As promised:

Photos from Alcatraz! Just as a heads up, they give you a free audio tour, so some of the pictures show people with headphones on. The pictures show Heidi (my field partner), James (her friend from St. Louis), and a very dork-tastic Me.

James and Heidi on the Larkspur Ferry (to San Francisco).

It rained and misted almost all day.

San Quentin: maximum security prison, right here in San Rafael!

....maybe Heidi's future home? No, just kidding.
She's totally straight.

Just in case there weren't tickets left for Alcatraz,
I took a picture from the Larkspur Ferry.

Prisoner intake! (bye Heidi)

James takes a shower. Like, a jailhouse shower.

At a cellular level.
haha.



Heidi examines her future home. I mean, a jail cell.

Recreation yard! Where you can do ... things.



The view from the rec yard - the Golden Gate
bridge is in the background.



I look too happy to be in jail.



Heidi looks a little mad. More appropriate
for her future home... I mean, jail.

View of the city from Alcatraz.

I like that you can see the roads.

Chatting on the phone with one of my jailhouse visitors.

A certain cell block name bears a resemblance
to a certain Chicago street.

I have no clever commentary for this picture.

They paint black where the knives are supposed
to go so it's easy to tell if one is missing.
They went missing anyway.

Guard apartments? I think... I can't really remember.



The windiest road ever... but really far away.
We stumbled upon this view on accident while
walking to Chinatown from the Alcatraz ferry.

Heidi and James on the ferry back to Larkspur
(and the rest of the North Bay).

Angel and... idiot*?

The End.

*He's not really an idiot

I'll try to make this short. (yeah, right)

1. Heidi's friend from St. Louis came to visit this weekend and it rained, a lot, while he was here. Nonetheless, on Saturday we took the ferry into San Francisco and then went to Alcatraz. Pictures to be uploaded soon! It was pretty awesome - the ferry to the park* is expensive, but there's no actual entrance fee for the park. A audio tour is also free, which is totally useful and amazing.

And then we had a delicious lunch in Chinatown. Pictures not coming soon, because I didn't take any.

After spending the day in the rain, we ended up soaked, taking the ferry back to the North Bay.

I HATE THE FERRY. Well, hate might be a strong word. I'm not a big fan of boat rides. If I'm not distracted by conversation and exploration I start to feel queasy. The ride to Alcatraz was really choppy and uncomfortable. We got off and the ramp up to the ground was really shaky too. After finally reaching solid ground I had to hang on to Heidi for a bit to regain my stomach.

2. Yesterday and today (and tomorrow) we worked on this new restoration site on the golf course. It's along the creek and the golfers have to hit their ball OVER the creek - meaning, while we're working there, that we have to hope and pray they don't hit us. Actually we wear hard hats, start early in the morning, and when we see a golfer get ready to t-off at that spot we go a little downstream in the healthy riparian zone (ie, tall plants, willows, trees, etc).

We're planting willows, juncus, and hazelnut tomorrow if I can fit them in my car. Essentially we're trying to recreate a riparian zone so the creek doesn't get so skanky there and golfers stop trying to rescue their balls from in the creek. Endangered salmon and threatened trout spawn there, dudes!

Yesterday I managed to smack my hand with a metal mallet once, with a rubber mallet twice, drop the rubber mallet in the creek, slip in the mud, bend a piece of rebar (long metal pole), and cut my hand. K L U T Z.

Today I realized that the smell I always associated with freshwater mussels & sampling with Bob and the Illinois DNR is really just wet neoprene. Wet the day before and not yet dried. IE it's river funk. Ahh waders. (Neoprene is what my waders were made of with the IDNR and what the bootie part of my current waders are made of - if I get a picture of them I'll upload it).

3. Last but certainly not least. My external hard drive died yesterday. All my tv shows, music, photos, and work files. Thankfully, one of SPAWN's volunteer naturalists works for Driver Savers, a data recovery service based in Marin, and will recover my data free of charge - I only need to pay for the medium they put it on (DVDs, a new hard drive, whatever). I think I'll need a new hard drive. Thank god for savings/Goodbye savings (well, not all of it - not delving into car insurance $$ or AZ $$).

