Happy Birthday Steve!

Today I made up a breakfast dish for Steve - breakfast nachos.  Scrambled eggs with sauteed peppers and onions, cheddar cheese, avocado, sour cream, and salsa on top of tortilla chips.  For breakfast.  It was really good!

Steve had to work today (totally a bummer because it's his birthday but also because it's really nice out today), but tonight we're going downtown for dinner. 

I took Seca for a walk in the sun, so beautiful.  The sun was warm enough to make this sign steam!

Feeling nostalgic

Yesterday I grabbed a few boxed of photos from storage to sort through.  Inside were all the photo negatives I've kept over the years, so I started scanning them in to digitize them.  It was so much fun seeing pictures of things I haven't thought of in years and years. 

Here's a fun subset.

On one of our first dates, way back in 1999, at a local state park in Wisconsin.  We look so young!

OMG, Seca as a puppy.  So adorable.

 At Jane's house, first 'family photo' with the new puppy.  

 Steve and I in northern Wisconsin on a camping trip, probably around 2000-2001.

Steve being silly, dipping his toe in the Atlantic on our trip to GA where he proposed.

 Seca, and Seca and I on a backpacking trip in Wyoming in ~2005.

 Finally, Steve and Seca playing in a fort that our nieces Natalie and Margaret built, not sure of the year.

Getting through winter

We're almost at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  It'll be nice to turn the corner and start getting longer days.  Right now, we're down to about 5 hours of wan light.  It's good for staying home and watching movies with popcorn.  And that's exactly what we did last night.  Last weekend I found a cheap movie bin at the grocery store and picked up nine movies...except that some of the boxes had multiple movies in them - like the 10-pack Fantasy movie collection, which I solely bought because it contained the movie The Beastmaster, which was Brian and my favorite movie as kids.  I've probably seen it 50 times or more, but the last time was probably when I was 10 years old.  Yes, it did stand the test of time and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing it last night.  It was rad.

Also in the movie purchase was a 20-pack of crazy old Sci-Fi movies (like 'They', 'Journey to the Center of the Earth', and '100 million BC'), Grease, the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Gremlins, Tropic Thunder, and the first season of the tv show Charlies Angels.  It should take us a while to get through all those!

The 'Fantasy Collection':

The upstairs neighbors are back from vacation, so Cassie and Alfie are back home.  :(  I kinda miss them.  On their last morning with us I had to get up and leave really early with Steve, so the pups all got food very early in the morning (~3 hours earlier than usual).  Cassie doesn't seem like much of a morning dog...it took all she had to drag her front half over to her bowl, then she sat there with her head in her bowl for a good minute or two before slowly eating, then retreating back to the bed (all while never moving her back end, I might add).  It was pretty hilarious. 

Welcome to December!

After the snowfall over the weekend, Monday is bright and clear!  It almost makes up for having to shovel the driveway twice yesterday.  I took this from my office this morning (with my phone!).

Happy Monday!

Winter is here, for now

Last night we had our first company over to the apartment - Karson and Bryce came over for dinner and euchre.  It was fun to have space for entertaining without being crammed into the Irv.

 We are dog-sitting for the two dogs who live upstairs while their owners are on their honeymoon in Hawaii.  They're small and pretty low maintenance, and we bring them down here most of the time, so it's an easy dog-sitting gig.  The bigger one, Cassie, is a basset hound.  She a lover, and will flop down on the floor in front of you (it's not a far flop!) so you can rub her belly.  The smaller one standing on Steve's chest is Alfie, and he's pretty adorable.  I don't know what breed he is, but he must still be pretty young - his favorite thing other than walks is to run around on the carpet upstairs (like a little crazy beastie). Seca is completely ambivalent about having them around. 

We're having our first snowfall and first winter storm of the year.  It started last night, and should end sometime Sunday afternoon.  It's pretty, but also a reminder that I don't really like snowfall at sea level.  I think it's much prettier up in the mountains, where you don't have to shovel it.  We also have a much larger driveway to shovel now. 

I left some birdseed on the back steps, where it's covered and sheltered from the snow.  Happy Thanksgiving, bird friends!

And finally, we had leftover baguette from dinner last night, and also leftover eggnog, so I made cinnamon-eggnog french toast with warm berry sauce for breakfast.  It was nice to come in for warm breakfast after shoveling.  (Have I mentioned how much I don't like shoveling?)  It's supposed to warm up again later in the week, but I don't know if that will mean we'll get above freezing back here at the glacier.  It's always colder back here than the rest of Juneau.

Where has time gone?

