A few days' worth...

Correction. The place we're staying is fantastic. Thursday night Nate asked how close we were to the water and they said they'd let us see for ourselves. When we woke up and looked out the window, we are ON the water. It's amazing. Beautiful mountans too. There's a stand of trees on a little island across a causeway, apparently it's a chapel, I still need to go check that out. First we had to go out and pick up Michelle, so Matt, Denny and I went. Denny left Matt and I at the University of Alaska's library to fiddle on our computers. I got everything I needed to done, and some less important things besides. Matt was going back and forth between his grad stuff and trying to help Denny with some computer issues. Eventually Denny came back, he and Matt worked a bit more, and we came back for a tasty lunch of sammiches. After that I went out exploring, something I missed out on in the morning. Spent my time on the rocks between the cabin and the water, lots of barnacles and clams. A few nice pools as well. The water here is CLEAR. It's amazing. On the way back up I took a path with less good rocks than I took on the way down, slipped a fair bit, and finally fell to the point where I landed with my hands right on the barnacles. So that was painful. Came back in, treated that, we spent a lot of the afternoon in a big circle in the main room sitting and reading individually. At 3:30 we had the first classes. Denny had us split into smaller groups and discuss various things about what is science, what's the methodology, so on and so forth. We'd come back and talk as a whole group about it. Then he told us about some of the requirements, we all need to pick something individual to work on as we travel, something we specifically are interested in looking at. David talked about the writing class, mostly introducing us to the different types of travel writing and a rough outline of essays. Unsurprisingly, the deadlines are more guidelines than set in stone. Not sure yet which kinds of writing I'll want to do, but then, it's probably too early in the trip for anything to have struck me yet. Then we sat some more, read some more, and let people prepare a fantastic dinner. Turkey and gravy, salad with Clay's raspberry vinagerette, David's amazing stuffing, potatoes. So good. I helped Mike with dishes, and Matt provided some assistance as well. We yelled at Ahn when she came in because we had a system. I was kinda hoping dipping my hands in chlorine constantly would help keep my hands clean. Some other people took over while we had dessert, which was a German dish whose name I can't spell, but rice pudding with fruit mixed in. DELICIOUS. Blackberry, strawberry, and I'm not sure what else was in there. So, so very good. And then there was more sitting, chilling, and reading. I mentioned the thing about "yeah, we set rivers on fire, that's how hard we party in Cleveland," Matt talked about what an awesome party that would be, Denny said "that won't happen in Cleveland" and just walked off. It was fairly epic. Around 11 the conversation died and we all sort of unanimously went to bed, that is, those of us that hadn't already crashed. I forgot to put on socks before sleeping, which was a mistake (this morning Denny asked me how I sleep, I said mostly well, I should have remembered socks, he asked if my feet get cold, and I said "in Alaska they do"). Slept decently well, though. In about an hour and a half we leave for the wetlands, then we'll go to the glacier and then to the state museum. After that it's some free time in downtown Juneau, dinner out and then back here for dessert.

Saturday, January 9th, roughly 8:15-8:35 AM local time

Had some trouble sleeping due to lack of socks at night. Will have to remember them tonight. Woke up around 8ish, ate, read a bit, learned a new card game from "Swaffy." It's called 13, played in tricks, pretty simple, fun enough. Prepared lunch and headed out. We picked up Zippy first and then went to the wetlands. Most of the things there were dead plant-wise, but there were a few other things. We also saw at least three bald eagles, some crows, some geese, and two different kinds of ducks (kindly identified by Clay): Goldeneye and.... I'll have to look back at my notes to see what the other one was. I'll probably do that before I post this online. Maybe. There were supposedly land otters too, but we didn't see any, sadly. After that we went to the Mendenhall Glacier, checked out the visitor center. I learned a lot about how glaciers work, actually, which was good. Saw a short movie about it and some interesting maps. After that most of us went out to look at the Glacier outside. It was SOLID ICE walking the paths. Kind of fantastic. We slid more than we walked, got some amusing pictures, and I tried to purposely slide down a ramp and managed to fall a second or so early. Woops. I did get closer to the glacier than anyone else, though, to get a picture. Getting back up was... interesting. I probably fell down about 3 times total today. So I'm "winning" the falling contest on this trip. I guess? After that we went to the State Museum, lots of interesting stuff about native cultures. Some weird digitally altered photography upstairs, and some interesting natural history as well. Probably the coolest thing was this large NOAA globe that could have various things projected on it. We saw a lot of different models of Earth as well as some other planets, though the Earth stuff had the most information by far. Hurricanes, fires, currents, temperature, CO2, and a few others besides. Lots of information. After that we went to downtown Juneau, the of age people drank a bit and the rest of us just kind of walked around. Allen got offered pot, which was amusing. There weren't a lot of shops open, some things I might have bought if we were only in Alaska, but with the big trip, none of us was quite worth it. (I did pick up a card and a magnet at the museum). We came back and had delicious delicious delicious salmon, green beans, couscous, and salad with Clay's delicious dressing again. All very good. And now we're chilling and I'm being INTENSELY amused by the banter between Matt, Caitlin and Swaffy.

