Pupsickle

I saw this in the parking lot at the grocery store. I thought you all might get a laugh out of it.
I especially like the bathtub – they really couldn’t have done without the tub. Or the two televisions. One’s just not enough, you know, even with (obviously) limited space. And the stovepipe. Ah, the miracle of bungee cords!

This is a rant – an emotional, unorganized bitch-fest. Consider yourself forewarned. Skip it if you feel so inclined.

I’m that person. You know, the one person in the group that no one really likes, and everyone belittles behind their back? Yeah, that’s me. All the girls in my department (the other grad students) knit together. I used to knit with them. But I quit knitting when I got my puppy Bobby because he rips out my stitches, no matter where I hide my knitting. And honestly? I don’t miss it very much. I find it more rewarding to work on obedience with Bobby than to knit. It’s sure less monotonous.

It (for lack of a better word) sucks to know that I’m the pariah, the person that everybody tolerates and whose company nobody really enjoys. They make a conscious effort to demean me in subtle, snide ways. And that’s small. They give me crap about getting married young (my marriage, by the way is the part of my life I’m most proud of), about the fact that I have a poodle (oh, grow up – he’s smarter than half of them, and at least he’s loyal!), and about the fact that I’ve decided to stay in Fairbanks (smallville central to them, but home to me), and most often about my weight. I’ve slowly grown sick of the negativity. I battle enough with my own demon of depression.

So, at the beginning of this year I decided to quit associating with them socially. Trite as it sounds, I just don’t have room in my life for people who bring me down. Sure, I interact with them on a daily basis at work. But during my free time I try to engage in activities that are edifying and/or fun. And spending time with them while they bitch (be it about me or about someone else) is neither.

Between trying to write my thesis (not making a whole lot of progress on that score), making a concerted effort to spend time with my husband, and trying to fix up the new house I just don’t have much free time. And I’m trying to blog more because lets face it – it’s all about me on my blog. And that’s perfectly okay. I need a place to express myself. I look at my blog as a journal, and I find your comments on my thoughts rewarding. (As a side note, I’ve made an effort to go back and respond to comments from the past week or so. I’d let it slide, sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel ignored. Rather, I have just been spectacularly busy.)

I feel guilty about not including them in my life anymore. Not because I’ve deprived them of my razor sharp wit and my tremendously insightful ideas *giggle*, but rather, I feel like I’ve judged them, and found them wanting. But their nastiness still stings, every single time. How about you? Have you had to cut people out of your life because you realized that they add nothing to your life, but rather take away? If so, how did it make you feel? Have you been able to follow through with it?

Apparently Alaska is the state expected to be hit first and hardest by the bird flu epidemic (H5N1), because (literally) millions of Asian birds migrate across the Bering Strait in the spring to reproduce in Alaska’s arctic. I haven’t given much thought to the impending doom of bird flu, since we don’t raise poultry and don’t have any close ties to migrating birds (except that I like to walk through our local migratory waterfowl refuge every now and again). But maybe I should be worried, after all, the state Public Health office has posted this. My research is on the Seward Peninsula, bird-watcher heaven, and the place where the majority of the birds cross over from Siberia (the Chukotka Peninsula) into Alaska.

See how close it is to where the all those infected birdies are? Should I be worried? I’ll probably be out there at least once this summer to finish up my fieldwork, and now I’m starting to freak out because there will be INFECTED BIRDS everywhere. Or maybe not. Perhaps I’m just letting my predisposition for paranoia get the best of me.

I’ve been nominated by some anonymous blog reader as Miss Blogger ‘06, a Blogger blog published by Dr. Blogstein. An interesting contest, it seems that I’ll be judged totally and completely on my looks. (Oh well, guess I can write off winning!)

You can see the post about me here:
Nominee #8

He seems to think that I’m obsessed with plumbing. I’ve only posted TWICE about plumbing! C’mon, read through the archives, buddy! Well, I guess you could sort of call what I do every day plumbing-related, since I’m researching domestic water use in rural Alaskan communities as a part of my thesis. He went through my Flickr photos and posted a few of them, too, which was an unexpected shock. I guess I sort of thought that only the people who really read my blog (all six or seven of you) and my family actually look at the photos that I put up on Flickr. Guess not!

The weird thing is that I was rather tickled to be nominated. Not about the prospect of winning, but rather that someone out there noticed me. Thanks, whoever you are – you gave me a much needed boost today.

THE MEETING:
My research group had our biannual research meeting, where all the scientists on my project fly in to get together and basically pat each other on the back for what they’ve accomplished. Except that only myself and two other grad students on the project had really done anything at all. Spectacularly boring phrases like biophysical feedbacks and socioeconomic decision making were thrown around with wild abandon. And I’d thought that my presentation would be bad. Ha! It was boring, and out of order (I found myself talking about stuff on a slide that I’d already passed, and got all sorts of flustered…), but in general everyone seemed impressed with my SWAGs. (Seriously wild-assed guesses) Hooray!

