Icing on the Cake
It's 11:30pm, and I really should go to bed. I really should already be in bed, for that matter. But I don't want to go. I want to stay up and tell stories and listen to others describe scenes and acts from the great stage play of life, each moment new and alive and vibrantly fresh, totally outside my experience even if just by the differing point of view of the teller. I love to experience the world. Be it through my eyes or those of another, everything is always so new and vibrant. And I love to share my experiences with others just as much as I love to share in other's experiences. I think that's why I love taking pictures so much. Each picture captures a moment of life, a snapshot from the Play that contains my memories. Want to hear stories for hours? Hand me one of my packets of 35mm prints, or have me delve into my digital archives in search of a picture.
I know! I'll copy-paste my Alaska Chronicle of old.... I kept a notepad in my pocket, and when something happened, I jotted it down in my notes. Later, compiled them into these "Alaska Chronicles", two emails sent home to family in friends in Idaho whilst I was living in Fairbanks (winter 2001). Both were written at about 3 in the morning, and took a couple hours in the writing. So apologies for mistakes, typos, and general choppiness (particularly in the case of the second one), I don't think I even proofread....
Heidyho from 'Laskyho!
Well I can't very well say "Heidyho from Idyho" anymore, now can I?
Anyhow, here I are . . . at the Tiawana jaaaaiiiiilll, don't got no mooooneeeey, to go mah bail; so here I'll staaaaayyyy, cuz I can't paaaaayyyyy . . . *beats Kingston Trio out of head with very big stick*.
Anyways . . . Here I are in Alaska, to which I moved not that long ago. It's a balmy summer day outside, high expected to be in the mid 60's. The sky's covered in clouds just like home, and the temperate stays in the 60's from the time the sun comes up at 4:00 AM to the time it goes down at 10:00 PM--I love it! I haven't been able to start any rousing conversations about the weather yet, all I ever get when I ask them what they think's gonna happen is "Cold." I get more of a response when they find out I'm from a desert, though: "Yer gonna freeze yore socks off." In fact, I found out more about the weather from the windows than anything else:
I walk into the room and somebody put a freezer/refrigerator door in the wall. So I'm wondering why in the world somebody would embed a freezer in the concrete walls when I notice this one even comes with a window (I guess so you can watch your food freeze, which I'm told is about the most exciting thing going on all year). So I go over to see what sort of frozen goodies came with my room and see little pin-pricks of light far below me (I'm on the 5th floor of our res. hall). So I concluded the obvious: my roommate, being the weirdo he is, must have decided to freeze his Christmas lights to keep them cold. Well, that makes sense. We're in Alaska after all, they must make special Christmas lights that can withstand the cold. So logically, if they're designed for -60 degree weather, they wouldn't do well in the pleasant 50 degrees of my dorm room. Then I notice the latch on the side, a turning-type lever with three settings: "close" (which was what it was set to), "open", and "clean". So, curious as to what was inside my complementary freezer, I set it to "open". The be-windowed door obliges by slanting forward so that there is a two inch gap at the top, through which 20 degree air was leaking. Well, that makes sense, I thought, in case your room gets too hot, you can just open up the freezer to vent cold air into your room. Very efficient, especially since installing an Air Conditioner would be a waste of money this far north.
So I set my handy-dandy freezer to "clean", curious what that would do. Nothing happened. Okay, that makes sense, I thought, it must be busy cleaning itself. I'll let it alone for a bit to do that. So I went off to unpack my stuff. As I was unpacking, I noticed a breeze against my back and turned around to find the freezer had swung open. Inside, I saw those Christmas lights even brighter, and they were all yellowish-orange. That makes sense, I thought, they must use sodium Christmas lights; those could probably handle the cold better. And the breeze must be coming from the fan inside: have to have a powerful one to keep the air moving fast enough to keep it form freezing. About then I noticed two things: 1. Isn't the purpose of a freezer to allow the air to freeze? and 2. There was a sticker on the side of the freezer door that said "Alaska Window" and had a picture of an Eskimo by his igloo and in the side of his igloo was this same freezer-ish apparatus with and arrow pointing to it that said "window". So, in light of this new-found evidence, I concluded that this must be a window, not a freezer (though exactly what the difference is in Alaska, I'm not really sure; I guess traditional freezers don't go clear down to Absolute Zero).
