Hiatus

To all: my blog is on hiatus until the next time I leave you all for two years. Or at least until the next time I have something of interest (to me) to report.

Until then,
Katrina

World Domination...Almost

When I was a child, my neighbor Adam and I were fond of board games, almost obsessively so. We spent summer days playing game after game, which taught us valuable life lessons:

Pay Day, a salary budgeting game, with true-to-life financial setbacks such as losing money at the tracks and having to pay taxes on monthly purchases of diamonds. Lesson learned: never declare.

Operation, which teaches children how to get little tiny organs out of an electrically charged man, or, as I like to think of it, early training for getting short pieces of toast out of the toaster. Lesson learned: your hip bone is connected to your leg bone.

Chicken Out, the objective of which is to try to get your chickens across the road without getting creamed by oncoming traffic. Lesson learned: always look both ways and don't draw the wrong card.

Monopoly, which taught me that I never, ever wanted to go to jail in real life because I would lose three turns. Lesson learned: capitalism is great when you’re winning.

I haven't been a game player for quite a few years, in part because you don't get summer vacations when you're 25 years old, and also because when a person my age says "let's play a game," it is often assumed that the game should revolve around beer, and those kinds of games are really no fun at all.

No, I have been mostly board-game-free, until this past week when I found out that game lovers still exist and they exist here, at 9 pm, three nights a week when the island toxic waste cleanup team is in town.

Carcassonne is always our game of choice. This could be because not all of us players are adept at learning the rules to a new game, but it's more likely that we always play Carcassonne because it is The Best Game Ever. It was even Spiel des Jahres in Germany. You can bet your American dollar that Monopoly was never the Spiel des Jahres in Germany, no sir.

It is a tile board game, with the objective of building a city, one tile at a time. Each tile may have a road, a farm, a walled city, or a combination of the above. On each turn, each player draws a tile and lays it down adjacent to another tile already in play. As you build and claim cities, farms, and monasteries, you simultaneously collect points. Am I starting to sound like the type of person who dresses up for medieval fairs and comic book conventions? But wait, wait, the best part of all: the players are called Meeples.

Trust me, Carcassone is great. I never achieved my dreams of being a great conqueror, the leader of an authoritarian regime, or even a decent playground bully. This game makes up for these failures. This game is my chance to achieve supreme domination at least once out of every four games. And with each game I'm learning the valuable lesson that dominating over everyone feels really good.

Simply Poop

I've used all of my powers of restraint; I've fought my strongest inclinations to do otherwise; I've exhibited extreme and total control; I have been holding back, really I have: I have stopped talking about poop.

The topic pervaded every conversation during my time with other volunteers in the Philippines, because if it wasn't the source of all of our problems it was at least a contributing factor. But I knew that American society wouldn't accept me or my casual references to fecal matter, and so, for the past ten weeks, I have painfully kept my talk of worms, parasites, and LBM to a minimum.

After scrutinous research, I've concluded that no day will occur when poop is in vogue as a topic of conversation. This upsets me. I'm like a nicotine addict. Kind of. How can I just quit offensive conversation? I can't, not cold turkey, so I've compromised to drop references to it sporadically and at my own good judgement, and lessening over time.

Good judgement has never really been my strength (think: stayed two years in The Hottest Country On The Planet, then relocated immediately to A Rock Colder Than The Dark Side Of Mercury, which is –346° F for those not in the know), and so I want to make it well known that I spent minutes, minutes, weighing whether or not I would write the following:

Today I collected reindeer poop.

During several debates with myself, I simultaneously won and lost by defending the aforementioned as an appropriate conversation topic because:

a. It is work related
b. It is about reindeer poop, not human poop
c. It is scientific and therefore educational

In any case, I did collect reindeer poop with Karin. She needed to collect fresh samples which will later be analyzed to determine food content of the reindeer herd. I obviously went along so that I could write about it in my blog after weeks of avoiding the "p" and "o" keys.

Like two female Jeremiah Johnsons, Karin and I scouted out the herd by following tracks, guaging the wind, and, finally, aimlessly tramping across the tundra and hoping for good luck, which was ultimately the best tactic.

When we saw the herd of about 350 animals, Karin said we would just walk toward them and after a short while they would run away, spooked by our approach or perhaps our bed hair. We kept walking, walking, walking. Suddenly we were there, within 100 yards of these reindeer, and they just didn't run away. They didn't give us a second thought. My immediate thoughts were: either reindeer have remarkably poor survival instinct or that maybe, just maybe, animals can sense that I wish them no harm. Unlikely the latter, considering the fate of my gerbils way back when.

But there we were, within spitting distance (or, if you will, prime shooting distance) of this huge herd of animals. It was spectacular. I could hear them, I could smell them. I couldn't touch them, but I could touch their poop and I'd say that is pretty darn close.

The thought now occurs to me that I'm above picking up the poop of my fellow man, but there I was playing janitor to a bunch of ruminants. This is the power of nature, people.

Further Proof That I Have More To Learn In Life

Sometimes I can hear it. It's this little bell sound in my head, tling tling tling, which starts to ring every time I am near kids who are about 6 to 12 years old. The bell is always accompanied by this singular thought: I want one of these. Or four.

Is this a maternal clock? Maybe? Am I old enough to have one of those?

I was first stricken with symptoms of child-wanting on the day I moved in with my first host family in Naungan when, after leaving my room unattended for three whole minutes, my 11 and 12 year-old host sisters, their three cousins, and two neighbor children raided my room and found the standard-government-issued condoms in my medical kit. "What are theeeeeeese??" As I was thinking of ways to explain why Americans carried greasy balloons in their luggage, I was simultaneously planning what color I would paint their bedrooms when I took them home with me two years hence.

