Ranger Mike says Happy Friday!

In this week's installment of "In the Field with Ranger Mike," I get to explore the prairies on San Juan Island and fend off a warren of rabid bunnies. Okay not really, but check it out anyway:

rangermikefriday.blogspot.com

Look, we're famous!

Haha, look, our Warehaüs exhibition made it to the homepage of our school's website. If you can't see the image, just reload your browser and it will cycle through a series of headings.
http://www.art-design.umich.edu/index.php

PPS

I buzzed my hair today. It's summer and it's cheaper.

PS

After a month in storage, I finally brought out my pens, watercolors, and paper. My senior thesis was such an intense and wonderful experience but I needed some time off to reflect and revisit my motivations/inspirations.

There was something weirdly intimidating about putting down my first pen strokes as an adult, as a non-student. Was I suddenly supposed to be able to draw with more confidence now that I had a BFA on my resume? Do I have more to prove with that degree? Or can I make more mistakes and take more private risks now that I'm out of the classroom.

Balancing my work life, personal life, and art-making will probably be negotiated the rest of my life.

What I do know for sure is that the weather is too beautiful here in the summer to stay cooped up in the studio. I may just experience life right now and table the physical art-making for rainy days of winter.

This blog post is about as long as my subject...

Sometimes I wish I had glasses. They would set the tone so nicely while working at the computer or catching up on reading. Even though I don’t have any need for a prescription, I think that glasses would help me focus on my work. Well, they would at least provide the illusion of productivity. As an accessory, glasses have become fashionable and it’s ironic that people who got laser eye surgery are now rushing to get frames for their 20-20 vision.

I think of myself as a voracious reader on Sunday mornings. Nothing makes me happier than plowing through the New York Times each weekend with a drawn-out breakfast and two cups of French pressed coffee. Where and when did this habit evolve?

Partially it’s genetic; my paternal grandfather was a professor at Cornell and would drive long distances to get his NYT fix. Friends and relatives describe him as a scholar and I enjoy following in his footsteps. Since he died when I was very young, continuing his tradition somehow makes me feel closer to someone I never really knew.

Like all behavior, this ritual also has roots in my environment growing up. Taking the time for a healthy breakfast was always expected of my siblings and me. Since my parents would read through the Detroit Free Press in the morning, it seemed natural that I would spread out the comics in front of my Life cereal with frozen blueberries. As I grew older, I transitioned to the front section of current events, but always starting with the comics (it seemed the more positive way to start my day).

I didn’t rebel much as a teenager but did stake out my territory while reading in the morning. I hated being interrupted so much that my family, mom especially, realized that if the newspaper was open, I was unavailable for conversation. With a bit more perspective as an adult, I’ve realized that hiding myself in the newspaper each morning was perhaps a coping mechanism against talking with parents who, having been up for at least an hour and a half, were much more cognitively awake than I was.

My love and loyalty to the New York Times can be traced to my three years living in a co-op during college. Competing against a pop/beer machine in the basement, a wok the size of a flying saucer sled and an endless supply of ice cream sandwiches, I always considered the Times to be the best perk of our house. And as the early bird of the house, I enjoyed the privilege of retrieving the blue plastic bundle each morning and being the first to open its pages. This is such a small thing, but reading through a newspaper that has already been read by 20 other people doesn’t hold the same satisfaction- the pages are never ever so crisply folded into each other (has it become evident that I’m a bit of a perfectionist?).

The Sunday Times is an especially hefty tome that requires at least two hours of attention. My old roommate, Steve, and I were scheduled to cook brunch for 40 people each Sunday, normally an all-morning task. But because we’d rather be reading the Wedding announcements, we found our culinary shortcuts. Did you know you can make scrambled eggs en masse in the oven? The trick is to agitate and stir the mixture around every so often. Otherwise, you run the risk of it turning into an unappetizing gray-green block with the consistency of soft plastic. Steve, it should be mentioned, was a master of cornbread.

During those mornings waiting for everything to finish baking, I developed a specific order for which sections to read:

1. The Week in Review
2. The Sunday Styles
3. Arts and Leisures
4. The New York Times Magazine
5. T: Style Magazine (not a weekly guarantee)
6. Travel
7. The Front Section
Sometimes: The Book Review (a recent because addition because it relies heavily on illustration.)

