Thursday, November 21, 2013

Gotta Travel On

Well, it's been four and half years, and it's time to leave this beautiful and warm (except for the weather) little pocket that has been my college experience. Not quite graduated yet, but graduating the location, if that's a thing that can happen.








This is pretty much how I feel about leaving, minus the part about missing all the wonderful people of COA:

Done laid around, done stayed around
This old town too long
Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on
Done laid around, done stayed around
This old town too long
And it seems like I've got to travel on
And it seems like I've got to travel on.


This song always seems to fit the occasion of leaving and moving on, and I've been humming it all week. This is just to say that I have no idea what I'll be up to next, all I know is that I've got the travel bug, as always, and I've got to travel on. Coming up next: probably some nostalgia posts about the good ol' days, as I sift through a lot of old pictures.



Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Post Office Obsession

I heard the worst commercial recently. It advertised a website called stamps.com. 
Avoid a time-consuming trip to the post office by purchasing and printing stamps online!

It even kind of rhymes. Barf.

I can see how some people would benefit from this-- post office hours are not conducive to folks who work from 8 am to 4 pm, and sometimes there are lines.

But...

What about the JOYS of walking into a bright post office?? You go up to the counter, and peek behind the scenes at the buckets of mail ready for sorting and delivery. You get to choose what unique varieties of stamps to buy. Sometimes there is candy. You get those wax paper bags with the USPS logo, full of stamps... ahhhhh, what could be better?

I have recently started a project of post offices, where I will attempt to visit and send mail from as many post offices as possible. This idea came to me when I laid eyes upon Wisconsin's Northernmost Post Office in Cornucopia. How cool is that?? So I took a picture and sent a postcard, and now I am hooked. Who knows what other unique post offices are out there? I must find them! I must send more mail! I am on a mission!
A very important one, duh.


This post is dedicated to Addie, because I sent her a postcard from Cornucopia.

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Stinky GiggleChunks

I think most children went through a Captain Underpants phase, but my childhood was perhaps an extreme case. The obsession with these cartoon books and the related hilarity in everything having to do with toilets probably is why I am the way I am today (Queen of Poop, that is). My family even put a tiny toilet on every birthday cake for years.
















For Christmas every year, my brother and I get presents from Captain Underpants. But Captain Underpants' greatest gift by far was the  Professor Poopypants' Name Generator.

All you need to do is take the first letter of a first name, and then the first and last letter of a last name. So for me, the key letters are A, C, and N. You look at the name generator, and then match the letters to  find your new name! Mine is Stinky GiggleChunks. My brother is Crusty BarfBuns. My mother is Stinky BarfBuns. My father is Stinky GiggleChunks (the one flaw with this generator is that you can end up with many people with the same name).

Sometimes when I'm bored I think of random people I know and come up with their Captain Underpants name.
Stop judging me.

So here's a list of some of my friends:

Buttercup BananaBuns
Fluffy HampsterButt
Snotty RhinoSniffer
Poopsie BubbleFanny
Lumpy WaffleChunks
Lumpy ToiletSquirt
Zippy LizardBuns

Now you try!
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~introcs/F2K/lectures/PoopyPants/index.html

Friday, November 1, 2013

Dear Diary

I have kept a journal for years, usually full of mundane day-to-day things, but if I don't write it down or take a picture then I don't remember it.

Today I was typing out my journal entries from my summer course, and thought that I might as well share them, since they're all nice and typed out. And also, dear readers, this is your one chance to read pieces of my diary, because I am usually too ashamed to let anyone know about all the boring things that I write about.

Here are some clips and corresponding pics from August in the Apostle Islands!


8/17/2013
Camping on Stockton Island tonight, after a day of paddling and sailing. We woke up at 5 am as per usual and dragged out stuff to the beach and had breakfast and paddled to from 8 to 9:30 ish when we started to sail, which was way better for my seasickness. Paddled the last stretch and had a relaxing camp set up and lunch and swim and rest before hiking to the quarry. The only problem is the mosquitos, and also that there is not much time to do the immense loads of reading.

Here we are, sailing!

On the beach at Stockton

8/18/2013
So very buggy. It’s fun to have a home campsite- no lugging huge food bags. Today we had a sleepy morning- slept until 5:40 then ate breakfast then slept again instead of reading. We went to Presque Isle VC and talked with Ranger Dan, then got lunch on Julian Bay and had two hours of free wander time. I had a lovely stroll along Anderson Point Trail, stopping along the shore to take selfies and enjoy the rocks and sun.


Ranger Dan!

Yup, selfies. Lots.