Frosty evergreen

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks.  A few days after moving into the new apartment, I left for a school/work trip to Seattle.  As a result, I’m still not used to the apartment, and have twice in the past two days made a turn to go back to the Irv site, instead of the new place.  But, I LOVE (lovelovelovelove) the apartment!

This is what I love about it (sort of in order of what I love most, but sometimes the order varies):

Laundry!  All the glorious laundry that I want to do it always available, never needs quarters, and I can let it sit without fear of it ‘wandering off’.  Who knew something so basic would bring so much joy.

Hot water!  Any time I want, and pretty much as much as I want.  We never left the water heater on in Irv, so gone are the days of ice cold face washing at night.  I can do dishes on a whim!  I can shower in my own space without having to go outside.

Space!  This is a given.  But it sure is nice to not have to step over the dog all the time, or cook with only 1.5 square feet of counter space.   We have seemingly miles of counter space now.

A couch!  We can sit somewhere other than the booths at the table.  Let the slouchy movie watching commence.  (Oh, and we have a TV now!! But no cable or actual TV channels…but we can watch movies!)

A real fridge!  I can have condiments on hand.  Novel, I know.

It’s warm in here!  Deliciously warm.  And no humidity problems either.

A view!  When it’s not too foggy, we have a beautiful view of the glacier surrounded by mountains from our living room.  When it’s foggy, we see lots of trees.  On a clear night, the northern lights are also visible from the living room.  Behind us is a national forest campground and lake, then the glacier.  Great trails for walking Seca!  The picture below is from the campground loop.

So, things are going great.  Irv is parked around the side of the house and we’re still moving a few last things in, then he needs a good cleaning and we’ll put back all of the things we took out (like the couch and the ugly valances).  

This is the apartment, with the back door at my back.  Front entrance is in the upper left of the picture, with the fridge partially blocking it from view here.  You enter into the kitchen, there's a front hall closet  right in front.  To the front-left of the table there's a door to the garage/laundry. Back right of the picture is the bedroom, with the door to the bathroom before the door to the bedroom.

 

This is a picture looking at the living room and back door.  I have a little office nook behind the couch.  The door to the garage/laundry is now on the right.  It's cosy but so nice!  Oh and it came mostly furnished, and I think the previous owner's dog is responsible for the shreds on the couch bottom. :)

Happy Thanksgiving week everyone!  I’m thankful for an apartment this year. 

Mmmmm, sunshine

This might be the best commute for a conference ever:

We are staying about 1 mile from the workshop site, but fortunately, it's a nice stroll along the beach then up a hill to the meeting place. 

The morning was free today, so I went strolling around La Jolla. I didn't go swimming, but I probably should have, since the water is apparently pretty warm.  There were a TON of surfers out too.  I was trying to get some good pictures, but none turned out to my liking. 

The weather is amazing here.  It was ~52 this morning, but maybe 70 for a high.  It feels really dry (compared to Juneau).  I'm not sure I could handle this much sun year-round, but given the crappy summer we had in Juneau, it sure is nice right now.  I wish Steve was here!!!!

I'm not sure how much time I'll have off for the remainder of the week, but if I get a chance I'll get out again.  In the mean time, here's a few other fun pictures. 

Wish you all were here with me!

Halloween fun

We went to a Halloween party with some of my grad school friends.  These were some of my favorite costumes...

In general my friends are a lot more into Halloween than me!

I'm in California!

I'm at a conference this week in La Jolla, CA.  Wow, the sunshine here is amazing!  I've already been out taking pictures and enjoying the beach, but I have to run right now...I'll try to post some stuff tonight!  And I also have fun Halloween pictures!

More to come...

:)

Onions and cars

Two things.  First, last night I made French onion soup, from scratch, in an RV.  The recipe calls for 4 pounds of onions, baked in an oven for a total of 3 hours.  Turns out that is a toxic amount of onion to cook in a small space.  Irv may never be the same.  Nor will my clothes, hair, the dog, or anything else porous at all.  And was it worth it?  Meh.  I think the soup turned out too sweet.  The recipe even cautions against using vidallia or other sweet onions, a recommendation I definitely followed, but even still it was too sweet for my taste.  It did have good flavor, but I can't get past the sweetness.  Bummer.

The other thing…this weekend we went used car shopping.  We’re considering getting another car, but aren’t sure we will.  We went to one of the bigger dealerships and walked around the lot, looking at new and used options.  No salesperson hounded us, which was weird but ok.  When we found a car we were interested in knowing more about we went in search of help, and found it quickly enough.  Clark was personable and possibly the most low-pressure salesperson ever.  We asked about a 2012 Yaris and he said he’d go get the keys.  On the way to the car he asked our names (first names, with a handshake).  Then he handed over the keys and told us to take it for a drive.  That’s it.  No last name needed, no need to hand over a driver’s license or collateral, no need to even prove we even had driver’s licenses, and nope, he didn’t come with us either (he had ‘some work to do’), but he did give us his business card, “Just in case”.  Hahaha!  I guess it’s not that weird considering that we can’t exactly go anywhere with car since we functionally live on an island.  But still, that’s a first for us.