I rarely ever read Business or Sports. Go figure.

There’s so much more I could go on about my relationship with reading the paper- how it has become a tradition for my sister Amy and I to buy whenever we’re home on a Sunday, how I consider the $5 each Sunday to be a healthy investment, how I’ve fallen in love with NPR over the past year, how I sometimes feel like none of my peers engage in this type of involved reading…

What do you think this habit says about my personality? One conclusion that I’ve settled on is that there’s obviously a love for learning. I think that so much of what I do--my work, my art, my inspiration--can be explained by that one point. Where do I go from the realization…I haven’t yet figured that out.

And lastly, thanks Mom and Dad for reading to me each night while I was growing up.

Ranger Mike

Just uploaded my first article. Check it out!
rangermikefriday.blogspot.com

I-CHI-RO!

Photos from a perfect sunny Sunday ballgame at Safeco Field in Seattle. I completely binge-ed on the world famous garlic fries. Shout out to Nick, Tessa, Nick and Erika, my A2 friends from NICHE/First Pres! Notice Tessa creepily zooming in on the crowd favorite Ichiro and then the inside-out hat which is part of some baseball tradition I don't really get.

Where I work

My "office"


The view from my office. If you look very closely, you can see the Dairy Queen to the left. This will be my summer vice.




This will be my second vice working here: the drive-through espresso hut right next door:

40 Hours into Adulthood

I’m in my safe place, ie Starbucks.

No matter where I travel, I can always count on the same ambiance and products here. I know that familiarity/insecurity is something that franchising corporations prey on. Well, it works.

Anyway, I’m in downtown Bellingham, having driven a half hour to look at yet another disappointing room to move in to. This one wasn’t the worse by far, but it was just a little too far out of my way to justify the price. And the owner wasn’t someone I would have been excited to return home to everyday after work. I still have a few more leads, so we’ll see.

This whole week seems to be pushing me out of my comfort zone. Having just finished my 5th year of college, I guess I got a little to confident and comfortable in Ann Arbor. I knew everyone, I knew the city, life was easy and good.

I don’t know why this transition seems harder than in summers past. Oh wait, of course I know why: previous summers out West were just that, summers, and I always knew in the back of my head that I’d be returning to Michigan in the fall, no matter how bad things got. It’s different now; the back of my head is telling me, whatever mess you get yourself into, you’re stuck with it!

So I just finished my first week of work as an adult and honestly, it was harder that I imagined. Maybe I hadn’t worked 5 days in row full-time for awhile. Or maybe, we’re still defining exactly what I’m doing this summer. As you know, working for the government means bureaucracy, and I’m just trying to figure out how I fit into the organization. As I’ve mentioned, this position hasn’t existed before so there’s no precedence to follow.

The people I answer to are the board of directors, which is made up of the superintendents at, in alphabetical order, Ebey’s Landing, Fort Lewis and Clark, Fort Vancouver, Mount Rainier, North Cascades, Olympic, and San Juan Island. That means I’m working with some pretty high profile people and I’m honored to have this opportunity. I’ll be giving a 1-2 hour presentation to the board in September about my work communicating the science going on in the park and I’m secretly (okay, not so secretly) thrilled to have that much face time.

The other people I’m working with are the lead scientists themselves--who are nearly impossible to track down! Because they’re all spread out at 7 different parks, I can’t just walk into their office and sit down to chat. Even if I could, they’re often out in the field. Plus, they still are unsure of who I am and what exactly I can do to help promote their work. Ah well, this isn’t going to happen overnight.

Quick tangent: have I ever explained how National Parks are abbreviated? If the name of the park is one word (Yellostone), you just use the first four letters (YELL). If it’s more than one word, take the first two letters of each word. And then there are of course some random idiosyncrasies We use these abbreviations in both writing and common speech.