I got my first sight of Eskimos! I was just coming into my Residence Hall for the first time and there they were, wearing normal people's clothes (though the pile of animal skins beside them under the "Just say no to Star Wars" sign gave them away)! The pair of them were squatting on the floor beneath a sign that proudly announced that "nearly 77% of UAF [University of Alaska Fairbanks] students do not drink to drunkenness", pointing to a scuff mark on the floor, rattling back and fourth at each other in Eskimo, which sounds a lot like Navaho. Ah-hah, I thought; tracking a polar bear.
I met someone else from Idaho! I didn't have anything to do for a while, so off I went, held the elevator button down for 5 minutes waiting for the elevator (you have to hold down the buttons on the 5th floor for them to work), finally got down the clanking elevator to the first floor (one of the few buildings on campus where floor 1 is the ground floor . . . most are numbered from the bottom up, so the ground floor is usually 3 or 4) and sat down on the bench by the elevators, watching people try to figure out why the elevator never came no matter how many times they pushed the "up" button (you have to push the down button to go up on the first floor . . . we have interesting elevators in Moore (my res. hall)), noted how, when no one was waiting for the elevators, they would zoom to random floors and sit there, opening and closing their doors convulsively. Eventually, I got tired of that (I don't have the stamina of native Alaskans), and went down to the Wood Center, the hub of . . . well . . . everything at UAF. So down I walked, past the FBI building (the Gruening Building--where most of our classes are held--is a replica (though somewhat smaller) of the FBI building in Washington DC; it was built in the mid-70's to be riot proof (I didn't really want to know why they felt it was necessary to have a riot-proof building in the center of campus)) to the Wood center.
There I was, standing in front of the Wood Center (which is a lie, it's made out of concrete like the rest of UAF), making construably derogatory comments about the large sign on the door that said "Explosives are not allowed inside the building", when one of the Orientation leaders, a sophomore whose name I forget, said "Hey! You're from Idaho, aren't you? You can always tell someone from Idaho, we've got nothing to be proud of and we're sarcastic!" So we went inside and talked for a while at the top of the stairway to nowhere (the original builders, according to local legend, misread the floor plan and built a three-story stairway in the middle of the two-story Wood Center, whose roof was luckily high enough to have allowed a third story with ease), and I found out he was from Payette. Payette, Idaho.
After that, I went crossed the beds of green-painted dirt (I found out later where was grass seed mixed in with the paint, and they just sprayed it on and hoped to death it would grow before the Freeze--note the capitol "F") to "Lola Tilly Commons", the lunch room. LTC is heaven, I decided after having been in it for fifteen seconds. They charge you for one meal at the door then let you into this incredibly huge room (as big as any buffet I've ever been in) jam-packed with counters of food of all different types (and tons of different kinds of juice, from raspberry lemonade to regular ol' orange). The food is contracted out to Marriott, and it would be even better if it were edible. Ah well, beggars an' college students can't be choosers. It's not ALL bad, though, they filter the water at LTC. On the rest of campus, the water tastes like catfish (or the sand at the bottom of a river, if you prefer).
Classes started today, and I went to my one class on Thursdays (my schedule's kinda weird) only to find out that they weren't even handing out the syllabus until Friday, which took us twenty minutes to figure out because our instructor, named Dima, is from Russia and his accent is so thick I didn't understand a single word he said until we got him to write it on the board. So I learned one thing today: Russia is not my language of choice. that's one of two things I've learned at college (I'm on a roll now!), the other being that even bottled water stored on the other end of the room absorbs the smell of rotting clothes, which kills the taste of purified water, and doesn't help the bottom-of-the-river dorm water at all.