8/20/2013
Heat Advisory Day! Up early as usual, but with a purpose- a 7.5 mile paddle to Manitou Island. I wasn’t feeling so great on the ride over, but was good as soon as we got there. Stared at a tadpole pool for a super long time, then got a tour of the fishing camp from Denise, and I became a Junior Ranger. Then we hiked to some old growth Hemlock and back, lunched at the boats and pushed off for a choppy but enjoyable paddle back to Stockton, where I sprawled on the beach for a while.


My beloved tadpole pond.

Ranger Denise telling us about the fishing nets.

8/25/3013
Paddled from Basswood to Oak, on choppy water but with a tailwind. We stopped by a shipwreck, but only Travis and Elizabeth scoped it out. I was creeped out enough by just floating on top of it. Now we are set up in a beautiful campsite, and have to come up with our full presentation and do a rough run-through.


A calm, innocent, Lake Superior.

View from the campsite on Oak Island.
 8/28/2013
Haven’t written in a while, but we’re leaving the camping life today, heading to the city life... Ashland. I’m excited to get back, get my phone, really sit down and figure out my program. I just showered so I don’t really have to worry about that. We packed up at Wilderness Inquiry, listened to Travis’s talk, played frisbee, took a group pic. Yesterday was our last day of paddling, and we left Oak and I sterned to Raspberry. We hiked to the lighthouse, and listening to an amazing interpretive tour by Ranger Jim, that basically exemplified all of the good things that we’ve been learning about interpretation-- he even sang us a lighthouse song. Then the fog was rolling in so we just paddled to Sand Bay, had a nice time in our boat-- good convo, scenery, got to jump in and plank the boat, good stuff. We unloaded at the beach and lugged it to the campsite, the set up camp and started hauling gravel for our service project.


The paddle to Raspberry

Ranger Jim after singing his lighthouse song

The last stretch of our trip-- canoe lyfe.

Us!





Tuesday, September 24, 2013

The National Park Conundrum

Previously on this blog, I made a pact with myself to check some must-do activities off my Mount Desert Island bucket list. I still have a long ways to go, but last week on my birthday I hiked up Cadillac! Well okay, full disclosure, I didn't hike up on a trail. I "hiked" up the road so that I could then bike down the road and have SO MUCH FUN.



















The walk up wasn't as long as expected. It was a brilliantly sunny day, so I had great views the entire way up. However, the part of the walk that I forgot to think about was the tour bus part. It must have been a cruise ship day (you can see one hiding behind Bar Island in the above picture, and one behind the car), where hundred of tourists get dumped in Bar Harbor and are then bussed around on a lightning tour of Acadia. As I heard a person sarcastically say once, "Hurry, hurry! Get through the national park!!" What I'm getting at is that I spent my walk up the mountain (which is the tallest point on the eastern seaboard, host of the first sunrise in the United States) sharing air with the fumes of enormous busses and trollies, RV's and sports cars.


Now, I have always defended the accessibility of Cadillac Mountain to my peers during discussion of the use of public lands and national parks. I like the idea of sacrifice areas-- places in scenic areas that are managed for enormous usage and thus have handrails, pavement, bathrooms, and gift shops built in to accommodate the throngs. If there is one sacrifice area, that means that the rest of the park is more or less that wonderful wild and scenic area that people such as myself seek in their visit. Take the Grand Canyon, for example. Two percent of Grand Canyon National Park is made up of paved walkways, concession stands, and sturdy overlooks with guardrails. That leaves the other 98% of the park open to those who want a solitary wilderness experience. Sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.






The park service was created to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations." The mission contradicts itself-- how can we preserve an area for the future while enjoying it at the same time? One answer is setting aside a mountain such as Cadillac as the space that gets trampled and overused. This way, visitors enjoy its spectacular vistas in the present, and the rest of the park stays preserved for the future visitors.

Edward Abbey, one of my favorite authors, would disagree with me on the topic of sacrifice areas. He advocated for the abolishment of automobiles in parks altogether, writing: "
...In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe. Probably not."
Anyway, this is all to say that walking my bike up Cadillac made me stop and think more about how Ed Abbey was onto something with his views on parks. Many visitors do not get out of their cars to truly experience parks like Acadia. We've made it completely accessible by car, and so it stays that way and so it's harder for visitors to see the other option. To quote Ed again (as I could forever and ever, it was tough to not quote the whole chapter on parks),
"A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, and enjoy more in one mile than motorized tourists can in a hundred miles."
Oh and here's a selfie of me on my bike in a park, definitely enjoying my trip down more than those cars.















I've always thought it was important that people who drive through parks were at least seeing the beauty and appreciating it, and that view would at least make some impression on them and that they would then be inspired to make other choices in their lives that help natural places in the long run. But now, after seeing the same cars pass me on the way back down Cadillac mere minutes after I had seen them go up,  I was saddened. It felt like an insult to the mountain, as if it was only worth a few minutes of time on a packed day of activities.