Ebey’s Landing= EBLA
Fort Lewis and Clark=LEWI
Fort Vancouver=FOVA
Mount Rainier=MORA
North Cascades=NOCA
Olympic=OLYM
San Juan Islands=SAJH
Michael Liang=MILI

Okay, back to my job. It took me awhile to figure this out—pages and pages of reports and protocols, lots of phone calls, and e-mails—but I think the research that I’ll be focusing on this summer includes the following Vital Signs:

-Climate
-Fish Assemblages
-Glaciers
-Intertidal
-Landbirds
-Landscape Dynamics
-Mountain Lakes
-Subapline Vegetation
-Elk

Throughout the summer, I’ll be going into more detail about each of these (in interesting and innovative ways of course!). A brief explanation of the importance of Vital Signs- scientists within the North Coast and Cascade Network have determined that these aspects of our national parks here are worth monitoring on a regular basis. Think of it as your annual visit to the doctor where your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, etc are all recorded. Keeping track of this data allows you to establish trends and should any changes occur, you could take the appropriate course of actions to remedy the situation. It seems fairly common sense that natural resources managers should be doing this, but these collaborative Inventory and Monitoring programs have really only emerged in the 1990’s.

So not only is this type of management somewhat new, but the work that I’ll be doing is going to be avant-garde for the NPS. It’s both thrilling and scary.

Well, I think I’ve rambled on enough for tonight. I hope you enjoyed this peek into the workings of the National Park Service. I’ll be in Olympic National Park on Monday and Tuesday and will have some blog posts/photos up next Friday! Don’t forget:
rangermikefriday.blogspot.com

Happy Friday

It's Friday night and what are you doing? I'm sitting at the dining room table with binders of research spread about me, reading up on monitoring protocols. In a little while (10:30), I'm going to be going to bed because I have to wake up at 5am tomorrow. In about seven more hours, I'll be rolling out of bed, nuking some old coffee in the microwave, and driving an hour into the mountains to go... birding!

That's right, the fun part of my job is about to start. I'll be following a team of 7 biologists as they train and prepare for a summer season of landbird monitoring. The birds are the most active in the mornings so we've got to be out in the field by 6:30am. I'll be armed with camera, pen and paper, and my new toy, a digital voice recorder. I'll try not to get in their way or step in a nest.

My job, after this fun field trip, is to take their stories and communicate their science through a variety of projects that I'm just starting to develop. One of the first ones will be premiering next week:

rangermikefriday.blogspot.com

This is my new weekly blog (starting next Friday), where I post essays and photos on my travels throughout the Pacific Northwest. Should be fun.

So birding this wejavascript:void(0)ekend and then visiting Olympic National Park on Monday and Tuesday!

Notes on Adulthood

I think I’m going to start a series of posts about my newfound independence as a “real” adult. Life’s lessons and all that stuff. Here we go.

I’m at the dining room table at my supervisor’s house with most of the lights off and a now empty mug that used to hold hot chocolate. It’s pretty chilly here, but I just did my laundry and am enjoying still-warm socks. Every now and then, Ham, the tabby cat, starts meowing and the only way I can quiet him is put him on my lap. It’s a win-win situation; he gets some attention and I get some purring warmth. Amazingly, I’ve grown out of my childhood allergies and apparently, I’m a natural cat person. I feel like I’m fulfilling some sort of stereotype here.

This peaceful evening is a nice contrast to the last apartment I viewed this afternoon.

First of all, I thought that apartment hunting would be fun but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s stressful, time-consuming and hard to do all by oneself. The first two I saw were absolute dives- dirty studio apartments in Western Washington’s student ghetto. These were the types of places that if I had to come “home” to them after work each day, I’d probably just stand in the doorway and cry because they were so awful.

And then today, I met up with a landlord to view a one-bedroom apartment closer to work and unbeknownst to us, the previous tenant hadn’t moved out and had been squatting illegally for the past ten days! He had nothing, except for a blanket and pillow on the floor, a chair, and a space heater. The landlord got into a huge argument and the guy kept making excuses in broken English. Meanwhile, I’m still standing in the living room, awkwardly witnessing this eviction. Oh yeah, and the landlords young son had tagged along.

I still got the tour of the apartment and it’s better than what I’ve seen, but still, my gut reaction says no. I’ve learned to trust my intuition.

