Moving to Motown

After 19 years of working on the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean coasts, I am about to get orders to a place with no salt water (other than that in our aquarium):  DETROIT, MI.  It will be interesting, challenging and different from everything I have done so far in my career, but I am looking forward to it.  My mother summed it up perfectly, as I could hear her in the background as I broke the news to my dad on the phone, "there's no salt water THERE!"

There will be no federal fisheries for me to enforce, but apparently there will be lots of smuggling problems between the province of Ontario and numerous locations in Michigan.

There will be no marine mammals, polar bears or sea birds to protect from the people, but there could be lots of Asian carp who have worked their way up the Mississippi River and are currently causing trouble in Lake Michigan.

There will also be the all too frequent opportunity to protect the humans from themselves and others as they get into trouble on the water and/or ice.

There will be no yummy Pacific Salmon to catch during my leisure time, but there will be plenty of places where I can explore my new fascination with fly fishing.

There will be no beautiful mountains to admire or snowboard/hike on, but there will be lots of places to snowshoe and cross country ski.

There will be no bears, tsunamis, or avalanches to worry about, and there will be Major League Baseball [and an opportunity to catch the Red Sox and Orioles when they are in town].

There will be lots of new stuff, but the best part is that the most important thing will be the same.  All the people I love best in the world will be going there with me:  Andy, Mittens, Joey, Nacho, Libre, Obi, Nori, Bertie, Pip, Ini, Meanie, Moe, Snuffy, Snails #1-3, and those scary green/red worms inside the live rock.  I am actually not that attached to the red worms, especially, but I hope that they make it safely to our new home in the midwest!

[I wonder if Joey and Mittens (pictured below lounging in the living room, one on the rug from Romania, the other on the soft cotton throw from Mexico) will like being midwestern cats??  They will certainly like being there better than the plane rides to GET there!!]

Land of the unwritten thank you notes

I am very glad to report that the days of January have not yet hit double digits, and I have written my first thank you note of 2010.  I am sorry to report that this is probably the first thank you note that I have written in the last 12 months.  I was trying to tidy up the house before the spousal unit gets back after a long vacation back east, and I came across the box of items that his mom had sent to me because I couldn't* join him on the holiday trip.

* OK, maybe I COULD HAVE gone with him, but since I took two weeks off at Christmas last year, I felt like it was my turn to stay back and run the office while the two bigger cheeses took some well earned leave from their official duties.

I remembered the first time I spent Christmas with his mom, and she had a pen and notepad handy while she opened her gifts, so that she could remember to whom she should write a thank you note.  My mom used to do the same thing with my brother and me when we were  kids, but somehow I grew out of that habit.

I gave the two guys who work for me a modest gift certificate to a local book store for Christmas, and each of them promptly brought in a thank you card.  The one who has kids had them write the message on the inside, which was TOO CUTE.

But it made me think of all the thank you notes I should have written, but didn't, or the ones that I wrote, but never mailed.  [that is the well developed sense of catholic guilt going into overdrive!!]

I can honestly say that I DO remember the person who thought enough of us to provide the gift, when I use items around the house, or my gaze passes them at work in my messy cubicle.  Does that positive energy count more than a card which someone opened, then (I hope) immediately recycled once they shared it with their family, because there really isn't room in anyone's life for boxes of old stored thank you notes?

I guess it would depend on who you talked to, and what else you did after fondly remembering that person, but I am going to count the positive cosmic energy as a virtual thank you card!

Attack of the Spider Protestors!!!

(picture borrowed from http://ukdf.blogspot.com/2008/10/that-camel-spider-urban-mythand-answer.html)

This story is not about camel spiders, but since I have a friend who is about to deploy to Umm Qasr (stay safe Jim!), and I couldn't find any pictures on-line to explain this situation graphically, I decided to share with you these scary, hairy arachnids.  I have no idea what the two pictured above are doing.  You have to read the blog I found the picture in to get more details.  Yikes!

I seem to be in a Seattle mode lately, and this story is one from 1997, when I first returned to Washington State to attend graduate school at the Univ. of Washington's School of Marine Affairs.  While I was looking for a place to live, I stayed with my friend Lynn in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle.  She has going out with a local Seattle-ite (there really aren't too many of these, but lots of pretenders...) named Noel.