Saturday, January 9th, roughly 8:45-9 PM

Moved in with Denny last night, since Zippy and Michelle are sharing a room now. Turns out there were sheets and extra blankets I was completely unaware of. That might have helped.

Free Day today. At least, that was the original plan. (By the by, we spent most of the rest of last night playing card games, especially lots of variations on poker. I've learned Celtic Cross and Iron Cross now.) However, the weather's absolutely awful. I spent the morning reading and playing more cards (Rummy). I'm going to know so many card games by the end of this trip. Might even learn to shuffle if I'm lucky. So, since the weather is so bad, we're going to do some classes this afternoon and save our free day for a hopefully nicer day. I wanted to check out the chapel and hike a bit, and some people did hike, but bah. I was cold and wet enough yesterday. Don't need to add to it today. If we had kept the free day all day I probably would have done a short hike, as it is, I'll just go on our next free day or whatever. I managed to finish Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist, which means two down already (finished Narwhal on the planes over). It reminded me a lot of Death of a Salesman, actually. Kind of dense and probably the hardest to get through of them all, at least that's my guess, but we'll see as I haven't even started Copenhagen or The Physicists yet. They're plays, though, so I'm guessing they'll be short and easy. We saw a few seals (sea lions? I don't remember the final decision) today, as well as a mink (weasel?) running across the path outside our cabin. I'm continuing to enjoy the vibe of our common room: nice carpet, wooden walls and ceiling, comfortable chairs, a circle of people reading interrupted by conversations, card games, and the occasional someone napping in front of the fire.

Sunday, January 10th, roughly 12:20-12:30 PM

Alright, tonight was FANTASTIC.

We all kept chilling and whatever until 1:30, when class started. Sort of. Denny, Sigrid and David told stories about taking students to East Germany before the wall for about an hour. Very entertaining stuff, though not all of it was funny, a lot of it definitely was. Then we sort of transitioned into the literature class, David told us he wanted us to read Measuring the World first and gave us some ideas on what he specifically wanted us to look at, at least in the first section. Lots of stuff about journey, but a few other ideas as well. We discussed various historical works of journey (The Odyssey, Gilgamesh, Huck Finn, The Hobbit, etc.) as well. We also did more on the Biomes class, talking about what we saw yesterday at the wetlands and the glacier, talking about what Denny actually wants us to do. This personal study plan thing has been... vexing so far. It's hard to think of something that fits the criteria, interests me personally, AND fits into the time and resources we have available. After that was another dinner, chicken soup, bread and salad with more of Clay's dressing. All very good, the bread especially so. Then more relaxing, sitting around, card games, reading. Nathan, Johnny B, Allen, Clay and I talked to Denny about specific ideas for our projects, with others adding their own thoughts as well. I think most of us are still having a hard time not thinking too big, and at the same time, figuring out what we can do without really any instruments. We'll get there... it's just going to take a few days. Becky suggested going outside, tried, it was too cold and windy, Swaffy and I decided to join her, soon we had everyone (student-wise) except Vince and Nikki suiting up. We weren't outside the door for 60 seconds before a snowball fight broke out. After all that miserable rain this morning, the afternoon and evening had been DRIVING snow. The wind was so strong it was practically going sideways, it was hard to control the front door, pure insanity. Also, PERFECT packing snow. So we slid around and chucked snowballs at each other for a while, I got Matt on the head, he hit me in the ear. I mean, honestly, this is packing snow the likes of which I've almost never seen before. So, so good. After doing that for a while we headed over to the chapel. Inside the trees the wind was almost nonexistent. We explored that a bit, a few of us ducked our heads inside. Not very big, but nice enough. After that we went over to this one spot where you could overlook the sea, the waves were crashing, the wind was whipping around us, it was amazingly dark. Fantastic. See, when we came to Alaska, this cold snow was what we were expecting. 30-40 F? Rain? Bah! Quit going easy on us, Alaska! So it was kind of exciting to see our stereotype played out, even if the more mild weather is more typical for Juneau specifically. We stood there for a while before we headed back, and then we decided to make a snowman. This resulted in clusters of people working on about 4 different snowmen before we finally got a base going, we built an... interesting form, and finally Matt brought over a ball he had been rolling which became the head. Allen carved in eyes and a mouth, and we took lots of pictures. While some people added sticks for arms, Matt rolled another, even larger ball, which became a new base. We PHYSICALLY LIFTED the snowman, I carried his head while others dealt with the body, and we eventually got it onto the new, taller base. It was almost human height at that point. There were pictures with my scarf, with Allen's hat, I think Jacob was the one who added eyes, Allen got a stick to go into the mouth. Finally, we decided to name it Denny Taylor, because it would be too hard to give it a beard to be David Anderson. More and more pictures were taken, we hung out in the snow, it was wonderful. We finally came in, had tea or hot chocolate (the latter for me), and I got my first shower and change of clothes of the entire trip.

See? Building a snowman in Alaska and my first shower? Fantastic.

Sunday, January 10th, roughly 10:10-10:25 PM local time