We flew across the mountains of Baranof Island back to the side that Sitka is on, but it was a lot of clouds that don't make for good pictures. Here's another verdant estuary, though.

Here's Sitka from the air. The main town is on the left; the airport is on the island on the right.

I'm pretty sure that they artificially extended the island to make the runway.

So that's the flightseeing. If you ever find yourself up here and want to go flightseeing, then the folks at Harris Air are the ones you want to talk to.

2011-06-15T19:29:00.000-07:00

Today there were a few folks in town from The Wilderness Society, which happens to be responsible for the funding for my collaborative position with the Sitka Conservation Society and the Forest Service. They included TWS Senior Vice President for Conservation, Amy Vedder, and I got to accompany them, along with the SCS executive director, Andrew Thoms, to fly up along the outer coast of Baranof, West Chichagof and Yakobi Islands. West Chichagof & Yakobi make up a great big Wilderness area, and getting it designated as such was the project that got SCS together as an organization in the 1960s.

It was really neat to fly over, and I'll share more photos of it later (such as I was able to shoot through an airplane window with a little camera), but here's Sitka from the air. If you see the red roof building in the middle, on the shore, and then a little below it a cluster of three brown roofed buildings, the smallest of the brown buildings is the Forest Service bunkhouse. As I said before, directly across the street from the beach! Tomorrow morning is the lowest tide of the month, and I'm taking the morning off to go poke some critters. Gently, of course!

2011-06-11T17:10:00.000-07:00

If you've been wondering what the Forest Service bunkhouse looks like, here ya go. One story, four bedrooms, two bathrooms. It's on the edge of a gravel parking lot, which is surrounded by three buildings - a FS warehouse, another FS building which I suppose is a shop for working on boats/ATVs/cars/whatever, and ye olde bunkhouse. I say ye olde bunkhouse, because yesterday someone was visiting from another ranger district and said it looked the same when she first stayed there in the 1980s.

Also, the truck, as all FS road vehicles, are called "rigs."

Above is my bedroom. It's double occupancy, and I do have a roomie. Below is our kitchen.

Finally, here is our living room. As many buildings here do, we have a great big pasted together map of maps to show the area where we are. These vary in scale; the bunkhouse map shows Baranof Island and a bit of the surrounding islands. I think it would be 200-300 miles, north to south, in the territory it covers. We also have a television, and two vcr/dvd players because one of them is crummy on dvds, or maybe it was just the dvd from the public library was crummy. What you can't see is the 15 vhs tapes that are part of the bunkhouse collection, including the entire set of the X Files. If I were into the X Files, that would be pretty exciting.

Also, here's my bike. I'm glad I waited and refused to take any of the rusting mountain bikes that were offered to me, because not only were most of them too big, they were not nearly as nice as this bike.

Although I have been to the bikeshop with it three times in the first week - first to get it checked over and air in the tires, second to fix a flat because I went through the spare tube I bought, and third because a piece of the derailleur fell off, and I didn't really want a single speed bike even though it is super flat here.

2011-06-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Today I've been in Sitka for two weeks, and I have a stack of certification cards: Survival Egress Aviation Safety 4 Hour Dunker Course, Heartsaver (r) Bloodborne Pathogens, Coastal Kayak Basic Strokes & Rescues, 4-Hour Defensive Driving Course, First Aid/CPR/AED and a visitor status library card with the Kettleson Memorial Library. I didn't get cards for aviation user safety, bear behavior & bear spray, Forest Service radio operation, hazmat first responder, or boat orientation, but I think I am getting a government driver's liscense with an endorsement for ATVs, because I got trained for that, too.

So, you can tell that I am now very well prepared to fulfill my work plan, which directs me to write a factsheet on Tongass salmon, briefing sheets on watershed restoration projects on the Tongass National Forest, profiles of Forest Service staff involved in fisheries and watersheds, profiles of community members who rely on salmon, some glossy publications about all the fisheries and watersheds programs...

Actually, I am not being entirely facetious, since to get the info for the materials I'll be producing, I will be spending some time "in the field," as they say, and so will be traveling by boat, small plane, and quite possibly ATV or even kayak to get out there.

Out thar, because they are places that are only tenuously connected to what might be referred to as "civilization." And I'll let you know some lat and long when I go places and know them, but I know the plan is to go to Prince of Wales Island in about two weeks. POW is in the top five largest islands in the US, and is also one of the most heavily logged places in the Tongass NF.

In the reading I've done so far, I've started identifying stories, and one of the ones I think has the most potential is on POW. With the heavy logging there, and past practices really tearing up the landscape, there is a bit of flowing water there that got the name Fubar Creek. (If you're not familiar with the term, let me direct you to the Urban Dictionary.) But Fubar Creek is a tributary into a larger bit of flowing water called the Harris River, and there has been a big watershed restoration effort going on there. I know it's big, because the documents I've seen mention things like "Harris River Phase IV." It seems like a really good place to use as a microcosm demonstrating the trajectory of the Tongass as a whole, and the name is priceless.

I should mention that one of the FS folks told me Fubar Creek will be officially renamed this summer, which is all the better, because nothing should be Fubar forever, especially in a National Forest. But if you were flipping through a paper, or, -- let's be realistic -- scrolling through headlines online, wouldn't Fubar Creek catch your eye? Wouldn't you start reading that story?

2011-05-28T15:50:00.000-07:00

My training has continued... I have now been certified for first aid and CPR, to ride an ATV, and yes, to exit underwater aircraft. I did not expect these trainings when I was signing up for a job in communications, even if it is communicating in Alaska. But I guess it is Southeast Alaska, the Panhandle, which is mostly made up of islands. Sitka, where I am living, and will be for the next six months, is on one of the three largest islands, the ABCs. Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagoff. (Sitka is on Baranof. Baranof was in charge of the Russian American Company, way back when.) To go anywhere involves going over water, by boat or plane, and thus all the safety training.

Hypothermia you can go read about on your own, and you can take the same standardized first aid and CPR training anywhere in the country, but I bet you can't get the underwater egress training, so I'll talk about that one.

The training was run by Dug Jensen, who also did most of the water and survival trainings on the previous days. For this one, he also brought in a retired Coast Guard pilot and helicopter mechanic. We watched a video, and learned things like if a plane (including float planes) has its landing gear down when it hits the water, the gear catches and flips the plane. Boom, you are upside down and underwater.

One of the Forest Service folks who has been around for a while recounted how he narrowly missed being on a flight where this happened. The pilot was running a couple of loads of gear back and forth to a camp on a lake, and this guy needed to go back for something at the last minute, and so didn't get on the plane. The pilot forgot the landing gear, and flipped. An unsecured propane tank from the back shot out the front window, directly through the passenger seat. Very lucky that he wasn't sitting there! The pilot got out, and wasn't able to convince the crew waiting at the camp that there was no passenger -- they figured he was disoriented -- and they dove in the lake to look for him for a while before it all got sorted out. This is just one of many war stories we have heard during the training period.

Anyway, we had the classroom portion of this training and then we divided into two groups for pool time. All the talk and anticipation was making me nervous about it, so I volunteered myself for the first group to get it over with.

At the pool, as I had heard, there was indeed a cage structure made of yellow PVC pipe, with a blue seat of laminated nylon sort of stuff in the middle, and a five point harness like you might have in a helicopter. You sit in the seat, and fasten up the harness, which has a release in the middle. You twist the release, either direction, and it all comes off immediately. You also wear a helmet, because you probably would in a helicopter or small plane, and be attached with some inflight communications system.

Here is what you practice.

1. Open your door, and lock the mechanism so it can't relatch and trap you.
2. Undo any cords attaching you to the comms system.
3. Find a point of reference for your hand near the door.
4. Now, instead of leaving your hands on that point where your arm is rigid and could get broken, put them under your legs, or wrap them around you so your face is protected in the crook of your elbow. Don't put your hand on the harness release, because you want to be strapped in at impact -- that's what the harness is there for!
5. Take a couple deep breaths before you hit the water, but not so many that you're hyperventilating and will make yourself pass out. The instructor asks if you are ready. Say yes, and listen to the count of 1, 2, 3.
6. Now you're in the water, upside down. Don't flail around; stay calm and wait for the cage to settle. In a real crash, don't wait so long that you are 300 feet below the surface, just long enough that the helicopter rotors or other dangerous moving debris is done.
7. Undo your harness.
8. Put your hand out to your reference point. From there grab another solid point, and so on until you are outside.
9. Head to the surface. Don't kick anyone who is trying to get out behind you.

My first immersion I flailed a bit, but got out. The next two I was calmer and did fine, but not so well that they offered to tip me in backwards instead of forwards, although I did I have a simulated blocked exit (i.e. the Coastie splayed himself on the side I had been going out on) on the last one.

Throughout the practice, there were a couple snorkel masks being passed around so we could watch other people underwater. There wasn't a whole lot to see, though. Some bubbles and moving limbs. Nobody stayed in for very long. Apparently, after I left, there was a person in the second group who really freaked out on the first dunk, and had to be calmed down, but went right back for the next one and finished the three times successfully.