It seemed like in the first week or so I was in Seattle, several Greenpeace protesters attached themselves to the Aurora Bridge and rappelled down until they were suspended only a few meters above the water.  They did this to prevent 'wasteful' (their term, not mine) factory trawlers from departing Seattle for the Bering Sea.  They had a net that they attempted to  string from one person to the next, intending to block the entire width of the waterway.

Noel was a former sailor on some of the NOAA ships which travelled to the polar regions, and he had purchased a surplus skiff from NOAA.  He proposed that the 3 of us get underway in his boat and see what was going on.  I rarely turn down a boat ride if the weather is good, so ......

Once we got on scene, I started to have second thoughts.  There was a Seattle PD officer on the north side of the channel, shouting things like, "you are in violation of a U.S. Coast Guard security zone!"  And, "you are subject to arrest for blocking the channel!"  The first statement made my heart skip a beat, as I didn't want to be a Law Enforcement case for my own agency.  The second statement just made me laugh, as the only two vessels in the channel were us (in a ~20 foot small boat) and one guy in a kayak.  If you click on 'the channel' link above, you will see that there is a lot of territory for navigating among the spider protesters.  They were able to turn back two trawlers, then their net malfunctioned, and a third trawler got through.

We talked to a few of the spider people for maybe half an hour, with Mr. SPD yelling at us the entire time.  Since he didn't have a boat, and no Coasties were showing up, I hoped for his sake that he had some throat lozenges in his pocket.  There was a rigid hull inflatable boat at a floating dock on the south side of the channel.  He was the support boat for the 'spiders', throwing food up to them, and presumably receiving bags full of soiled Depends products that they were using to deal with processed foods and liquids.

I admire their dedication to their cause, but apparently it wasn't important or successful enough to record for posterity on their web site.  [Or maybe my searching skills just leave something to be desired.]

Mascot Hockey Memories or (mascots + skates + sticks = trouble)

I was discussing one of my favorite subjects, sports jerseys, with an acquaintance the other day, and I recounted the story of a crazy hockey inter-period mascot game I had seen several years ago.  While I was attending graduate school in Seattle, some friends and I went to see a minor league hockey game on mascot night.  I cannot remember whether we knew the mascots would be playing hockey between periods, but it was so hilarious, it would be worth a $500 R/T plane ticket to Seattle on a key weekend to catch this game in 2010.

All my favorites were there:  Shneedle the Space Needle; the Mariners' Moose;  and the Husky Dawg (of course).  A few were just silly, like a giant blow up owl from Hooters, and another blow up cell phone from AT&T or some other such concern.  Those blow up ones had a hard time moving around on the ice.  My favorite was the poor woman dressed up as the Ivar's clam.  I couldn't find any photographic evidence of the clam's exploits on the ice, but in doing some research I found that Ivar's has some cool old clam mascot TV ads on their web site.

If you check out the link above you will see that the clams have no arms, so you can imagine that made holding a hockey stick somewhat problematic.  I don't think she could see very well thru her costume, and she spent most of the time skating aimlessly around the rink, trying to get out of the way of the more out of control mascots on skates.

If you take the time to look at the youtube link below, you will find that by 2009, they discovered that mascots + skates + sticks = trouble, and they decided that broomball was a safer option.

And no, I do not have, nor do I need, a Seattle Thunderbirds Jersey, however............

Latest mascot hockey at Seattle Thunderbirds game

Aquatic farming - yes or no?

The state of Alaska does not allow fish farming within its waters, but the federal government is advocating fish farming as a possible answer to future food insecurity.  There are different types of fish farming (i.e. not all methods are created equal).  There is the type where you build holding facilities on land and cultivate your critters on shore (tilapia or catfish are two examples), and then there is the method used in the waters of British Columbia and Chile, where they rear salmonids in net pens.  I don't know very much about the on shore methods, but I do know that the offshore rearing has several problems.  First, the fish are so close to each other all the time, that they have to give them lots of antibiotics so that they don't all get sick and cause a mass die off.  Second, salmon are not vegetarians, so they have to be fed other fish to survive.  The amount of fish killed to make a salmon is nearly twice the weight of the actual salmon produced by farming.  Third, all the fish waste and antibiotics get dumped on the bottom right below the net pens, and the pens have to be moved periodically to keep the ocean bottom from becoming unusable.

