Raccoons

I have lived in urban areas my whole life, and I personally never had to worry about putting out the trash for the trucks to take away.  Either someone else took care of this (thanks, Dad!), or I lived in apartment complexes that would have a giant dumpster into which our trash could disappear, never again to be seen by us.  As a consequence I never fully realized how wily raccoons could be until I got here this summer.  Until today, actually.  My previous two raccoon encounters had been:

1. At the Bursley Hall bus stop freshman year, a bunch of us kiddies were startled to hear some rustling in a nearby trash can.  After some minutes a raccoon popped its head up, climbed out, and slinked away.  To my rather immense relief, the bus arrived shortly after.
2. Outside a branch of the Ann Arbor District Library earlier this spring, the fiancé and I saw a raccoon skulking around the dumpster which, due to the layout of the library's grounds, was relatively close to the sidewalk where we happened to be.  We watched in fascination as it managed to pry open the top and drop inside, after which we heard a bit of a commotion coming from inside the dumpster as I wondered how it would be able to get out.  We didn't stick around to find out exactly how.

This morning I arrived at the library to find two of the trash bins knocked on their sides and spilling their contents.  At first I suspected a raucous party--likely involving copious amounts of alcohol--had occurred last night (hey, you know, I have firsthand experience with going a bit crazy with end-of-semester stress--is it not unreasonable to think this happens to others as well?), but the wonderful people at the admin office immediately knew it was raccoons' work and made a call to the facilities staff to help clean it up.  Sure enough, when I got back to the library a closer inspection revealed paw prints all over the floor behind the reference desk--where I'm sitting right now, though in a chair, not on the floor.

Everything is now cleaned up thanks to one of the TAs and the quick response of the staff here; someone just came by to put signs on the doors exhorting people to please "CLOSE doors when you leave" (there have been multiple raccoon incidents recently); and we are all thankful that the raccoons didn't do anything worse to the collections or facility than going through the trash.  As far as I can determine they didn't help themselves to any books while they were here.

Cute, right?  UNTIL IT GETS INTO YOUR LIBRARY.
(U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

No one ever suspects the Asian librarian.

The fact that I, a relatively small Chinese American librarian, play hockey (in a co-ed league, no less), never fails to elicit reactions of surprise from people I mention this to.  This happened at lunchtime today during a conversation among a group of women talking about their kids playing sports.  It's a fantastic conversation starter because people usually want to know how I got into it, do I like it, what's it like, etc. which I don't mind at all because I usually have very little to say in a given conversation around here and it forces me out of my usual reserve.  Nobody, nobody suspects the unassuming Asian librarian of being the type to get under the other team's skin enough to draw penalties out on the ice.  Excited to play again in the fall!

Fact: Bears eat beets.

A more corroborated fact: Ian Fleming named the secret agent protagonist of his books after the ornithologist James Bond (of Philadelphia!) after seeing a copy of Bond's book Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies in Jamaica.  One of the neat things about working in a library at a biological research station is that the collection is likely to have such a title as this among the "old" books, by which I generally mean the part of the collection assigned Dewey Decimal call numbers rather than Library of Congress call numbers.  So I was able to take a look at this unassuming book that relatively few non-birding people would have ever heard of were it not for this bit of trivia.  Among the herons, macaws, parrots, hummingbirds, and flycatchers (along with the curiously-named "Old Man Bird" native to Jamaica), the book lists "Ivory-billed Woodpecker" as a potential bird one might see in Cuba, but notes that its range was "Formerly widespread" even in 1947.

When trying to find information sources for this entry other than Wikipedia, I found this dandy from the Washington Post in an obituary of 17 February 1989:

PHILADELPHIA--The real James Bond has died peacefully in his bed of unreported causes with never a fear of being blown up, poisoned or tortured by a horde of archvillains who threaten western civilization.

The actual James Bond, unlike his fictional namesake, never toted a gun and never drank a martini that was shaken, not stirred. He spied on birds, not beautiful female enemy agents, for a living.

Interestingly, many of the obituaries seemed to point up the pop culture reference of Bond's life, and only secondarily the fact that he was a renowned ornithologist.

EDIT: It appears that the book Fleming had was not Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1947), but simply Birds of the West Indies (1936).  The Field Guide seems to take material from the 1936 book judging from its copyright dates.  Still a neat little book and honestly, was that quote above not worth finding even this lesser-known James Bond work?

Mackinac Island

Last weekend my parents came for a visit.  We went to Mackinac Island on Saturday which calls for another photo post!

The Arnold Line of ferries has two trips each morning that go under the bridge before heading over to the island.  How awesome is that?  Naturally we took one of those!

Unfortunately there were no cars driving over the grating when the ferry went under the bridge.  Still pretty amazing.

Once we got to Mackinac, we took a carriage tour.  This is Arch Rock along with some stunning waters.

They mean business here.

On the carriage tour we stopped off at the Wings of Mackinac butterfly conservatory.  Definitely an unexpected highlight of the island.

Here's another butterfly.  I took several more photos of butterflies (and one giant moth which was kind of creepy) but these two were the ones that came out best.

