Alone in Seattle....

It's been quiet in Seattle since Fabien left for Paris and work some six weeks ago... but I thought I'd write a few lines and let you all know what I've been up to on my own... to start with, I moved - I left our little appartment for a nice, big house with a green garden and a flat screen TV in the kitchen... a friend of my professor left for India and vacation - and I got to "house sit" their lovely home. The house included a little white thing called Fluffy - whom I've been taking for a walk every now and then... Fluffy is nice and cute... but a poor substitute for Fabien...

When looking through the photos I've been taking lately, I realize most of them are from the lab... work, work, work... what I've been doing, well hm... in short... we're trying to find out more about how canyons and ridges on the continental slope around Antarctica effect the flow of dense water from the shelf down to the deep basin... In order to do so we decided to build a simple model of the Antarctican slopes... and for a couple of weeks I spent my days with clay and foam building ridges and canyons in different dimensons and sizes... just like Slartbartfast!

I haven't spent all my time in the lab though... I've been kayaking on the lake - seeing lots and lots of beavers, muskrats, herons... I went to the Japanese garden, to Port Townsend and my professors "holyday home", to Hurricane ridge and Dungeness spit... and this I went kayaking in a lake called the Potholes in eastern Washington. Driving there was quite amazing - leaving a rainy Seattle we crossed over the Cascades (a mountain range) and driving on, the trees got fewer and fewer and the ground drier and drier until we drove through a macchia like vegetation... alomost a desert! We had a nice time on the lake, paddling through a maze of small, bush covered islands... until we found one on which we could land and pitch our tents... making dinner as the sun slowly set, listening to a symphony of bird lullabies (and the buzz of thousands and thousands of bugs...) was not bad!

On Thursday evening I head back - flying first home to my parents in Steninge and then on to Bergen and Norway. It's been great here in Seattle - but it's great to go back too...