Hopefully I never have to do this anywhere other than in a pool, but it is good, of course, to have a plan and a laminated card that says you've completed the 'Survival Egress Aviation Safety 4 Hour Dunker Course.'

2011-05-24T19:20:00.000-07:00

I guess it is Tuesday. I have now had two days of Forest Service training, in company with a lot of other seasonal folks, and it has been intense. Yesterday was ethics, hazardous communications, defensive driving, wilderness, sexual harassment, payroll and housing, and probably some other things I'm forgetting.

Today was a lot more hands on. The topics were fire and water, with a few plants thrown in. We visited the beach and shoreline to familiarize ourselves with some of the plants. Thanks to my mother knowing pretty much everything, I already knew most of what the instructor told us. I already grew up eating fireweed and goose tongue and avoiding pushki on sunny days (or any days, really).

We also watched a video, taken by a tourist, of a halibut charter boat sinking, and noted all the things that they did wrong. They never looked for the hole. They didn't try to bail although they had at least one five gallon bucket. They didn't have any backup/battery powered GPS when the electric system went out. They never said "MAYDAY." They didn't put on extra clothes before abandoning into a zodiac. They didn't try to signal the boats that were nearby, but waited to shoot off a flare until a helicopter was spotted (they were able to contact the Coasties on a cell phone before the boat went under).

The instructor's opinion was that so many people spend so much time watching television, that most automatically put themselves in the spectator role. Someone in this situation spent the whole time videotaping, when they could have picked up a damn bucket and tried to keep the boat from sinking.

Then we went out and spent some time taking action rather than being spectators. We drove out of town to about the end of the road (the paved road goes 7 miles each way from town), and the instructor poured a gallon of gas into a big pan in the middle of a gravel turn out. Then he lit a flare taped to the end of a ten foot pole, and lit the gas, and we took turns putting it out with different types of fire extinguishers. Then we shot off a bunch of flares to see how they worked.

From the flares, I learned that the kind I carried for two summers as a kayak guide in Kachemak Bay are the cheap kind (I knew that) and that once expired they pretty much never work. But a $47 one made in Sweden goes up a thousand feet, makes a big noise, and floats down on a little parachute, and should be visible for forty miles in open country. So if I go kayaking again, now I know that the little orange plastic flares are not the ones I want to take, maybe even if they are new.

Next we went to the pool and experimented with survival suits and with a bunch of different types of life jackets. The instructor, Dug Jensen, lists his business as "Dug Jensen & family" and brought in his wife and son to help. His wife was on the PFD station, and his son was on the side of the pool with a hose to spray cold water in our faces while we tried to do survival things - climb into a floating tent/raft thing, or swim across the pool in a tightly huddled group to conserve heat. A survival suit is a handy thing, but it's not that comfortable in the long run, and trying to get through the water while it's cold and coming into your face really sucked. And I'm sure it would be about fifty times worse when you're out in the open ocean.

Tomorrow afternoon there is another training in the pool, which has been subject of much speculation and we'll see how bad, or not so bad, it actually turns out. It is called P.I.G. training. The acronym, I believe, stands for Personal Immersion Gadget and to my understanding is some sort of PVC cage with a seat in it, designed to simulate what you would be strapped into in a small plane or helicopter. And the training is how to get out of it in the water. Today with the PFDs, we were told that the aviation life vests are designed so you have to manually trigger inflation, because otherwise they can fatally impair your movement if underwater in a plane.

Myself, I am a pretty strong swimmer, and I have already gone through the nervousness of getting out of kayaks underwater. Plus, it's a safety training, so it seems pretty obvious that it will be conducted in the safest way possible. But I can still see why some people are pretty nervous about this one. We'll see how it goes...

2011-05-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

I have officially arrived in Sitka, Alaska, for my next adventure. I'll be working with the Sitka Conservation Society and the USDA Forest Service to tell the story of the connection between the Tongass National Forest and the abundant salmon runs of SE Alaska. Apparently this who will start with two weeks of training on various topics from the Forest Service, from radio operation to ethics to sea shore survival. I've been opted out of rifle certification, and assured that in the field I will always be with someone who is rifle certified. Should be fun!

Since I'm classed as a FS volunteer, I get to stay in the FS bunkhouse, about a mile out of town. The house itself isn't much to speak of -- mostly it gives me strong college dorm flashbacks -- but it's across the street from the beach. When I left this afternoon to walk to town (and get a sense of when I need to leave tomorrow for 8 am training!) at first I was going to count the eagles. I walked out the door and crossed the street and saw maybe half a dozen eagles. A little further, and I could see down to the shoreline and by then I'd seen a dozen or so bald eagles. And after that I figured I wouldn't bother counting. There's just a lot of eagles here, and I say that having grown up in Homer, another Alaskan town known for its eagles.

Now, although I am tempted to stay at the library and compete in what is apparently Sitka's Annual Adult Spelling Bee, I'm going to hoof it back to the bunkhouse. I saw a place on the waterfront with a sign about salmon or rockfish or crab, and I am hungry...

2009-11-19T15:05:00.000-08:00

I am thinking of a new project, which of course I don't have time for, called 'Russian for Bears.'

sand fantasy

2009-07-29T18:37:00.001-07:00

This is one of the coolest animations I've seen in a while!

2009-06-26T13:25:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 20

A record today which came up including a link, in the field that would indicate an online copy of the text, but which actually pointed to a search on ebay. The book is a collection of award winning high school history essays about the terror of the 1930s, and the hardships suffered by previous generations. The ebay link is a search for swakara coat. That's some sort of fur coat. WTF? This is a field which will not be copied into our library system.

**

Нефтянка [Neftianka], by Валерий Ларин [Valerii Larin]. On the cover: Реальность такова: "нефть" и "кровь" - это синонимы [Real'nost' takova: "neft'" i "krov'" - eto sinonimy/This is reality: "oil" and "blood" are synonyms]. I didn't recognize that the title is actually a word -- it looks like a made up word, to me at least, intimating a oil woman. Neft' means oil, or petroleum, and the ending -ianin [-янин] or -ianka [-янка] is often used for nationality nouns. I.E. россиянка [rossiianka] means a woman of Russian nationality. So a нефтянка would be a woman with a ...personal and political connection to oil.

As it turns out, though, нефтянка is also a word for oil machinery, like oil rigs. In any case, I think it is a novel about the corrupt world of oil corporations...

2009-06-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 19

A (Polish) dictionary of literary scenes. Full of images relating to various tales, as well as explanatory text I cannot read. For instance, Bulgakov's Master & Margarita includes paintings of Christ & Pontius Pilate, photo of Bulgakov, painting of a street in 1930s Moscow, photo of a fellow with horns in a production of M&M, and a painting of Christ on the cross. Hamlet includes various paintings of Ophelia, or the man himself looking thoughtfully at poor Yorick. [ISBN: 9788372664204]

**

A double book: one copy in Slovene, one copy in English. It's about star-children, and I think the translator was mistaken about a word. When the little stars wake up in the evening, "they mince their eyes", which sounds, well, painful. I can't identify any part of the Slovene that this is translated from; the English text is about four times longer than the original as well.

**

Lithuanian folktale explains why cats wash their faces after eating: A cat caught a quick-thinking sparrow, who exclaimed "I never met anyone who ate breakfast before washing their face!" Chagrined, the cat began to wash its face, whereupon the sparrow flew away. Even more chagrined, the cat vowed to wash afterwards.

**

Series of what appear to be trashy paperbacks by one Darya Dontsova (www.dontsova.ru). Very busy covers. Here's one called Две невесты на одно место [Dve nevesty na odno mesto/Two brides for one spot] with one of the many things on the cover being a business card for Ivan Podushkin, gentleman сыска [syska] (detective).

**

Also from Poland: THE PWN GREAT ENCYCLOPAEDIA - how appropriate for this to come out of Poland, which has historically been pwned so many times...

What do they actually mean by PWN? It's an acronym, which I can't specifically find spelled out, but I'm guessing it stands for something like Polski Wydawnictwo Naukowe (except with proper Polish grammar, which I have no grasp of), or Polish Publishers of Science. Except the full name of the publishing house seems to be Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, so who knows?

2009-06-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 18

Today's discussion topic among the media librarians: one of them has got a video of a modern dance production done at Stanford, which is choreographed to represent protein synthesis, and how exactly do you put the right subject headings on such an item, to indicate that it is more than modern dance, and more than a normal visual representation of a biology lecture... They put it up on one of the screens, so I got to see part. The film starts with a fellow in a suit and a tie, washed out colors from 1971. He's got his chalkboard all set up with a diagram, and as he points out each player in the process of protein synthesis, they flash to a still of the dancers who will represent it. You don't have to wait for the media librarians to figure out how to label it, it's already on the internet. Overall, it reminds me of the cellular respiration ninjas.

