Mom Day

So.   

 

   Nearly a year...   I suppose it is to be expected.  I dropped the ball, but here I write.  I do not want this to evolve into a blog about what has happened over this past year or what has evolved From this past year... BUT...  a Lot has happened and right now I'm nearing a day dedicated to moms - a holiday driven by Hallmark, and I must admit, not fully understood by me until most recently.  This past year was busy, and through it all I have been loved and supported by a woman I call Mom.  

   And so on the cusp of this year's circumnavigation, I pause and I breathe, and I send a very very large hug out to her.  Happy Mother's Day to a woman I respect and love and who has gone above and beyond to encourage me not only through this very busy of years, but for every year and for every day of my life.  I can always count on Mom to tell it to me straight and to love me and be there for me.  I don't have to worry about a messy house.  She fills my fridge when it is empty.  She makes me pies when skies are blue.  She is support personified.

   I cannot express how much I love and appreciate my Mom.  She is an inspiration.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom....  Love you.     

Back on Solid Ground

it takes restraint to not forage constantly with ripe and ready blueberries at my feet

I lounge now in our cool (amazing 68 F this morning) Pville house all calm and relaxed and thinking about baking zucchini bread.  It is a good morning for it after all the heat.  Sinking into the patterns of summer, I realize that I haven’t written anything for this blog in months.  I mean, geeze….  Months!   And so much has happened.  I suppose field-work is mostly to blame, but in general, I just find myself distracted.  Garden, kitchen, science, family, friends, house.  Where do people find the time?  And I don’t even have kids…. Yet…..

Syncrude processing plant with sulfur mounds

I just returned from Alberta where the days are long and warm and the bugs are blood-thirsty and vicious.  I have remnants of black fly evidence all over my what was once a head-net-covered maligned melon. The little bastards found ways to sneak past my defenses while I distractedly did my job collecting plants from the bogs which flank the center of the oil sands activity north of Fort McMurray.  This is what we lovingly call our field work.

Kel, Cara, Brian, and Nate getting ready

It was a great trip.  I mean, really….  One of the best.  How many people get to spend two days  helicopter hopscotching from bog to bog hoping to hop out into sloggy wet?  Me thinks not many.  But we were able to get our entire crew of 14 up at one point or another and it was an experience not soon to be forgotten by any of us. 

me. copilot.

As co-pilot all weekend, I got to hang in the front of the chopper enjoying great views, but also embracing the occasionally heavy responsibility of actually finding the bogs and directing us to them, and this is not necessarily as easy as it may sound.  We naively thought we were totally prepared with gps’ed sites gleaned from satellite images, but as we flew, it was clear that the bogs were not going to make it that easy for us.  You see… I won’t go into the details of it all, but suffice it to say, bogs and rich fens look remarkably alike on satellite images, and man, I can assure you: there are a lot of rich fens up in Alberta.   

momma with twins

Ultimately, we accomplished our goals, and I am happy to say that in the process, our helicopter befuddled and bewildered 5 moose from our sky vantage.  We saw beautifully big rich fens that stretched to the horizon, patterned poor fens ridged and ringed with vibrant colors, uplands and bogs and a myriad of greens.  Alternately, we also saw the massive destruction of the processing centers, tailings ponds, slag piles, massive mounds of bright yellow sulfur with their negative pH’s and spontaneous flare-ups, demolished landscapes, open flames, cutlines and pads, oozing pipes, oily slicks, great smelly clouds of pollution.  Such contrast of breathtaking beauty surrounding and yielding to bitter destruction made for a very sensory and complicated experience.

theorhetically, there should be no oil in this mess....  but there is....

I hope to again, one day, rise into the sky to absorb the natural beauty spared from the cumulative efforts we are currently waging, seemingly hell-bent to destroy these intricate and fragile ecosystems.   The Boreal forest is a beautiful thing. 

patterned poor fen with a tiny little bit of bog maybe....beautiful views

Frazzled April into Glimmering May

Well….     2 months without a blip, a blurb, so much as a noun.  Not that I’m in high demand, but my psyche misses it.  My immediate circumstances leave me with good intentions of talking about the rhubarb I have marinating in grapefruit juice/rinds and sugar for jam, or the pies, or our lovely garden that is sprouting green beans and raspberries and lettuce, but alas….I’m knee deep – or neck-deep, bogged down and mired is more like it – in prep for field work:  it is taking over my brain.  It is almost as if there is no end in sight, though I know that is not true.  A new project is in the works and it is a monster. NSF has kindly given us 1.2-ish million dollars to discover some things over the next few years, and we are feverishly prepping to lay the ground-work for it.  We’ve said we’d do quite a bit.  More than what most of us argued we could do, from the get-go, but it turns out writing mentality and implementing mentality are two very different things.  Arguing about minutia and dribs and drabs when no one wants, or has time, to focus on such slop is not how I would have liked to move forward.  Thankfully, I hope and think we are past that and onto making it all happen.  The truck leaves in 11 days.  Even if we wanted to, we have no more time.

