I've decided to standardize my blog pseudonym to TwoYaks to be in line with some of my other online handles, as opposed to what it was before. It has the advantage of being even harder to pin to me, since you can count the people who know the reference/joke on... okay, you need a lot of hands to count that high. But it's smaller number than before! ;)
I love/hate the lower 48. Mostly the latter, but you can have some fun there too! I spent a lot of time at a hotel bar trying to pass time before I could get to sleep - evil evil jet lag - and I heard a lot of... "Wisdom." For example, this guy who was throwing back Gin and Tonic all night insisted that North Dakota was colder than Fairbanks, and he ain't gonna be told otter-wise by no al-akan. I shouldn't make fun of how he talks (god knows folks poke fun at me!) but I can make fun of
what he was saying. He was, by the way, well on his way through his 7th gin and tonic when I left, and he clearly had more before I came there. Oh, and he was an airline pilot. :p
Other pieces of brilliance I observed include a car shop that, quote, "Specializes in
forin cars." Forin. You know, the place where they speak forin. And over there in America, they speak American.
A lady who was wearing two sweaters, and some clothing under that, and kept complaining it was too hot. Really? You don't say. I can't figure out why! :)
A couple who exclaimed that climate change must be real, because Fairbanks was so hot. Well, uh, they got it
half right, so I didn't feel inclined to correct them on the half that is oh-so-very-very-wrong.
Other than that, the trip was nice. I've got my yearly reminder why I don't want to live in the lower 48 when I can avoid it, and the wedding went well enough. People would seek me out to talk about Alaska, meaning someone told everyone else that I chased critters for a living. That was great, I suppose, except for the part where I really wanted to talk about someone else's job - he worked with rocket engines for
LUNAR LANDERS!!! and only wanted to talk about caribou and moose. I think I informed him he had the coolest job in the whole building, but he wasn't impressed - I suppose we all get used to the neat bits in our life, huh?
I don't have many pictures from Columbus Ohio, but I do have quite a few from Ann Arbor Michigan, where I stayed a few days. Ann Arbor is a very lovely town, and I'll share some of those soon.
To update on the iPhone, I decided to give it a pass. Jailbreaking is nifty, but only works with other GSM carriers. In Alaska, AT&T is the only GSM carrier (whereas outside, they have others like T-Mobile). I'll end up getting one directly from GCI, since they have masts in lots of the places I end up. And for my eon inside airplanes, I bought a 16 gig iPod touch. I watched movies on there until my eyes bled, and then I watched more. I
love this little gadget! Also, I put photos on it from around Alaska, a sort of `best hits` which came in handy at the wedding for showing very interested attractive people what I do.
It worked, ahem, well. O:)
I love it. I also used it to take notes on some of the more dumb things I saw or heard outside. And when I got stuck sitting around (since there's often a lot of waiting around between things in big weddings) I played iPod airhockey and other neat little games.
Thanks to everyone who gave me feed back on their iphone/ipod experiences!
Finally, a bit about grilled peanut butter - thanks to your blog replies, and a through investigation around the department, my research has concluded that you're most likely to know about it if one of two things is true:
1) You grew up in the bush, rural area, or your parent(s) did.
2) You grew up in the Midwest.
This is a strange distribution, and clearly merits further `research.` People from AK seem more willing to try it if they hadn't had it before, and people from California seem least willing to even consider it (and some think it's the most disgusting combination they've heard).
I'll treat this as another datapoint that California is just plain weird. ;)
Submit your guesses!
So much for fishing. I remembered that I have a prior obligation. I'll be helping out with the Yukon Quest's event on Sunday, which precludes me being out on the river. Oh well! That'll give me some time to work on the boat. I've got much of the sewing done! And if you have time, swing on by the Midnight Sun celebration!
You can probably see the issue right from the get go.
Uh-oh! COORS? And they're reading all the bad things I said about them... If I mysteriously disappear, tell the police to look for my body in the bottom of Molson Coors' brewing vats. I might be wearing concrete shoes!
Home. Landed late last night. I'd make a bigger post, but I'm going to try at least a half-day at work (even though technically I'm still on vacation). This way I can take off half of Friday, and spend it out either actually fishing or climbing some rocks (I'm iffy on the plan because we're winging it).
This handsome critter (and I use the term loosely) is the Northern Collared Lemming (Dicrostonyx groenlandicus). Yucetun, it's just avelngaq (I took forever to spell that one out. Clearly, I'm not as literate as I hoped. :( ), which covers anything small brown and furry. There's another word for it that starts with ug-, and one that I prefer, but I can't spell it out. It's still `mouse/vole type thing.`
Shame these guys are extinct.
I was hoping to have a beer review for tonight, but instead I spent the time tying several thousand small knots. Right know, it feels like I've taken a hammer to my hands for about a half hour of pounding. If you're going to try to tie most of your boat's lashings in one day, take everyone else's advice and wear some leather gloves. It won't make it any easier to tie the knots, but it will help you yank them tight without cutting into your hands. The wax coated line has some bite to it when your hands slip down the length while under tension...
at we see caribou exhibit site fidelity among females for parturition (what normal people call "childbirth" or "calving"). Because they return to at least roughly the same area each cycle, we tend to treat all the animals who use that same space the same way as a management unit.
So, it should be clear that the herds are somewhat demographically independent - that the number of caribou in an area is linked to how well the herd is doing, and not how well the herd nextdoor is doing. This makes herds a very useful concept for management, as we as managers want to manage how many animals there are (abundance). However, although useful for management, the herd concept might not be evolutionarily signifigant - it might not reflect the actual, biological reality of what are important groupings for the animals. This is because caribou occupy different space when they rut and when they calve. Rut is when all the sex is happening, and long term biological processes are chiefly concerend with who has the largest number of successful offspring.
Plants aren't alive? Crap, someone tell the botanists!
If you can count to 6, you've beat the refs at the last game. Apparently counting on two hands is tricky.
He isn't a duck, but the Horned Grebe Podiceps auritus. It's rare to see them fishing on my pond or lake, since they tend to like fish more than insects, and there isn't any fish that I know of.
