If I could have one wish or one invention, it would be Gummi-vites applied to Microsoft Excel. Don't you just hate taking vitamins? Escpecially the ones where you have to chew highly compressed chalk in the shape of cartoon heads? Why is it so hard to be healthy? Why does my mom do this to me? Isn't there another way?!? There is! Let's all take a minute to thank the genius who invented gummi-vites--the candy with nutritional value!
Now let's all take another minute to write the inventor of gummi-vites a letter demanding that they come up with some similar mechanism for eating your excel spreadsheets. I just can't get mine to taste good. But more importantly, I can't get them to do a damn thing I want. Also, I don't know what I want.
Please mail your suggestions to:
Bridget Bradshaw
c/o Friday Harbor Labs
Library, desk by the light with all the dead flies
Friday Harbor, WA
98250
The fact that it would be backwards never occured to me.
This is what I've been working on for the last couple of minutes.
For those of you who enjoy consistent downpour, this is your time to shine! It certainly is a good thing I chose NOT to bring my rainjacket! Because who spends time outside, am I right? So here I am sitting in the lab, mentally prepping myself to go out into the great concrete outdoors and wander into somewhere where the hot chocolate comes with generous amounts of whipped cream.
This is the most recent picture of me I could find.
Also, you know what's funny? I feel like an island person now, even though I'm a mainlander--born and raised. But as I look down on my nasty nasty salt encrusted boots and a pair of pants I found in my room from a couple years ago and the flannel and coat that I've been wearing literally without fail for the last 6 days (that's correct, I wear them in bed and the shower. just kidding! I haven't showered in more than 6 days), I think that I now have more in common with an islander than a mainlander. The city is too big and people wear shorts over tights and shoes that have never seen dirt and aren't wearing 90000 layers. I have a minumum of 3 layers every day when I ride to school in Friday Harbor. I think this is because everything is a short enough walk that you can stay under awnings most of the way to and from school on the ave.
Here are things I am looking forward to when I am back for good:
1. Thai food
Here are things I am not looking forward to when I am back for good:
1. Spending money
2. Going to school (category: real)
3. Having homework and sitting in suzzalo. I need to find somewhere else this year. Too many bad memories.
4. Cars
5. Cement
6. Noise
7. Nights that aren't clear or dark
8. People that are normal (category: annoying)
And in actuality, I am also glad that I have good friends back in Seattle to have dinner parties with and that I can hopefully hang out in the Burke like a little goblin all the time and actually not care about school so that I can make time to bike and run and row and go back to doing things that I can't do when I get too into my own research. In short, it will be nice to take a break from caring so much.
But I will miss boat days. Beats a land day any day.
I've been sitting in lab 5 for about 12 hours now. I have little to show for it--namely a stupid powerpoint and empty bags of tortilla chips, apricots, and chocolates. I think I've gotten 5000 times my daily recommended amount of sodium. I've drunk almost no water and had black black black tea this morning. Yet it is somehow hard for me to motivate myself to ride home through the black black black forest, up the long long long hill to go home. Where I will inject myself with more sodium if I feel up to the task of boiling water. No guarantees. I suppose it would be irresposible of me to sleep in the lab, but I have to be here in 10 hours anyways...so, what's the big deal really?
This is what I'm going to be for Halloween. I gotta figure out how to do it though.
If I had a camera, I would have taken pictures of:
-The strawberry rhubarb pie sack from Sunday.
-The way too sweet beer bread from last night and right now.
-The billions of dinner plate jellyfish (not the actual name of jellyfish) washed up in Griffin Bay. Jellyfish are so weird.
-Velma the cat curled up on my keyboard while I watched the Life Aquatic.
-The Harbor Porpoise dissection this morning.
-The sunrise yesterday.
-The waves we were bobbing around in on the centennial yesterday trying to count birds and mammals.
-The other Bridget. There's two of us.
-The Golden-crowned Sparrow that hit a window at lab 5. I kept it and it is in an inconpicuous bag in the freezer.
-The red fox that sat by our van for awhile and waited for us to feed it. What a sucker.
-Let's be realistic--even when I have a camera, I NEVER take pictures of anything. Except food. Most notably, spilled food.
Anyways, heading home Friday night. I have to load up on extremely warm clothes in preparation for being cold and probably wet for a week on the Thompson. I should also probably go to the doctor.
Yesterday, I did not check my e-mail. I did not use the internet. I sat around all morning, made the pie crust. It made me wish that I had hands like a food processor--fast and deadly sharp. Then I rode my bike up past False Bay and over towards American Camp. I went for a long run through the field down to South Beach and then up the ridge by Jackle's Lagoon. I could see the Olympics outlined in the haze. The water was still. Then I made a strawberry-rhubarb pie that was more like strawberry-rhubarb flavored sugar-soup in a pastry bag.
I woke up sore this morning. So I used this new leg-jiggling strategy that has all the exercise pros a talking amongst themselves:
The weird gross noises that sound like someone hitting a geoduck with a baby are just me laughing.
First things first: I had a dream that I found my phone charger.