Well, I'd best be off, my roommate (his side of the room looks like a bar, it's covered with beer advertisements of all sizes and shapes, if that tells you anything about him) and I have to talk to Bob, the Res. Director (she's insane, in every sense of the word) and fill out some stupid "Roommate Agreement Form", which, in effect, is an agreement that we wont blow each other up while we're inside the dorm room.
Good luck an' God bless!
-Jarrardi
Guess what? It's me again, your genuine Alaskan transplanted weirdo!
It's fall here at the beautiful UAF campus (*cough cough choke choke* Well, I almost said it with a straight face!), has been for about a week.
I took a multi-mile hike last Friday through all the beautiful green trees (It's the only way to class, but I try to make it sound like I was doing it for fun). The next day, I took another multi-mile hike (this time to the Commons to eat) through all the beautiful yellow trees. It's a strange sensation, falling asleep looking at the lush green vegetation and waking up to the not-so-lush yellow vegetation. It kinda makes you wonder just how long you slept. . . .
It followed, I predicted, that when I woke up the next day all the leaves would be off the trees entirely, but I was wrong. The trees have all kept their leaves so far . . . until today. I went outside today and it looked like a hundred miles of black walnut tree groves in mid-fall (meaning you have to cover your face if you get within 50 miles to keep from inhaling leaves). I'll go out tomorrow and see if they all dropped in the space of a single day.
It took some thinking, but I finally decided that all this happened because of the tree diversity in Fairbanks. There is one evergreen species (Spruce) and two deciduous ones (Birch and Cottonwood). This, as you can imagine, makes Intro to Forest Management a much simpler class.
Oh, and speaking of my Intro to Forest Management class (which will hereby be abbreviated NRM for "Numbing and Really Monotonous" err... I mean "Natural Resource Management"), we had an optional (but highly recommended) field trip in that class last Saturday to go out and "pick potatoes". I got kicked out of the class because I couldn’t stop laughing (luckily, there was only 5 minutes ‘till it was over anyways).
On my way from said NRM to Biology class (on the exact opposite corner of campus) a few days ago, we (I and a couple other people) took the shuttle (because even Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge me couldn’t make that hike in 15 minutes, though I found out a few days later that I actually could . . . you do insane things when you’re desperate to get to class and high on caffeine). Or rather, we tried to take the shuttle (a handy dandy little thing that takes students from one end of the campus to the other, thereby keeping the undergraduate mortality rate down). The shuttle pulled up right in front of us so the driver could open the door and say "Sorry, we’re all full. There’ll be another coming through in fifteen minutes for your convenience." Needless to say, we weren’t too impressed with the shuttle service or his convenience at the moment, so instead decided to walk down to the building ourselves. Right then, about a quarter mile ahead, I see a shuttle pulling out of the Natural Sciences Building (in which no Natural Sciences courses are taught, interestingly enough) and heading off down the road towards our destination. So we go running towards that spot, deciding to wait out that shuttle. I was (un)lucky enough to look back right as we got to the Natural Sciences building and see a shuttle stop at exactly where we were standing before, then turn around and leave the other way down the road (reading around, the slightly longer way to our destination). So we give up and sit at the natural sciences building for 15 minute waiting for the next shuttle, only to find out it wasn’t coming back (maybe on lunch break or something?). So off we go down the road and through the woods (though not to grandmother’s house, unfortunately). Along the way, I see a shuttle coming from our destination and go out into the middle of the road, just standing there and forcing it to stop. While I’ve got it thus distracted, the two people with me force the door and climb on board. The driver on this empty shuttle, for some reason, didn’t show the standard Alaska courtesy, instead just telling us that he wouldn’t pick us up unless we were in one of the convenient shuttle stops (the nearest of which was a mile away) and wait 15 minutes for the next shuttle to come through, then tossing us back out onto the street again. So off we head again, into the woods, coming out at the Wood Center (which, since the recent remodeling, doesn’t even have the fake wood paneling anymore), next to a city bus stop, a University Shuttle stop, the shuttle and bus lunch break area, and about a mile north of where we wanted to be. Right then, pulling out of the Wood Center circle and headed back to the Natural Sciences Building, was the shuttle we’d been waiting for. Needless to say, none of us were too happy with the University shuttle system. After the last-mile hike to class, we got to hear the last two minutes of the lecture. It was a good lecture, too, I’m told. Something about using technology to make life easier. . . .