In warmer climes than here, much bigger fish like tuna are farmed.  This practice is common in Australia, and Japan is also producing thousands of tiny tuna fry in laboratories.  Hawaii has also gotten into the tuna farming business.  In some places they catch wild tuna when they are small, then keep them in pens for a certain amount of time so they can get bigger and more valuable.  I imagine they have the same problem with crowding and die-offs as you would have in salmon pens, but if you only have a quota to catch 10 tons of tuna, but you are able to increase the weight of the surviving fish by 25% while they are in the pens, you can see how valuable this practice might be (especially since certain species of tuna are in dire straits right now).

Back closer to home, Alaska does allow shellfish farming, and there are several enterprises farming oysters that are fairly profitable.  They have to send samples of their product off to labs in Anchorage once a week to ensure that it is not contaminated with Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP) before they are allowed to sell their oysters.  I know that many people think that oysters are just scary snot creatures, and shouldn't be eaten, but I find them delicious (though not in stuffing).

When I was stationed in New Jersey in the mid 1990s, they had these facilities called depuration plants.  When "wild clams" (that's a good name for a band!) were harvested and landed in NJ, they had to spend 3 days in the depuration plant before they could be sold.  That's because bivalves are filter feeders, and they tend to grow REALLY big when they are located near sewage outflow pipes.  They had a nice 3 day spa visit at the depuration plant after they were landed to help flush any nasty stuff out of their systems.

If you are starting to think that Clams Casino isn't so tempting any more, let me try to allay your fears.  If you are not a vegetarian, most of the animals which you consume probably eat something that would make your stomach turn.  I love bacon, but pigs are not the cleanest/healthiest of eaters (probably why they taste so good).  Lots of sea creatures are scavengers (lobsters, crabs and striped bass being among the tastiest that I love to eat).  And I know not too many Americans of my generation have enjoyed the delicacy of turtle soup, but we have two of those funny reptiles that live with us, and if you could see what I do when I observe their eating rituals, you would never want to eat one again.

The tofurky by comparison, has lead a clean life, but I cannot imagine it is as tasty as a Dolly Varden that you have caught yourself and pan fried in a skillet with some rosemary and olive oil.   MMMMmmmmmmmmm.........

Letter to Santa

S

Dear Santa's Helper (a.k.a. Elf Dude),


I decided to write directly to the elf helper here in Juneau,  because I know that Santa is quite busy this time of year, and I don't want to contribute to his Info glut.  I hope that he has a good relational database to see him thru the Christmas season. 

He may also want to think about using caribou rather than just plain old reindeer, since they seem to be bigger and stronger.  Here are some good candidates: 

This last one is from Canada, and looks like he has a bad attitude (like my Towson Catholic sister in law), but the first two are probably nice cooperative Alaskan caribou. 

I realize that spousal unit and I may have to give up our fish when we move, or risk having them perish during the journey.  This is going to be a difficult decision, as it was when we moved to Alaska from Massachusetts.  

However, I would still like to have one of these critters join our little saltwater community for six months.  The fellow in the picture at the top of the blog/letter is probably a pajama cardinalfish, but the spotted ones are nearly as beautiful.  You can find out what their general characteristics are by pasting the link below into your browser (as long as you are not using internet explorer, which will probably explode when you enter this:  tee hee hee 

http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=15+26+85&pcatid=85 

From all reports, they play well with others, and we know a couple right across the pond who might want to adopt our creatures if we are worried that they might not make it safely back to the east coast of the U.S. (or wherever we might end up). 

