Holiday travel

Last week I traveled back to Minnesota to see family over Thanksgiving. For all of the flying I do, I drive down to Denver and park at a long-term lot near the airport and catch a shuttle. The drive down is just over 2 hours; if the roads are good - that is, no snow or rain - a shortcut goes through Fort Collins. In some ways, Colorado seems close. It is an easy day trip to the Fort Collins area for skiing and I have friends who have taken dance classes down there, and I made day trips to the Defenders of Wildlife Carnivore Conference in Denver last week. However, Laramie is definitely a Wyoming town.

After a bit of a break, I have been back at the biochemistry. After taking classes through undergraduate and MSc work, it can be frustrating to still be taking courses at this point. However, my field work schedule has required me to spread out lecture courses, and this material is so fundamental to my interests that it remains worthwhile to put in lots of time. I have been reviewing past coursework, and considering the needs for my disseration research and what, in general, I would like to have as my background in terms of courses. I hope to finish up courses this spring or next year.

For fall field work this year, we used a US Coast Guard icebreaker to travel to the edge of the sea ice, north of Alaska and Russia, and recapture previously-sampled polar bears. I worked with a science museum (San Francisco Exploratorium) to post dispatches about life in the field, at their website devoted to polar science: http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/arctic-projects/the-bears-of-summer/. We disembarked from the ship in early November, leaving about 5 pallets of equipment in the cargo hold. The ship will arrive at its home port in Seattle next week, and the technician working on our project will be there to help sort and ship gear back to Laramie.

READING

After scoping out the other blogs of PiE students, I am going to plagiarize two ideas. Erin included a couple notes about items for reading, and Julie mentioned the recent editorial by David Orr in the December Conservation Biology. If you have online access to the journal, I thought it was a provoking essay.