Last Post on Blogger!

Hey everyone, just so you know - I am moving to a new blog. I'm sorry if this is upsetting and understand if you never want to read my new blog. But please do! It can be found at:

http://michellejw.wordpress.com/

I've moved all of my previous blogger posts over to there too, so you can see it all from one place. You'll see that I've already got a few posts up there, and the welcome post is about the fourth down from the top. That's because it took me a long time to decide whether I really wanted to make the move.

** A special sorry to my two known RSS subscribers - you'll have to re-subscribe at the new site.

See you there!

Snow Day tomorrow?

It looks like the 5th storm of the season is going to hit us tomorrow - what is going on?? Last year the snow didn't even stick until January! What is Fredericton going to be like?!? I have an exam tomorrow morning too - seamanship. It will be fun getting into school tomorrow! woo hoo! Poor Trooper has become a bit less fond of the snow, it seems, now that every step he takes off a beaten path involves punching through a layer of frozen crust and sinking in up to his armpits. (legpits?)

Some kind of woodland creature...

We always suspected, but now we know the truth: Trooper is not a dog - he is a rabbit. Trooper-rabbit.

Latke-tastic!

I guess this is a bit of a delayed message, but last Sunday Janice and Yifty hosted a Chanukkah party and invited a bunch of their friends, including several of us CCOMers. It was super-fun, we learned how to play dreidel, and had lots of delicious fried food, yum... They made homemade latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganyot (jelly/chocolate/vanilla filled doughnuts - I probably spelled it wrong...) Even Gracie came - but she didn't eat any of the fried foods. The picture shows some cookies (with sprinkles on top) and also the doughnuts before they were cooked. That's Janice standing behind the table overseeing the food preparation. It was delicious and lots of fun!!

Early morning walk

While Trooper's paw was healing from his injury, John and I felt so bad for him that we let him do whatever he wanted, including sleeping on the bed, getting up on the couch, giving him lots of treats. This has, of course, backfired. Trooper is feeling better already, only two days later, and he now thinks that he is entitled to all of those things, all the time. He jumps on the bed, pulls on the leash, whines endlessly when he can't get what he wants - we've created a monster!

This photo is from our walk this morning in College Woods. It looks so different in there when there's snow on the ground. There were tracks from cross-country skiers - we need to get some skis! But we missed the ski-swap this year AGAIN :( I've been told it took place way back in October.

Operation

Two days ago Trooper broke a toenail on his right front paw. He ended up having to go into doggie surgery yesterday morning. They sedated him and amputated the whole nail - it seems harsh, but they had to do it because it was split all the way up to the base. We don't really know how he did it, but he was running around like a maniac in the snow, and it could have caught on something like the icy crust or a branch that was buried. Well, he's back to his old self again, except that he's extra hyper because we can't let him go outside much to burn off his energy, in case he irritates his paw. I'll try to post a picture of him with his cast on - it was hilarious - a little blue cast.

I'm tired

I think that grad school is slowly killing me. I need to get out! I need to know what it's like to be outside in the daytime, to sleep in past 7am, to stare at a computer screen for less than 14 hours every day. What is that life like? I don't even remember... That's why I need to get graduated and move on out of here.

Right, sorry for all the complaining. But I am sick of trying to wade through 27 gigabytes of acoustic data, only to realise that I didn't calibrate the sound levels for changes in the pre-amp gain settings. Now I have to go back and write it all down by hand, and apply it to the data after the fact... Oh well. Such is life, eh?

Well, I think I'll try posting a video. This on cheers me up, it's starring Trooper, mainly. It was after we'd just played scrabble, and I lost (235 - 240). I have a bad habit of gambling on words that I have never heard of but suspected they might make their way into the scrabble dictionary.

Christmas Plans

Our plans are set, the flights are booked, we've told our families when we're arriving - we're going to both Fredericton, New Brunswick and Durham, North Carolina. I am beyond excited - I cannot wait! Two weeks of family time for the holidays. Trooper dog is coming to Fredericton with us, but we're putting him in boarding while we are in North Carolina - maybe next time we'll attempt to get him on a plane, but for now he'll have to make do at the Barking Dog. It's a very nice place with heated floors and fancy food and daily playtimes with the staff and baths and daycare where they play with other dogs. I doubt he's going to cry himself to sleep at night missing us... The Barking Dog is also where we take him for his obedience classes.

I have planned our vacation so that we are in Fredericton on a Saturday for the Farmer's Market - a crucial requirement for me. I need those veggie samosas and german sausages and breads and the delicious almond chocolate triangles...If you don't know what I'm talking about you can check out this link: Boyce Farmer's Market

Trooper

This is our puppy, the day I brought him out to Fort Foster to help with fieldwork. We spent the day out on the end of the pier with periodic breaks to go for walks on the beach or in the park or trails. When he wasn't sniffing at the people wandering out onto the pier, he spent the afternoon lying out in the warm october sun on a blanket that I'd brought along for him.

Finally, a new blog post...