I used to think that I had a weakness for only Filipino children, because who wouldn't enjoy a fan club of 12 beautiful, doll-eyed followers who laugh at all of her jokes and wash the dishes? But as it turns out, I was wrong; I like all children, not just Filipino ones. All of them. Even naughty ones and bratty ones and ones who cry - though certainly less so. I like them for their humor, for their innocence, for their carefree look at the world, and also for the same reason that I like good apple pie: because they taste good. Har har, that was a joke.

But the part about me liking children, that is not a joke, and that is why the faculty of St. George must have thought I would make a good substitute teacher. Also not a joke. That's right, not only am I seal counter by day, but also Educator of America's Youth.

Okay class, how many syllables are in 'WorstJobEver?"

After playing gym teacher for the middle school students, science teacher/babysitter for the high schoolers, and a mere teacher's aid to the elementary school teacher, it is now obvious to me that the tling tling tling bell in my head was improperly wired. The correct sound should have been more like this: AH-WOOO-GA! AH-WOOOO-GA! Something akin to fire alarms, panic buttons, self-destruct warnings.

In the wake of this substitute teaching experiment – complete with missing children, constant tears, "so-and-so pushed me!", tattle tales, attention deficit disorder, angsty tweens, apathy, resentment toward structure, and, perhaps worst of all, Dora backpacks – I have come to one single conclusion:

Substitute teaching: the best birth control there is.

People Lister

There is an entire subculture of bird enthusiasts who visit birding hot spots of Alaska, including St. Paul and St. George, and with them they bring their birding checklists. With sometimes disturbingly giddy excitement, they check off the birds that they see on their travels one by one. I call it Nature Bingo. Just like Ordinary Bingo, I don’t really get the point.

But a surprising number of people do this, and be ye not fooled: listing is no ordinary scavenger hunt. These Listers are out for a challenge and also bragging rights, and consequently their lists are elaborate creations with columns and categories that make inventorying our old kayak shop seem like child’s play. The bird lists may include common, rare, casual, accidental, and vagrant birds – the latter few being the more exciting find because of their rarity. They may be further complicated by seasons – breeding, wintering, migratory, blah, blah. The listers then walk around, from cliff to cliff or island to island, and check off with enthusiasm when they spot a ne’er before seen on their list. Northern Fulmar, check…Brant, check…Northern Pintail, check…Rock Sandpiper, check…The most dedicated of the bunch might do this several times throughout the year in order to see as much as possible, especially the most rare and obscure birds of all.

The Listers have inspired me to make a list of my own: people I hope to meet. On the list could be ordinary or seasonal type folks, like orchard pickers, groupies, and watch salesmen. Others on the list could be the rarer, or perhaps obscure people I might meet. Think and antique wrench collectors, astronauts, or deep-sea treasure seekers.

I’ve met a fair number of these workers extraordinaire during my month out here, like Doug. Doug’s job is to shoo birds off the St. George runway. He has other work, too, which includes collecting swabs and samples from various bird species for avian flu testing. But never mind all that. In bold letters and all caps at the top of his work description it reads SHOOS BIRDS OFF RUNWAY. If you were a pilot flying on to a small island with about 3 million birds on it, you’d know this profession makes perfect sense.

Doug’s job is just one of many that I never realized existed, or at least never thought much about. Aside from people who are hired to clear runways of birds, there are also people who count seals, who work as “living historians” and pretend to be colonial Americans in North Dakota, who repair escalators, who trap foxes, who design toys for Natural Wonders, who plan corporate parties, and who make neon signs. In my month on this tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea, I’ve met all of these people, and I can’t help but wonder who else I may meet and what interesting things they have done.

Living on an island throws everything and everyone under a sharp eyeglass. It is so easy in the streets of Seattle or the slums of Manila look right through people, to pass them over, to not give them a second thought. But when you live in a place where you see a third of the town on your way to work, where newcomer to the island is known by day’s end, where your neighbor asks you the next day why you shut your lights off so early the night before, you learn a lot more about people as individuals, and the term community takes on a whole new meaning – for better or for worse.

I won’t live on an island forever, I’m sure, and I worry that one day, when I return to city streets, I’ll carry on with my day and forget about the other people around me. But maybe if I were a lister of people I would be more inclined to take chances and talk to individuals that I ordinarily pass by. The stubbornly naïve part of me that remains after my Peace Corps service thinks that if we all looked at the world as though it were an island, if we all took a moment to find out just a bit about our neighbors, then maybe we would all come that much closer to understanding and respecting each other.

Girl who started a silly trend of talking to strangers and subsequently caused restless nights for thousands of mothers, including her own…check.

Some Wildlife Pics

I find myself thinking, "wow, arctic foxes are so cute," right until I sit in their droppings.

There are millions of birds on the cliffs of St. George. That's right, I said millions. I don't know how many people can say they've seen a million living things all at once. Microscopic things don't count. I'll have to add "see a million living things in the same place at the same time" to my list of Things to See Before Dying and then check it off right away. That's what I call an instant sense of accomplishment.

Steller sea lions, for those unaware, are massive. They are the Hummer of cars, the Big Slurp of 7-11 drinks, the Costco-size of pizza. H-U-G-E. The male on the left is what a 1,500 pound animal looks like on camera. In real life, it's so big that you hope you aren't a zookeeper who has to clean up after an animal that size.

There was a customer who used to come into my family's kayak store who had eyebrows kind of like this tufted puffin. I read this fact about them: "when taking food to their young, they usually hold about 10 fish in their mouths while returning to the nest, but they have been observed carrying up to 6o fish in their bills at one time." I wonder if our customer could do that.

Sights on St. George

The Airport: a glorified parking lot.

The St. George shoreline

A day's work: Rachel peeks at Murres to see if they have eggs or chicks.