Back in the Slavic domain, I have "Designers of Novosibirsk (they were first)" by Iu. Shepel'. First though they may have been, they were not assigned an ISBN number, and have no copy.

Also had a book cover with Braille imprinted on it, with the title. The book itself is not printed in Braille, so why did they include it on the cover? Did someone think it would make the book stand out design-wise (yes, at least if you pick it up), or is it just mean-spirited? Imagine the blind man, picking up the book. He is intrigued by the title, and flips it open, and... damn.

("I wonder," says one of the media catalogers, "if it should be performance art, instead of modern dance.")

2009-06-05T17:57:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 17

I spent a while this morning searching for genocide in Abkhazia. I didn't find it, which is not to say that it didn't happen, but rather that the book "Genocide in Abkhazia," is nowhere to be found, though the computer records show it was recieved by the library in Sept 2007. This is so long ago, that it must have gone through the quickcat process already, but it would probably have gone to the basement again. There is an acceptable Library of Congress record we could use now, but it is from Oct 2008, so it wouldn't have been there in spring 2008, when this book was probably handled by a previous student worker. But, apparently they cannot locate it in the basement, so it's an all hands call to look everywhere else.

And why? Some patron of the library would like to read it. It seems ironic. So many of the books I process I wonder if they will ever be read (in front of me just now I have The Philosophical Law of P.I. Novgodtsev, in Russian), and here is one that someone wants, that is in English, and we can't find it!

On a more pleasant note--though also of questionable utility--here is the best subject heading ever: Butter trade ǂz Russia (Federation) ǂz Siberia ǂx History ǂy 20th century.

2009-05-29T13:51:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 16

There was just a PA announcement, which is odd, because you don't think of a library as having a PA system. Anyone in the library just heard that a theft had been reported, and all persons should not leave their belongings unattended.

**

I really can't help it; I always look through the art & photo books. Some that I've seen:

Photo book: Russian 1900-1917. The first photograph: looking from the street at a large building, a shop front, for the artistic photographer M.I. Rumiantsev.

Randomly from the middle: 1911 photo of school children outside their new school building in Archangelsk. Not a single one is smiling. Many are actively scowling. One girl has her arms folded, with a particularly severe look. Later, a photo from Malevich's exhibit "Black Square," showing his art on the wall, the various black, quadratic compositions as they were first viewed by the public.

The last photo: A group siitting at a board room table, a single bulb lamp hanging down above and between the heads of Lenin and Trotsky. Lenin leads towards Trotsky with a grin on his face, he is in on a joke which he hasn't told yet; no one else is smiling.

Another photo book, the 1968 invasion of Czeckoslovakia. It is filled with photos where the only thing I can understand is the grafiti scrawled in cyrillic: "Go home." "Moscow 1800 km -->" "We don't need you. We don't see you. We don't hear you." "Russians go home" "Why are you shooting friends we have no friends" "Ivan go home" "Soviet occupation" "Soviet fascists"

**

PA: "May I have your attention please. A theft has been reported in the library."

Media Librarian 1: Yet again.
Media Librarian 2: Stop walking off and leaving your bags!

**

2009-05-01T13:51:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 15

Today starts with a bunch from a Hungarian publishing house, Akademiai Kiado, in Budapest. Some of their books are in English. I think one pair of books is the same - one in Hungarian, the other in English. But they have call numbers somewhat removed from each other, so either they are not exactly the same book, or the language change moves it around.

Another one in Hungarian, which is about ethnic relations in Transylvania, according to the subject headings. All I can think about is vampires, and how preying upon your neighbors wouldn't make for good ethnic relations.

Sárközi seems actually to be a Hungarian name. I know nothing about the French president, but perhaps his ancestry is from further east in Europe.

I don't know what the name of the Hungarian currency is, but it is abbreviated Ft, and it takes a lof of them to buy a book, so the prices printed on the back look oddly like elevations. 2600 Ft. This book printed at 2835 Ft. Written at 4400 Ft. Best read at 2980 Ft.

Also, I messed up today. The first Russian book after the Hungarian ones, and I added Cyrillic to the record I found, and updated it and then realized that I hadn't really looked at it, I hadn't added a barcode in the book or done any of the things to add it to our system, and furthermore, the existing record didn't have call number so I shouldn't have done anything anyway! I can't assign call numbers.

In case you've been wondering, here's an update on the media librarians: A serious discussion to determine whether an item is this four CDs accompanying a book, or a book accompanying four CDs? The question hinges upon whether the book exists only as liner notes for the stuff on cd. Also, different call numbers are assigned for an item from a public museum than for an item from a private museum, so there was some research into whether Oxford (in Britain) is public or private. Turns out the Brits don't quite differentiate the way we do, but Oxford is about 80% funded by the government, so we'll just presume it's equivalent to public.

2009-04-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 14

In no particular order, books that have caught my eye.

**
Мы дзеці таве, Беларусь [My dzetsi tave, Belarusʹ] (We are your children, Belarus): A photo album of kids in Belarus, from infant to teen, doing a lot of extremely stereotypical Slavic things. In traditional dress, harvesting potatoes, singing, dancing, riding bikes, sitting with cats on top of stove, feeding chickens, peeling potatoes, riding sleds being pulled by horses or dogs. Just one page for riding skateboards & roller blades.

Agresja językowa w życiu publicznym : leksykon inwektyw politycznych, 1918-2000 / Irena Kamińska-Szmaj.
Polish: something like "Agressive language in public [something]: lexicon of political invective, 1918-2000"

"Istoricul tracţiunii feroviare din România"
Three colorful volumes (red, yellow & blue) on the history of railroads in in Romania.

A biography of Maxim Gorky. He is a mustachioed fellow; when I lived in Irkutsk there was a statue of him downtown that I thought was Stalin (also mustachioed) for a while.

Big fat book in Russian on the possible authorship of Shakespeare's work. Who's responsible? Everybody wants to know.

A catalogue of the Tibetan manuscripts and block prints in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciencee, by Gergely Orosz.

Миссия России : православие и социализм в ХХI веке / А.Е. Молотков.
Russian: "Mission of Russia: [Orthodox] Christianity and Socialism in the 21st Century" by A.E. Molotkov. I looked at this one and thought, 'honestly? there is enough going on with this to write a fat book?' and then I remembered I probably don't know as much as I think I do.

Co dělat, když Kolja vítězí / Andrej Stankovič
Czech. Beginning of title looks like, 'what to do', no idea about the rest. Book copyright not the author, but Olga Stankoviča (heir). He passed away in 2001, but he's still being published.

Oh yeah, doing this just on Fridays now.

2009-04-17T14:30:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 13

Today: eroticism, warnings from the media librarians and material goods!

If you read Serbian, and are looking fro something steamy, I just had a book of Serbian erotic fiction.....followed closely by Serbian author V. Jerotić!

**

Fiddling things around on my cart o' books, I dropped a few, attracting the attention of the media librarians.
ML1: At least you didn't drop them on your foot.
Me: Just a few, and they didn't have far to go.
ML2: Have you tipped over a cart yet?
Me: Not yet. I've had a few wobble precariously, but not quite.
ML2: It's sort of a rite of passage.
ML1: That one is pretty stable, though.
Me: The wooden ones seem wobbly.
ML1: You try to turn one of them, and things can go haywire in a hurry.
**

Found inside books acquired through donation:
1) Long personal letter. I asked what to do with it, and it was decided to return it to Slavic librarian in case it is something that should be filed separately.
2) Photograph of man & woman drinking. He is looking down at the shot glass in his hand, eyes closed, she is looking directly at the camera, maybe about to tell you something important. When I asked about this, I was advised to put it up on the wall of my little cubicle. I did. Now they watch me (and the other slavic cataloging student) work.
3) Estonian Easter card. I didn't bother asking about this one, I just took it home along with the day's catch of book covers.

2009-04-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 12

More fun with Polish!

Here's an English language book, published in Poland, on local adaptations and interpretations of Shakespeare. Flipping through it briefly, one case is about a Singaporean modern adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, called "Chicken Rice War," wherein the unfortunate lovers are children of rival chicken rice vendors. Since everything is on the internet, here's what the film's website says: "It is in the midst of bitter rivalry, close friends and chicken rice that love begins to blossom." http://www.mediacorpraintree.com/crw/index.htm

**

So much Polish today! Here's a book title I would reuse, in my imaginary rewriting of books based on how I think they translate: Dzień przed końcem świata, by Aleksander Jurewicz. Seems like "The Day Before the End of the World" to me. The cover features a 1940s black and white photo of a mournful little boy on a rocking horse, with a equally serious young man kneeling with an arm around the child. Perhaps it is actually a novel about WWII.