This weekend we decided to rake the patches of yard that had thawed. We raked about half of both the front and back lawns yesterday. And today? Today I am so sore that I can barely move. I did not realize how very out of shape that I had gotten over the winter. I can honestly say that I’d forgotten where my hamstrings were. No worries, though, as I know exactly where they are now.

When we got up this morning, our newly raked lawn was covered with about three inches of new snow. It was very pretty, but it melted away by 9 am. Unfortunately, when it melted, it also flooded our (detached) garage. Where we store all our crap. Between what we brought with us and what the previous owners left us, we’ve got the crap angle covered, let me tell you. Except that now it’s wet crap. So we bought a sump pump (ah, the unexpected financial pains of homeownership) and pumped it out. Fun, huh?

I completely slacked off at work last week, and now I have a meeting at 11:30 tomorrow for which I’m supposed to have a PowerPoint presentation prepared (hey, beat that for alliteration!), and I haven’t even started it yet. I think I’m just going to have to give it my best from 8:00 until the meeting starts, and let my boss deal with the results. Last week I practically lived off of Vicodin, so intolerable was my migraine. The pain is gone, but my vision is still slightly flashy, and I’m still seeing auras in the mornings. Now, doesn’t that sound like an exciting thing to wake up to?

Bobby has been a neurotic little mess lately. Usually he’s a happy-go-lucky, go with the flow little guy. But for the past week or so every noise, any movement we make, has scared him. I don’t know whether his fear is because our schedule has been off lately, or because we’ve been doing a bit of work around the house, or what. But he’s driving me CRAZY. He wants to have one paw on me if I’m sitting down, or better still, he wants to lay on me. If I’m in the kitchen, he’s laying on my feet. If I’m in bed, he’s laying on my stomach. If I’m sitting at the computer, he wants to be in my lap. It is so darned strange to have a usually outgoing, friendly dog become a neurotic little fraidy-poodle overnight. We’re trying to act normal and give him treats when he does, too. Any other suggestions? (The photo is of me reading on our couch and him INSISTING on nestling in the crook of my arm – he just snuggled there for two and a half hours) His constant need to touch would be gratifying, but I’m used to him being a self-assured little guy that honestly, it’s just weird.

Six seventh graders in North Pole, a suburb of our town, were arrested after a plot to kill other students and teachers last week was discovered. They had apparently stockpiled weapons, created a ‘hit list’ and planned their escape from both the school and the town. Thank God that another student overheard them and relayed their plans to the authorities. I’m so thankful that they were caught and no one was hurt. I find it incredibly frightening to think that children actually plan out murder. I was as filled with teenage angst as the next person, but murder? It never even crossed my mind. The plot has apparently made national news, but you can read our local paper’s version of events here. Scary, huh?

Well, here I am typing at my computer at 2 am on Friday night/Saturday morning. Not because I chose to be awake, or because I’m doing anything spectacularly fun, but rather because the new allergy medication that I took at 10 pm made me W I R E D instead of putting me to sleep. I trusted that the Benadryl Allergy and Sinus pill would knock me out, as Benadryl usually does. Nope. I’m all jittery, as though I’d just drank a 4 shot espresso, even though I don’t drink coffee anymore. What a feeling.

The willows are covered in catkins up here due to our nice warm weather (getting into the upper 50s during the days), and I’m definitely reacting to their pollen, as usual. Without decongestants, I’d be a wreck. But gee, with them, guess what? I’m still a mess! Ah, spring. Dontcha love allergies?

We have lots of yard work to do this weekend, since we ended up moving into our house just after the first snow, and the people we bought the house from didn’t bother to rake the yard, since they were selling. So now there are 8 month old piles of muck all over the place. Someone has to clean them up, and since we’re the proud new homeowners, I guess we can’t really get out of it, allergy-addled though we are.

I wish I had a nice photo of a pussywillow, but I don’t. Sorry.

When I found this cartoon (where someone had substituted ‘geologist’ for ‘caveman,’) I just knew I had to share it. Calvin and Hobbes was the best. cartoon. ever. And here I am, abusing copyright. Oh well, the cartoon’s just too good not to share.
While not really a great job, geology is a spectacular hobby. Especially when you have a loving husband who’ll pack out all the rocks that you collect while hiking in his pack. And let you store them in the garage. (And the guest bedroom, and on the computer desk… you get the picture) He even pretends to listen when I blather about rocks. What a guy! Do you collect something? Why? Where do you keep it?

As I was looking for a nice picture of Alaska in the summer to share with all of you out there, I realized that the majority of my good photos have people in them, and they’re almost all pointing at rocks of some size or another. Someday, I’ll write a book called Geologist for scale filled with pictures of goofy looking people posing next to rock formations. Like the picture below, from Denali National Park.

Canadian Geese
Originally uploaded by Pupsickle.

The Canadian geese are here, a sure sign that spring has sprung. With temperatures soaring to 48 today, it certainly feels like winter has ended. Our garage flooded, another sure sign that the winter accumulation of snow is melting quickly.

I took this picture of Canadian geese at Creamers Field today over lunch. There were also a pair of tundra swans, but they were too far away to show up in a picture.