my backyard.

the weekend i got back from juneau, jen, rob, justine, aerin and i headed down to delta to float the clearwater river. we were a little early on the bird-front, but it was a wonderful welcome-back to the boreal forest and home after being gone to southeast for over a week.

justine, checking on the bird-situation.

it was kind of like being a small child, sitting in between jen and rob and just basking in the sun...

here's an ice shot. we figured we'd try to get some hardcore picture of us with icebergs, but this is as best as we got. looks intense, huh??

mama and her calf, munching on the aquatic veg. yeah for the end of winter!!!
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** the next weekend (just this past saturday) cory, lauren, morgan, zoe and i headed up and hiked from angel rocks to chena hotsprings. it was a beautiful day, with good views, good people, finishing with a good soak in the springs.



stopping to have some food at the top of the ridge, looking southeast

cory demonstrating something or another that was, apparently, quite funny...


zoe had a great time and was one fast dog along the trail!!

lauren, morgan and zoe hiking up to the ridge

who knew returning an ipod could be so much fun..

after chris' ipod stopped working i realized that i had become hopelessly addicted after just a few short months. so yes, i caved and on monday went to the tech center to buy a new ipod.
so then i'm all happy and listening to 'this american life' on my run yesterday. after two episodes i still had a few miles to go, and was all excited to listen to the 'run run run' playlist i had made myself (which begins with the first part of the 'hippity hop' hiphop cd megan made me!!)

right.
except that the middle 'select' button had ceased to function. ack! i had to run down sheep creek road, the longest most boring road in my head, without music.


today i decided that the 'select' button was never going to come back on, and so went back to the tech center to return it. this, as i should have figured, took forever.
but in the meantime, justine and i got to play with the apple computer for sale with a built-in camera!

pray that we don't have to return to the tech center soon....who knows what other options may be available with that computer. i can't imagine how much LESS work i would get done if i had one of those camera things. lordy

well, springtime is so very much here and i love it.
a few days ago i busted out my bike, an example of which is pictured above (thanks to the gary fisher website) and rode up chena ridge to play scrabble with em and melissa. i lost horribly (i'm not usually quite that bad....) but melissa and tom have a great new house - though i had definitely forgotten how very steep it is getting up to the top of chena ridge!

the ride home was *amazing* and beautiful, with the alaska range in the distance and the sun setting lower in the sky at 930 and the temps still high enough to not be cold flying down the road.

i forget how much i enjoy biking.



here's nola and i, me with my old bike, last april in denali.
the park road should be opening soon - gotta get back down there again before that happens!!

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in other fitness news, i ran my 16 miles yesterday.
http://www.mapmyrun.com/user_profile?username=rachelerrin
this is a great website (there seems to be quite a few of similar ones out there) to map out run routes and view them on satellite images. the elevation feature doesn't seem to work here, but it's still nice to map some things out from my desk before having to drive it all.

so after the 16 miles i feel pretty good, remarkably! shins are okay. achilles is well, not as good as it was before i ran, but not terrible.
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maintain & gaurd your idealism...

this is for mark. i am all about idealism, but with just ever so slight a hint of cynicism....

(the shirt is from www.qwantz.com wicked funny dinosaur comics. well, i like them anyways.)

trapped at a bar in fairbanks

i'm not sure if anyone reads this any longer... i don't update it all that often. however, since i'm trapped at the bar currently, i thought what the hell.
so yeah. i'm trapped at the red fox in fairbanks. after a failed attempt at the post office, i went to the coffee shop to do some work before meeting a friend just down the way at the bar at six. so six came and i went to the bar, we ateand had some beer and generally fabulous conversation. so then nine rolls around and it's time to go warm up the cars and head on home. right. except come to find out it's hovering around at least -30F and my car, after 5+ hours of sitting there, is entirely uninterested in starting. awsome. so adrian gave me one of her extension cords, and that combined with mine reached to the building to plug in my car. so now i'm sitting here in the red fox, waiting for my car's battery, oil pan, and engine block to warm up enough to allow oil and all that other good stuff to flow around properly. let's cross our fingers that it starts.....the music was terrible terrible on the jukebox, so i put in $1, but my songs haven't come up yet. someone loaded it up with generally horrible music, but i have yet to resort to my headphones. that seems like it would just be weird.
to my rescue, emily has come to hang out and drink a beer with me while i wait. ahhh, winter in fairbanks. indeed it was +20F just a week ago. how quickly things change...
in the words of manu chao:
hay dos cosas ciertas - el muerte y el cambio.