4. Finally, I'm importing this blog to both Facebook and LiveJournal (on a separate feed for LiveJournal). So you can read it there if you forget to come over here... in fact, maybe you're reading it over there right now...

Photos soon, I promise.

*National Park, mind you.

Obama '08!

Those are Barack Obama '08 stickers that I've circled on that car. I actually followed him a little out of my way in order to get this picture with my camera phone. Of course, that would explain the size and quality of the picture.

I want those stickers.

some photos

From the Marin Headlands. It looks so much bigger when you're there.

Heidi and I got a little goofy after an hour and a half of teaching
1st and 2nd graders the water cycle.

We lost.

How sad is that? The Chicago Bears lost the super bowl today.

Heidi and I had a superbowl party at her place. About an hour before I was supposed to get to her place, she texted me to let me know she was at urgent care because of an allergic reaction to something. Shit, yo. Talk about awful - she just got over a steroid run due to a crazy allergy attack (BTW, the kitten in the house I live with just had a problem getting up a table and it was really funny), ANYWAY. When I got to Heidi's, she still wasn't back. Her roommate let me in.

Shit, yo. (can you tell that's the theme? and that's the "funny/hip" phrase I'm all about currently?)

Shortly after calling her, her roommate left and two of my friends arrived. Not really early, except for the Heidi-missing factor... and if they hadn't arrived then and kept me company while I made food in an apartment I'd never been in (her roommate also left, by the way), I probably would've been freaking out a little bit. As it was, I was totally high on the holy shit i'm a hostess in another person's house thing and it was stressing me out but less than it could've.

Heidi didn't actually get back until after the game started and everyone who was going to arrive had arrived. Then we made beer brats, and they were awesome. And then the Bears lost, and it was not so awesome. I mean, shit, yo.

California is so much warmer than Illinois

I like jobs where we get to go to National Parks for work. Thursday we went to Muir Woods (old growth redwoods) to check out their native plant nursery, on which we're modeling our own. We drove back over Mt. Tamalpais (the North side marks our watershed's boundary), which is pretty high. We got to stop and check out the view before the sun went down, and spot a bobcat. The view was so beautiful: the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco, the lights from the east bay, and even the Golden Gate bridge peaking out from behind a hill.

I went into San Francisco Friday to see Of Montreal - it's really not that far from me, as long as the traffic is light. I left my friend's at 2:25 AM and got $8 of gas, got home, brushed my teeth, took out my contacts, and was in bed by 3:28 AM. So I shouldn't be so "ughh.... don't want to go so far..." because it's not that far. The only killer part is the $5 toll southbound on the Golden Gate. Parking is also killer, being my archnemesis, but I lucked out Friday night. I spent 30 minutes searching, gave up and parked in a hotel garage, but the attendant wasn't around when I left and the gate was open. So I just kept going.

Today I went to the Marin headlands. Remember that hill the Golden Gate bridge was peaking
out from? Right, that's it. I saw the postcard image of SF and the Golden Gate. It was pretty goddamned gorgeous.

I felt like such a wimp when I complained about the wind and had to add a sweatshirt. I talked to my mom this morning and their furnace can't even keep up with the cold from the wind there.

MLK Jr and Ed Training

So the service day and ed training are done. Hooray.

For our service day on MLK, Jr. day, we learned about Tsunamis, and then we were split into teams of 3-5 and sent to local towns where we would canvas, giving people information about what to do, how to know if you're in danger (natural warnings rather than official warnings), and where they should go in their community.

I was in a little town called King Salmon, essentially a large trailer park.

Definitely going to be underwater in a Tsunami.
You can see it cause I circled it with red.