Which leads me to the good news!

I was in a coffee shop in Bellingham yesterday, using their free wi-fi to continue my craigslist search, when I overhead the barista mention that he was trying to rent out a room in his house. Because I believe in providence and I went over and started chatting with him, explaining my situation. He wrote down the address and told me to stop by later that evening.

The house was perfect, though that could have been influenced by what I saw earlier in the day. There are four bedrooms and the three guys in the house are all upperclassmen at Western. Amazingly, they’re studying graphic design, geography, and food science (ie 3 things I love). It’s a quiet residential neighborhood, a few blocks from downtown Bellingham and the place just feels like a “home.” Definitely good vibes. I think that moving out here by myself, it would be smart to move into a house with other people than to have a lonely apartment on my own. There are a couple other people ahead of me that are interested in the room, but I’m prepared to outbid them. Especially since it’s relatively cheap too. I’m trying not to get my hopes up.

Well, Charles just returned home so I’m going to stop for now. Have a happy Mother’s Day!

Happy Mother's Day!

I know you've already seen these, but they're too funny not to put up on the blog. I love you Mom!

Photos from the road trip

I didn't take too many photos this road trip. As this was my 4th cross-country drive, there was a sense of familiarity as I drove the interstates. Since my need to document life's experiences comes only with novelty, I guess that's why I didn't take that many photos. Still, these are pretty choice:











I also realized that the landscape was so huge that not even a wide-angle lens could capture the grandeur. So eventually you just give up and commit it to memory.

I'm here!

Three things that I've forgot about living in the Pacific Northwest:

1. How bad the traffic is in Seattle (mostly because the drivers don't know how to drive)
2. How the air smells mildly and wonderfully like wet evergreen
3. How the the chilly spring can seep into one's house and cause one to consume lots of hot beverages.

It's so strange to be back, and to think that I'm here for good (for awhile at least).

Back on the road, back on the blog

Hi everyone,

Wow, it has been a LONG time since I last wrote on the blog. Life got kinda crazy with the last few months of school and I fell out of the habit. However, I am back on the road and there’s nothing like a road trip and new adventures to get me writing again. I’ve started thinking about what motivates me to write and create art and I think that they have different catalysts. What exactly those are, I’m still not sure.

Here’s where I am right now: It’s 9:30am in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and I’m sipping my double Americano at The Summit Coffee House. There’s a local bookstore across the street and I’m hoping it opens up soon so I can grab a copy of the Sunday NYT. I guess that’s one of my luxuries and I think if I keep it to just the Sunday Times, it’s something I can afford each week.

I’m a bit disoriented from the time changes and altitude. I’ve driven over 1,600 miles in the past two days and crossed two time zones. It’s around 5,750 ft here, compared to 879 ft in Ann Arbor and I peaked yesterday at the Loveland Pass, 11,995 ft, which is also the Continental Divide. If I were a drop of water, I’d now be flowing towards the Pacific Ocean. Eventually.

I feel like an example in Nick Tobier’s class about perceptions of time and distance. Isn’t it strange to think that we can travel a mile in under a minute while driving? And that the fastest mile I ever ran was 5:19. And that 65 mph seems slow when everyone else is driving 75. And that 65 in the curvy mountains feels fast compared to 65 on the open desert interstate. These are the crazy thoughts that go through one’s head when driving long long hours on the road.

This is the fourth cross country road trip I’ve taken, the third one by myself and I’d like to think that I’m somewhat seasoned at this type of travel.

Today’s going to be fun. I’m only three hours away from today’s destination, Moab, where I’ll be staying with my former NOCA supervisor, Nancy Holman and meeting up with another friend. I won’t be leaving until Wednesday so I’m looking forward to exploring the area (Canyonlands and Arches National Park). En route to Moab, I’ll be stopping at Colorado National Monument to take a hike and/or do some drawings. Still, I can feel myself getting antsy and wanting to continue westward to my final destination. I have to keep reminding myself to slow down, take a vacation because 1. Once I get there, I probably won’t be returning to this area for awhile and 2. I have spent the last year living inside my studio and it is time to finally reward myself and get OUTSIDE.

I think that’s it for now!