Flight of Understanding Life to San Diego -

The flight to San Diego started out with a bang. There is a new time limit of having to check in luggage 40 min before the flight and I was there at 38 min and missed the flight, which had changed in July from 30 to 40 minutes, so I had to wait for the next flight 3 hours later. The leg of Anchorage to Seattle during the day was hopefully going to be full of shooting pictures, since I am finally not flying the red eye flight. You usually have to fly in the middle of the night to be able to hook up with flights in the lower 48. I got on the plane and it was booked solid. I had a weird feeling of deva vue and I knew something was about to happen. There was a cute kid in my window seat and he really didn't want to move, so I stayed in the aisle seat. The boy had no hair and was wearing a baseball cap. He looked like he had been through a rough treatment of chemotherapy and was embarrassed. So I started saying how cool it would be for Halloween to be able to paint his head different colors, like purple or glow in the dark green. Maybe even make an outline of his brain on his head, like we do in Neuroscience Potpourri for the kids. He was laughing and took off his hat and wasn't self conscious anymore.

There is nothing like seeing a kid with leukemia laugh. Well, him and I hit it off and he was taking pictures in no time and enjoying the rough bumpy ride. He at first was a little scared when the plane started dropping suddenly, what a feeling in the stomach. I said this is better than any rollercoaster ride, he got the hint and we made a game of it. We were laughing and having a good time, and this let his very tired mom to get some needed rest. Seth just had a few bad days of chemotherapy and was flying down to Seattle for more extensive therapy. His mom was pretty worried and tired from being up with him all night for the last few days. She looked like she needed some rest and Seth had such a good light hearted personality, that I spent most of the trip talking and playing with him. I enjoyed showing him how to draw Rufus, a dog I sketch, but we didn't have any paper, so we used the barf bag. He drew sponge bob on one side of it. We didn't have any crayons and there is a way to change the color to yellow like eating something yellow, but we just couldn't do it. We went on to playing chess on my iBook and then brought out the Pocket PC. He played for hours Jawbreaker MegaShift and beat my pants off in scoring, go figure! It was really was a beautiful moment in time to see him forget for awhile his severe disease and have some fun and laughter.

His mom even got some needed rest. At the end of the flight, his mom thanked me for baby sitting and she had that longing look of trying to absorb every minute of time in his short life. I have been there and I was trying anything I could do to ease her burden. It made my troubles seem a lot less and how far I have come. There is nothing like helping other people and making them laugh. Laughter is the healer of the soul and it is starting to mend mine.

Reflection of the Year

Each year on this special day I look over what I have accomplished and overcome and this has been one of the most eventful years of my life. I have gone through beautiful joy of falling love again to heart wrenching heartache and I would do it again. It is better to keep trying to make your life a better place, than allowing fear and insecurity take a hold of you and not letting you take a chance in life. You need to sort those destructive emotions out and put them in context, then try and see if you can change them into something better. If you don't they can control you until you enjoy them, which I had seen in a good friend from last spring. Life is too short and needs to be enjoyed with laugher, family, and friends. Our current interpretation of time only moves forward each and every second, and will not wait for us.

So for good therapy I joined a softball team this summer. It was the best move I made all year for myself. The team was great! We were there just to have fun and really didn't care about the score. To this day, I do not know how many games we won or lost, because it didn't matter. The friendships that were formed and playing together is what counted. I went from playing pitcher, didn't hit anyone with the ball I think, to playing every position even bench warmer. I didn't care where I played, just to be having a good time with friends is more important.

One of the best things that could happen to my career this year was being invited to an AAAS Gordon Research Conference and present a poster. It was one of the most camaraderie atmosphere I have ever experienced.

The people were warm friendly and above all so helpful. You could ask them anything and if they didn't know something they could point you in the right direction. Oh and I did get in trouble.

I stupidly told people about the first conference I ever went to, Hibernation Cruise from Vancouver to Seward. I duck taped a totem pole to my director's door, so he couldn't get out of the room. Somehow he knew who did it, go figure. Well, at the GRC conference the darn wind up monkey that bangs the drums that told everybody that the discussion was up disappeared. I didn't even wait for them to ask me where it went, they did eventually ask me about the monkey. So, I went and contacted the librarian that was next door, and would talk to the maintenance guys that I saw working that day near the conference room. The maintenance guys had thrown it away in the trashcan. So every time that monkey started playing, I just kept having these thoughts of a monkey in a dumpster, and tried not laugh. We really had a good time and enjoyed working with people in my field of expertise.

Another wonderful thing in the past year I have had good new friends come and go, that really enriched my life. A next door neighbor Veronica Topin, what a crazy Bahamian. She helped pull me out of my heartache and was getting so upset saying, "let it go", that she took an axe to my fat white but.
The three of us, Joann Cooper, Veronica, and I, to this day laugh about that crazy trip to Chitna and Kennicott. It sure was not ever boring, trust me. A cool thing came out of that trip was a good time with friends and a lot of King and Red Salmon (121), but who is counting. I know I will be getting an e-mail about this!

On other cool thing, was going to Key West on a Harley with my friends Audra and Marie with their boyfriends. What a hell of a time. I will follow with all the cool gorey details on subsequent blog entries.

Another cool fun thing was entering the University of Alaska Fairbanks Forestry Sports Festival. I made new friends and had a lot of fun with people who enjoyed the outdoors, even if it was snowing and cold we didn't care. We were a large group of people from UAF and the community participating in multiple forestry competitions.
The axe throwing was the most dangerous and got second place. I didn't hit anything except the target, no bodies were impaled. The single buck saw competition had multiple different type of saws to use and I thought the newest one would work because it was the sharpest. Well, the blade was squirrelly and I was sawing sideways at one point.