**

A subject heading from a Polish book: "Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust"

That's the thing -- spend any amount of time poking around in Eastern European type things, and things start turning up about Jewish history, and the terrible things that happened to them. Not that I can keep track of all the books I've seen, but I can recall two or three just about the extermination of Lithuanian Jews during WWII. My supervisor, who is from Lithuania, mentioned that the financial crisis is bringing up anti-Semitic feelings there, given the stereotypical view of Jews being in charge of the financial system. Oh, and Bernie Madoff's not helping.

2009-04-08T13:55:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 11

Big excitement in Slavic cataloging! I found a book which is missing its last 14 pages. Goodness gracious! It will go back to the head Slavic librarian who orders everything, presumably it will be sent back as a defective copy, and exchanged for a complete copy. This is serious drama!

Okay, not very serious, especially compared to the trials and tribulations I hear the media ladies discussing (half of which have to do with cataloging, half of which have to do with their teenage children or aging parents). But my supervisor praised my eagle eye, and said I should get paid $20 an hour, which offer was quickly rescinded in the face of budget realities.

Budget realities, in fact, are pretty grim. I've also been told that incremental raises for student workers (every 150 hours you get a few extra cents!) are suspended for a year, and heard plenty of talk about how many people will be cut from library staff. No one has disappeared from the section I can keep track of, but there is lots of worried conversations about how they couldn't possibly give up a specialist -- "no one else can do the things I do" sort of thing.

**

The non-financial sad part of this job: seeing really interesting novels that I shouldn't even bother trying to read because it would take me years to get through 510 pages of modern Russian fiction. I only read short story collections, which are infinitely more manageable, but still get submerged by school work. The best story length is under ten pages, really.

2009-04-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 10

...and we're back after spring break, with some disturbing news about linguistic geography: vowel distribution across Europe is strikingly irregular.

Exhibit one. Bosnian book title. "Mrtva trka"
Exhibit two. Lithuanian book title. "Lotynu-Lietuviu"
Exhibit three. Estonian book title. "Eesti Korporatsioonide Liit"

Not to mention that the Poles are hogging all the Zs.
Exhibit four. Polish book title. "Peregrynacje do źródeł : twórczość pisarzy Lubelszczyzny od połowy XIX wieku po współczesność "

2009-03-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 9

Lots of Ukrainian books today, and an update from the media librarians.

Ukrainian publisher. "A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha-Poeziia" No really, that's the name of the publishing house. They have a website. You can preview some of their books, with some very rich illustrations. Looks like they mostly publish children's literature, though the book I'm holding is poetry. Oh, apparently the poet also has authored at least one kid's book.

**

Most Ukrainian authors seem to be named Oleksa. If not that, then Ivan, or Oleksandra.

**

The cataloging librarian who disapproves of online social networking: "Even if I was twenty, I don't think I'd need to tell the world, 'I'm tired, I think I'll go to sleep now.' Who needs to know?"
Cataloging librarian whose daughter's MySpace page is under discussion: "I think it is for her small circle of friends -- they like to keep tabs on each other."

2009-03-16T11:44:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloging, Pt. 8

Ukrainian book, on cinematography, with a page at the beginning from the sponsor of the printing-- Yakitoria Japanese kitchen. Yakitoria - tvoia territoria! [Yakitoria - your territory!]

**

Heated media catologuing discussion: A video which is three episodes of the 1950s television show Rin-Tin-Tin, spliced together an rereleased as a film, called 'Rin-Tin-Tin, Hero of the West." Is this categorized as television, or film? Is it an adaptation if the television broadcasts were in black and white, but the film is in color? Was it filmed in color or in black and white and colorized later?

As the internet research progresses, we learn that the official Rin-Tin-Tin website lists filmography by dog.

**

Just saw a book of pretty darn amazing Slovak photography. My supervisor tells me that Eastern Europe has good photography in general, but the Czechs are the best. Haven't seen any Czech photo books yet, but I got the cover from Majstori Hrvatske fotografije [Masters of Croatian Photography] which also had some beautiful pieces in it.

Actually, the cover isn't very cool, it just has geometric designs on it, but I'm kind of collecting Slavic text on various book covers, for a project I haven't figured out. Some sort of collage project, I suppose.

2009-03-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloguing, Pt. 7

I've added some editorial comments to one or two of the previous posts to account for the offline commentary of the native speaker in my life, who is kind enough to correct my silly mistakes. It's probably a long-term strategy to keep me from accidentally saying anything really embarrassing to his mother.

Today: fun with Serbia!

Oct 2, 2006 - the 125th anniversary of the establishment of diplimatic relations between the Serbian Principality and the United States of America. Commemorative books were published.

At least, in Serbia.

**

Serbian book on the history of Deligrad. One of the pages in the back, showing pictures of two generals, with captions, has been printed in mirror image. The captions are backwards. Flipping through, no other mirrored pages jump out.

**

Return of the Politics of the Serbian State Series -- two more books came through my hands from this very confusing series. I guess on the ordering end it's probably hard to tell quickly if we already have Book I Part 1 Number 2....

2009-03-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Quick Cataloguing, Pt. 6

Things you may not have known about the layout of slavic books: the table of contents is generally at the back.

**

Book entitled "Bogastvo je v nas" (Slovenian). Nas = us. Bog = God. Bogatstvo = riches (in Russian). Subtitle, "iz dnevnika novodobnega milijonarja" (something like 'from the journal of a modern day millionaire'). Publishing house, "Divine Touch Publishing." Is this a book about God and Us, or Wealth and Us? You decide!

Also, inside it is laid out like a high school text book. Lots of pictures. Maybe it is a get rich quick manual?

**

Book on Mari mythology. Random sentence (my translation) from p. 261: Mari people believe that it's best to talk with the souls of ancestors at the place of their death: the prayer will be heard.

**

Russian book: Oral history in Karelia, vol. 3: Finnish occupation of Karelia (1941-1944).
Karelia (aka Karjala) is ethnically very close to Finland; I don't think the Finns view it so much as an occupation as much as a brief repossession of what ought to have been part of their country, except that Russia has always been bigger, militarily. And the Finns have learned to be diplomatic and neutral.

2009-03-09T11:11:00.000-07:00

Notes from Slavic Cataloging, Pt. 5

The library code for Emory - EMU.
The library code for Cornell, whose records I have been strictly instructed not to use for our database -- COO COO.

**

Latvian children's book, illustrated with photos of driftwood assembled into fanciful creatures. I really ought to bring my camera. Here's an image of the cover. It is called Mazgalvīši spēlē mājās, by Pauls Bankovskis, which is funny for me because my elementary school was named Paul Banks, after a man who had been the janitor, but also wrote children's plays, one of which was enacted by the school each year at Christmas.

**

Media librarians daily discussion topic: Marshmallow peeps.
A package of "tulip-chicks" has appeared on the communal snack table. Someone is quick to check the peeps website and discover that 1) they make "chocolate mousse" flavored creations and 2) the same company is responible for Mike & Ikes, Hot Tamales, etc.
On the website, they proudly list the fact that the number of peeps eaten at Easter could more than encircle the earth. Personally, I think they are mistaken in assuming that they are eaten.

2009-03-06T14:01:00.000-08:00

Notes from Slavic Cataloging, Pt. 4

The books in languages I can almost understand make me want to do some sort of grand project, like Ezra Pound, who translated Chinese poetry without knowing Chinese, but extrapolating from the idea that the ideograms originate from visual representations of something. To pseudo-translate these Eastern European novels into something entirely different and new, only slightly connected to the original work. Start with what the first page might say, to my understanding, and go from there. Or just the title.

Here's a good one in Slovenian. "Sanja in Samostan" I presume Sanja to be a person, and Samostan to be a place. But maybe Slovenian "in" isn't equivalent to English "in." Maybe it is equivalent to "and", "or", or "of." Perhaps Sanja is a place, and Samostan a person. Or both people. Sanja and Samostan.

Сам [sam] means 'self' in Russian, and perhaps in Slovenian as well. Sanja is probably a short-name for Alexander, or Alexandra. Sanja and Samostan. Best friends since childhood. Samostan is a big fellow, strong and trusting. Sanja is the scrawny one who gets them into and out of trouble.

Then again, саня [sanya] also means 'sleigh.' The sleighride to Samostan. But Samostan sounds like a desert place, or a jagged mountain place, that would be hard to get to by sleigh...

Here's another option: самостоятельный [samostoyatel'nyi] means independnt, self-reliant, literally "self-standing." Sanja the Independent. It's a political novel, about a dissident. Or it is satirical, a harshly ironic tale of a the young man who becomes part of The System, despite his belief in original thought. Or the independent sled. Sanja is actually the name of a factory, making sleds, and the tale is told to show how the people involved in sled-making fare with the fall of communism and the rise of independent business. Samostan is an allegorical location where all must be self-dependent, and no long rely upon the state to provide things like pensions for them.

[Ed. --The native speaker in my life informs me that саня [sanya] is rarely, if ever, used in the singular. It's always сани [sani]. But he agrees with "samostan" bringing self-reliance to mind.]