Santaland Diaries

So i'm heading out tonight to see the Santaland Diaries, a play adapted from David Sedaris' semi-tragic story of being a holiday elf.

Listen to it HERE
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an excerpt that, for various reasons, particularly speaks to me:

"...they asked us why we wanted to be elves.

which when you think about it is a fairly tough question.

i told the interviews that i wanted to be an elf because...because it was
the most ridiculous thing i'd ever heard of. i figured that for once in my life
i thought i'd be completely honest and see how far it got me."
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I can't even begin to describe how funny it is. I love David Sedaris and have to say that I am floored and excited that he is coming to Fairbanks on May 1st.

Happy Birthday, Chris!!
i figured, with you being down in Nicaragua and all, I could most effectively send you virtual birthday wishes. in addition, I have all of these old (and some not so old) pictures that were worth putting up. All of my love to you, little brother.

always sleeping in the sailboat....it's amazing that you stayed awake for Sea Semester given your history.

i love this picture of dad. it's from 1978 and it's classic.

i have no doubt that you remember my 18th birthday and our trip up tuckerman's ravine. you had amazing patience that day with your sister and i thank ya for it...what song did we listen to on your weather radio up in the bowl? that was a great day...and you're so cute and little looking!

just a reminder of what your sister looks like. okay. looked like.

haha. you were so sick when dad took you lobstering. man he was worried about you out in the carribbean


again, your sister. lookin' good on the AT back in the day


and finally, here we are with Body back in the day.

time moves in a linear direction

so i'm at lulu's bread & bagels - a great coffeeshop in fairbanks. free coffee refils as long as you want, good music, free internet. in addition, at least on saturdays and on several other days of the week as well, you're more than likely going to see a solid percentage of people you know and enjoy in fairbanks.

alright. but i'm here to do work (ack. on my plant physiology lecture tomorrow on 'Mycorrizal Associations' don't you wish you could be there?) however i just went to get some water and felt inspired to throw something down in words. maybe not too eloquently, but i'll put it down anyways.

so why did getting water in my nalgene prompt this inspiration? it was the water bubbler. one of those like in an office, blue 5-gal bubbler. the very same as i had all of last year for drinking, brushing my teeth, washing my dishes, cooking my food. and now how easily water just flows out of a tap!
so i'm getting water out of the bubbler, thinking about last year in my wee cabin. and there's folky music on (maybe kris delmhorst?) and i'm flashing back to new england. to the various concerts, folk festivals, beautiful people i know and love. and it feels like a lifetime ago.

daily i've been feeling incredibly thankful for such a rich and ever-changing life. time, indeed, moves in a linear direction. (but, as john put it during a strange game during thanksgiving, light does not) each day in this world is everything - it can be all you have. but at the same time, it's just another piece of life, of the adventure that is day-to-day which becomes month-to-month, year-to-year and so on and so forth.

and as i head to school, sun still not up at 8am, full pot of coffee drank & granola eaten, singing and dancing, i am forever grateful for all of this time and my everyday piece of the world.

turkey day

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!


This year I celebrated turkey day with my friend Katie and her wonderful family. They adopted a number of us to join them for the day! Such good company and good food!

left to right: John, me, Amy, Katie V, Justine, Blaine

This is Blaine in our kitchen, working on his super yummy stuffed mushrooms... please notice the fabulous Tom Brady poster on the fridge. Indeed, this is the same poster I got from the Wells Dunkin Donuts and sent to Maura many years ago. hm. She gave it back to me...I think Blaine likes it as much as she did. Too bad!

This is my roommate.
There are no words to describe.

Blaine passing Justine some of John's amazing bread

Katie, sitting next to her sister Lisa, talking with John
We all went around the table and said what we were thankful for...
my personal favorite - Justine is thankful for the cultivation and distribution of coffee.

A view down the other end of the table. Family friends shared in the feast...folks that Katie and her sisters all grew up with.

