We're always touching by underground wires

LA

In a milestone moment of my continued growth from scientist-in-training to the real deal, I successfully survived my first conference ever without Sarah Jones. Hooray! It wasn’t too terrible and anyway, Carol had my back. UCLA is a ridiculously pretty campus. And it took us a while to figure out that their mascot, a Bruin, was really just a bear.

2 days spent wondering “what the heck is a Bruin?” before we saw this statue

The UCLA conference was titled Inner Magnetosphere Coupling and it was pretty excellent. I decided that I love going to conferences where most days I want to attend a majority of the talks. I gave one talk and Carol gave a total of three (!!) - one of her own and two for our advisor. Other highlights of campus included: the creepy “inverted fountain” where I’m pretty sure a Cthulhu creature dwells, the nearby all-vegan Native Foods cafe, and the botanical gardens.
red fuzzy tree!

whatever this is called, i want one

really cool tall bamboo

Skijoring!

Today we got a lovely 6+ inches of snow, so I headed outside to snowshoe a bit. It was very pleasant. On that note, I almost tried cross-country skiing while in Alaska… but we ended up launching the rocket the day before I was going to go out with Kristina, the Dartmouth rocket scientist. So close! I’ve been wanting to try this for some time now. My university has skis for rent, but the snowfall has been depressingly sparse this winter. Plus, for my first time skiing, I’d want to have somebody with me that knows what they are doing.

And this whole train of thought reminded me of this wonderful sport I saw a lot of while in Fairbanks. There was a bird sanctuary behind my hotel, with acres of groomed trails. I ran back there quite a bit and witnessed skijoring for the very first time. Here’s a little sample of what it is:

This dog and this song together!! So cute!
I’m so in love with this idea. If I end up living & working in a place with arctic winters, I’m totally trying this. All you need is a dog (or a few), some skis, a pulling harness for the pup, and a rock climbing harness for yourself. And look at Mendel! He’s having the best time. I also like how any dog can participate, as long as he/she likes to pull and run. Which, come on, is like every dog ever. When these skijorers (is that a word?) really get going, let me tell you, they can really fly. Some I saw must have been going 30 mph.

Last winter I had tried dogsledding while in Norway, which was all kinds of awesome since it was in the pitch black arctic winter, with aurora overhead. But it was also lacking something, because all the human does is stand there on the sledge and direct the dogs. Skijoring is a type of mushing where the person actually does something active. It looks like so much fun! So in the fantasy in my head I’m definitely skijoring around the Alaskan wilderness every weekend.

Return to the land of the living

I have been inching back towards my normal schedule. Sort of. The first few days home have been rough… I sprained my leg while running to catch a flight from a late plane so I had been hobbling around, though it’s about healed up now. I then went on a bout of housecleaning since my room was inexplicably covered in a sizable layer of sand. But today I woke up before noon! I didn’t really get much sleep though. My plan to take Benadryl and read until I got drowsy totally backfired; my book was so good and my head was so thoroughly screwed up that I ended up reading for hours until the early morning. So today I’m sleepless and cranky. Also, it has been raining all day without a drop of snow. I miss Alaska.

But guess what? Pictures! See my Alaska trip photos here, complete with more mediocre aurora, but also a rocket and some dogs, so that’s cool. Somehow I didn’t get any pictures of my fellow grad students at Poker (Phil, Brady, Rob, the Norwegians) but I know Craig Heinselman did — see the Heinselslug’s photos here. He has really amazing aurora shots. Oh! He also caught us playing Settlers instead of working, haha.

Tomorrow night I’m going to what I know will be a really great show: the Low Anthem are playing in Portsmouth. I have listened to them for the past few years and even saw them once before when they opened for Iron & Wine. I’m excited!

the low anthem

Back home from the frozen north

I arrived home from Alaska two days ago. Since I’ve been home my thought process has been something like this: What time is it? Wait, back up, what day is it? Am I awake right now or asleep? When is that last time I ate something?