We stayed at the Grand Hotel!  Not only that, but our room faced the lake and had a balcony!  (So it was one of the few rooms that you see right above the main entrance.)

The view from the balcony.  Just off the left side of the photo: a wedding featuring 10 bridesmaids and just about the complete opposite of what my wedding will be like.

Being at the Grand Hotel we took advantage of the "world's largest front porch", where instead of reading the book I had bought earlier, I used my phone and the "grandhotel" wireless network to look up the relative sizes of Mackinac Island and the nation of Nauru.  Nauru is a bit more than twice the size of Mackinac but probably gets far fewer tourists.

A view of Round Island at sunset.  That's the old Round Island Light on the right, and the newer Round Island Passage Light on the left.

Woo!

Delicious?  Not so sure about the green, orange, purple, or pink varieties of fudge.  But this particular shop advertised that it had made some Mt. Gay Rum fudge, so of course I had to ask for a sample!  Were it not for the fact that I had bought a half pound of maple walnut earlier, I would have gotten some of the rum walnut.

The fiancé's interest in all things boat-related has influenced me not a little bit.  Here we have one freighter heading west and the other heading east.

Harry Potter

Four years ago tonight I stood on the steps of Caernarfon Castle in north Wales with a group of fellow study abroad students proudly posing with our new copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  We were all bummed to find out that we'd be on a field trip to Wales when the book was released, rather than in Oxford, but an enterprising student on the trip called the only bookstore in Caernarfon and convinced them to open at midnight so long as we could guarantee that at least 25 copies would be sold.  We got our books at the shop and ran to the steps of the castle for a photo op, and only one person (not me) immediately read the ending and called her friends in the States who would otherwise have had to wait another five hours to see how it all turned out.

I had only jumped on the bandwagon that spring, but I read all six of the previous books in a four-month time span--two while I was here at the Bio Station for a spring term class--for the sole purpose of being able to go to a launch party in Oxford (or Wales, as the case turned out to be) when it came out.

I have not seen the movie as of yet.  But it's not like I don't know how everything will turn out...

Weekend adventures, part 2

The weekend's excitement did not end with that trip to Petoskey on Saturday; I also had to drive the fiancé back to the airport on Sunday.  This time there were no weather conditions affecting air travel so his flight departed as scheduled from Chippewa County International Airport.  Driving someone to the airport is usually not that big of a deal, but then one usually doesn't have to drive across the Mackinac Bridge in order to get to said airport.  I had been over the bridge in the past but had never driven across myself.  Thankfully, I don't drive a Yugo, so my car didn't get blown off the bridge even though I drove over the grating in the middle lanes, but when you can still feel the winds buffeting your car it's a bit unnerving when you're 200 feet above a body of water that's almost 300 feet deep.

I told the fiancé to take the photos for this one since I certainly wasn't going to take my hands off the wheel.

Approaching the Bridge from I-75; at this point we'd already  passed the last exit possible in the Lower Peninsula.  The sign on the right says "REDUCE SPEED" but people were still going 70 at this point.

Looking east toward Lake Huron.

Ooh, we're on the Bridge!  So far so good.  But we're really high up and we're not even to the towers...

The car's swerving because I'm driving on the grating and this never happens when I drive over grating on other bridges and it's super windy and it's really far down to the water OMG

I would like it to be known that I drive over bridges with grating every time I visit my parents; it's just that those bridges don't face the wind that the Mackinac Bridge does, so my car doesn't swerve back and forth ordinarily.

Now that I am not, at the moment, driving a car across the Bridge, I can appreciate how much of a feat of engineering it is.

Made it!  And that van there totally makes the photo that much more "Upper Peninsula".

Our destination of the day.  It has flights to and from Detroit, and the security checkpoint doesn't even open until about 45 minutes before takeoff.  Fun fact: the airport used to be Kincheloe Air Force Base with a squadron of B-52s in the '50s and '60s.

On my way back; this time I've got to do it on my own.  Definitely glad I'm in a car and not on a motorcycle like the people in front of me.

The loooong approach from the north side.  Needless to say I couldn't take any more photos after this.  The ride back was only slightly less harrowing than the ride up but I managed to make it despite the car in the right lane deciding not to get out of my blind spot and, therefore, preventing me from changing lanes.

Petoskey

Photo post!

The fiancé came to visit me this weekend after an eventful trip from Washington DC on Friday.  His original flight plan called for a flight from Baltimore to Detroit, to Chippewa County International Airport (south of Sault Ste. Marie).  Storms had apparently rolled through on Friday afternoon and disrupted air travel on the East Coast, causing his flight out of BWI to be delayed for over an hour.  Upon landing in Detroit, he found that his flight up north had been cancelled altogether which did nothing to improve Delta Airlines' image for either of us.  They put him on a late flight to Traverse City which very slightly improved their ratings, but the flight was scheduled to arrive at 11.40 PM and Traverse City is about two hours' drive from the Bio Station.  All told I spent a little over four hours in the car on US-31 late at night, trying to avoid deer in the road for my first visit (albeit brief) to Traverse City, but as you might imagine I have absolutely no regrets about it.