It's been so long since I've posted anything. I'm pretty sure that no one even checks anymore, assuming of course that people checked it out before. John has been reminding me for weeks to put up a post. So here it is, finally. A lot has happened since my last post (which was on September 3rd by the way) - John returned from Africa mid September, I went to a conference in Vancouver at the end of September, we collected data for my thesis for two weeks in October, and then we got married on November 9th. :)

Durham Landing

Another photo from a morning walk with Trooper. This is overlooking Durham landing from the walking bridge.

Buoy-tastic

Here it is - attempt # 2 to make a weight that is hand-deployable, yet heavy enough to stay in one spot on the bottom. tricky, very tricky. Good thing it doesn't have to be hand-deployable by me. I can hardly lift the frame of this thing, let alone half of 150 pounds. Those gigantor chain links are HEAVY! Luckily, Tom and Ben C. could get it into the water with the help of the pulley on the A-frame - and it seemed to stay in place! Excellent. That was at Adam's Point though, several kilometres upriver from our actual research area. We'll find out soon if it'll hold out in Portsmouth Harbour...And yes, this is about as exciting as it gets for me. In fact, I think that the last post about a bag-o-milk was more interesting.

Bag o' milk

I found this picture online on the first page of a google image search for milk bags (hence the mystery child in the background). This looks like the same kind of milk bag container that we always had at our house, except maybe in a different color. I've posted this basically so that my American friends know what a 'milk bag' is - and because I miss being able to buy milk in a bag.

Doe Farm, by the Lamprey River

I worry too much about this dog - does he look sick to you? Me neither. He looks a little bit crazy actually. He doesn't usually do this, but he had a little spaz attack for no apparent reason.

Lighthouse work

Val and I found ourselves back at the lighthouse again last Thursday and Friday. We complained about being in that dark lighthouse, soldering and splicing, while we could hear people having fun at the beach just a few hundred metres away. But then we figured that if you have to be soldering and splicing, it's better to be doing it with the sea breeze outside the door and waves washing up onto the rocks 10 feet away, rather than in the freezing cold electronics lab at CCOM (and I do mean freezing).



You may notice that there is a GPS (Global Positioning System) antenna mounted under a deck. And we're OK with it! Sure, the positioning will probably be pretty crappy, but we're not using it to find position - an additional signal that comes out of a GPS receiver is a very accurate pulse every second. For GPS to work, very precise timing is required to synchronize the satellite signals and the receivers. This works out for us because we're going to use the clever GPS timing scheme to synchronize the acoustic signals we're sending into the harbour.



Val made me take this picture of a splice we did between the GPS cable and ethernet cable. It's more impressive than it looks. Well, on second thought, it probably isn't.

John in Mozambique

Here's a shot of John sitting with the sonar that they've been working with. They are currently in Maputo, Mozambique. They're doing the survey work for a fiber-optic communications cable. Which, in my opinion, is desperately needed - the internet connection there is terrible. Our Skype calls keep getting cut off! Well, by the time the lightning-fast internet connection arrives, John and the rest of GRS will be long gone... to Tanzania, anyway. He should be back in Durham by early September. This six week trip has transformed into more than 7, and is expected to go on for at least another 2!

Morning walk

Trooper likes to wake me up SUPER early in the morning by chewing a chew toy really close to my head. This is loud and impossible to sleep through. If I open my eyes, or otherwise appear to respond, he licks my face. If I take the toy away, he starts to chew on the comforter or the edge of a pillow. But once I'm up, it's definitely worth it to see the sun coming up over Oyster River.

Congratulations, Luis!!

Luis defended his Master's thesis yesterday morning, and did a great job. He's now just finishing up with the formatting so that he can submit it to the graduate school for binding. His half hour lecture generated some interesting discussion afterwards, including how box cores and different acoustic frequencies might be combined in the future to come up with better estimates of the bottom type for classification. I think everyone hopes that they can deliver their thesis topics so clearly and calmly. Congratulations!

Fieldwork and Trooper

The past week and a half have been pretty crazy. We started testing the pinger positioning last week at Fox Point in Newington. It's a gorgeous spot, and it was nice to work there. On Saturday, Trooper came over to CCOM to help me test the RTK GPS. His job was supervisor, but he spent most of the time chewing on his kong toy.

We finally got the RTK working, it took quite a lot of running around, downloading drivers, picking up forgotten tribrachs and trying to get the laptop to stay alive long enough to set up the receiver. ( we ended up having to use a car battery and an inverter - it worked very well)

The actual survey at Fox Point was very hectic, with the R/V Coastal Surveyor driving back and forth in front of the pier, and Tom measuring sound speed profiles continuously over nearly two hours. Below is a photo of the GPS antenna with the Coastal Surveyor in the background. It was a beautiful day and it only rained a little bit.

Trooper

We were so sad to give up Cayo, but now we've finally found the perfect pup for us. Elisa told us that we should check out labs4rescue.com. She used to foster dogs from there, and said they were a great organization. They are rescue group that takes labs from high-kill shelters in the south and finds good homes for them. We found one called Leo the Lover on their website. His description said that he was friendly to everyone and just loved people, other dogs, and children. We got them to cat-test him - he'd never seen a cat before. He was scared of them!

We ended up changing his name to Trooper - this was a name that Jakob came up with. It's actually Storm Trooper. If you want to see more pictures of Trooper, he's up on my picasa site, the link is at the left side of this page.