The tsunami danger reminded me of tornadoes in the midwest. The warning to watch elevation, the sirens (which either don't exist, don't work, or don't carry far enough in the North Coast area...). The main difference was that everyone in the midwest knows what to do if a tornado is on it's way. Basement, low point, not by a tree. The sirens are used, tested regularly, and acknowledged (unless you're in the middle of nowhere). Not so much for tsunamis.

WSP member Tambra pushing her independent service project at
King Salmon's Tsunami information station

Thus the event, while being in its first year and thus poorly organized (not enough sandwiches for people, no organized rides to the communities-to-be-canvassed), was still clearly helpful for a number of community members. A lot of people knew where to go, but not necessarily the natural warning signs. And of course a lot of people knew what to look for or feel, but didn't know where to go.

------------------------------

The education training was alright. We went through a lot of stuff that was redundant, considering the number of field trips Heidi and I have done at SPAWN. But we also learned a lot of new games to play and useful tips on classroom management, we dissected a steelhead trout, and went through what is required to complete our "Real Science" portion of the AmeriCorps WSP.

One of the new games is a salmon pageant. I was a shimmery, shiny smolt.
Jacob is a spawner (adult coming back to spawn)

Another new activity is fish printing - using plastic fish molds,
painting them, and then pressing them to paper. Yay a fish.


Are you ready steelhead? It's going to hurt.


I told you so.


Fish organs. Tasty. Or not so much.

We also met the new January hires (there's an October hire period and a January hire period in the WSP), one who is from Champaign-Urbana and went to Parkland. Yay chambananites.

We played catchphrase and drank cheap beer.

It was colder up there, and I spotted some snow on the drive back! Driving along hwy 101, Heidi slowed and I rolled the window down and took a couple pictures. Kristin laughed. One of the pictures showed up.

SNOW! Or possibly ice/frost that never melted if it's always in the shade.
I'd like to believe it's snow.

You can kind of see the white ahead along the road...
another small patch of snow. /frost. Didn't turn out so well.


I like this town's sign. It's a fairly large town along hwy 101.

While we did have to buy our dinners while we were up there, we got to claim them as expenses. Of course we won't see that money for many, many months. I did finally receive my physical reimbursement ($70.15!) from September. I think I may have been the first person to receive it!! Yay money.

-------------------------------

Talking to Kristin, who is the AmeriCorps WSP at Institute for Fisheries Resources, made me really curious in possibly serving a second year, specifically at her site. The position at IFR is all policy, so no field work and little outreach. I would really like to know more and experience more of the policy side of this whole industry, but I'm not sure I'd want to spend an entire 11 months away from field work and outreach. Currently I feel like I learn something new every day or at least reinforce newly acquired knowledge. I have this fear that I'd forget all this new knowledge.

Whatever, it's a long ways away before I need to start worrying about applying for another job.

real quick....

It frustrates me that I can't reply directly to comments, but basically:

Annie, Congratulations! It's good to hear from you.

Rob, No, a Natalie would not fair well against a Bear. No bears around here anymore.

WSP training, post #1

I am in the front, sort of near the middle. These are all the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project interns and staff in our new WSP hoodies. I'll write more about the training and MLK day later, when I don't want to go to bed so badly.

*photo by AmeriCorps WSP

Field Trip!

Well, the Coho Salmon run has ended. We took out 6 school groups this past week from preschool to high school (on probation, failed out of other school type high schoolers) and only 4 groups saw any fish, and most of those groups just saw a sad, wasting away female. Only one group saw her do anything besides swim a little downstream (she muscled her way over some shallow rocks creating this wall of water behind her).

I'm glad it's over. Heidi and I have discovered that any age group can come out for the creekwalks, but the walk's appropriateness is entirely dependent on the teacher's control of their students and the students' respect for others.

With the end of the Coho Salmon run also comes the end of creekwalks. This weekend is the last weekend of volunteer naturalist led creekwalks that SPAWN puts together, and HOORAY. I am so sick of coming to the office and returning a bazillion phone calls saying the exact same thing to every person.

This new week ERA brings me and Heidi first to the Eureka/Fortuna, CA area (where the AmeriCorps WSP home office is) for a MLK Jr Service Day and then Education Training.