Second things second: I've come to the conclusion that to live frugally also means that your life revolves around simplicity and repetition. For example, I have consistently eaten a very smushed and almost unrecognizeable PB&J, along with a bag of goldfish and chocolate truffles for the last three days. For dinner, I've eaten top ramen and yogurt with mango. Turns out I found the can opener but it did NOT open my can of pears. However, upon inspection this morning, I think I may have been trying to open a tin of hot chocolate and was either 1) too blinded by the necessity to look cool while opening the can in front of Winter or 2) actually really blind. It should also be mentioned that Beth and Winter put kimchi into the fried rice they were making. STINKY. Stinky was what it was. Smelled like when you forget to check the mouse traps under your bed. The GOOD news is that I made some small talk with the roommates and got to choose the next record (Bob's Highway 61 Revisited). Then I thought that maybe the time had come to try and loosen the thick film of dirt and sweat encrusting me by putting some water on myself. I forgot a comb. The BAD news is that then I was 100% too shy to go back out and watch Inglorious Bastards with Winter and Beth, and instead opted for going to bed at 9:00, like Scottie.
In the brief and stressfull casual conversation with Beth and Winter, they told me they had just released a Barred Owl from Wolf Hollow that had been rehabilitated. For those of you who don't know (all three of you probably already know) Barred owls (Strix varia) are a controversial inhabitant of the Pacific Northwest. There's been one metric butt ton of arguments about what to do about their interactions with the Northern Spotted Owls (Strix occidentalis caurina). The Northern Spotted Owls began rapidly disappearing as the old growth forest was being cleared from logging during the 40's and 50's. Northern Spotted Owls are small and nest specifically in cavities, platforms, or abandoned nests of other birds. They are very sensitive to disturbances in the environment. Logging being the main industry of the Northwest, communities were violently opposed to the new enforcements being made by the Department of Fish and Wildlife to protect the Spotted Owl habitat. Spotted Owls were killed and hung on telephone poles in defiance of the new regulations.
Barred Owl (Strix varia)
Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis caurina)
In addition to logging, the introduction of the larger, more agressive Barred Owl threatened the Spotted Owl population, directly competing for food and nest sites. It's been sugested multiple times and I think may be practiced in some areas--the culling of Barred Owls in known Spotted Owl territories. It is still debated whether the westward expansion of the Barred Owl was natrual, or whether it was either enabled or executed by man.
Here is a link for more information on the Northern Spotted Owl in the Pacific Northwest.
Right now I'm hunkered down in lab 3 because I can't figure out where ichthyology is supposed to be meeting. Or if it is supposed to be meeting. This mornin' I had some close encounters with the college kind which were, as per usual, lame and made me want to go back under my big warm rock where there's peanut butter and those good trader joe's chocolate truffles.
On the bright side, islands are full of birds! Just full of them! Here is a baby Glaucous-winged gull. The ones here right now are not this cute because they have lost their speckly down and have resorted to following their parents around making soft peeping noises. I saw one try to eat a piece of red algae yesterday.
For those of you who DON'T live in the northwest (not that you will ever read this), I am living on San Juan Island in the San Juan Islands. That's right. I live on the one that the rest of them got NAMED after. The ORIGINAL ONE. It is shaped mostly like a pointy pork chop, or like a elephant seal with a disproportionately fat body and skinny head upside down.
Right now I live in an awesome house with some people named Winter, Beth, and Scottie who are all older and more cool than I am. They listened to Neil Young last night and ate curry and watched a horror movie from what I cold tell as I hid on my bed. I ate chicken flavored top ramen and ate trader joes vanilla yogurt with mango chunks for dessert because I couldn't find the can opener to eat some canned pears. They have 2 cats and a bunny named Roy. The fatter cat--Feldspar, I think? Came and sat on my bed this morning as I got ready to leave. She is the softest thing. Actually the bunny is the softest thing. They have crates and crates of records and all kinds of yummy food and i suspect they cook a lot. Winter is an artist and there's all these awsome paintings/collages on the walls and in crates. Apparently there's an art studio, but I'm not sure where and I'm afraid to use any supplies.
It's sunny outside right now. It's already thursday. I'm tehtered to my computer waiting to hear if I can switch my classes so that I take the Pelacic Ecosystem Appretinceship. I think I might head into town. Fo to ACE harware and look for a doodler that will magically make me be able to plug in my computer back at the house. Maybe I'll swing out to visit my old eagle friends at Hunt's Point. I wonder if they've migrated inland.
If and when I have internet, I will attempt to keep all of you (the one of you) caught up on my fascinating life. I wish I had a camera to document things I see.
I wonder if sometimes I don't intentionally make life harder for myself. For example, why would I start somethin' lame when I already have lots of other lame things to do? What's the point?
Here's the point:
Sometimes it's good to share some important wisdom nuggets that you have accumulated, usually from old people.
Here's a nugget:
"...this much is crystal clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it had lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.
"Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free."
hey, how come everyone has these? i'm going to have one so i don't fall too behind the times. also, if i don't write down what i do, i forget it almost instantly.
to start off, i think i will list some things that i think are good:
1. beets. i used to hate them, but then i saw the light.
2. birds. all of them. and everything about them. even poop.
3. old people. they usually have some good nuggets of wisdom.
4. kids. they say the darndest things.
5. weevils. or tiny elephants, would you were.
6. anything dairy based. i have a newfound fascination with farm animals.
7. binoculars.
8. mechanics. too bad i know nothing about mechanics.
9. the way different things smell. i love a good smell.
here are things that i think are, how you say, not so good things:
1. the way some things smell. some things smell terrible, like usually me and also skunk cabbage.
2. technology and things with too many buttons or one button with lots of functions.
3. grades. school. tests.
4. pants that wear out in one month. ALL PANTS.
5. throwing up. that shit's the WORST.
6. most people. don't be one of those people!
mostly i enjoy things in the natural world, especially if they're BABIES!!!
oh, and i also like penguins. i hugged a whole bunch of these and they did NOT like it. except one: turbo the penguin.
