Brush with fame

In case you needed proof that I did actually meet with Angela "The Chancellor" Merkel, here are a couple of photos that I got from a reporter about a month ago.

Photos by Inge Rasmussen.

I wonder what this coming field season will bring.

The things kids do

People say that kids everywhere are pretty much the same. That's probably true, but I guess most 4 year olds don't do this:


On Sunday Inari and I went to see the Junior North American Dogsledding Championships. There were something like 20 competitors ranging in age from 4-16 years. The kids raced with anywhere from 1 to 8 dogs, depending on their skill level. Some of the dogs were really fast and were good sled dogs. Some ran half of the course and then stopped and decided that they'd rather do something else. A couple of the kids were thrown off their sleds into the snow - that's why they wear helmets!


One girl said that her favorite thing about dogsledding was getting to play with her dogs. Most of the kids' favorite dogsledding memories involved getting thrown from their sleds or narrowly missing a tree.

Photographic phrustrations

Since I got into photography a couple of years ago I've really started to appreciate good photographs of people and also of the night sky. I'm starting to get the hang of both of these, but I still have a long way to go.

A couple of nights ago I took these photos of the aurora. They look good when viewed from afar, but grainy and blurry close up. I've tried long (30 s) exposures, short exposures, different ISO settings, just about everything. Not sure if its a problem with me or my camera. I suspect that analog cameras still do much better than digital for low light conditions. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

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.