It's official!

Sassafras passed her Canine Good Citizen test today! As a reward, she gets a whole month off of classes!

2 a.m. on a saturday night...

I'm procrastinating walking the dog, anxiously awaiting word from Alaska, and Jen's at a bachelorette party. So, to distract me, here are some pics from last Saturday:
We had a slightly successful yard sale- here are Jen and Mark around mid-afternoon, right before I ditched them to head out to the crazy Ann Arbor Art Fair.
The Ann Arbor Art Fair isn't your typical art & wine. First of all, there's no wine. Secondly, it's actually FOUR art fairs, each separately juried. Mass craziness descends on town for four days. This was one of the more creative booths. Mostly just your typical leather, jewelry, photographs, and tie-dye.

Camping trip

This past weekend, Jen, Sassy, and I went to camping in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Sassy was not amused by the large racoon that tried to eat her food at the campground the first night. She took the first chance she had to tell us how she felt.
Friday was gorgeous- we went to the Munising side of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. We were fairly limited in where we could take the dog, but we still had some spectacular views.

We stopped at Sand Point along the way and discovered Sassy's dislike for the water. We kind of got her to swim in knee-deep water, but it was more like a hop from one leg to the other.

On Saturday, we stuck around Taquamenon Falls where we camped because it was raining buckets in the morning. In early afternoon, we went on a couple short hikes to see the falls. Sassy was quite worried we were going to make her go in that water as well. She was actually more interested in all the people and made friends with a little boy who was glad "she's not one of those biting dogs".

After the Lower Falls, we took a break and went to the Whitefish Point Lighthouse and Shipwreck Museum. Michiganders are big on their shipwrecks. Funny thing, when you try to have a ton of commercial shipping boats go through a narrow channel east of Lake Superior, sometimes they run right into each other.

We went the Upper Falls on our way back from buying more firewood. On our walk back to the parking lot, we decided to take the "nature walk", i.e., the unpaved trail. When we were almost back, we heard two distinct woofs. Couldn't see it and Sassy was oblivious, but it was likely a black bear.

That night, it was hard to start a fire (damp newspaper and damp wood), so I had to take a picture of our hard-won log cabin fire.

We made one last stop in Mackinaw City.

The Goodbye Wave.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with myself, having left Toolik so early in the summer. I suppose I should work on writing my dissertation or something...

Found this on Youtube- Climate change video

4th of July highlights:

Our lab was the traveling circus- complete with lion tamer, lion, painted lady, clown, bearded lady, trapeze walker, and prancing pony. We finally won best float! Annie had constructed the prize: a small replica of the Titanic and an iceberg.

In his most challenging role to date, my advisor dressed up as the mime of our circus.

Secret Reagent man: aka 0.007 uM

Panorama on top of Slope Mtn.

I just finished my last day of field sampling, and look who's eagerly awaiting my return:

Sassafrass!

On top of Slope Mountain...Ashley and I hiked up Slope Mountain this past Sunday- it was one of the only (reasonable) hikes I hadn't gone on yet. On the way up, we got stuck in a huge field of willows up to our heads. The perfect place to live if I was a bear. Luckily, no incidents involving bears, although we did see a pair of Moose. I've never seen them north of Atigun pass that I can recall.

Up at the top, there was an amazing view of the Brooks range, where it turns to run mostly north-south. Ashley was standing on a ledge above a super steep drop when I took this picture. If you look closely, you can see a small glacier along with the haul road and the pipeline.
I'm not that brave and barely peer over the edge. We later climbed on top of those rocks for pictures with a self-timer.
And yes, I'm still doing work this trip. Lots of it. Which is why my updates have not been very frequent. The weather has been great but it's super buggy and the streams are low, the latter being not so great for transplanting bacteria in dialysis bags in streams.
But the fun never ends. Here Alex and Ashley are taping foam onto the handle of the D.I. water bottle. It's been cutting my hand for years whenever I moved it and we finally came up with a solution this year. Necessity is the mother of invention, even if it takes me a few years to figure it out.