So traveling from another time zone, where I was pulling night shifts, and spending a whole day on planes with no sleep has messed me up pretty nicely. I wish I was back in Alaska! I had so much fun there, saw some amazing aurora, met great people and just generally enjoyed every second of it. I really love what I do at the heart of it and these trips really ignite that passion all over again… Especially if the mission is successful, like this one was. Hooray for the rocket not crapping out mid-flight like the one last year.

I slept 17 hours straight after finally collapsing in my own bed Tuesday night. Last “night” I didn’t manage to fall asleep until 6am, so tonight it’s a double dose of Benadryl and Sleepytime tea for me.

I have to share a couple of mediocre pictures of aurora here; I know there are a thousand better pictures you may find with a single Flickr search, but this was my very first time at attempting to photograph aurora myself so I have to show it. It’s harder than I thought it would be and I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to experiment with various ISO’s and color balancing. These pictures below are original shots before editing.

Bright green aurora behind the 11-meter dish at TM


Aurora over launch pad

The lights down below on that last one are shining from the launch pad and blockhouse and a couple other buildings. So one of those spots of light is the rocket sitting on the launcher ready to be launched (I think the one all the way on the right). This is the view from up on the hill outside the TM trailer, and this was the spot where I got to see the motors ignite and the rocket take off from the ground. Quite spectacular.

Ah, I could go on and on about Alaska. Maybe some other time I will.

A New Year

        Welcome to a brand new year. For me, it will be a year of big changes. But I honestly can’t remember a year in recent history that wasn’t, so I suppose it should but obvious to me by now: the only thing you can count on is that nothing is constant. I don’t care for resolutions, but my friend Meghan has a “year of _____” habit going on that I can adopt by saying this will be the year of tea for me. Drinking tea, trying new teas, brewing tea and making tea blends. I have been an avid tea-drinker for many years, but realized lately that my tea preferences revolve around only about half a dozen core choices: Sleepytime, Earl Grey, Tazo Awake, Jasmine Green, Lipton Yellow Label and a few fruit herbal teas. There are hundreds of teas and blends out there, so I resolve to expand my tea horizons in 2012. On a side note, this year I’ve taken to drinking warm water with lemon slices in it - no tea, just fresh lemon - and it’s so delicious.

      One thing that will mark this year above all others is that I’m planning to get my PhD degree sometime before September. This is a huge milestone and as you may have guessed, involves an enormous amount of work. So maybe this will be the year that passes as a blur? The Lost Year? I’m dedicated to working as hard as possible while still retaining an active social life (mostly with Matthew & the dogs), time for reading & cooking & other downtime activities, and a healthy appetite to keep my weight steady (or hopefully gain some). This will require a skill that I have little talent for: time management. But I will be trying out a few things: alarms on my laptop to signal different sections of my workday, major use of my Google calendar, and better rewarding of myself. As crazy as it sounds, I may have to start rewarding myself with working time provided I exercise or relax a certain amount. Most people reward themselves with pleasurable activities after completing some work assignment, but the way my brain works I will need to reward myself with staying at work an extra hour if I managed to relax for half an hour with a book the night before… for example.

      As I prepare for a year of stresses, personal & external deadlines, frustrations and so forth, I find myself missing a pair of people dearly. I am referring to my ex-officemates, Sarah Jones and Hyomin. Oh how I wish they were here! Right now, I am the senior person in my lab, which means nobody to run to when I can’t understand LaTex or have a question about thesis formatting or want to whine about how lame my research paper sounds…. They both got their PhD’s at about the same time and I listened to them going through all this together. But I’m all out of luck, like a duck that died. I have no such partner to go with through this last rite of passage. They were like this awesome big brother and sister that I could ask anything of, and they were always there to help and support me. So - wish me luck, send me care packages and cross your fingers that I get through this next bit relatively intact.