Settling

It's been a bit of a food time-warp for me.  Way too many years ago during a semester in Italy, I lived by a menu that was both cost effective and tasty: roll for breakfast, pb&j and apple for lunch, and linguini with carrots, broccoli, and tomato sauce for dinner.  Once a week I'd change it up, sauté thick slices of potato in olive oil and top them with parmesan.  My friends across town had me over for ravioli-making dinner parties, and one roommate occasionally presented us delicious veal-and-eggplant dishes.  Ok, sure, I ate out some as well.  But for four months, night after night, it was me and my pasta.

So, here history repeats itself, and cooking simply for myself on the cheap = lots of pasta, of which I will never tire.  Or, after a ten-hour day of egg cracking and potato frying, I might just dip apple slices into a jar of peanut butter.

One big difference is there's lots of great beer in Alaska (though I do miss those 2-euro bottles of chianti).  The query of my trip to "town" today is now chilling in my fridge, ready to effervesce a bit of pleasure into any day.

I got to town on another group bonding trip: dishonoring nature's beauty be tearing through it on ATVs.  Here you can see me (surprisingly) in pink, coaxing my death-wish vehicle over a small stream.  Driving over uneven, rocky terrain?  Forget the seatbelt -- just hold on tight to those handle bars, and hope against a neck injury.

In other news, I switched rooms.  Being beside the slamming door, next to the staircase, underneath evening-shifters that play darts and smoke lots of pot was not a good recipe for sleep.  Let's hope the new digs are a  it quieter.

Fun mistake: when I told the 19-year-old dish washer I was a quiet old lady, he guessed I was 23.  

MAIL!

Two awesome things today:

1. I got a mailing address -- and I love writing letters.  I might even draw you a little picture on a card.  Please drop a line!

Claire Veligdan
PO Box 488
Denali Park, AK
99755

2. I saw two more moose; they crossed the road and scared me into walking along the highway instead of into the woods.  It's nice in among the trees, but from the road you can see this:

Blazin' the Trails

Greetings from up north -- if I understand latitudinal distances (nowadays the internet does my math), I'm about 1,200 miles north of my familiar northern Michigan 45th parallel.  Tonight the sun will set at 11:15pm, and it will still be dusky enough to see fifty yards or so into the trees at the darkest hour.  It was really quite lovely the first few days, 60s and sunny, and then we had a flurry of heavy snow yesterday, beautiful and hushed, which melted after a few hours.

Usually (in my now-4-day experience) things look like this:

Creekside is aptly named, situated next to swift, chilly Carlo Creek.  The woods are dense but crisscrossed with countless ATV byways, hiking paths, and game trails, and in most places you can blaze your way through springy (now sponge-soaked) moss-and-lichen-covered little hills.

It smells amazing here.  A green, cedary-piney, robust, Alpine-cowherd-yodeling-with-joy kind of smell.  The mosquitoes are big but dumb, easy to clap against my (sort of) white wall.

So far my projected diet of nuts and grains has been supplemented by castoffs from the cafe.  I'm not sure who purchased several large freezer packs of chicken wontons or why they neglected to consume them, but they've made for a few tasty lunches already.

There's not much to report about work because I've barely done any.  We had an actually constructive and fun team-building/ice-breaking day white water rafting through a canyon; the first day of work was thirty minutes of HR policy and paperwork; then I came in for a few hours of burger pattying and vinaigrette whisking; and yesterday we scrubbed out the coolers and I continued down the list of salad dressings.  WHEW...now it's time for three days off.  And what happens on one's day off?  I saw two moose!  Those gals were enormous, like horse-dinosaurs.

And Now the Other Direction

Hi people!  Back by popular demand a few people's encouragement, I'm going to keep writing about cold places that start with A.  I last wrote about my first Antarctic sunset and awaiting a big ol' vacation.  I saw innumerable indelibly beautiful places throughout New Zealand and Thailand.  I swam in a sulfurous hot-spring river and petted elephants.  I ate lots of cheap noodles and drank out of a coconut bigger than my head.  It was pretty fun, and though I was often deeply sad about getting divorced, the time spent traveling allowed me to sort some of my thoughts in a way I hadn't managed while redirecting angst at steaming pans of for-institutional-use-only meat.

Island Hut Hotel, Koh Mak, Thailand:

And now in just a week I'll go to Alaska (where roughly 17% of people trying to recall where I've been take a stab at guessing since Antarctica is too implausible).  Seven degrees shy of the Arctic Circle, just a few miles from the entrance to Denali National Park, I will flip eggs -- and pancakes! -- at a small "lodge," really thirty or so little cabins with a restaurant next door.  It's still early spring and near-freezing at night, but the summer season will ramp up quickly as thousands of people flock to the remote area to be frightened by bears and eat acceptable omelets.  

With three days off a week, I should re-learn French, perfect my fly fishing...I'm open to suggestions.  One fun thing is I mostly have to procure my own food and cook for myself, an interesting prospect as the grocery store is a few hours away.  I'll bring in a good amount of staples, but it would be awesome to forage for mushrooms and berries and pork tenderloin.

So I hope you enjoy dispatches from up north.  I'll return to regularly scheduled Antarctica musings in October, but with the inside view as science cargo admin (but don't worry, I'll still keep abreast of the latest in food folly).