It took forever, so the next competition I watch and waited to see what was the best technique to use. Go figure, using brain over brawn. So in the double buck saw competition I watched and found you had to let the saw do the work, also work together with the other person. Well, it paid off to where Megan and I won the Jill & Jill (27 secs) and the Bill and I won the Jack & Jill (15 secs) competition.
There was even log rolling and heavy cheering going on. That log was huge and not symetrical, so it rolled every which way but straight. The coldest event was the log burling in Ballaine Lake. They had to break away the ice to put the log in the lake. I just could not do the Polar Bear Club thing again and didn't enter this competition. Other people had more courage than I did and just got a little wet and ran to the large campfire and steamed to warmth.

Well, I didn't expect it but I won the "Belle of the Woods" award, the women with the most points. My mother a "Southern Bell" is fit to be tied, her daughter ending up to be Queen Lumberjack in Fairbanks. My grandmother and I are still laughing about it. It has been an interesting year and it is not done yet. I am about to go to the Society for Neuroscience Conference in San Diego on Tuesday, if San Diego is not engulfed in flames. The last conference in Cancun had a Hurricane and was canceled and now this one is going up in flames. You would think I would get the hint, but they have not cancelled it yet so I am going into the fire. One thing I would love to have happen is just a little break from bad luck with timing!! Nothing is falling into place, but I would be bored if things were easy.

Perigee Moon Part of Life

I am sitting here writing and turned on Stevie Ray Vaughan's Tin Pan Alley (aka Roughest place in Town) it truly helps me write the feeling I had after seeing the twisted wreckage of a vehicle with blood running down the drivers side door and how much my heart is aching right now only a few days before my birthday on the perigee of the earth's moon.
We were driving on the Libre to Cancun and saw this huge thundercloud. Guess what? We were driving right into it, go figure. There were no places to turn out, being on one of the huge stretches of nowhere land. If we pulled off someone might not be able to see the road and drive right into the back of us. So onward us crazy Alaskans drove into the maul of a gigantic frog croaker (frog killer - Florida southern slang from crazy friend Marie). It started raining very, very hard to where it was just a constant cacophony of sound and then the darkness enveloped us. You couldn't see much of anything other than the faint yellow doted line, hopefully the road. The thunder just rolled and rolled like Stevie Rays guitar solo, you just get swept up into it and float. Like what has happened to me, getting swept up and then left to float. The road was flooding and when we hit huge puddles of H2O, they exploded over the car. It was like on a trail in Alaska down in the Southeast. The huge storm finally abated and we could finally see gray skies no more black ones.

Only a few minutes later did we come up on this awful wrecked and rolled vehicle. We thought it was a truck or suv couldn't really tell, until we drove on the other side of it. I wish I have never looked and yet that human drive can't be stopped and I did. Like me wishing on a falling star of falling in love again. The blood was slowly flowing on the door and dripping onto the ground, like my heart ripped and torn. There was no body in the cab and the guys standing by the vehicle looked very upset. There were other vehicles there and people were helping to clean up the wreckage, so we didn't stop and help. Hopefully the person was still alive and would make it to the hospital in time. It has been like what I have been going through, with my friends being also helpful and supportive, they have really helped me. To me that is part of life, being there for your friends and family. No matter how hard things get there will be people there for you if you let them help.

I had a good person let me talk and let the pain out till 4:00am a week before leaving for Cancun and only a few days after Crusher (18 years of love) died. It allowed me to get ready one of my biggest turning points in my career and kept me sharp during an emergency situation in a foreign country. She really helped me out and to me that is what being a human being is about. Helping others in need and asking for nothing back. I only wish more people in the crazy no time in their lives would stop once in a while do an act of kindness, maybe some of the violence in this world would start abating. I wonder if the world is going through a Perigee Moon of its life.

Mexico Country Side - Taking a Side Street

The country side was full of multiple shades of dark luscious green. There were at least 10 to 12 intricate shades. The leaves were multiple forms from thick cactus spines to huge banana leaves. It was an intricite ecological niche. While I was flying over the landscape something kept bothering me about there was something missing from it.

When I was in the Mayan Archeaological Musuem, the mystery began revealing itself. One of the exhibits was on ecological landscpe and it was then that I noticed that there were no lakes or rivers, blue was missing from the visualization of the actual landscape. The whole Yucatan peninsula is made of limestone, which is just like cottage cheese. The Mayans got their water by aquafers, sink holes, and underground rivers. No wonder their religon has alot of underworld deities, for example the Jaguar the ruler of the Underworld.
The realy interesting feature was the small towns we went through. There were venders on the side streets selling delicious food and handmade items. The pottery was exquisite, with deep colors and very smooth and accented forms. I bought alot of my souveniers from them, because the money was going directly to them and not to a third party.

Road to Chichen Itza

We awoke the next day with a refreshed vigor that you couldn't really explain. Maybe almost like a new awakening or lease on life, from surviving all of the histeria and stress of a catagory 5 Hurricane coming at us. We loaded up the rental car and headed back to Cancun with a stop off at Chichen Itza, but there was one little problem we couldn't read the road signs. Who thunk that! I thought if we got a map from the front desk I could visually from the map see the area's to turn and hopefully the streets had numbers.

Luckly, the streets in downtown were numbered and we chose to go down the old highway instead of the turnpike to see some of the country side and the other side of Mexico. We only got lost once and went down the wrong way on a one way street written in spanish. opps those crazy gringos!! I learned something from working at UPS, it helps to ask for directions, but in English it was intresting. Thank goodness for the visual map of Merida we had. It help break the language barrier us snobby American's have of knowing only one language.