On Saturday we drove a little ways back down US-31 again and visited Petoskey.  I figured I could get another photo post for the blog!

We parked for free near the marina and checked out the boats before walking over to the downtown area.

I'm a fan of the flower photos.

I don't even know what any of these are called.

We got lunch at the American Spoon Cafe which has amazing everything.  I had breakfast for lunch, partly because I wanted to ensure that I got some of American Spoon's delicious sour cherry preserves with the meal.  Before I go home I intend to stop at the American Spoon shop next door to the cafe and make a huge purchase of delectable fruit preserves.  It was a sad, sad day when the American Spoon Cafe in Ann Arbor closed; I couldn't go the Beaner's Coffee (now Biggby) that replaced it for a long time!  (In much the same way I couldn't go to the terrible pizza place that replaced the Tim Hortons at the League on campus, ever.)

We walked around downtown Petoskey after lunch, and made a stop at a gazebo in what I have since learned is Pennsylvania Park.

American Spoon also has delicious gelato which we came back to after checking out various downtown shops.  All available tables and benches being occupied, I had the fiancé hold on to my cup of hazelnut-stracciatella and maple walnut so that I could get a photo.

Some foul fowl, mayhap?

This jetty is near the marina.  The sign says one thing, but the obviously recently-surfaced sidewalk says otherwise.  A short ways down the jetty (behind the sign from this perspective), the groomsmen of a wedding party were taking photos and generally looking classy.  At the far end of the jetty, high school kids were alternately jumping off the jetty (there are ladders built into the retaining walls to get out of the water), smoking cigarettes, and generally just doing things that stereotypical high schoolers are often wont to do.

A view of Little Traverse Bay, looking towards Bay Harbor and the rest of Lake Michigan.

A view of Petoskey from the end of the jetty.

New books

When I lived in the dorms in undergrad there were few things more awesome to get in your mailbox than the slip notifying you that a package had arrived.  Apparently nothing has changed in six years.  I went to check the library's mailbox this afternoon and lo and behold, a package notification!  Not even just one, but two different boxes, one of which was directly addressed to me by name; the other had been addressed to "Library".  It's not even my stuff, and I had been expecting all of the materials to show up, yet the novelty of getting that slip in the mailbox and the anticipation of opening up a box containing new books is still powerful.  It's the small things in life.

Also: bubble wrap.

Free time?!

I'm sure most people, like me, feel as though they have very little in the way of free time at home (or maybe that's just me?); there are always errands to run, groceries to buy, and countless other things to take care of.  This is emphatically not the case here.  All meals are taken care of so in theory I wouldn't need to go grocery shopping; I haven't yet found that I forgot something essential in Ann Arbor; and a lot of things can be taken care of online very quickly.  So what's a person, much less this city girl, to do in her free time here?

• Hike the trails around the station property.  Best to douse oneself in bug spray before going out on the trails at this point in the summer, I've found.
• Attend a square dance (held yesterday evening) for the social, rather than the dancing, aspects of it.
• Attempt to watch the Monegasque princely wedding but be thwarted by the network strength.
• Drive 90 miles round trip to Otsego County Sportsplex in Gaylord, the only rink in the area that has ice in the summer, to go skating and to prevent what few hockey skills I have from deteriorating.
• Read a lot of books.
• Sporcle.
• Plan a wedding from 250 miles away.

If you have other ideas as to what could be done with this abundant free time, I'm all for it.

Photos!

Let's see if my computer can handle video chatting and uploading photos at the same time.

(Note, afterward: Definitely not.)

Obligatory "on the road" photo.  I can't even remember where this was along I-75.

My cabin: a lot better than the student cabins that I remember!

The view from my cabin.  Not too bad, I suppose.

This is along the Grapevine Point trail that starts near the western edge of the main camp.

Some sort of daisy-looking flower.  I have no idea what it actually might be.

Some sort of yellow flower.  I also didn't know my camera was capable of taking photographs like this.

And when I got back to the main part of camp, I saw this little chipmunk, and I have no idea how or why it let me get so close.  Next goal: a photo of a thirteen-lined ground squirrel.

Summer?

I don't think summer actually exists here, but then I haven't been here very long as of yet.  It is currently 56° outside with occasional wind gusts and patches of rain.  Not many are at the library right now.

Instruction

Just had my first instruction session of the summer!  Not a particularly taxing session, mind you, since there were only about 15 people in the class and all I was supposed to do was show students how to get to some databases.  But I still had to take a little time and prepare some material so that at least the names of the databases to use would stick.  That counts, right?  I'm counting it.

Beginnings

Welcome to my corner of the Intertubes. Here you will find a recounting of my adventures as the solo librarian for the University of Michigan Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan (part of that nebulous region of "up north"). In no way, shape, or form is this like anything I have done before.

• Solo librarian? I've always had coworkers I could refer people to.
  
• Eight weeks in a camp? I spent four weeks here in the Spring 2007 semester, but other than that, my existence has always been in some sort of urban setting.
  
• Lots of bugs? Definitely not.

I don't promise good prose or even much excitement here, but once I download the pictures from my camera, perhaps there will be some half decent photographs!