Last summer for Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge I got to dig big huge pits for soil-analysis professor dudes to look at. I left that job never wanting to see dirt, doctors of dirt, or shovels ever again. I’m now doing an experiment for biology that requires not only the use of shovels and looking at dirt. But we’re using one of those specialized square shovels the Soil Professors used. What’s worse, I have to dig holes and collect dirt samples from said holes. I’m not sure whether to shoot myself, my teacher, or the dirt. I think I’m gonna go for the third option: I at least have some slim chance of hitting that one.
I found out what’s wrong with the water here on campus! It has just-short-of-dangerous levels of arsenic. Because of this, I have so many water bottles and containers stockpiled in the corner of my room (all of which I fill when I get access to decent water) that it looks like I’m stalking up late for Y2K. Waaaayyyyy late.
I went to the library yesterday and learned a few things about Fairbanks. 1: said library is the biggest in the state, and I might even think that was cool if they didn’t have the top two floors taken out completely, and all the books removed to some unspecified, non-checkout-able high security top secret storage area. Construction is supposed to last through this year. In other words, failing students just become a whole lot easier: just assign a research project. 2: said library has 3 security checkpoints to get into or out of the library. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it probably has something to do with the scale-proof building next door and the cop truck (they don’t have cop cars in Alaska, they have cop trucks) that is always on patrol outside. 3: every tree on campus comes with a complimentary dog. Or at least, that’s what it looks like. Try to imagine a park full of evenly spaced trees, and tied to every single last one of them is a Siberian husky/wolf mix that looks exactly like every other dog tied to every other tree in the park. Oh, and every last one of them is female. Don’t ask me, I only live here. 4: Alaska doesn’t have an accent, but the language is still a little different. I imagine it’s the difference between English English and Anglo-American (our) English. Every once in a while something about their grammar will just grate at you. For example: "these data". "We can see from these data that Alaskans cannot speak proper English." That one just plain bugs me. [Jarrardi note: I found out subsequently that it is correct grammar, but it still bugs me. :-3 There were other (valid) examples of Alaskan grammar shift, but I don't remember any of them anymore.] 5: French bread doesn’t look like French bread after 3 weeks on the shelf waiting to be eaten. In fact, I’ve noticed that not many things look like French bread after they’ve been sitting on the shelf for 3 weeks.
I’ve officially stopped using the elevators. It all started a couple nights ago when I had a dream that I was in a hospital that had 3 levels of basement (like a UAF building). For some reason, I was on one of the underground floors, and I was trying to go up one floor to the ground floor. So I pushed "1" and it went to floor 1. But, it kept on going up. It said it was on floor 1, but it was still going up. So when I estimated it to be at level 5, I pushed the level 6 button, hoping to catch it there. Instead, it just starts going up faster until suddenly it lurched to a stop. I could feel it stuck in the shaft (I think the shaft was too narrow), but the machine on top kept on pulling the rubber band thingy. I somehow got the doors open to the elevator and was debating whether I should climb up to floor nine or drop down to floor eight when the rubber band thingy snapped and I went into freefall, headed back to the ground floor (and beyond) much quicker than I would have liked. When I landed on the 3rd basement floor, the shock wave from impact went through my legs and shattered every bone in my body practically. Luckily, I woke up right after that, so the discomfort didn't last long.
However, I noticed for the first time that when you’re going down, the elevator increases speed steadily until you reach freefall. At about that point, you hit floor one and that rubber band thingy bungees you back and fourth until you’re at the floor you wanted. This, combined with the one elevator’s occasionally opening and closing its doors convulsively while it is moving between floors, and the other one’s clanking as it passes between floors, gave me very bad memories of my dream.
