Back-blogging

Sorry about the complete lack of updates lately. I haven't felt very inspired to sit down and write about anything, at least not after spending day after day struggling over words at work. The paper that I've been working on is nearly finished - I hope to submit it next week. That will be weight off of my shoulders. Now that the paper is almost finised I've begun to start thinking about the upcoming field season. I've been looking into purchasing some really fancy audio recording equipment with a small student grant that I have. I could see myself totally getting into it. Next thing you know I'll be out recording birds and squirrels.

Life hasn't only been work work work. I've seen some good music (The Wailing Jennies, a folksy group from Canada) and some really good movies (No Country for Old Men; Juno). And then there's always hockey, broomball, drumming, and soccer. For those of you that have played broomball and appreciate the difficulty of the game, check out this youtube video. Amazing. I didn't know that people could be so good at it.

In early February I went to NASA's PARCA (Pan-arctic regional climate assessment) meeting in Boulder, Colorado. It was a really interesting meeting with good discussions. We debated questions like: How can the PARCA group most help society? (Improving predictions of sea level rise.) What is the single biggest contribution that we can give society? How do we go about doing that? Where should we focus our resources? I realized that the discussions we were having directly affect policy and the future of NASA. Pretty neat. Also strange in a way. I guess not very many people spend much time thinking about Greenland and Antarctica. In a way it makes me feel very isolated from society. Even more so when I hear people talking about business, stocks, and economics, and I have absolutely no clue what they are talking about. In my life I'm happy if the number at the bottom of my bank statements is positive.

I took advantage of the trip to Colorado to do some skiing. It was great timing - Colorado was getting hammered with one snow storm after the other. The snow was really great, so was the company. Jason Stenson wrote about our trip and posted some nice photos.