Irrelevant Cheetah

Aaahh… home again. Land of ice and snow and… volcanic eruptions?

Yes, if you’re carefully watching the news and reading the ticker down at the bottom of the screen, you’re aware of the fact that Mt. Redoubt has erupted six times in the past 24 hours, sending plumes of ash and smoke up to 60,000 feet into the stratosphere, which, according to one vulcanologist, “is about as high as volcanoes go.”

Mt. Redoubt (which, parenthetically speaking, is a rather amusing name) is about 110 miles southwest of Anchorage. This means that if the weather gods frown upon us we could be looking at burial under several inches of ash. Luckily, so far the winds are blowing the ash everywhere except into Anchorage. This is good because Alaskan volcano ash is chock-full of goodies like pumice and bits of volcanic glass, which can play hell with your lungs. It also has the nasty tendency to turn into mud once it hits the wonderfully wet environment of the human lung. This means that first the ash chews up your lungs with tiny bits of glass, and then turns to mud. Outdoor activities are definitely not on the menu.

In an effort to make the best of the situation should the ashfall hit us, I plan to set out several large pans in order to catch as much ash as I can. I shall then bottle it and sell it on eBay as “pure Alaskan volcano ash. You too can own a piece of the interior of the earth! Buy now!” I’m thinking $5 an ounce. Anybody interested?

In other news, the Offspring and I climbed a fairly large mountain in our snowshoes over the weekend. I might post pics later.

In other other news, I’m walking normally again after climbing a fairly large mountain in my snowshoes.

I call them the Clipboard Army. A group of well-meaning, idealistic, annoying students that gather around campus at strategic spots and try to get you to sign stuff on their clipboards.

“Hi there!” she’ll say. “Got a moment to save the whales?”

or

“How’s it going?” he’ll ask, as if he cares. “Can I talk to you about the plight of the North Vietnamese Labradoodle?” And you shake your head and scurry on your way, because although you really do care about the plight of the North Vietnamese Labradoodle, you’ll be damned if you’re going to sign a petition just because some smarmy kid in skinny jeans shoves a clipboard and a three-ring-binder full of factoids and sappy pictures in your face.

And the Army is everywhere. If you need to get from the student union to the library, there are three platoons in your way. Walking from the science building to the bus stop requires a flanking maneuver on your part to avoid them.

I figured out early on that if I wanted to be left alone without having to walk several blocks out of my way, there was a trick. Simply hold your cell phone to your ear and have a discussion as you walk past. It doesn’t matter if there’s anybody on the other end or not. The Army respects the cell phone. It’s a good time to get any talking to yourself out of your system. Go nuts! Yell and scream! Tell the person on the phone that you won’t do it for less than 10 Gs. Express your undying love for fertilizer. Or simply nod and say “uh-huh” a lot, as I do.

Yes, the Army respects the cell phone. But there’s one important thing to remember.

There I was, deep behind enemy lines. The library was in sight, and I had to outmaneuver one more private in an overcoat. The safety was off on his clipboard, and I steeled my eyes and gripped the phone, white-knuckled. It had already gotten me past the “Save the Old Growth Forest” girl. Now it just needed to get me another forty yards and I’d be home free.

I headed for the library, my gait purposeful. I strove to make my eyes go glassy, as I talked to my phone. “Uh-huh,” I nodded. “Yup. I agree.” The private relaxed, respecting the phone, and began to turn away toward another target.

And that’s when it happened:

The phone rang.

Yes, the phone I was currently holding to my face, yakking into like a complete idiot, rang. The newspaper photographer couldn’t wait another thirty seconds to call and ask what sort of photo I wanted with the article that was running the next day.

The private lifted his head and looked straight at me. I swear, he must have smelled prey, and I saw death in his eyes.

There was nothing for it. I squealed like a schoolgirl, jammed the phone in my pocket and broke for the library. I made it, but only by cutting behind a sad-looking goth kid that never knew what hit him. His sacrifice, I am sure, will be remembered.

The moral? Make sure your phone is, at the very least, on vibrate before you try a damn fool stunt like that.

The Wife and I had been quietly not-talking for a minute or so.

“Well, I think I’m going to go,” she said. “You’re just staring at me over the webcam, and it’s kind of disturbing.”

