Return of the blogger

Dear readers,
This post title is not creative but the picture is. In fact, I hope it inspires at least a little humor. The reason I selected this picture is because I felt I needed a rather neutral ice breaker to get things going again. Although I have not written one single post in the past five months, it was most certainly not due to having a submerged groin. I began college. I made a phone call to enquire about enrolling inn spring quarter three days prior to winter quarter's start up day. The kind receptionist asked, "are you available to begin this winter"? Of course I said yes. That following Monday morning i was tested and administered to and after registering for my classes was able to make it to my first class just one minute before it began. I dint really have the time to consider what i was doing, only why. Being human, we feel a need to define every thing we do with perimeters. Bees do not. Bees build waxen hexagonal honey comes because they must, not because they or any other busy body thinks they should. So it has begun with my schooling, omitting hexagonal wax. And so I am evolving along with my course work. I am now focusing on completing the voluminous amount of math classes required before I can declare an associated degree major. This is fine with me. I love math and am aiming for a transfer degree to Western Washington University, (our local four year University located, naturally, on top of the biggest hill in down town Bellingham, WA) in science. But which science? Physics. Yes, physics. Why? Because we do things which are governed by laws of nature; bees make hexagonal combs, light travels in waves, gravity allows things to exist without floating away. I think that I want to teach. I know that I I want to learn and I want to grow our own food, even oats and rye and millet. Id like to be able to watch all of the seasons change from one location on the planet. Id like to be able to keep laying hens and maybe even someday get a goat. Steve and I love the thrilling adventure the Polar programs afford us and we love working to support scientific research, but we are privy to the fact that in ten more years time, we will have been doing seasonal contract work for 30 years , and will want to enjoy the work we are putting into our one acre estate; the fruit and nut trees, the berries, the (soon to start up honey bees), the flower gardens and most of all; our wonderful community of bee keeping, food growing, friends. Therefore, a new career objective instills. Lets face it, fixing log trucks or city buses for a living when I'm in my 50s and 60s does not have much of an appeal. Teaching college level mathematics or science does! And when I'm relay old and want not to work very much outside the estate, I can subsitute at the local High School in Deming, only a bike ride away.
I am about to finish my first quarter with a 4.0. I don't even yet know yet, exactly what that means, other than its what universities like to see when one applies and hopes for a scholarship. Spring break begins next Wednesday and I have a long list of gardening and grounds keeping projects tojoyfully attend to, not to mention repairing an inherited 1967 Mercedes Benz sedan which Steve's uncle Russel gave us. I hope to have it running well enough that I can pick Steve up at the airport in it accompanied by Uncle Russel who will be 92.
Speaking of Stephen, he has gone off to Greenland for the spring and summer. He just arrived in Kangerlussuaq via Denmark yesterday and will be waiting there at the KISS building (where we lived and worked all of last spring-summer season) until the weather improves enough up on the ice cap for the small twin prop to fly in. He is filling in for a person who was medically evacuated less than 2 weeks ago This was not in the cards, so to speak, but since it allows for Steve to return home earlier than originally planed (July 17th as compared to Aug 20th) we both decided he should go for it! He has just written me telling me that he has gone out for the day as a volunteer with some biologists to collect reindeer urine. The biologists will measure these samples to see exactly what state the caribou's diet is in. I will try my best to keep a Steve update running within the body of this blog. I will try my best to keep this blog running, but it might be difficult at times as course loads oscillate.
I hope everyone out there is doing what they find to be fun and enjoying life.
If you have a set up which enbales you to watch movies, and have an ecclectic movie rental rescource such as a library, or netflix (sp?) look for MINDWALK. In this film, a physicist gives her, Systems Theory dissertation in a most unassuming way; as three strangers walk about Mont ST Michelle discussing life.
One worker (female) bee flys over 20,000 miles in her lifetime of just six weeks.