Not much is happening up here. My roommate just got dragged away by a whole squad of policemen. Not much at all.
Well, good luck with whatever it is you be doing, and God bless in all things!
-Jarrardi
Love yah all! *big snuggles*
I know! I'll copy-paste my Alaska Chronicle of old.... I kept a notepad in my pocket, and when something happened, I jotted it down in my notes. Later, compiled them into these "Alaska Chronicles", two emails sent home to family in friends in Idaho whilst I was living in Fairbanks (winter 2001). Both were written at about 3 in the morning, and took a couple hours in the writing. So apologies for mistakes, typos, and general choppiness (particularly in the case of the second one), I don't think I even proofread....
Heidyho from 'Laskyho!
Well I can't very well say "Heidyho from Idyho" anymore, now can I?
Anyhow, here I are . . . at the Tiawana jaaaaiiiiilll, don't got no mooooneeeey, to go mah bail; so here I'll staaaaayyyy, cuz I can't paaaaayyyyy . . . *beats Kingston Trio out of head with very big stick*.
Anyways . . . Here I are in Alaska, to which I moved not that long ago. It's a balmy summer day outside, high expected to be in the mid 60's. The sky's covered in clouds just like home, and the temperate stays in the 60's from the time the sun comes up at 4:00 AM to the time it goes down at 10:00 PM--I love it! I haven't been able to start any rousing conversations about the weather yet, all I ever get when I ask them what they think's gonna happen is "Cold." I get more of a response when they find out I'm from a desert, though: "Yer gonna freeze yore socks off." In fact, I found out more about the weather from the windows than anything else:
I walk into the room and somebody put a freezer/refrigerator door in the wall. So I'm wondering why in the world somebody would embed a freezer in the concrete walls when I notice this one even comes with a window (I guess so you can watch your food freeze, which I'm told is about the most exciting thing going on all year). So I go over to see what sort of frozen goodies came with my room and see little pin-pricks of light far below me (I'm on the 5th floor of our res. hall). So I concluded the obvious: my roommate, being the weirdo he is, must have decided to freeze his Christmas lights to keep them cold. Well, that makes sense. We're in Alaska after all, they must make special Christmas lights that can withstand the cold. So logically, if they're designed for -60 degree weather, they wouldn't do well in the pleasant 50 degrees of my dorm room. Then I notice the latch on the side, a turning-type lever with three settings: "close" (which was what it was set to), "open", and "clean". So, curious as to what was inside my complementary freezer, I set it to "open". The be-windowed door obliges by slanting forward so that there is a two inch gap at the top, through which 20 degree air was leaking. Well, that makes sense, I thought, in case your room gets too hot, you can just open up the freezer to vent cold air into your room. Very efficient, especially since installing an Air Conditioner would be a waste of money this far north.
So I set my handy-dandy freezer to "clean", curious what that would do. Nothing happened. Okay, that makes sense, I thought, it must be busy cleaning itself. I'll let it alone for a bit to do that. So I went off to unpack my stuff. As I was unpacking, I noticed a breeze against my back and turned around to find the freezer had swung open. Inside, I saw those Christmas lights even brighter, and they were all yellowish-orange. That makes sense, I thought, they must use sodium Christmas lights; those could probably handle the cold better. And the breeze must be coming from the fan inside: have to have a powerful one to keep the air moving fast enough to keep it form freezing. About then I noticed two things: 1. Isn't the purpose of a freezer to allow the air to freeze? and 2. There was a sticker on the side of the freezer door that said "Alaska Window" and had a picture of an Eskimo by his igloo and in the side of his igloo was this same freezer-ish apparatus with and arrow pointing to it that said "window". So, in light of this new-found evidence, I concluded that this must be a window, not a freezer (though exactly what the difference is in Alaska, I'm not really sure; I guess traditional freezers don't go clear down to Absolute Zero).