Ah, here is a pair of a spotted variety called Benggai Cardinalfish.  The ones at the wee fishie shoppe in town just seem to hover in one place.   The first time I became attracted to this species was when I went to see the Jelly exhibit at the Boston Aquarium several years ago.  They had this one aquarium with upside down jellies, who basically sit on the bell shaped part of their body, upside down, and grow algae on their tentacles, which they then eat!  How cool is that?!?  But I digress.  In amongst the self eating farmer jellies were several dozen pajama cardinalfish hiding between the mangrove roots.  If you didn't look at the exhibit for more than 30 seconds, you wouldn't see the fish, because they barely moved at all.  Since their stripes were in the same orientation as the mangrove roots, it was almost like they were hiding in plain sight.

Please let me know if I can be of any assistance in this endeavor.

Your able elfling, 

aquagal

P.S.  I would also be willing to make the dreaded peanut butter cookies if that makes the difference between coal and fish.  Please don't put the fish in my stocking.....

No more Native American code talking

Native American code talkers have been used in foreign wars since the early part of the 20th century to help the armed forces of the United States confound enemy forces from decoding tactical messages. The picture to the left is of Chocktaw code talkers who contributed to the Allied victory in WWI. Navajo code talkers are commonly known to have fulfilled the same role in WWII.

We had a Native American pot luck last week at work, and I wanted to make my favorite Italian American dish, sausage and peppers. I knew this wasn't very Native American, so I asked a Tlingit lady at work if she could translate the name of the dish for me. She didn't speak Tlingit, but she knew someone down at the Bureau of Indian Affairs who might be able to help me. I went down to the 3rd floor of my building and found this woman, who didn't speak Tlingit, but she thought she knew several other people who did. After another 10 minutes of traveling around in cubicle land and asking her co-workers if they could translate something for me, we found one man who could speak Tlingit, but couldn't write it.

Later that day as I drove home, I thought about how the important role which the code talkers had played in past wars would now not be possible. Not simply because the skills weren't available, but because the internet has made information so accessible in the early part of the 21st century, that the valuable skills of the code talkers have become obsolete in less than a century.

I did find some on-line dictionaries for some other Native Alaskan languages, but nothing to help me out with my sausage and pepper translations. Made me think that I should learn one of the languages in my heritage. I think Italian is the one that I will choose. It sounds so beautiful, and it may not be as useful as German, but being a latin language, it will be easier for me than Norwegian.

Ciao!

Loss of Eight Coasties and Two Marines in Mid Air Collision

Yesterday was a fairly somber day at work, punctuated by the occasional visit of the kids from the day care center on the ground floor of our building trick or treating. Everyone was holding their breath and waiting to find out if they knew any of the aircrew involved in the crash off San Clemente Thursday night.

This morning I could tell from one of my friends' comments on Facebook that the names had finally been released to the press. After a few google searches, I found the following press release:

Coast Guard identifies 9 missing in midair crash
By The Associated Press (AP) – 24 minutes ago
The U.S. Coast Guard has identified nine people feared dead at sea following an air collision between a Coast Guard aircraft and a Marine Corps helicopter.
The missing crew members from the Coast Guard C-130 are all stationed in Sacramento, Calif., where their aircraft was based. They are:
_ Lt. Cmdr. Che J. Barnes, 35, Capay, Calif., aircraft commander.
_ Lt. Adam W. Bryant, 28, Crewe, Va., co-pilot.
_ Chief Petty Officer John F. Seidman, 43, Stockton, Calif., flight engineer.
_ Petty Officer 2nd Class Carl P. Grigonis, 35, Mayfield Heights, Ohio, navigator.
_ Petty Officer 2nd Class Monica L. Beacham, 29, Decaturville, Tenn., radio operator.
_ Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason S. Moletzsky, 26, Norristown, Pa., air crew.
_ Petty Officer 3rd Class Danny R. Kreder II, 22, Elm Mott, Texas, drop master.
The missing crew members from the Marine Corps helicopter are:
_ Maj. Samuel Leigh, 35, Kennebec, Maine.
_ 1st Lt. Thomas Claiborne, 26, Douglas, Colo.
Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I didn't know any of the people involved, which somehow gave me a temporary sense of relief. Then reality set in, and I started to think about what their families must be going through right now. They are proud that their loved ones perished in the service of their country, but they are anguished trying to imagine a future without them. My heart goes out to all the families involved.