All Saints Day

Last night we celebrated All Hallowe's Eve by dressing in costumes, burning candles, hanging garlic and eating ghoulish foods. I dressed up as the ghost of Joan d'Arc. Andy shaved his head and became Mr Clean. Katy was one of Dr Seusse's beloved, Star Bellied Sneetches and Steve was a combination of characters: Bub Rub, the infamous U-tube, "Whistle Tips" icon and "The Delicious" ( a film short man who found escape from the corporate lifestyle he was leading by dressing up in a red jump suit and by pinching his fingers together as you would to make a bird shadow on the wall, went about saying, "neee na neee nee nee nee").
After we satiated ourselves on amputated finger cookies ( I didn't have enough egg whites available to make the wasp's nests cookies) and maggot pizza (orzo pasta) I read, "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe, to the crew as they sipped coffee in the candlelight.
It really was a fun night, though no body knocked on our door offering up mid-evil carols in exchange for treats from our lone mansion on stilts, full of toilet- paper- tube- bats and garbage bag streamers and Bach's organ music and an apothecary jar with some green oozing mass suspended in it, labeled, Dark Matter; specimen #6. Now safely we have passed into the day of All Saints. The sun is shining mutely through spin drift clouds causing the world to be but a pink moth. We bow our heads and say prayers for those beloved souls no longer here on earth with us.
This last week and a half we have been very busy preparing for the new crew who will arrive , weather permitting, this Wednesday. However, few minor snafus have already occurred. One of the science technicians, trying to depart Logan Int. Airport in Boston, received a bad airplane; due to mechanical troubles she did not make it to Copenhagen with the others but is stranded in Massachusetts, a rather creepy place to weather Halloween. The second science technician vomited her whole away across the Atlantic (this was not a Halloween "trick") and was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance directly after landing in Denmark. She was accompanied by our supervisor and is doing fine now. Food poisoning, they said. The fourth person scheduled to arrive with the group, has staid on in Wisconsin with her ailing Father, and will probably not be leaving the States at all now, understandably. Meanwhile the other four members, of the original crew of eight, have all arrived safely in Greenland. They are staying at the KISS building in Kangerlussuaq, patiently awaiting the next Airbus from Copenhagen, which will arrive on Monday, with the stricken and afflicted. Meanwhile, Murphy's law has been in practice here during this past week; having groomed the ski way and shoveled out all of the door entrances, a storm blew through camp which has abated, but has not yet dissipated. Winds of over 60 MPH tore sheets of metal flashing off of the Big House roof and so thoroughly buried the Green House that we are now entering and exiting though the roof hatch, as the roof is now level with the snow. The weather forecast is predicting another gale today, with winds subsiding by tomorrow. This will leave us with just enough time to groom the ski way once again and dig ourselves out enough from the storm so as to not scare the incoming crew away (resting their travel weary eyes upon a snow scape, seemingly devoid of any "camp"may simply be too intimidating to warrant their wanting to remain).
Amen.

Orange Chair

If this is any example for my mind set, than I have become not only very dull, but also terribly out of date and worn. I spent the past seven days entranced in a misanthropic day dream about dance. I watched shorts from Don Quixote and Swan lake on U tube. I danced and stretched every day of the week and composed numerous letters to not only the adviser of the dance program at Western Washington University, but also to the few professional dance schools in Bellingham. I began researching ways to improve my turn out (the extent of one's ability to achieve a 180 rotation, from the hips, of the feet) and ways to become even more flexible. Every time I tried meditation to relive myself from this madness, I had to cut my time sitting short as I had to get up and move; Mozart was in my head, or Bizet. I have lost the desire to even try to control my mind any more. It is miserable to be stuck in this nihilistic day dream of something not real, but it is harder still to be quiet and to not move at all. I am not good at being like a sled dog buried beneath the snow; waiting.
So I go outside for some fresh air even though it is -50F and there is absolutely nothing out there to entice or supplicate one's needs. Well, yes, there is the sun, setting ( I do not get up early enough for the sun rise anymore). It rises setting. And as it drags itself along the Northern horizon it bleeds out some very dim streaks of sun - blood. Then the sky fills up with a powder blue fog which appears as a burial ritual and then all is diminished.
It really is quite bleak here.
But we have planned a holiday; Procrastination Day. Two days ago Steve took a 25 pound turkey out from the freezer. I was supposed to have taken it out three days before. It still has not thawed out yet. Hence the name for the holiday. Actually, most of what we do best here is procrastinate. Only a few things really ever need timely doing. Water, when low or empty needs refilling, same with fuel, food needs to be cooked, we need to call in over the radio every morning to let the world outside know we are alive. We need to keep the toilet paper stocked.
There is a little over 2 weeks until the crew change begins. On Tuesday, November 4Th the plane will arrive with four new camp staff , one scientist (who will be made to understand the harsh reality of problems that the mid winter sub sub freezing environment accrues on instruments designed in warm collegiate basements) and three full time company employees.
Together we will spend one week turning over the duties of camp life. Then we will get on the plane and fly away over the bumpy pinking snow-scape to a remote arctic city of 567 people where the earth, already covered in snow, will seem so abundant with life yielding grasses poking through the crust, white hares hopping, song birds chirping, ravens gargling, children playing, dogs barking, smells smelling...
Steve is watching the last of the unwatched, extreme ski movies. I pop around the corner just in time to see some dude land in a pillow of perfect powder. He is surrounded by a vista of evergreens sugared with snow. I walk away muttering, " snows pretty awesome when theres trees and topography".
Katy has just walked in bemoaning her brownies which are ,"bubbling...no they are boiling...there gonna SUCK"! High altitude baking is notorious for being troublesome.
It is four thirty in the afternoon and almost dark. My heavy(philosophically) book requires much page consuming in order for me to reach my goal of finishing off the season here with yet another book: Herman Melville's, Moby Dick. Its important to have goals, after all, without them, what would we have to procrastinate over?