2009-03-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

Notes from Slavic Cataloging, Pt. 3

[I was writing these notes out for a week or two before I got around to posting them, which I only mention because this one is dated.]

In the aftermath of the grammies? Oscars? I'm so out of touch I'm not sure which awards ceremony just happened, but now the media librarians are discussing which films are in the collection so they can add the appropriate tags for the winners. Wait, there's the conversational cue -- the Academy Awards. Did I mention I am out of touch with popular culture? My weekend included Javanese shadow puppetry, a concert in a catholic cathedral, and the fiftieth birthday of my martial arts teacher. Plus schoolwork and kitten time, of course.

**

One Latvian publisher, Dienas Grāmata, has their books marked as printed on paper from mixed sources, as certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

**

I hear my supervisor and the other slavic cataloguer talking. "...and she'll ask, if she has any questions." Next thing I know, I'm looking for copy on a stack of books from the other cataloguer's shelves -- a stack of books mostly in German. And a few in English, like "Love Me Turkmenistan", a brightly colored photobook illustrating the personality cult built around the former Turkmenistan dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, who proclaimed himself Turkmenbashi -- father of the Turkmen -- and, among other things, renamed months after himself and his family members. Of the first eight books, there's only one with copy I think we can use, but it is a large series, and the screen is filled with a palimpsest of isbn numbers for the individual volumes, then a confusing bit of contents field. Pretty sure, though, that the individual title of this volume is "Texte der deutschen Tischgesellschaft". Text of the german something. I know that "bruderschaft" means brotherhood. Tischgesell-hood. I use an online dictionary to check Russian words I don't know, and it says Tischgesellschaft means общество [компания] за обеденным столом, which is to say society (company) at the dinner table. The social interactions during meals. That group of friends you always sit with in the cafeteria.

2009-03-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

Notes from Slavic Cataloging, Pt. 2

this morning starts with polish. actually, it starts in the sub-basement, filling up the cart with new books to check through. We're up to last August, only seven months backlog to work through! Last time I went to the sub-basement there was a crumbling newspaper on a table near the stacks of slavic orders. It was a Seattle publication from 1904 or so, and had a front page story decrying the fact that the price of vegetables increased far more than the cost of transport between eastern Washington and Seattle. How could they possibly charge so much more, when it certainly costs less than a cent, per item, to bring them from Yakima?

**

The first polish book I find copy for has the author's face inside the back cover, right where I need to put the barcode. She has crooked teeth, and is drinking a cup of tea, so I carefully place the barcode over her forehead, just above her eyebrows.

**

From a string of Bulgarian books:
--Book printed in Blagojevgrad -- probably where a certain former governor's forebears came from. Insert your own Bulgarian/gipsy joke here.
--Title: Diplomatic records on the ruination of Bulgarians from Macedonia and the region of Edirne in the times of reforms 1904-08

**

Here's a great name: Ладыженская [Ladyzhenskaya]. For those of you unfamiliar with slavic languages, "zhenskaya" also means lady.
Also, Безносикова [Beznosikov] -- no socks.

[Ed. --The native speaker in my life helpfully reminds me that носки [noski] is socks, but носик [nosik] is a diminutive of нос [nos], or nose. These are the kinds of non-native mistakes that are easy, and silly to make. TNSPIML once commented on someone's sedimentary lifestyle (meaning sedentary), and my mother once explained in Russian that my younger sister was seven o'clock (семь часов) instead of seven years (семь лет). Anyhoo, it's more unfortunate that way - I'd rather be without socks than without a nose.]

**

Russian-Chinese Customs Dictionary -- customs, as in border-crossing customs.

2009-02-27T13:36:00.000-08:00

I'm working at the university library this quarter and next, as a "slavic quick cataloger." New books come to the library, go sit in the basement, and six months later the quick catalogers (there are two student workers in my position) catch up to them. We look the book up by their call number, and if another library has entered its information in worldcat, we copy it to our catalog. But only if it is a library which is trusted to enter it correctly.

So I'm seeing a ton of books from all over Russia and Eastern Europe, and overhearing conversations from other people working in the library's cataloging section. I started keeping notes of the interesting bits, and I keep meaning to carry in my camera to document some of the covers and such, but so far I haven't remembered.

Notes from Slavic Cataloging, Pt. 1

here's a useful book?
Information science and processing vocabulary : Estonian-English-German-Russian
Mostly I was just intrigued to see that this exists.

**

A dissertation published (in English) by the Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy of Sciences, "Cooperative guards in art galleries." It is mathematical models of how many people are needed to be able to see everything in art galleries of various shapes, and also how to have the guards all be able to see each other, in case one is disabled.

**

funny name:
Институт этнографии имени Н.Н. Миклухо-Маклая [Institue of ethnography in the name of N.N. Miklukho-Maklaya]
Миклухо-Маклая!! [Milukho-Maklaya]

**

today's discussion topic among the 40-ish media librarians (as in their age, not that there are 40 of them) - going to "geezer" shows as older people and no longer wanting musicians to take off their shirts.

2nd topic: this book is about green cemeteries.
lib. 1: if you want to be green, why don't you just get cremated?
lib. 2: they bury them without the coffin, and not too deep, so they can contribute to the soil.
lib 1: do they have anything to keep the raccoons from digging them up?
lib. 2: they say they haven't had any problems with it, so far. no bear has been intrepid enough to exhume anyone.
lib 1: but they're still taking up space. once you're dead, you should get off the earth.

**

there is something seriously wrong with mathematical education in Serbia. I've just added to a series called 'documents on foreign politics of the Serbian crown 1903-1914' (at least that's the best I can gather from Serbian) the following books:
vol. 2, part 4, no. 1
vol. 2, part 4, no. 2
vol. 2, supplement 2

"volume 2" is at least ten separate books! Seriously! They are also labeled by both old & new calendar dates*. I'm postulating extreme counting issues in the Balkans.

*if you're not familiar with the old & new calendar concept, it has to do with the followers of Russian Orthodoxy not switching to the Gregorian calendar until early twentieth century.

2009-02-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

The thing I like about Seattlest (my fair city's local blog) is that they quite often have awesome posts about food. Then I can go and make it, and it is tasty. Hooray!

Meyer Lemons
Lemon Curd
Crepes(unfortunately I've missed this year's Crepe Day...)
Edible Book Festival (I'm totally going to this!)
Xiao Long Bao
Pumpkin pancakes for day after Thanksgiving

2009-01-31T23:11:00.000-08:00

Have you seen a wordle yet? They keep popping up lately, so I've been playing with them. Here's what I get when I feed it a bunch of stuff from the last year worth of this blog, various emails, my resume and some of the essays I wrote to get into grad school.

I think "one" is probably something the common word filter should have pulled out, but obviously doesn't.

Basically, my life goes like this... "So, like, this one time, in Seattle? I met this one Russian, and then also I went to school with all these people who like being around water and marine things." That's my current life, in one reduced form...

2009-01-19T14:37:00.001-08:00

Don't worry America -- help is on the way!

2008-12-05T16:19:00.000-08:00

Addendum to wishlist:

6. Gift certificates to yarn.com -- feed my habit :)

7. Avoid material goods altogether. With the economy in official recession, funding for non-profits is down, just when they need the money most to help hold society together and do all the wonderful support things that non-profits tend to do. Here's some non-profits I would be happy to know had received some support:
Planned Parenthood
People for Puget Sound
The Center for Wooden Boats
Seven Star Women's Kung Fu
grist.org
American Field Service
The CAIR Project

2008-12-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

A Christmas List

1. Joann & Monte cd - preferably with 'Alaska, I'm Coming Home' & the mosquito song & the one about the susitna
2. Two tiered bamboo steamer, in the 6-10 inch diameter range
3. Wok with lid (something without crappy non-stick coating that is going to come off in my food after six weeks)
4. Kitchen Aid mixer - dark blue:
5. gaiters for snowshoeing

2008-11-21T18:28:00.000-08:00

I'm quite fascinated by the commentary going on in my home state.

In the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a fellow named Ken wrote a letter to the editor to ask

Now that Obama is going to be the new commander-in-chief, what does this mean for Alaska? Will Obama choose to reduce the military status in Alaska? If he did, what would that mean for Fairbanks? Will he choose to try to block the natural gas pipeline out of revenge to try to hurt Sarah Palin? I believe these are the things Alaskans are going to face in the next four years. What say you Fairbanks?

Responses vary, but focus mainly into

1) You Obamabots sure are gonna be sorry when the military bases are closed down, and they take away our guns and the Russians come!
2) Sarcastic liberal responses. Yes, I hear Pres-elect Hussein is printing out Korans and massing African witch-doctors to destroy Christianity as we speak! Buy all the ammo you can now!
3) Umm, has Obama even been to Alaska? He's probably more worried about the economy than your guns.
4) Arguments over the use, legality, and appropriateness of various guns.
5) You can't trust democrats/republicans/politicians.
6) Arguments about literal readings of the bible versus not so literal interpretations

Read for yourself, here's a smattering.