When I was stationed in Massachusetts, I did two next of kin notifications. The first one I did was to tell the wife a fisherman that our C-130 flight had located the raft which held her husband and his crew. Their ship had gone up in flames, but they were able to get into the life raft in time, and after many hours of searching throughout the night, the C-130 crew located them, and a 110 foot patrol boat would be on scene within the hour. I called her at around 5am in the morning. I am sure that she hadn't slept the whole night. She was crying, I was choked up just trying to get the words out, but at least the outcome was good.

The second time I interacted directly with the family of someone who was missing at sea. I showed up at the house of the family affected, and showed them the charts of where we were looking, and explained all the efforts we were expending to find their loved one. That case did not have a happy ending, as later that day I had to explain that we were suspending the search because we had searched many hours past the predicted survivability of the missing man, given what he was wearing, his height and weight, and the temperature of the water. I kept my composure this time, but I was overwhelmed with sadness at having to break the bad news.

The search continues off California, but I fear that someone will be making those notifications sometime soon.

There's always next year....

Sadly, my Red Sox didn't have the stuff this October to pull out another come from behind win during the playoffs. They played OK, but there were some costly errors and not enough hitting at the right time. So I find myself using the old Cubs phrase, "There's always next year," when referring to the post season of 2009.

Currently, I am watching the Rockies try to come from behind to pull out another win to force the series back to Philly for game 5, but it isn't looking that good for the men from Colorado. One of my Boston friends said that she was going to shift her allegiance to Philly now, which I think is because she got her PhD there. I supposed that is all right, but unless it is one of my favorite teams, I prefer not to see people repeat. I like to spread the wealth around by rooting for the underdog (when my teams have been eliminated).

I guess that's why I like the revenue sharing that the NFL does, rather than the Rich Team, Poor Team method that MLB employs. It just doesn't seem fair that there are more than 2 dozen World Series trophies in that new Yankee Stadium, and other teams haven't even gotten one. All those trophies were earned after 1922, and since the Steinbrenner era, they are financed mostly by television revenues.

Not that I have anything against television, but in baseball the large market teams have such a great advantage over the Milwaukee and Pittsburgh teams, for example, that it doesn't seem right. Not to mention the fact that I cannot see any Red Sox games without paying thru the nose, unless they are broadcast on a national channel. It is just wrong.

How to become a Nobel laureate........

Just so you don't read all the way to the end of this blog and get disappointed, I really don't know how to become a Nobel laureate. Being a graduate of the University of Chicago (UofC), I do know that being associated with that institution at some point of your career, gives you a better chance than your average Jill or Joe to get that cool medal and some cash from those nice folks in Sweden. When you attend a wanna-be Ivy league type school, they tend to grasp at all sorts of obscure facts to make themselves feel better. The one I remember most was the "we have more Nobel laureates than you" expression of superiority. They actually sold t-shirts in the bookstore with all the Nobel laureates associated with the University and the categories for which they won and the years listed.

There was a tall apartment complex (maybe 15 stories, which is tall for Hyde Park) which was called Nobel towers by the locals, because there maybe half a dozen Nobel winners living there. I used to camp outside Saul Bellow's office and sit on the stairway reading one of his books, hoping that I would catch him coming in or out of his office, so I could sheepishly ask him to sign it for me. [He only taught graduate students, and didn't have any office hours posted, strangely enough. Maybe he realized that would make it easier for goofy undergrads like me to stalk him......]

Enrico Fermi won his Nobel in 1938, several years before he began teaching at the UofC, but there is a huge skull/mushroom cloud bronze by my favorite sculptor, Henry Moore, positioned where the squash courts used to be. This was the site of the first nuclear chain reaction, which would not have been possible without Dr. Fermi's work. Whatever your feelings about nuclear energy, you still need to give Dr. Fermi credit for the amazing scientific discovery.

And now the book store can get some new shirts printed with President Obama added to the long list, and those Hyde Parkers can have another statistic to lord over their pals at Harvard and Yale. But seriously, I am happy that the Swedes have seen fit to honor our President with this award. I think he has done a great deal to create a better working relationship with all the rational actors on the world stage. I hope that he continues on in this vein, and is able to make good on most of his significant campaign promises.