Rainy days

I've been told that a geek would have realized his computer wasn't connecting to the internet because his ethernet cable was plugged into the wrong port. But I'm trying!

This has been the dreariest autumn since I've been in Fairbanks. It's rained almost every day, and today the rain is slowly turning into big, fat snowflakes. I hope it sticks! It must be time to wax the skis and make sure they're ready to go once winter hits.

On Monday good friends and colleagues of mine moved back to Switzerland. They've known they were leaving for about a year, but its amazing how fast that time passed. Probably the best part of being in the academic world is that you get to meet a lot of great people from around the world. The worst part being that they all leave at some point.

In other news, a paper I submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research - Earth Surfaces has been conditionally accepted. This means I need to make some major revisions to the paper within the next month, and if the revisions please the scientific editor (the person who ultimately decides whether or not to publish a paper), then we should be seeing my first manuscript in print sometime next year.

Let's party - American style

I've been convinced by two fellow geeks and travelers extraordinaire that I should join the blogging community. Alaska is still a blast and often an adventure, but many days my life consists of cursing at my computer and talking about geeky things that nobody else really cares about. So, for now I'll just post once a week unless something else comes up that inspires me to blab, rant, or show off some photos.

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A busy weekend. Saturday was the Equinox Marathon and Relay, supposedly the second most difficult marathon in the U.S. It's often considered a graduation requirement for graduate students in the geophysics department. Each year I tell myself that I'm going to run it and then chicken out. This year I ran the 3-person relay, along with Inari and my friend Anthony. We finished at 4:09, good enough for 16th out of 62 relay teams and 4th out of 22 mixed teams. Full results, if you're interested, are at http://www.equinoxmarathon.org.

On Sunday we celebrated Inari gaining resident status by hosting an American party. This required dressing as an American and bringing American food, which of course, was open to interpretation. We had a redneck, a hippie, a jock, a cowboy, an American tourist, and everything from ding-dongs to chili. It was a real hoedown.














As a resident Inari is now able to remain in the U.S. indefinitely, which means no more stress and no more unnecessary bureaucracy. For now. She'll have the option of becoming a dual-citizen in five years.