Ok fine I need to quote Ed again, as he articulates things way better than I ever could:
"Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robber and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while."
This post is just the tip of the iceberg of an attempt to write my thoughts on this subject. Food for thought, anyhow. If you got this far in the blog post (longest one ever, oops), I highly recommend reading Desert Solitaire to get that Ed Abbey perspective on public lands. Ideally it should be read on slickrock under a starry Utah sky, but take what you can get.


"Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all." -Guess who

Friday, September 6, 2013

Canoeing the Apostle Islands

Apparently due to my Jewish upbringing, I never learned that to say the word 'Apostle', you do not accentuate the T. Unfortunately, this was not brought to my attention until after we were done with our 12-day canoe trip through these islands, but whatcha gonna do. The islands were named so because it was thought that there were at least twelve of them, like the twelve apostles (I had heard of them, pronunciation aside). Turns out there are actually 21 islands included in the National Lakeshore. Off the top of my head, they are named: Long, Rocky, Outer, Cat, Bear, Hermit, Stockton, Oak, Raspberry, Sand, Basswood, South Twin, North Twin, Devil's, Manitou... sadly there is not a good mnemonic device for remembering them... so that's all I got for now.



My favorite thing that I learned about the flora and fauna of the islands regards the black bear populations. A couple of the islands are the most densely populated black bear regions in the country, because their area is just tiny and they have a lot of bears. For example, Stockton Island used to be the most densely populated, but then two bears swam to Oak Island and the title shifted accordingly. Funny, huh?

Good place for a swim, eh?


But way more exciting than bears... wait for it... AMPHIBIANS!!!!
Of the six species of frogs and toads in the Apostles, I saw all of them. And tried to hold as many of them as I could. Cynthia and I have often talked about how we have an amphibian catching problem. No matter how many times we have caught a dusky salamander in the stream, we HAVE to catch one if we see it. Even though we know exactly how it will feel, and even though we know it's not really good for them to be handled. It's slightly problematic, but as problems go, I think it's an ok problem to have. Plus they are sooooo cuuute!




Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Lunch Cake

 It's not summer if there's no Cake For Lunch. This summer was a particularly momentous lunch cake event, because the camper whose project the Cake For Lunch song originated from was on staff! Any excuse to make cake is a legitimate one, but that one really took the cake! Ha!
So but anyway, here are some pictures of cake that Emily and I made.



Why make a normal cake if you can make a multicolored cake?

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Monongo

Second session at camp typically means more advanced workshop topics, older campers, ripe wineberries, HEAT, Bastille Day, but perhaps most importantly it means that everyone gets to go on the two-night three-day backpacking trip to Monogahela National Forest! Monongahela, also known by some as Madagga Hills, is likely the 2nd most special place in West Virginia to many of us who go to camp at the Cove.
The trips we lead during second session all have different themes. In past year I led the mellow trips: Lazy Monongo and Vista Monongo, where the point of hiking was not to get somewhere, but to be somewhere (this is a reference for those familiar with the wall of the lodge at camp). This past summer, I took a different path (mostly figuratively)--the Hardcore trip. That is not to say that we weren't going to enjoy BEING places, only that we would hike all day to get to those places.

Here is the group being hardcore. Nevermind the fact that this was taken right after a quick joyous frolic in a field of blueberries.
One integral part of a backpacking trip is coming up with a group count-off so that we don't lose people. Everyone is assigned a letter, and usually it spells something that meshes with the theme of the group. Unless you are the Hardcore group, in which case you will chose something that makes virtually no sense, like C-A-M-E-L-B-A-S-H. Actually, despite it not being a word, our count-off made a lot of sense because it used the first letter of everyone's name.


Here we are at the Canaan Valley Overlook for lunch on the second day. CAMELBASH, indeed!




While some intense thunderstorms threw off the intensity of our trip somewhat, we still managed to see a bunch of the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Here are the highlights:

Camping at O is always lovely. Though thunder kept us from swimming, Lucas managed to build a fire with a lot of wet wood and kindling. And to top it all off, I woke up to a sunny day and the sight of two of the campers walking back to camp with the bear bag of food in hand! The best sight!




Canaan Valley Overlook post-lunch snooze-fest. At one point, Alec was giving the campers a calculus lesson while Maddy and I slept. Lunch at this spot was also amazing. Bagels with cream cheese and pepperoni is delicious, who knew?




Red Creek. Always the tastiest water and the most beautiful sight on a hot day.



Camping at H by Red Creek at the best campsite there. When we arrived, the campsite was taken, so we started setting up camp in the adjacent but dark and enclosed campsite. After we had painstakingly set up the tarp, we realized that the other people had vacated their site and so we nabbed it.



YEAH. Hardcore Madagga! Here we are looking the most hardcore and also the most dirty at the bus on the third day. Weather aside, a trip to Monongahela is always a relieving change of pace from life at camp (especially if that that involves pulling up barberry).