All in all it was a great day. We went skiing for a bit on the slough
(Blaine stating that, "I don't think I like cross-country skiing...if I'm going to fall I may as well be going fast" .. he loves it.)
made and ate great food
and spent time with great people.

Then we went to see Borat. Wicked disturbing.
And now I'm procrastinating in a serious way from working on my lecture on mycorrhizae for my plant physiology course. Eek. I really don't want to work on it. So instead I'm updating this, sitting in my office on a Saturday, with the sun streaming in. Which, in fact, is beautiful!! The sun sets in about an hour (around 3:30pm) and it's about -25F outside. So I'm not in a bad place right now.

Back to work!

25 below zero

it's tuesday morning around 720am. justine gave me a ride to the auto shop this morning, and then off to school. so here i am, rather sleepy, sitting and listening to NPR and thinking about starting to do some work (goal today = get *something* done. anything, really, would be good). hoping hoping hoping that the car doesn't have something terrible wrong with it! and thinking about updating this here blog-thing more often. this is sparked mostly from reading Tash's blog (see links!) and Nola's blog on myspace. so good to read words from these wonderful wonderful women.

so indeed it is around -25F out today. something about the pollution in the air (gotta love fairbanks, but lordy the air quality is bad in the winter) made the light from the street lamps shoot straight up in these light spikes. sunrise at 940 am. sunset, probably around 430...alright. gonna put out some pictures from our trip to kanuti in october!


i'm unable to find MSPaint on my computer. hm. So i can't highlight on this wee map where we were. but i can describe. Fairbanks, here, is right above the 'K' in ALASKA. We drove ~170 miles up the Haul Rd. (Dalton "highway"), to appx. 30 miles south of Coldfoot, AK and about 10 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Then it was a ~9mile hike almost due west from the road to the hotsprings, following south of the Kanuti River.


Ken and Freya along the Haul Rd, gearing up to go
Ken and Laura, up on the ridge. Lordy it was windy. Yet another buffeting in life.

Drinking one of the PBRs that Danny threw in his backpack on the way out. Mmmm...essentially water


Chrissy, Jon and Freya working their way up the hill. Fraya enjoyed herself, trying to catch ptarmigan the whole way along the ridge

socked in on the backside of caribou mtn, wicked happy to have a compass in my pocket! also glad that i took a bearing on the way out near the car. it hadn't fully occured to me that when you are so close to the pole the magnetic pull is crazy. my bearing was probably 30 degrees off! so to get back to the car, which was nearly due east, i would have needed to work back nearly due NE

me, walking through the tussocks, after the clouds lifted

ken and laura, at the final push down to the hotsprings. the kanuti river is in the top right, and you can somewhat see a small meadow just to the left of the river. that's where we were headed..getting through that burned slope just below these guys in the picture, and then through the veritable swamp at the bottom, was a pain.in.the.ass.!! but so very well worth it.

freya sleeping in front of the hotsprings pool...

Colorado in September

these pictures are from the flight back from CO, but since this is where they uploaded to, this is where they'll stay! I took them from the plane on the way home to Fairbanks. The mountain shots are of Denali and the Alaska Range around her! Then there's a shot of the Tanana River as we passed through the cloud layer coming into Fairbanks...ahh, the beautiful colors of fall in interior AK!




During September a bunch of us from UAF headed down to Estes Park, CO for the Long Term Ecological Research group's All Scientists Meeting (LTER ASM!)
Up here, most of us work for the Bonanza Creek LTER
Check out the nationwide network!
I got to go, paid for by said network, as I am one of the graduate student site representatives, along with Kelly, for BNZ!
It was beautiful, as well as being an interesting conference with scientists working all over the country and the world present.


We skipped out one morning to go hiking in Rocky Mtn National Park...what a different ecosystem than interior AK!!


From left to right, Katie, Blaine, Evan, me, Dana!

equinox marathon

here's the top of ester dome, cory coming up on the far right, leg #2 of the marathon!


team F.T.J.!
we came in 16th out of 60 relay teams



Justine waiting for Lorien to finish up leg #2



Lorien, after 9 grueling miles, handing off the bib to Justine!
He rocked it, coming in 6th out of all of the 2nd leg runners!!!