Alaskan who now feels more cocky about being blue:

With all the pressing issues affecting this country, Ken, I think you can sleep well at night knowing that reducing the military here in Alaska may not be at the top of his "to do" list.

Alaskan who paid attention in high school government class:

The President cannot withdraw soldiers without a two-thirds vote from congress.

Alaskan who probably moved there to get away from the gu'ment:

We had our chance to warn the voting public before the election and it "didn't take" - now we'll just have to wait and see. I hope, as I'm sure you do, that things won't be that bad but we're just going to have to wait and see. You might want to buy a couple of boxes of bullets while you still can but other than that, there's nothing else we can do now...

Alaskan who begs to disagree with the previous:

lol, warned? more like paranoid drivel from frightened little people.

Another Alaskan not impressed by the above:

I keep forgetting how many unhappy, end-of-roaders come to Fairbanks, paranoid to the point I can't help but laugh. It's insane to assume Obama will take "revenge" on Alaska. That says more about YOU, than it does about him.

Alaskan who has more rights to the title than most others:

Obama must support Indian Country in Alaska!

Alaskan who is actually thinking clearly:

Ken, you must be used to politicians who are petty and/or have lots of time on their hands. I seriously doubt that Obama has given much thought at all to Alaska, one way or the other. And why would he need to 'get back' at Mrs. Palin? SNL and the entire country already did that, through laughter. As far as military installations, Alaska is vitally important to our national defense, so why would they be closed? After all, Russian Pres. Medvedev can see Alaska from his house.

Alaskan wondering:

Has Obama ever stepped foot in Alaska? Does he have any clue what's up here, who is up here? I have a hard time believing he hates us, but does he care about us? Will be interesting to see.....

Alaskan commenting on Alaskan politicians:

Well, it's common knowledge that Palin goes out of her way to punish people who have the audacity to vote for her opponent, and Young has stated on camera that he only represents the people who vote for him. I haven't heard anything of the sort about Obama so I doubt it'll happen.

Alaskan taking this question seriously, and distrusting politicians:

I don't think Obama is vindictive, or that he'll come after Sarah. That's her MO, not his. I do fear though, that he'll escalate the war in Afghanistan, and that he won't hold the criminals in the White House accountable for the trillion dollar slaughter of over a million people who weren't a threat to us. It's the crime of the century but they'll get off scott free. He's one of them.

Alaskan making vague inflammatory comments:

According to the press, Al Qaeda knows what Obama is.

Alaskan making vague inflammatory comments II:

koolaide was invented by the liberal media

Alaskan making vague inflammatory comments III:

Osama Bin Ladin has condemned Obama and Biden. Weird.

Alaskan who isn't worried:

I wouldn't worry about Obama he'll let us drill for oil and open are resources he'll just tax the hell out of it like he said about the coal industry and have a lot of government regulations to render it impossible to do any thing in are state. So I wouldn't worry about Obama.

Alaskan who isn't worried II:

no worries the rednecks down south will get'er done before he can get us!!

Idahoan who wants to get his two cents in:

I would like to know how do you bury your guns and money when the ground is frozen?I wish to move to Alaska but I need to know how you dig a hole in frozen ground. Otherwise I will stay in Idaho. Alaska seems more suited to me though.

Alaskan offering advice to the above:

you use a weed burner to thaw the ground first. it's laborious and time consuming, but it works. dunno, think i'd want quicker access to those guns anyhow.

Alaskan who is somewhat sarcastic:

Yes,Ken. Obama will close Alaska completely I'm sure it's been his plan from the get-go. ASo,list your home on Craigslist at a reduced or even free price,turn your guns into the authorities .If you have large flat panel T.V. I would be interested in that, turn your pets loose. Good Luck and get some sleep.

Alaskan who is somewhat sarcastic II:

I also hope Obama cuts the military in Alaska. I may get to practice my Russian.

Alaskan who is somewhat sarcastic III:

In addition to going out to buy up all of the ammo, you guys better start buying up bibles. I heard that after President HUSSEIN (B.O.) is sworn into office, he's going to outlaw the bible and replace it with the Koran in every store in America!!!

Quick, run!!! Cling to those guns and religion!

Alaskan who is somewhat sarcastic IV:

did you no that obama and palin are both robots. Yup heard it on a.m. radio so it must be true...

Alaskan who believes in the office of the president:

I'm a patriot, and while I did not vote for Obama, I believe in supporting the president until he/she(someday) does something to lose my support (lying to a grand jury Clinton), (failing to close US borders Bush). As is stands now, I don't think Obama will be vindictive towards Alaska, but that of course can change.

Alaskan who is pessimistic about the economy:

Remember All the Great-Things that you put on the Community Discussion board about the Son of a Goat Herder, "Obama”, it will give you something to talk about, while you’re standing in the Soup & Bread Line!

Alaskan who is more fond of the caps lock than the president-elect:

where is the CHANGE your canidate PROMISED??? SMART GUYs!?! i can't believe you would vote for OBAMAMAMAMESSIAH. where will you MOVE when he has to SELL ALASKA back to the RUSSIANS because we HAVE to PAY for all the HOMELESS!! i HEAR they need JOBS in the YUKON

Alaskan offering advice to either president or fellow commenters:

It is impossible to please everyone. Most people are lucky if they can please their families, and if you have teenagers in the house, that NEVER happens. So, start with yourself and work your way out, see how far you get, and if you make it to the Presidency, make sure you drop by here once in awhile too defend yourself. Becuase regardless of what you have done or will do, we will be judging, with our crystal gavel. Mr. Obama, goodluck. Check your rose colored glasses at the door, you dont need them where your going.

Alaskan whose username is "prophetone":

Since the fourth of November we have seen in Alaska panic buying of all firearms and ammunition. Further more at Fort Greely there has been close to 100 lay-offs. We don't need Sarah Palin as a US Senator, send Todd or her sister instead if given the opportunity, but delete Mark b. The news media will continue to hammer and down play the great governor of our state. Obama will continue to divide as every Democrat would. The only good Democrat is a Democrat that doesn't vote. All over our nation people either have or are choosing sides. The next four years will be tumultuous and cataclysmic. The line has been drawn, now choose who you will serve.

Alaskan environmentalist:

I can only hope that Obama will reduce the military presence in Alaska. As for ANWR, with a democratic president and a democratic congress, I think you can forget about drilling there. yay!

Alaskan responding to the environmentalist:

I think I'm rather correct in assuming that most people who voted for Obama feel the same way as you. Alaska sinks further into Third Worldism. If you think that selling trinkets to tourists is a great thing, then I encourage you to do more. Personally, I do not share this dream. I dream of exceptionalism for my people.

Alaskan who suggests relying on liberal media rather than right wing talk radio, and doesn't believe in excessive firepower:

No Pat Robertson, SkinHeadUSA, & Sarah Palin are not sources & neither is Rush Limbaugh, he's an entertainer thus he makes money by stirring you up. Let's go for something a little more mainstream. Maybe CNN, WSJ, Washington Post or even NPR. If you just look at the data, how families do under Democratic vs Republican administrations. http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2008...

P.S. He's not going to come and take your guns, nor is hey gonna dismantle the base in Fairbanks. He will however probably take away your AK-47's, M-14's, M-16's, G-3's, AR-10, FAMAS's as well as a number of other assault rifles. How can you possibly justify having an assault rifle? You can't hunt with it, there's no shooting events for 700 shot accuracy.

Alaskan in favor of more firepower:

in truth, AK-47s, M-14s, M-16s, AR-10s, and especially the FN FAL make superb hunting weapons. When I was in Africa, I observed that the majority of large animals, including Cape Buffalo and Elephants are taken with these weapons. Especially set to short burst or full-automatic. Of course, the FA version of these firearms are outlawed already in this country for hunting. So, you have no argument there. Just misinformed fantasy.

BTW, the Ruger Mini-14 semi-auto (.223) is the most popular caribou and wolf hunting rifle in Alaska villages, especially amongst reindeer herders.

Alaskan for sensible use of firepower:

So what's left to eat after you kill a moose with an AK-47? I think if you can't kill an animal is Alaska with something as simple as a 308 then you shouldn't be hunting.

Alaskan (who don't like gu'ment above) on the use of firepower:

The wording in the 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, it has to do with a militia. ...AK-47s, M-14s, M-16s, AR-10s, and... FN FALs are especially what is needed because we the citizens are the first line of defense. ...There was a movie made probably 25 years ago called "Red Dawn" about a hypothetical invasion of the United States by Russian, Cuban, and Nicoraguans (sp?) and how a group of highschool kids in Wyoming or Montana or some such place "out west" escaped to the mountains and fought back in a guerilla campaign. I'm guessing that most Liberals find that story highly illogical but I can also tell you that most conservatives don't - we find it very possible and very frightening (and we therefore want to have weapons close at hand that are suitable for killing invaders should the 'hypothetical' ever enter the realm of 'reality').