So we took it for a drive, and it was ok.  They are asking more than we’re willing to pay, so we said we’d think about it.  Then he said, “Well, make an offer if you want.  We’ll consider all offers, because we’d rather sell a car than have it sitting on the lot.”  And we shook hands again and left.  That was a surprisingly pleasant interaction with a car dealership. 

Weekend getaway

After a looooong week at an in-town conference (which is somehow worse than a conference out of town), we spent a relaxing weekend at a lovely vacation house in Douglas.  Douglas is really just Juneau, but across the bridge from downtown Juneau, on Douglas Island.  The house is owned by one of Steve's clients, who let us use it for the weekend.  So we got to hang out in a beautiful house high on a hilltop that was dozens of times larger than Irv, with a beautiful view of downtown Juneau, and with a big screen tv perfect for watching movies.  It was fabulous. 

Steve brought the GoPro and tried to take a time lapse of the view of downtown, and it sort of worked.  I'll try to get a copy to post here.  I also brought my camera and took some pictures.  The top picture (above) is the view Saturday evening as the sun was setting.

This is Friday night, as the fog rolled in:

 And finally, later Saturday night, it was crystal clear out (well, if you're on the hill on not in town where there was fog next to the water) and there's a hint of northern lights starting over the mountains!

Exhausting

For the past three months I've been working on part of my project that is really the key to all other parts of my PhD...a spatial stock assessment model.  It's been particularly exhausting in the past three weeks, as I raced to get a working model done for a presentation I have to give next week.  I've spent 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week, working at my computer and trying to get this beast to run.  And finally, last week Thursday, it finally worked.  Wow.  Since then I've been writing code to automate the graphing of my model results and looking at those graphs to try to come to some conclusions .  By no means am I done with this model, or even done enough to give a great presentation next week, but I feel like a rock star in terms of how much I've gotten done.  And today, after painstakingly writing out a detailed, annotated, complete-with-figures, summary of my model results, I got this from my co-authors and mentors:

Mentor 1 - "Oh and good job, it seems to scale surprisingly well and doesn't seem like a bad start at all!" 
Mentor 2 - "Kari, you've made a lot of progress here and the results are promising!"

It is so nice to hear those words!  I feel like I could fly!

But, back to work...those presentations don't write themselves. 

Organizing

Only 38 days until we move!  Steve had a rare day off on Saturday so we spent part of the afternoon getting organized to move and moving most of our 'outdoor' things over to the new place - things like the kayaks, the motorcycle, and the plant pots.  That is all we'll move in advance.  It looks so bare at Irv now.  We also crawled underneath the RV and removed the stabilization jacks, and it's surprising how much support they were giving.  Now when you walk around inside you can really feel it move.  We could drive away today if needed; that's kind of fun to think about.

Now I just hope we don't get snow or ice before we do move! 

Mobilization

 

Last night there was a brief reprieve from the (incessant) rain.  We broke a record this summer, actually; this was the wettest summer on record.  Anyways, it wasn't raining so I used the dry spell to remove the skirting from around Irv.  We want to see if someone else at the park can use it so we won't have to put it in a landfill.  When Steve got home last night the first thing he said when he came in was "You took off his pants!"  Hahahahaha - It does seem like Irv is naked now.

We are moving mid-November, a date is set!  We went over to the new apartment on Sunday so Steve could put in a new garbage disposal for the current tenant, and we talked details of the move with her too.  We have a pretty short window to get out of our current space, so we're going to move some of the outside things like the grill and kayaks, sooner. 

Also last night for dinner:

It's a recipe I made up - coconut curry quinoa and chickpeas with roasted broccoli, sweet potatoes, and kale.  It was really, really (really) good.  And because the coconut milk is so rich, we didn't even notice that it was meatless. 

Seca's first roomba

We didn't know how she would react to a free-roaming vacuum cleaner...turns out she's pretty unfazed by it.  It ran into her a couple of times and she'd just look at it, but not get up or avoid it at all.  If we lived in a place with more floor space and a lot of bare floors, I'd get one of these.  I wonder if they make a version that would squeegee up her drool?