Saturday, July 20, 2013

Barbarians

I've spent the last few weeks in tandem. Part of my time involves living in a beautiful tent on the hillside above the field with a stunning view of Left and Right Ridge out my tent window, while the other part involves killing and poisoning things for a few hours a day. My job description actually says 'Destroyer'-- my duty is to tear out wineberry and barberry bushes. Taylor, my partner in crime, and I spend our days in various locations around the lodge, gloves on hand and loppers close by. We rip out wineberry, stuff our faces with berries, get covered in scratches, attempt to avoid poison ivy, jump in the pond, try to pull out every barberry plant, get more scratches, use loppers to cut down enormous barberry, sometimes dump borax solution on the roots in hopes of poisoning them, jump in the pond again, and take long snack breaks.

Here's a picture of the tent. I like it because I feel like I'm outside (I can see the entire sky), but I also am effectively inside (I have a real bed and mattress and everything!). We even have a guest room! For real.

And that just about sums up this past week! Next up: Monongahela and Cake for Lunch. 

Note to anyone who is reading this:
Sorry I've been failing at blogging. I meant to, I really did, but summertime just zips by with little time for things like computers and witty remarks. Which is why I did not write a long blog post-- taking a break from blogging and school has made me less able to write things coherently. Cheerio!

Friday, June 14, 2013

Dang DC...

I'm only in town for a week, and so I'm trying to make the most of it. I've never done a real 'DC Summer', so on Tuesday I decided to test my luck at getting out and about in the city, instead of just lazing at home.

Tuesday in Bar Harbor means pick-up ultimate frisbee, and by chance it turns out that Tuesday evenings in DC are also frisbee nights on the mall. Lucky day- I was missing it.


















I went down to the mall and joined in on the games for a couple of hours, silently freaking out to myself about how gorgeous the sky swirled around the Washington Monument as dusk fell. I made a pact with myself that I would try my darndest to watch the sunset on the National Mall every night that I was home.

Yesterday I got my chance, armed with a camera this time, in hopes that I could capture the magnificence of the mall in the evening. Let me back up and say that my favorite thing about DC summers are the thunderstorms. I don't get to see many thunderstorms in Maine during the year, and didn't see any while I was in Alaska, so I've been quite happy that there has been some crazy weather every day this week. And it makes for gorgeous sky colors.

So back to yesterday afternoon-- I met up with my friend Rachel from school, right before the wild 3-minute storm hit. One minute all was calm, the next minute saw torrential downpours and tent-ripping gusts of wind. As recent graduates from hippie college, we ran around barefoot eating strawberries and soaked it up!



















We made our way to the mall, lo and behold the sky was indeed incredible! That blue against the capitol building, calm after the storm... can't get enough!
  





































Later on in the evening, I wandered the mall as the sun was setting, true to my self-pact. Here are
some pictures of how pretty DC is. What-a-city!




Monday, June 10, 2013

What's in your backpack?

I thought it could be fun to dump everything out of my all-purpose school backpack and see what I'm really carrying around. I like to be prepared for anything that could happen, and in Maine you never really know what the day could hold weather-wise.


It's funny to see which things come in handy at which times. For example, while in the middle of a conversation about determining personality types, I realized that I had a handout about personality types in my folder... good thing!

I also frequently come across people who need tape or glue. My donut tape dispenser is actually my favorite thing in the world (aside from my now forever-confiscated camping stove, RIP), good for hanging up posters, taping letters, birthday surprises, etc.

The other most useful thing in my backpack of late has been a spare shirt. Rain, sweat, frisbee... so useful. And the INSECT one is particular is good for getting asked many times: "Ummm is there a story behind your shirt or something?"

Ok I know I keep saying this, but I think I'll blog about something interesting that I did soon. Promise. Sumer break!!

Sunday, May 26, 2013

The end is near...

....and so I'm testing out reviving this blog, in hopes that it will keep me more connected with friends who are scattering around the country so soon. Also because lunch cake da best.

Two weeks until graduation is a whole lot scarier than three weeks. Time to cram in all of the things with all of the people we love before we leave the Bar Harbor Bubble. Even though I'll still be around in the fall, I am still feeling the urge to check all of the stuff I've been meaning to do over the past four years off of the list, before the people I entered with are gone (stopping with that thought before I get too nostalgic for the good ol' days).

Here's hoping this blog post will hold me to finishing this bucket list!

Go climbing/bouldering in Acadia
Get a bagel from Agnes herself
Work at an ice cream shop
Play water polo
Sleep out on Sand Beach again
Hike up Cadillac (how I have never done this??)
Go to a work day at Beech Hill Farm
Jump off the rope swing (haven't done this in over a year, egads!)
Bike the park loop road