Tomorrow is the Service day - we'll canvas the area teaching people about disaster preparedness (i love knocking on unsuspecting people's doors in the middle of the day when they're napping, or reading, or otherwise enjoying their leisurely day off and then telling them all about awful things like tsunamis and earthquakes. yay).

Tuesday and Wednesday is Education Training. AmeriCorps WSP requires that we go into a classroom a set number of times and teach a set curriculum. I'm actually really looking forward to this part. I feel like a lot of salmon related questions I answer I'm not necessarily answering completely correctly - I'm using the background information that I already have and picking up on what others say to draw out answers. So I'm excited to really learn this stuff and become a true salmon expert. At least, I hope to become an expert.

The good news is that AmeriCorps will pay for or provide all of our meals for those days, and reimburse our travel (though the reimbursement for these things takes a long time - I still haven't received reimbursement from my October Training week. I'm not looking forward to spending money I'd rather spend on something else and then not having it back for 4 or 5 months).

I'll bring my camera. And I *might* take pictures.

In other news...

I'm going to visit Kerry in Phoenix, AZ, with Vince for CUBS SPRING TRAINING!

From March 1st through March 5th you will find me in the bleachers at miscellaneous spring training parks (mainly HoHoKam park though) throughout the Phoenix area wearing my Cubs hat and hopefully drinking an Old Style.

This coming week of adventures....

We have 5 school groups coming for salmon creekwalks.

5. There also happen to be 5 days in a work week. Which means we have a school group every day this week.

I get exhausted after groups of kids or really any kind of outreach thing - the whole "being on" for a couple hours (keeping relevant conversation, keeping upbeat, happy, knowledgeable...) is mentally tiring. With a group of kids each day (sizes ranging from 8 to 50 + parents) I'm going to be sleeping like a baby every night.

Two of the groups are mixed age, I think. One is kindergarteners, another is at risk high school youth (god this could potentially be awful), and the last I'm not sure - Paola (mentor), set that one up.

-------------(insert image of obnoxious and noisy children)--------------

We had another restoration day this Saturday - about8 or 9 volunteers showed up and we planted nearly 40 trees. All within 2 hours and with only 6 shovels. We had this whole last hour to do more miscellaneous tasks, from cutting back blackberry to removing not invasive non-native plants to collecting alder seed. Things that needed to happen at some point, of course. All this happened with a totally beat up pair of fish in the creek right there. The male's kype (nose-protrusion dealy) was beaten and partially missing. These fish are the swimming dead. Zombie fish, decomposing as they spawn.

The seasons are confused

There are daffodils blooming in Mitch & Julie's backyard.

Disappointing

It didn't snow the entire time I was in Illinois. 9 days of weather pretty similar to what I came from, though less rain I'm sure. I'm disappointed.

No hoodie with a scarf under a peacoat with gloves and a hat. Instead it was run-outside-really-quick-in-your-tee-shirt-and-no-shoes to move the car weather.

Oh well. I shopped on State Street, saw the Marshall Field's/Macy's windows and the Bean, practiced my South Side Chicago accent, and celebrated Kerry's Christmas Eve birthday all the while enjoying family and friends... etc etc. We had a take off of peking duck for Christmas Eve dinner and lasagna for Christmas day dinner. Very a-traditional and very delicious.

It was my last night sleeping with Judy (my parents dog), and she decided to be even more of a bedhog than usual. She comes into the room late, usually when I'm already asleep and last night was no different. In the middle of the night I had this uncomfortable feeling that I couldn't put my legs together. I woke up and discovered Judy curled in a ball between them. She's such a slow and difficult mover when she's half asleep. When I got up to go to the bathroom I discovered she had moved, even though I had just shoved her to the perfect spot, and was now positioned exactly where I wanted to be. Like, the central point. Frustrating things to deal with when you want a living space heater to sleep with you.