Hi

We are house- and dog-sitting for the next week.  It's nice to spread out a bit, but the move always freaks Seca out.  She gets anxious, like we might leave her here *forever*.  Somehow, the fact that we've not done that yet in the past 14 years doesn't seep into her consciousness.  So, she's like a shadow on me...all day long.  I'm working from the house today so she can get used to it.  The dog who lives here is pretty chill with having a temporary sibling...His favorite place to sleep is a bean bag chair.  This is him wiggling into it:

He'll sleep like that, on his back, sandwiched into the bean bag, for hours.  Or until I try to get a picture of him.  But one of these times I'll sneak up on him and get a better picture.

Today I signed up for a twitter account.  I can't believe I did it.  I think it's kind of silly, but someone suggested it's a good way to keep up on current events with a few organizations I'm interested in, and also a good way to keep tabs on job openings at some of those same organizations.  We'll see, I am skeptical.  I have no intention of creating my own tweets, so don't follow me.

Since it's my birthday next week and we're house sitting, we can actually have more than two people over to celebrate. So we're hosting a small party tomorrow night! 

Beach seining

Tuesday and Wednesday this week I helped a fellow student with her field work. We met at 4:45 am (that's so early!), loaded up a small boat and drove to the sites.  It was cold out, but fortunately not raining either day.

Why are we paddling a boat with 2 perfectly good motors?  We were in 2 feet of water!

Each day we'd put the boat in and motor a short distance to the beach.  Then we'd pull the seine at least 3 times, putting things in separate buckets each time. While 2 people were seining, 2 people would be getting buckets full of water, anchoring the boat in a place where it wouldn't be high and dry if the tide went out too far while we were seining.  The beaches are shallow enough in pitch that it was constant work to keep the boat in the water as the tide rushed out, and sampling had to occur right around low tide. 

Emily's goal for her project was to get 25 each of starry flounder and staghorn sculpin to keep, then measure and count everything else and throw back alive.  But sometimes we couldn't get 25 starry flounder and sculpin in three tows, so we'd have to keep going and going and going, until either we got enough, or the tide started coming back in and made seining dangerous.  Both days were were back at the lab by noon, so not bad!

Emily, too short to reach into the boat with her feet on the ground, so she's balancing!

Day two sampling location.  So pretty!

It's like someone flipped a switch!

It seems like when September 1 rolled around, we flipped immediately to fall.  It's been cold and rainy, typical for fall, the wind has picked up too, which is rare except in fall (or in downtown, where it's windy a lot).  Last night it was 41 for a low!  That's only 9 degrees above freezing.  Too soon!  We forgot to turn the heat on overnight so it was a brisk 51 in Irv this morning.  I can't wait to move into the apartment...counting down the weeks.

Tomorrow and Wednesday I'm helping another student in the field with a beach seining project.  Tomorrow should be sunny and cool, so I'm looking forward to it.  It's supposed to rain again Weds, so that'll be less fun.  I'll try to take a few pictures.

Seca's superpower

Seca has a superpower.  She can reduce grown men into squealing, giggly little girls.  We had a break in the rain yesterday, so I loaded her up and we went to the glacier for a hike.  It was an unexpected madhouse there; 10 buses backed up into the road, hundreds of tourists waiting for said buses and walking the trails.  Several times on the walk to the waterfall, we were stopped (always by 50-60s age men) who upon seeing Seca would actually squeal something along the lines of "Oh my cute little puppy dog, are you enjoying your walk?"  Only, they said it in high pitched, giggly voices, while speaking in baby-talk.  It. Was. Hilarious.  Seca, naturally, ate it up. It's good to know she hasn't lost her touch in her old age.  :)

survey pictures are posted

Survey pictures are posted.  Start HERE, if you want to read from the beginning...

Home!

So we made good time last night, and actually arrived in Juneau at 8 am instead of 1 pm.  That means we had a bit of a scramble to get things ready to offload, but we were done and off the boat by about 9:30 am.  It is good to be home.  This was an unusual trip, and I didn’t have as much fun overall – mostly because of the weird personnel dynamic on the boat.  We didn’t work very well as a team, which is odd and unfortunate.  But, there were some good times too, so it wasn’t all a loss.  

Oh, and check this out.  To get off the boat (with all your gear and duffel bags slung over your back/shoulders) you have to leap the cavern of doom (aka the gap between the ladder and gangplank), then climb about 15 feet up the (slippery, wet) ladder.  *shudder*  I had to make two trips to get all my stuff off.  On the way down to get my second load, the boat shifted away so it was about 4 feet to the gangplank, much farther than I was willing to stretch/jump.  So, I had to hang out on the ladder for several minutes until the boat drifted back…I thought clinging there for a bit was a better option than climbing back up, then back down once it was closer.  Glad I don’t have to do that every day!