Alaskan who might be named Charlie Brown:

Good Grief. Knock it off you crazies from both sides. I don't think Obama is the Anti-Christ, nor is he The Savior. He is, however, a democrat. To me that platform just by it's very nature is not going to be pro-Alaska development. It's not going to be pro-gun. It will be pro-environmentalist, It will be pro-social programs. It is what it is, that's not paranoia and it has nothing to do with Palin. It's fact and frankly I assume it's what the democrats who voted for him want. Of course he will be my president too, so obviously I will pray for the very best for my country during his term, as I do for all of my political leaders.

Alaskan who is a fundamental Christian:

I also do not believe Obama is "The Anti-Christ" but I believe he has the spirit of the Anti-Christ. If anyone really cares, go back to all the speeches he gave about doing away with all nuk's and uniting the world as one. Never did he ever say uniting the world threw Jesus Christ. So this is why people say he is Anti-Christ. Now for all the dem's out their you will say what is wrong with wanting world peace? And I say to you that true peace comes threw Jesus Christ and with out Jesus Christ you will never have world peace.

Alaskan who must be a dirty heathen:

And there you have it folks. This particular Christian will not be satisfied until the entire world has been dominated by his religion... Isn't this what all of the Christians keep "chicken littling" about the Muslims? "They want global domination" "They are trying to take over the world" blah blah blah

...and now we are down to a handful of people arguing over literal readings of the bible versus viewing the old testament as a mythology, and whether Obama, being in the latter camp, is a decent or depraved person.

Finally, one commentator linked to this:

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

2008-11-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

Indeed, why promote hate?

2008-11-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

Some more footage of last night's Obama Mob from youtube. I just saw something that described it as a "love riot." I like that.

Here's the dancing:

And the view from atop the grocery store on one corner:

2008-11-05T11:02:00.000-08:00

After classes yesterday, I trekked back to my former neighborhood to vote, and by the time I made my way home it was nearly six o'clock. I started watching news sites and had just figured out how to get the Daily Show election special to stream live on the computer when it was time to go to my kung fu training. After a bit I decided I would probably get more, long term, out of going to training than watching talking heads, however amusing, so I took off for that. (It was an extremely small class.)

When I got out at 9 pm, we had no idea what had been happening with the election, but were hopeful. I found that I had a text message from a friend, cryptically, hopefully, reading 'yay obama!!' I biked home as quickly as I could. I saw a few scattered fireworks being shot off, and heard people yelling at televisions. As I burst in the door, one of the news websites was playing a video of McCain's concedance.

My boyfriend got home pretty soon after that, and we decided we should go out and lift a glass for the occasion. We walked up to 15th, the closest street with a strip of bars, restaurants and coffee shops. There started to be cars honking and people yelling in the street. We picked a bar which had a sign outside reading "$1 pints after 10 pm if Obama is president." It was a few minutes after 10, so we went in and spent $2. It was pretty packed, and there was a television on the wall which showed a mob of people in the streets downtown near Pike Place Market, where a big club was having an election night party which appeared to have spilled into the street. After about a minute, we decided we probably wanted to be on the street as well, and closer to downtown, so we chugged the beer and headed to Broadway, epicenter of a densely populated neighborhood just uphill from downtown.

There were a lot more honking cars, and when we came to Broadway, there was a throng of people in one intersection, cheering and chanting and dancing. Two buses were pulled over, obviously stopped by the crowd, which was waving Obama posters and generally grinning like maniacs. A car approached from down the street with a guy standing partway out of the sunroof, swirling a large American flag on a pole. They progressed slowly through the crowd, with the driver tagging people's hands as they passed, and people jumping up on the bumper to gain height and shout more. A few more cars made it through, with people climbing up to gyrate on the roof of one SUV. Then there was a flurry of action as one of the buses started up and proceeded forward. A few people acted as traffic directors, parting the crowd before the bus. Although it was allowed forward progress, the people immediately pressed up to the sides of the bus, pressing Obama posters against the windows.

Chants of 'YES WE CAN,' 'O-BA-MA' and 'YES WE DID' repeatedly broke out. There was a guy in a lion costume, no doubt left over from Halloween, who was, as my boyfriend said, 'high as a kite' (on drugs or jubilation, or both?) who was a particularly frenetic dancer.

After a bit we thought we should head towards downtown and see about the street party there. We headed down Broadway and found a larger mob at the intersection of Broadway and Pine. This one was blocked off by police cars with flashing lights. The cops were standing in groups halfway up the block, chatting benignly and watching the crowd, which was similarly waving flags, chanting, and dancing.

We joined the crowd, and never got downtown. We were there for two or three hours, just being joyful. People climbed up on the lightpoles to wave flags and posters. We saw a group of topless women who were yelling 'Titties for Obama!' I saw a big cardboard cutout of Palin being passed around for a while, and then just her head. Also a cutout of Obama. Someone passed out Obama 2008 pins. Eventually we ran into one friend, then another. A friend of a friend was going around with a paddle and smacking people on the ass, saying "We saw a spanking tonight! O-B-A-M-A!" The mob from the first intersection arrived and merged with ours, then I think a bunch of people from the university district turned up there as well.

The first intersection we were at, there was a camera crew from the local news station, and at the larger mob there were a number of press folks circulating around. A woman from the Seattle Times came up and asked if she could photograph the guy who was spanking people. She asked me what my reaction was. I said something along the lines of, 'This is amazing! I feel like when you see things on the news in other countries, when they've overthrown their dictator and everyone is celebrating in the street." Since she didn't take my name or anything, I doubt I'll show up in the news. I think the Seattle Times endorsed McCain. What were they thinking?

There's a club on the corner as well, and for a while they put a speaker on the roof, and someone dancing in a sparkly top (due to it being a gay bar, hard to say if it was a lady or a drag queen dancing), and some invitations to come and live it up in the club. I think everyone was pretty intent on the street party, though, and after a bit the speaker disappeared, and the intersection just got fuller.

The best part about a jubilant mob in Seattle? They clean up after themselves! Around 1 am someone appeared handing out trashbags, and there was a lot of gathering up beer cans and broken bottles, and getting them in the bags and on the curb. That was pretty awesome as well.

A bit after that, we, and the people we had found in the "Obama Mob," as one person was gleefully calling it, extricated ourselves and went to a diner downtown for some greasy food. We didn't get to bed til nearly 3 am, as a result of which I have blatantly skipped my morning classes.

Last night was the first time I've seen spontaneous singing of the national anthem. Or participated in such. I've been scared to be American before (once or twice in Russia or China), I've been saddened and ashamed of things we have done. But right now.... I've been tearing up a little reading news stories this morning. My boyfriend, ex-Soviet cynic that he is, expects disillusionment within six months. But, I think right now we can dare to hope!

And, here's someone's video from the first intersection we were at:

2008-10-28T17:12:00.001-07:00

Looking through my journal from the second summer of guiding, for information to back up a paper I'm writing, I ran across this particularly anecdotal day.

14 July, 2005

No guests at all today, after breakfast. Cleaned the stove and scrubbed and waxed the kitchen floor. A man and his two sons came to buy fishing licenses from Nelda. She introduced me as a local girl who just finished college back east.

"I went to the East Coast once," the man said. "I got arrested."

He told the story:

"I was just a kid and I drove across the country with an older man, our neighbor in California. He was a trucker. We got there and he was beat, so he was sleeping, and I went to go do our laundry; we'd been on the road for a while.

"This little black kid come in, and asked me to buy him a beer. I said, 'I can't buy beer, I'm sixteen.' The kid said, 'yeah, but you look eighteen.' So I went over and I bought him a beer and one for me.'

"We're doing our laundry and drinking our beer. I never drank before, I thought, 'this is pretty good.' I went back and I bought some whiskey, and I woke up in jail."

He shook his head. "I wouldn't go east of the Continental Divide now, that's where people change."

One his sons asked "What state was that in?"

"Buffalo, New York."

I caught another fish and watched an ugly brown cloud of smoke roll across from Homer. The sun turned orange.

This time I brought home most the whole fish, less the tail intestines and the bloodline. Froze the fillets and boiled the backbone and head, picked the meat off, and threw the bones out, added onions and rice for soup.

Looking in the Cooking Alaskan cookbook, it said the Aleuts would mix salmon liver with berries and seal oil. I tried it with blueberries [without seal oil], but I don't think I will again. The liver tasted okay (boiled intil white and mashed) and the blueberries tasted fine, but they weren't a great mix. But you never know unless you try!

2008-10-24T22:23:00.000-07:00

Another Russian cooking Friday!

I made borshch a while back, and today I made golubtsi, which are kind of like Russian burritos. Except, of course, they don't have tortillas in Russia, so none of that wheat stuff. You gotta use something that Russian cooking is full of -- cabbage! That's right, golubtsi are traditionally a rice and meat filling wrapped in a cabbage leaf, with tomato sauce. I didn't take any pictures this time around, but there are some good ones here.