Almost Done

The pictures are off the wall, I vacuumed up all the volcanic dirt and bits of cheese and bread off the floor, and my possessions have been divided into a box that will remain here and my backpack of practical travel clothes.  I had today off to clean and pack and "bag drag," which is actually dragging your bags up to the transport building to weigh in what each person will account for on the flight tomorrow.  BUT, our plane got delayed coming to pick us up, so there will be at least one more day of half-assed work before leaving.  Luckily, the winter crew are all good cooks and have things well in hand, so we'll make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, mop the floor, and call it a day.

The weather has been quite nice lately, and I've taken a couple more turns around my favorite hiking path.  The open water has come relatively far in -- not record-breakingly so, but beyond what it has in several years.  Here you can see some seals hanging out near the edge, which ominously creaked with the tide.  I didn't see any big chunks break off during my hike, but that's what's happening.

I had the time, inclination, and permission to use actual good food in a soup on my (formerly) last day, and spent a cheerful hour or so nicely cutting carrots, onions, celery, and parsnips into tiny cubes.  These were gently cooked before being combined with vegetables stock.  But the best thing I've made in a long time was my own breakfast omelet, in a pan on the stove, with sauteed mushrooms, spinach, gouda, and lots of butter.  We've all passed a good amount of time talking about what restaurant food we'll get in New Zealand.  Sushi is a popular choice, and good beer is high on lots of people's lists.  Conversely, we all have fractions of liquor bottles to bestow on the winter-overs.

Hey -- I did it!  I got up last Saturday night at 12:30, walked in the frigid cold and watched the sunset!  This doesn't really do it justice, but I like Scott's hut on the right there:

There were a few clouds to catch the colors, and though it was windy I stayed for a decent interval.  I thought it would set extremely slowly, but once the edge was touching the horizon, it proceeded as it usually does.  It was still pretty light out after it was completely gone, and supposedly it's staying set for a few hours a night now.  If it's not too overcast, I'll try to catch it one more time before I go.

Creation of Penguin

So today is one day later than I stayed last year.  People should be leaving by the hundreds, but our usual runway is a soggy puddle and we can only use smaller, slower Hercs to fly to New Zealand instead of Airbuses.  I'm not due to leave for another week anyway, but the backlog of people grows every day as weather and allowable weight keeps town full.  It's probably just chance, but the temperature dropped about 15 degrees (it's 1F, with -27F windchill) and you can tell summer is waning fast.  The first sunset will be Saturday night/Sunday morning, around 1am.  I plan to watch it dip down and hope for colorful clouds.

Penguins have been thin on the ground this season, but we did have two nice instances that nearly everyone was able to see.  One day a penguin walked all around town, pausing at the McMurdo sign and to stare at the Coffee House.  Another day, a little guy got it in his head to waddle uphill and take a nap about 100 feet above the beach.  Word spread that he was hanging out, so I approached -- cautiously, of course, not to disturb it -- and got within about ten feet.  He rested his eyes and occasionally squawked and preened.

The ice has cleared out a few more miles into the sound, and is seething with steam in the colder mornings, as well as today.  There's a section of beach, where the waves roll the rocks up and down and you can see a marked variance with the tides.  The waves have washed the remaining ice on shore into a slick slab.

There were a slew of last events, bands performing, goodbye parties, and even my terrible company paid for some decent beers for us to all bond over.  In gloopy food news, I made some sloppy Terrence, with textured vegetable protein instead of beef; also, we may have stumbled across the secret formula for Velveeta in our attempt to make nacho cheese from american slices and dehydrated milk.  Once it cools it becomes a perfect colloid, moldable yet yielding.  And unfortunately also gloopy, cases upon cases of red onions must have frozen and thawed and then molded before they got to us, which called for the removal of foul squishy layers to retrieve the still-edible nuggets within.

I may have mentioned this before, but there's a dining attendant friend who makes stunning illustrations for our bulletin board.  Every morning when I'm sandy-eyed and bilious, I perk up a little as I walk up to his daily creation.  This is just one of many fantastic pictures:

Banana Boat

The blush is back on our cheeks.  Bananas at breakfast, apples at lunch, lemon and parsley on our calamari, and virtually unlimited root vegetables around the clock -- we got freshies on the boat AND the plane.  And our hands are sore because we once more have to cut things with dull, dull knives.  To be fair, there are sharpeners, and I mostly cut meat from a bag, but still, after months of ripping open plastic bags of frozen diced onions, it's a little bewildering to have cases and cases of moldy onions that require thought to process into food.  And why do we peel carrots, wasting precious nutrient-rich skins?  Mom, you need to impress upon the NSF the importance of eating whole vegetables.

The supply vessel has departed, and the bottled-up (wait for it) tension of nearly two weeks without alcohol sales has finally been released like the pleasant uncorking of champagne (ba-dum-chh).  Here's what most of a year's supply of science equipment, vehicles, food, and other stuff looks like (can't get enough of those power lines):

And...it's hard to remember exactly what filled this week.  I watched some "Futurama" and scored a November "New Yorker" from a friend.  A lot of people are starting to count down the days left, because even when you like a place it can get grueling doing similar stuff six days a week.  I have achieved a certain level of stasis and am anxious about the tumult of leaving and travel and another distant job.  I really like New Zealand and seeing new places and cooking for myself and sleeping in; but it's also been nice to have some routine, some degree of fulfilled expectation -- even when that expectation is that you will be tired and your boss will do something really stupid.  So, as dad said the other day, I will try to soak it all in for the next few weeks, and get a good dose of life at McMurdo.