Long term, we are at a point where I am not worried.  The sites will be set up.  The research will be accomplished with our normal grace and skill, and it will be good.    

If you’ve never set up a million dollar research project in the middle of nowhere, I assure you, expenditures are front-end heavy.  We are currently $4 million deep in projects up there, so this is nothing new, but we are ramping.  We have a lot going on.  I just received a quote for 700 rough-hewn 2x6x10’s that need to be delivered to gps coordinate-identified spots and then we will tromp the lumber into wetlands, cut it with chain saws, and nail it together into plots which are spread across central/northern Alberta (a feat that will be mostly accomplished by variously-skilled and patiently-taught (hopefully) graduate and undergraduate students… ).  I have bought $7000 in weather stations….  Thousands of dollars in electrical bear fence supplies….  You don’t want to know how much pvc of all sizes…  over 3000 crank wires… 200 plastic buckets…  temperature buttons, temperature probes, hand-held thermometers…  DI water…. Gas standards…  bags, bottles, books…. oh my.  The list is growing and this isn’t even the half of it.   

So, a big sigh.  I’m just now seeing a glimmer before the next real-life-make-it-happen-obstacle slams me in the head.  Wish us all luck.  If you care to follow our adventures this summer, I have set up a blog for the research group to share their thoughts (http://55parallel.blogspot.com/).  We shall see how it goes, and hopefully the group will be posting some fun things over the field season for what is probably Meanook’s last hoorah (sad, so sad).  I’ll try to keep up, as well.  You’ll find me in Alberta soon.   For now, the garden really does grow, and the Peony in my backyard just started blooming today.  The bats are back, and spring is manifest in many many ways.  I will strive for non-work before the work takes over in a few weeks again, in earnest. 

Chillin' with the Mayans

A clipped healed-over iguana tail stuck out of the wall from between the 2000-year-old carved Mayan stones of an ancient ruin.  He seemed content to chill there in the shade and let us watch him and contemplate his fate.  He lives now where a great civilization once thrived.  Today, along with the lizards, this is a place teeming with awed tourists and hustlers probing for pesos.  Chichen Itza, with its massive storied pyramid and carved stone structures is a city-reminder of how an advanced culture can suddenly and inexplicably disappear.  We are left to decipher their lives from what we uncover in the forests, from ancient stories written in pictorial relief on the walls, from geometry and architecture and art.  Their skills in astronomy were unprecedented, and if we are to believe the science in their structures, their math skills were outstanding.  They enjoyed lives rich with symbolic metaphor.   I struggled to grasp our transient nature and to get a grip on a tiny piece of the big picture.  This was vacation.

The ancient city of Chichen Itza was a highlight of our vitamin D-rich escape.  Other highlights included anchoring my feet in the fine white sands where drips of sunlight freckled my skin; staring out at the rolling turquoise ocean from beneath a rustling palm frond; eating fresh pineapple and kiwis as large as my fist; cooling off in the pool where drinks at the swim-up bar were made to order; imagining myself as the frigatebird or pelican flying weightless in the on-shore breeze overhead.  The grey dreariness of PA was burned out of our brains by day two, and the white sands and blue blue waters calmed the frenzied brainwaves.  We had disconnected.  No internet.  No news.  No life except the one in the sun. 

And so….   Note to self:   a late winter vacation to warm sunny climes should happen every year.     I’m back now, and while my productivity is still surprisingly high, I can feel the world encroaching again on my good vibes.  I cling yet to the still-tactile sense of well-being.  Tempus fugit, but I am reminded that there really are ways to recharge and stop time for just a moment.   I am reminded to define my life instead of waiting for it to define me.  I am reminded that there is a big picture to appreciate and I don’t do nearly enough of that.  I am reminded of the vastness of this tiny pale blue dot and that unless I turn around in, and every once in a while leave my crack in the wall, I’ll miss quite a lot.