On the way here, I had a layover in Denver. Luckily it was the day before the blizzard hit, so I had no problem with it, though apparently Aspen was snowed under as the flights across from me were incredibly delayed. As they boarded, the woman on the loudspeaker said "If the plane can't land, it's coming back" and everyone groaned. I flew into Rockford, amazingly, and ended up in a very small airport very late at night with no one there but the people getting off the plane and the people waiting for them. Seriously, I really don't even remember workers there.

I leave for O'Hare at 5 PM this evening and have a direct flight to Oakland. Which means I'll have a movie on the plane! Lately I've discovered that I get a little motion sickness on planes and I can't read on them. I need the movie to distract me, since my iPod is breaking down and the battery only lasts a couple hours at the most (but I got a new one so this will no longer be a problem after this flight).

ThroatLand Security

I've decided that my hypochondria should have levels like the terror alerts the White House has. Green for everything's fine, I don't think I have a disease or terminal illness; Yellow for maybe have a cold coming or something bigger but nothing terminal or life threatening; Orange for not dying but something's bad; and Red for I have something terminal and awful and debilitating.

Right now I'm at red because I've decided I have throat cancer. Yes, there is a tumor in my throat and I'm probably dying from it. Hopefully soon I will go to the doctor (and they will probably tell me I'm crazy and I just have plaque buildup or something lame), but until then, I will continue to worry.

way too much news

This week was a big mix of coho salmon related fantastic-ness. It was also super busy.

The storm Saturday night brought the flows high enough for the coho salmon to jump up the pools at the Inkwells, which I think I already wrote about.

So anyway, to continue, I suppose, the salmon run is really hot. Heidi and I have been going out a lot this past week to both look at fish and just check out the area and also do some surveying. Tuesday we took a video camera to Roy's Pools (a series of pools built so that spawners could migrate upstream, though it's a migration barrier to smolts migrating back to the ocean) to watch them jumping up the pools.

Unfortunately, by the time we got there in the afternoon they were no longer jumping every minute, but more like every 10-15 minutes. I tried to get a picture with my camera phone, but everytime they'd jump it'd be a surprise and by the time I got over the "HOLY CRAP LOOK AT THAT!!!" moment, the jump would be done. But we did catch at least one fantastic, perfect leap on the video camera.

Marjorie, the law intern, had her last day on Friday. It was sad - so on Tuesday (or possibly Mon or Wed, can't really remember) Heidi and I took her around to see the salmon, and indeed we saw lots. Marjorie works on the Sea Turtle Restoration Project/GotMercury.org project, so she doesn't have these requisite "hey we're gonna check out Lagunitas Creek today" excursions. It's so exciting - these huge fish in these streams! Their behavior is so clear - it's really easy to humanize them and get excited about what they're doing and what their objectives are while you watch them.

We went out later in the week with one of our volunteers (and because we were possibly going to do a CBS interview - didn't happen) and saw a salmon missing it's nose. It had gotten stuck while jumping through the Inkwells (a series of pools at the confluence of Lagunitas and San Geronimo Creeks) and ended up not making it - and staying in the larger creek. And he lost his nose in the process!

So, other office-y news:

Megan, our lead naturalist (who occasionally brings us delicious homemade food ever since she discovered that we were on food stamps) called into a show on NPR and mentioned our creekwalks on Tuesday, so every since then the phone's been ringing off the hooks. Heidi and I come back from outdoor excursions and we have billions of messages. I ended up hooking up with one of the creekwalks today, after our habitat restoration in the morning, because I signed up a friend of mine (yes, I have A friend in San Francisco) and his roommates. It was so packed! And we saw coho and possibly a chum salmon, so it was quite a success.

I need to go to bed:

So this will be short.

The coho salmon are spawning!

Monday Heidi and I took Marjorie (the law intern who is leaving to go back to Wisconsin and her parents while she awaits the bar exam) to an area to see them - we watched males fighting, females building redds (nests), amazing.