I got my first sight of Eskimos! I was just coming into my Residence Hall for the first time and there they were, wearing normal people's clothes (though the pile of animal skins beside them under the "Just say no to Star Wars" sign gave them away)! The pair of them were squatting on the floor beneath a sign that proudly announced that "nearly 77% of UAF [University of Alaska Fairbanks] students do not drink to drunkenness", pointing to a scuff mark on the floor, rattling back and fourth at each other in Eskimo, which sounds a lot like Navaho. Ah-hah, I thought; tracking a polar bear.
I met someone else from Idaho! I didn't have anything to do for a while, so off I went, held the elevator button down for 5 minutes waiting for the elevator (you have to hold down the buttons on the 5th floor for them to work), finally got down the clanking elevator to the first floor (one of the few buildings on campus where floor 1 is the ground floor . . . most are numbered from the bottom up, so the ground floor is usually 3 or 4) and sat down on the bench by the elevators, watching people try to figure out why the elevator never came no matter how many times they pushed the "up" button (you have to push the down button to go up on the first floor . . . we have interesting elevators in Moore (my res. hall)), noted how, when no one was waiting for the elevators, they would zoom to random floors and sit there, opening and closing their doors convulsively. Eventually, I got tired of that (I don't have the stamina of native Alaskans), and went down to the Wood Center, the hub of . . . well . . . everything at UAF. So down I walked, past the FBI building (the Gruening Building--where most of our classes are held--is a replica (though somewhat smaller) of the FBI building in Washington DC; it was built in the mid-70's to be riot proof (I didn't really want to know why they felt it was necessary to have a riot-proof building in the center of campus)) to the Wood center.
There I was, standing in front of the Wood Center (which is a lie, it's made out of concrete like the rest of UAF), making construably derogatory comments about the large sign on the door that said "Explosives are not allowed inside the building", when one of the Orientation leaders, a sophomore whose name I forget, said "Hey! You're from Idaho, aren't you? You can always tell someone from Idaho, we've got nothing to be proud of and we're sarcastic!" So we went inside and talked for a while at the top of the stairway to nowhere (the original builders, according to local legend, misread the floor plan and built a three-story stairway in the middle of the two-story Wood Center, whose roof was luckily high enough to have allowed a third story with ease), and I found out he was from Payette. Payette, Idaho.
After that, I went crossed the beds of green-painted dirt (I found out later where was grass seed mixed in with the paint, and they just sprayed it on and hoped to death it would grow before the Freeze--note the capitol "F") to "Lola Tilly Commons", the lunch room. LTC is heaven, I decided after having been in it for fifteen seconds. They charge you for one meal at the door then let you into this incredibly huge room (as big as any buffet I've ever been in) jam-packed with counters of food of all different types (and tons of different kinds of juice, from raspberry lemonade to regular ol' orange). The food is contracted out to Marriott, and it would be even better if it were edible. Ah well, beggars an' college students can't be choosers. It's not ALL bad, though, they filter the water at LTC. On the rest of campus, the water tastes like catfish (or the sand at the bottom of a river, if you prefer).
Classes started today, and I went to my one class on Thursdays (my schedule's kinda weird) only to find out that they weren't even handing out the syllabus until Friday, which took us twenty minutes to figure out because our instructor, named Dima, is from Russia and his accent is so thick I didn't understand a single word he said until we got him to write it on the board. So I learned one thing today: Russia is not my language of choice. that's one of two things I've learned at college (I'm on a roll now!), the other being that even bottled water stored on the other end of the room absorbs the smell of rotting clothes, which kills the taste of purified water, and doesn't help the bottom-of-the-river dorm water at all.
Well, I'd best be off, my roommate (his side of the room looks like a bar, it's covered with beer advertisements of all sizes and shapes, if that tells you anything about him) and I have to talk to Bob, the Res. Director (she's insane, in every sense of the word) and fill out some stupid "Roommate Agreement Form", which, in effect, is an agreement that we wont blow each other up while we're inside the dorm room.