“Really?” I asked. “I thought it was disturbing when I did this.” I bugged out my eyes like a maniacal turkey-herder and stared full into the webcam for ten seconds.

“No, that’s creepy,” she said.

“Hmmm. So there’s a difference?”

“Creepy is when the hair on the back of your neck stands up,” she explained slowly, as if she were trying to describe the workings of a fuel injector to an attention-deficit iguana. “Disturbing is… well, disturbing.” She typed furiously for a moment. “Here’s what I mean.”

My computer beeped at me, informing me of the receipt of two files, creepy.jpg and disturbing.jpg.

creepy

disturbing

“See what I mean?” she asked.

“I think so, but help me out,” I replied. “Let me give you some examples, and you tell me whether they’re creepy or disturbing.”

She looked wary. “Um, okay.”

“Big Bird wearing a latex BDSM outfit?”

“Disturbing.”

“Michael Jackson slathered in green Jell-O?”

“That? That’s suicide fodder. Don’t ever bring that up again.”

So I think I’ve got it. I thought I might direct readers to my earlier post, Bringing Sexy Back, in which I’m not sure if I nudged the line between the two or went way over into Creepy-Land.

That was one of my Dad’s favorite one-liners.

But it’s a good segue into the fact that the Great Experiment is over. Yes, wolf is heading back to Alaska.

It’s not that I don’t like Portland. Portland is awesome on many levels. It’s got culture, and weirdos, and public transportation, and Universities, and civilization. I can walk four blocks and see more cafes and idiotic bike riders than exist in all of Anchorage - or all of Alaska, for that matter.

But there are two things Portland doesn’t have: the Wife, and the Offspring. And no matter how cool it is, without those two things it’s just kind of… meh. I don’t mind admitting the fact that I miss them both. Terribly.

So I’m heading back home. Studies will continue, just using Alaska’s University System rather than Oregon’s. And while it might mean two years in Fairbanks braving minus 60 degree winters, it might also mean a chance to intern with NASA and work on some rovers.

So, all around, I think it’s a good move.

Care to follow along?

Christmas is one of them. December 25th, every year, without fail.

Thanksgiving’s another. Fourth Thursday of November. Every year.

And don’t even mention New Year’s Day. Goes without saying.

I’m speaking, of course, about common holidays. Average, everyday, run-of-the-mill, commonplace holidays. They happen every year. How boring. How common. How trivial.

Today, however, is different.

Today is a holiday that only happens nine times every century. Now that’s special.

The holiday, you ask? Why, it’s Square Root Day! 3/3/09!

(For those of you that are math-challenged, 3 x 3 = 9. So the other days that qualify are 1/1/01, 2/2/04, etc.)

How do we celebrate? I’m not sure. Maybe everyone should hug a nerd.

I’ve always known that I have a slight obsessive-compulsive streak. That, in fact, may be why I do so well in math and science - I intensely dislike inaccuracy and sloppiness.

So now that I’m back in school, those OCD tendencies are beginning to manifest themselves in a rather amusing-yet-disturbing fashion. Namely, on the chalkboard.

Obviously, professors fill up the chalkboard with equations and notes and diagrams and so forth when they lecture. It’s understood. Accepted, even. And students dutifully copy the scribbles and doodles into their notebooks.

At some point in a two-hour lecture, however, there often comes a point where the chalkboard is full. No room for more notes. When that happens, obviously, the professor erases the board and starts clean.

Except he doesn’t always start clean, and this is what drives me batshit. Often he’ll just give the board a cursory wipe, removing the majority of the writing, and then start with the new stuff.

I don’t know what it is, but when the board isn’t erased cleanly, and there are scattered fragments of previous notes and equations and bits of diagrams, it gives me the heebie-jeebies. Enough so that I have to make a conscious effort to ignore them and concentrate on the new stuff. If he erases the board cleanly, I give an almost audible sigh of relief and go forth on my merry way, copying down notes and equations and knowledge.

Incomplete erasing makes me just want to scream “Doesn’t that bother you? How can you leave it like that?”

But I don’t, obviously, and I suffer in silence.

I know, I know. Feel free to disparage me in the comments.