Dance of the cotton grass

Way back in July of this year, drenched in the warm, dry, brilliance of the the high Arctic summer, I would ride my bike up a steep sandy hill to a stream which flowed from out of lake. I would lie in the tall grasses and rushes by the edge of the steam and peer into the clear but turbulent current of the water and watch the Stickleback fish. They were tiny. Smaller than the stub of a well worn down pencil; no longer than 3 inches in length, yet they were strong enough to hold position in a swift current bound for a falls that fell into the saline head of the fjord. I could see them gulp food. I could see them stop their effortless hovering and turn to dart to gulp another quickly passing morsel. They were dancers of another world. Conditioned to control their bodies as the graceful instruments of performing lives. Though every cell of their beings was toned for survival, their efforts were executed harmoniously with the water's motions itself. Like birds soaring on air currents, a ballet of life.
For the past three years now I have been entertaining the idea of going to school again. Why not? I have time off when we are not away working on distant islands or other continents. Perhaps having had so much exposure to travel in the midst of so many professional academics, professors, scientists, artists, etc. has allowed for a culture of thirst for knowledge to grow within the petri dish of my intellect. We are fortunate to have enough free time in our lives to experiment with dreams. If Steve wants to build furniture out of wood in our shop, he can. If I want to take dance classes at an annex of the university, I can. He remodels the house, I build the compost. We walk to the view of the Twin Sister's Mountain range, seen from the north bank of the Middle fork of the Nooksack River, just behind our house. He researches fuel efficient battery powered adaptations that we could make to our little Geo Metro while I plow through the chemical chains found in the emissions comparatively, between Swedish Masonry wood burning stoves and conventional wood burning stoves.
These free form "thinkering,-tinkering", time episodes of puttering , lead to small ideas which blossom into bigger ideas which grow into large "Why -Nots?".
And so my cute little kitten idea of going to school has grown into an enormous jungle cat named, "MR. Whynot". Well, one good reason is that it would significantly cut into my lovely ski bum life style of waking up at 0500 to press the speed dial button on the phone (which instantly rings up the Mt Baker ski report, which usually has most excellent news), and then go racing about the house getting ready to go skiing while singing, "15 inches fresh pow, 15 inches fresh pow....." or something like that.
Another reason of hesitance is the field of study, which has ranged from physics to atmospheric chemistry to math to mechanical engineer, to dance, to philosophy to fine arts to machinist and most recently, from paramedic to information technologist.
Certified.
But back to the fish...........I think they have got it all figured out. Even though they might only live for only one short summer or one very long year, they can dance every day through the atmosphere of their medium and exist symbyotically with this graceful movement, which I call dance, which swimming is a sort of kind of, dance, or choreographed movement designed specifically for survival; could it be that some people have to dance in order to survive. I mean, in order to survive, by using the term, survival, as the purpose driven expression of one's happiness and contentment with life; of feeling alive. We all must have some thing that bring this sort of sensation to it's maximum, causing it to go triumphantly coursing through our veins, trumpeting "life"; whether it be skiing or riding a bike or conversing with friends over tea or coffee, or watching birds, or bees, or loving someone or building something or going somewhere new. So why not dance?
It seems so impractical and self indulgent, a B.A. in dance, after all, I don't want to become a professional dancer; or even a choreographer; we would have to move to the city. And though I wouldn't mind teaching, how practical is that idea? Would I commute to a studio in town or lease one of the old chicken barns near our house on Mosquito Lake Road? Getting a B.A. in studio arts would at least contribute to helping me develop my potential as an artist, or a designer, or a sculptor. And what about all of those other ideas, either continuing along in the trades or working towards being able to become a teacher, or a paramedic, at least those ideas have some sort of practical application.
Maybe having worked for so long in impracticable situations with whatever skills I have garnered along the way has suited me just fine, like the fish in the stream, gliding, and floating and gulping.
And dancing in that sparkling buoyancy of water, the medium of origins.
Why not dance then, "MR cat"?