Good luck an' God bless!
-Jarrardi
Guess what? It's me again, your genuine Alaskan transplanted weirdo!
It's fall here at the beautiful UAF campus (*cough cough choke choke* Well, I almost said it with a straight face!), has been for about a week.
I took a multi-mile hike last Friday through all the beautiful green trees (It's the only way to class, but I try to make it sound like I was doing it for fun). The next day, I took another multi-mile hike (this time to the Commons to eat) through all the beautiful yellow trees. It's a strange sensation, falling asleep looking at the lush green vegetation and waking up to the not-so-lush yellow vegetation. It kinda makes you wonder just how long you slept. . . .
It followed, I predicted, that when I woke up the next day all the leaves would be off the trees entirely, but I was wrong. The trees have all kept their leaves so far . . . until today. I went outside today and it looked like a hundred miles of black walnut tree groves in mid-fall (meaning you have to cover your face if you get within 50 miles to keep from inhaling leaves). I'll go out tomorrow and see if they all dropped in the space of a single day.
It took some thinking, but I finally decided that all this happened because of the tree diversity in Fairbanks. There is one evergreen species (Spruce) and two deciduous ones (Birch and Cottonwood). This, as you can imagine, makes Intro to Forest Management a much simpler class.
Oh, and speaking of my Intro to Forest Management class (which will hereby be abbreviated NRM for "Numbing and Really Monotonous" err... I mean "Natural Resource Management"), we had an optional (but highly recommended) field trip in that class last Saturday to go out and "pick potatoes". I got kicked out of the class because I couldn’t stop laughing (luckily, there was only 5 minutes ‘till it was over anyways).
On my way from said NRM to Biology class (on the exact opposite corner of campus) a few days ago, we (I and a couple other people) took the shuttle (because even Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge me couldn’t make that hike in 15 minutes, though I found out a few days later that I actually could . . . you do insane things when you’re desperate to get to class and high on caffeine). Or rather, we tried to take the shuttle (a handy dandy little thing that takes students from one end of the campus to the other, thereby keeping the undergraduate mortality rate down). The shuttle pulled up right in front of us so the driver could open the door and say "Sorry, we’re all full. There’ll be another coming through in fifteen minutes for your convenience." Needless to say, we weren’t too impressed with the shuttle service or his convenience at the moment, so instead decided to walk down to the building ourselves. Right then, about a quarter mile ahead, I see a shuttle pulling out of the Natural Sciences Building (in which no Natural Sciences courses are taught, interestingly enough) and heading off down the road towards our destination. So we go running towards that spot, deciding to wait out that shuttle. I was (un)lucky enough to look back right as we got to the Natural Sciences building and see a shuttle stop at exactly where we were standing before, then turn around and leave the other way down the road (reading around, the slightly longer way to our destination). So we give up and sit at the natural sciences building for 15 minute waiting for the next shuttle, only to find out it wasn’t coming back (maybe on lunch break or something?). So off we go down the road and through the woods (though not to grandmother’s house, unfortunately). Along the way, I see a shuttle coming from our destination and go out into the middle of the road, just standing there and forcing it to stop. While I’ve got it thus distracted, the two people with me force the door and climb on board. The driver on this empty shuttle, for some reason, didn’t show the standard Alaska courtesy, instead just telling us that he wouldn’t pick us up unless we were in one of the convenient shuttle stops (the nearest of which was a mile away) and wait 15 minutes for the next shuttle to come through, then tossing us back out onto the street again. So off we head again, into the woods, coming out at the Wood Center (which, since the recent remodeling, doesn’t even have the fake wood paneling anymore), next to a city bus stop, a University Shuttle stop, the shuttle and bus lunch break area, and about a mile north of where we wanted to be. Right then, pulling out of the Wood Center circle and headed back to the Natural Sciences Building, was the shuttle we’d been waiting for. Needless to say, none of us were too happy with the University shuttle system. After the last-mile hike to class, we got to hear the last two minutes of the lecture. It was a good lecture, too, I’m told. Something about using technology to make life easier. . . .