Yesterday Heidi and I watched them leap through Roy's Pools (a series of pools that allow the salmon migrate through in high flows and, in lower flows, act as a dam. The dam that was there before was too high for the salmon to get over)!!!

Today Paola took Heidi and I on a spawner survey - so we got decked out in our chest waders and went in the stream, walking upstream (out of the stream as much as possible) in a tiny tiny creek (literally 2-10 ft wide) for 2.5 hours looking for salmon building redds and males hanging around waiting for their gals or fighting with other males.

holidays are coming

so here's my address in case you want to send me a card or a present (gift certificates are nice: walgreens, safeway, target, or just cash):

PO Box 400
Forest Knolls, CA 94933

And you will not get anything in return! Because I'm poor and lazy.

San Francisco

My pet peeve with San Francisco is that there's no highway that runs straight through it. So even though I live about 30-40 minutes from the city, once I cross the Golden Gate Bridge it still takes another 20-30 minutes to get anywhere. Hwy 101 immediately turns into a really heavily lighted road - imagine trying to get from the north side of Chicago to the south side taking Halstead the entire way.

Heidi and I went to the SF Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) yesterday after we had a school group of fifth graders come plant willow in the morning. So yes, we skipped out on work early. Being the first Tuesday of the month, the museum was free (parking, however, was not - $9, yuck).

Even though we only spent an hour and a half or less there (since it took longer to get to the downtown area of SF than we expected - thank you absence of an express route), it was still great to get out and just see something beyond the North Bay. They had some really neat pieces - a room of Paul Klee and some sweet Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Marcel DuChamp pieces. They also had a room dedicated to the art of design. Something I know Jess would like, but something in particular Jason would've loved. They had Charles and Ray Eames furniture, a whole bunch of ESPRIT stuff, including explaining the transition to using more natural and recycled paper (with very high post-consumer %s - since the term "recycled" is sort of a catch-all), as well as typewriters, citrus presses, and a series of concert/show posters done by two design firms (one had done a series for the Pixies reunion tour, and two recent Bowie shows. Recent as in 10 years ago, but not in the 80s. Recent enough).

The museum closed a little early and we just walked a little. It appeared that we were right in the downtown - people were leaving work and businesses were getting to close around 7. Heidi was going to see the Blood Brothers & Trail of Dead show, so she had to wait for a friend arriving via BART (bay area rail transit or something). I, on the other hand, was missing both that show as well as The Faint, which I would have really liked to see, but definitely not alone.

Today we had another school group come, more fifth graders, and we put them to work. Yesterday the group that came got too social and didn't do as much as we would've liked. I realize it's about their experience too, but they can chatter away about video games any other time. So today we really made them work. They took all the redwoods and oaks out of the shade house and organized them by species - a lot of work for Heidi and I, but really quick for 18 kids. Then we split them into 4 groups - 2 planting acorns, 1 propagating snowberries (separating the seeds from the berry) and 1 collecting acorns. A lot of work for Heidi and I done in so much less time - it was great to have them.

Tomorrow is... something. Returning the calls we didn't return today, I suppose. And Friday is another school group - home schoolers that are going to help us plant more willow! We've had these kids before, they're hard workers.

It's not this year, but it's still our creek and a Coho salmon jumping.

FINALLY

I saw my first salmon on Friday! We took the morning at work to go on a hunt where some had reportedly been spotted earlier that week. Paola, Todd, Megan, Heidi and I piled into Megan's car and we were off!

Amidst wet toes (I was wearing sneakers) we hiked along the side of the road and nearer the creek, spotting around 5 Chinook (really big, also known as King) and 2 Coho (smaller, redder, and federally endangered). We watched this massive Chinook building a redd (the nest) - she looked like a shark. She'd flip on her side, showing herself and digging the gravel with her tail and then disappear underwater, until she'd appear again digging. It was amazing.

I can't wait until the run really gets going - I'm afraid I might be in Illinois for most of it though. Hopefully it will wait for my return. (I'll be home Dec. 19th - 28th with sometime spent in Glen Ellyn and Chicago in addition to Paw Paw).