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.