Last summer for Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge I got to dig big huge pits for soil-analysis professor dudes to look at. I left that job never wanting to see dirt, doctors of dirt, or shovels ever again. I’m now doing an experiment for biology that requires not only the use of shovels and looking at dirt. But we’re using one of those specialized square shovels the Soil Professors used. What’s worse, I have to dig holes and collect dirt samples from said holes. I’m not sure whether to shoot myself, my teacher, or the dirt. I think I’m gonna go for the third option: I at least have some slim chance of hitting that one.
I found out what’s wrong with the water here on campus! It has just-short-of-dangerous levels of arsenic. Because of this, I have so many water bottles and containers stockpiled in the corner of my room (all of which I fill when I get access to decent water) that it looks like I’m stalking up late for Y2K. Waaaayyyyy late.
I went to the library yesterday and learned a few things about Fairbanks. 1: said library is the biggest in the state, and I might even think that was cool if they didn’t have the top two floors taken out completely, and all the books removed to some unspecified, non-checkout-able high security top secret storage area. Construction is supposed to last through this year. In other words, failing students just become a whole lot easier: just assign a research project. 2: said library has 3 security checkpoints to get into or out of the library. I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it probably has something to do with the scale-proof building next door and the cop truck (they don’t have cop cars in Alaska, they have cop trucks) that is always on patrol outside. 3: every tree on campus comes with a complimentary dog. Or at least, that’s what it looks like. Try to imagine a park full of evenly spaced trees, and tied to every single last one of them is a Siberian husky/wolf mix that looks exactly like every other dog tied to every other tree in the park. Oh, and every last one of them is female. Don’t ask me, I only live here. 4: Alaska doesn’t have an accent, but the language is still a little different. I imagine it’s the difference between English English and Anglo-American (our) English. Every once in a while something about their grammar will just grate at you. For example: "these data". "We can see from these data that Alaskans cannot speak proper English." That one just plain bugs me. [Jarrardi note: I found out subsequently that it is correct grammar, but it still bugs me. :-3 There were other (valid) examples of Alaskan grammar shift, but I don't remember any of them anymore.] 5: French bread doesn’t look like French bread after 3 weeks on the shelf waiting to be eaten. In fact, I’ve noticed that not many things look like French bread after they’ve been sitting on the shelf for 3 weeks.
I’ve officially stopped using the elevators. It all started a couple nights ago when I had a dream that I was in a hospital that had 3 levels of basement (like a UAF building). For some reason, I was on one of the underground floors, and I was trying to go up one floor to the ground floor. So I pushed "1" and it went to floor 1. But, it kept on going up. It said it was on floor 1, but it was still going up. So when I estimated it to be at level 5, I pushed the level 6 button, hoping to catch it there. Instead, it just starts going up faster until suddenly it lurched to a stop. I could feel it stuck in the shaft (I think the shaft was too narrow), but the machine on top kept on pulling the rubber band thingy. I somehow got the doors open to the elevator and was debating whether I should climb up to floor nine or drop down to floor eight when the rubber band thingy snapped and I went into freefall, headed back to the ground floor (and beyond) much quicker than I would have liked. When I landed on the 3rd basement floor, the shock wave from impact went through my legs and shattered every bone in my body practically. Luckily, I woke up right after that, so the discomfort didn't last long.
However, I noticed for the first time that when you’re going down, the elevator increases speed steadily until you reach freefall. At about that point, you hit floor one and that rubber band thingy bungees you back and fourth until you’re at the floor you wanted. This, combined with the one elevator’s occasionally opening and closing its doors convulsively while it is moving between floors, and the other one’s clanking as it passes between floors, gave me very bad memories of my dream.
Not much is happening up here. My roommate just got dragged away by a whole squad of policemen. Not much at all.
Well, good luck with whatever it is you be doing, and God bless in all things!
-Jarrardi
Love yah all! *big snuggles*