Here's my recipe. They were surprisingly quick and easy.

Core a head of cabbage and boil it in lightly salted salted water for 10-15 minutes. Carefully peel off 8-10 leaves, taking care not to rip them. Set aside.

For the filling: Saute one small onion, diced, with 1-2 seeded and diced tomatoes. In a bowl, mix together 1 cup cooked rice, 2 cups ground meat or veggie equivalent (veggie ground, textured vegetable protein, diced mushrooms, etc), onion and tomato, large spoonful tomato paste from a 6 oz/170 g can, and salt and pepper to taste.

Place a large dollop of filling on the inside of each cabbage leaf and fold together "like an envelope". Stick a toothpick through the folded ends to hold it together. Repeat until filling is used up.

Put assembled golubtsi to fry in a pan with melted butter, turning once. (Use a fork and the toothpick to hold on to them as you flip them.) Meanwhile, put the rest of the tomato paste in a sauce pan mixed with water or broth, and a spoonful of sugar. Add one or two bay leaves and bring to boil, allow to thicken to tomato soup consistency.

Put fried golubtsi in a casserole dish. Remove the toothpicks and pour tomato sauce over them. Place in a 350 F oven for 30-45 minutes. If you have a meat filling, you want to make sure it is cooked through. If a veggie filling, you are just wanting the cabbage leaves to be soft.

Serve with tomato sauce spooned over them, and a dollop of sour cream.

2008-10-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

Someone took my bike today.

I went to class. I went to seminar. I had some lunch. I went to get my bike.

It wasn't there.

Did I put it on a different bike rack? Did I move it between class and seminar?

Where did it go?

Did I do something boneheaded and lock it up to itself, and not actually to the bike rack? No sign of the lock. No sign of the bike.

The campus police gave me this (paraphrased) advice: Ride an uglier bike, or get a more expensive lock.

I don't know the serial number. I have one picture that includes part of the back wheel, behind my photogenic cat.

I have my old bike, but not only is it lacking pedals, but the rim is a tiny bit warped on the front wheel and I'm not comfortable riding it say, down steep hills (the warping makes it jerk when you brake, which is kind of freaky).

Too bad I live on top of a big hill.

Too bad my other bike was stolen.

If they're selling it for parts, I hope they're not worth half what they think. I wish the bike had some sort of odd quirk that would cause serious pain and bodily damage if you weren't aware of it. Like the seat would electrify you when it was wet.

Vittun paskapää. Mene helvettiin ja kuole. Sulla oo kaks persea ja ei oo yks pää.

2008-10-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

On a whim, I'm starting a new project. I'm going to write a haiku every day, just like I try to take a multivitamin every day.

It's a way to be creative, but also contained. I always want to write longer things, and say more, and be pithier, but I'm going to practice being concise. I'm also leaving the door open for possibly illustrating them in various ways, but no promises.

Oh, and I'm going to write some in Russian, just to stretch those brain fibers as well.

2008-10-03T20:34:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, being finished with the week's classes (though, of course, not the week's schoolwork), I rocked out to blues guitar and made borshch. At least, my version of borshch. I have been sort of hoping that my boyfriend's mom, an authentic Russian mother, will come and visit and show me whatever the "family recipe" is. However, she wasn't around and I wanted my soup - it's rainy and soup is definitely in order, so I forged ahead on my own.

First, there was chopping of cabbage.

About half of a cabbage, sliced thinly, and then the resulting shreds cut up a bit, so that over all there were many little pieces. It looks like a lot in the bowl, but it will get cooked a little before it goes into the soup, and will decrease in size.

To the cabbage, I added one shredded carrot. I was going to do more carrot, but once it was shredded it seemed like a lot. Next I diced up half a large onion, and broke up a big handful of green beans. All these went in the bowl, as storage before they went in a big frying pan.

Mmmm... veggies!

Once I had the veggies squared away, I also diced up four medium potatoes - two Yukon gold, and two red. You can see how differently colored they are, inside and out! I'm not sure that my palate is sophisticated to describe the differences in their tastes, though.

Before I started chopping anything, I had three beets cooking in almost boiling water. They take a while to cook, so it is good to get them started early. By the time I had the veggies frying, they were soft enough to stick a fork in, so I moved them to the cutting board to cool off. I saved the water they cooked in to add to the broth.

While the veggies were frying up...

I was peeling beets...

...and grating them...

...and getting very pink.

It washes off pretty well, but you might want to wear gloves. And don't expect it to come easily out of a wooden cutting board. This is a powerful color. If you've never eaten beets before, the color does go all the way through you. My mother is not a lover of beets, so I never ate them as a child. At some point in college I cooked some for myself, and in true collegiate fashion, ate little else for a day or two. Then my pee was pink, and I thought it was blood and I was dying of some horrible disease. But no, it was just from the beets. No worries!

By the time the beets were all shredded, the veggies, were pretty well cooked, so I put them back in the bowl to cohabit with the beets, and put the potatoes in to fry.

I had some trouble with the potatoes, which probably had to do with not using a non-stick frying pan -- they stuck like crazy. Every time I would leave them alone for two minutes, they would affix to the bottom. By the time they were cooked up, there was a layer of potato on the bottom of the pan that I had to leave to soak off later.

Finally, we're ready to actually put everything together as soup! First, we have the water that the beets were in. It is super ruby red, and very pretty. I added the potatoes first, since they maybe needed some cooking still. Then, my secret ingredients!

That's right -- veggie broth. Organic and on sale at the store recently. Some tomato paste because last winter when I made borshch I didn't realize it was supposed to include tomato anything, and my boyfriend explained that I did it all wrong. And some black-eyed peas, because I vaguely recall some beans in the borshch that his mother made, except I think they may have been cannelloni, which I didn't find at the store.

Secret ingredient #4 is the squish inside bits of a squash I baked the other day. I took out most of the seeds and fried them, and I was going to put the stringy bits in the compost, but then I wondered why I've never eaten that part of the squash -- I don't think there's anything wrong with it... so I saved it, and now it's soup. I did cut it up some, because it was originally one big fibrous mass.

So here's everything in the pot!

I let it simmer for a while, mixed everything in pretty well. There was salt in the vegetable broth, and the borshch tasted pretty good as it was, so I didn't add any spices. Just a little salt once I got it in my bowl.

And here's the final product! Red red red Soviet soup! Yum!

This reminds me of something I learned in high school -- a somewhat non- sensical reasoning for why fire engines are red.

1. Fire engines have ladders.

2. A ladder has 12 rungs.

3. There are 12 inches on a ruler.

4. Queen Mary was a ruler.

5. Queen Mary is also a ship.

6. Ships sail on the ocean.

7. Fish live in the ocean.

8. Fish have fins.

9. The Finns fought the Russians.

10. The Russians were Communists.

11. Communists wear red.

Ergo...

2008-10-03T09:07:00.001-07:00

We're still pretty well surrounded by boxes, though they are ebbing, and Pippa Cat has recovered herself. She's happy and perky and loudly wompussing around the new apartment. She knows we get up at seven, so once the alarm goes off, she turns on the noise as well. Unfortunately, kitty cats don't come with snooze buttons. She comes and jumps on the bed and tells us how it is morning, and then she goes and speaks loudly in the bathroom and the kitchen, and ricochets off things in the living room. She can be awfully loud, and while it's good to see her feeling normal again, it's pretty annoying when she gets loquacious. Unfortunately, it seems that the best remedy is to pointedly ignore her when she's being yowly.

2008-09-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

I am moved!

Far from unpacked, but you know, that may take some time. We've got boxes every which way-- half of them full of books-- and no coherent furniture floor plan yet. But I put away most everything in the kitchen, and that's a start.

Pippa Cat, however, is not so pleased with relocation. I think she is becoming more timid as she ages. Although she was curiousing around a bit during the night (as we felt her on the bed/mattress on the floor), as of this morning she is firmly wedged in the corner of the bedroom behind the radiator. I guess it's a safe space, as to get at her would require moving the headboard of the bed, a set of drawers, and a few boxes.

Hopefully she will get used to the place as we work towards making it seem more like a home.

2008-09-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

Among the things I have run across while packing: a McSweeney's style list from when I worked in the call center for Princess Cruises & Tours.

Comments we would like to make to someone who wants to go to Alaska on a ship which spends the summer in the Mediterranean

"I bet you do."

"You may find Alaska a little different this year. You know, global warming, they've done some landscaping."

"Don't be surprised if you find Alaskans don't speak English."

"Eskimos look a lot like Italians. Very fond of scooters."

"Good luck with that."

2008-09-24T17:30:00.001-07:00

Yep, here we are -- it's grad school for sure, and I have the pre-first day of class reading assignments to prove it. And I've also got to get everything in boxes to move this weekend, all of which makes it absolutely necessary to avoid the temptation of newly updated RSS feeds showing 26 new items from The New Yorker.

.....

Fortunately, Pippa Cat is self-packing!