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So it comes down to these final 9 days and I'm really taken at back at how fast it's going by.
But at least I'm doing it in style with my newly named bike "Klingon." He is amazing and keeps my back straight. : )
As far as work is concerned, I'm freaking out cause I don't think I'm going to be able to do as in depth case studies as I had wanted to do. If anything, I'll have tiny summaries and will be able to continue working on it when I get back but I just want to be able to help Green Star as much as possible before I go.
What's really great though is that I got to talk to one of the founding mothers of Green Star and she's really inspiring me to start up my own chapter of Green Star back in New York. But that's if and only if I can figure out how the hell to figure my life out first before trying to start something that big. I guess the big places were all little places at first though...
Here's a picture of the one of the buildings I'm helping to track. It's in midtown and is a typical office space with a plan to retrofit the lighting. 
I think I've done everything I've wanted to do this summer and I am more than ready to come back to New York. Knowing what I have to do and having the energy and motivation to do it will be as usual: in peaks and without completion.
We'll see...
^ The beach... kinda ... ok fine a Lake. Goose Lake.
-Allan
In fact it's so lovely, there's even a mention of it in the Times travel section today: http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/tra
As far as my project is coming along, I'm just a little worried I won't have enough meat to meet the 20 pages for the term paper I'd have to turn in at the end of the fall, but we'll see. I'm probably just freaking out cause I have to make sure everything that I have here is acessible when I get back to NYC.
The only things that I need to do before I leave is finish up working on one building's data, have a final meeting with one that I've already done, and follow up with the others. I know none of that made sense, but it makes sense to me.
This past weekend I just got, read, and finished the last Harry Potter and I'd like to say that it was a fitting end. And to think I used to be such a hatterrr.
As for the weekend before, me and a couple of the girls (and Ryan) went to Homer. Least to say, we walked around with full stomachs the entire weekend, wandering around the lovely little town.
Hali-butts on the "Spit" in Homer
Kenai Lake on our way back from Homer in ... I want to say Cooper's Landing? Probably was.
18 days.
-allan
One hike I can talk about is the Crow's Pass Trail. Kara and Kate organized it and brought along Nick, an intern from Yale who works with Kara. We started in Eagle River after work on Thursday and did a solid...I wanna saw 10 miles (?) near to the first river that we had to cross. We camped the night and crossed the morning after. I nearly fell in mostly cause I'm uncoordinated, but we forward marched until we crossed another little stream.
After having hiked a couple of hours, we tread up this mossy/grassy, steep hill. I was completely exhausted just because I'm not a hardcore hiker. We stopped at the top though and downed some peanut butter pita sandwiches. A collective nap was in order after eating and the view was AMAZING. We had a good view of a nearby glacier behind us and a view of the valley that we had trekked in front of us. The weather was perfect and I had never gotten better sleep EVER!
After the nap, we hiked for another couple of hours to get past the hardest part of the trail which was a steep 3,000-ish ft climb. Camping at the top with a view of some snow capped mountains, a dusk orange sky, and a glacier melt lake was simply to die for.
This summer has been absolutely beautiful and I'm really glad I'm here. It reminds me of my goals in life. The environment's something I want to protect so that other people can enjoy this beauty. Sure it was exhausting and I was tired of talking really loud to scare bears away, but one of my best experiences in life.
Oh and the work I'm doing is coming along, just slower than I thought it would be. People just have so much going on this summer and it's hard for people to commit to anything. I haven't gotten word back about my lighting calculator that I helped make for Green Star. If it's good, I want to be able to use it in New York. Actually...I want to continue doing this work here, but school calls for me. Not to mention I don't want to start experiencing the bad weather here.
Oh and here's a clip from another hike that I did:
-allan
I guess I should start with the bad news first.
I GOT MY BIKE STOLEN! ! ! It was definitely one of those typical grocery store stories you hear from your friends, the one where someone steps in for 5 minutes thinking nothing would happen and by the time they come out POOF it's gone. Well, me and Old Red had a good run. Too bad that's the third bike in our office to get stolen so now everyone's bikeless, with the exception of another coworker and mine. Her boyfriend had an extra bike so luckily I can still get around town.
The good news though is that I'm really busy up here with all of the projects that I'm assisting on up here and I'm really excited to tag along for a site assessment next week! ! ! I'm learning a lot about myself while working here and I'm finding that I really do want to do this kind of work for the rest of my life (or at least for a really, really, really, really long time). It's soooo refreshing just because I've had a lot of changes in the way I approach career opportunities and that lack of passion doesn't help. But, I feel like I've finally found that passion for saving the environment through corporate/business responsibility. I really can't wait to get back to the city so that I can find a company similar to Green Star to work for.
Also, before I forget, Pride was so much fun! Granted the parade was about 6-7 floats, it was drizzly, and the performances were bad, but it's so nice to have a strong sense of community in such a ... oh right this isn't a small town. But you know what I mean.
I haven't had many opportunities to visit other parts of Alaska yet, but I'm assuming that me and the girls are gonna go to the Crow Creek Pass trail which is about 26 miles in total. If not then we want to go and visit Seward and hike around a little there.
Sigh. I'm really enjoying this summer and although it's really scary going through some of the things I'm going through, at least I can say I was made a better, stronger person because of it.
My undying optimism's gonna be the death of me.
Oh and I will post more pictures soon! This whole no internet thing is kind of hard to keep on track.
Miss you all!
-allan
So I'm at the office again, trying to get through another monday. There's not much to update on other than the fact that I'm starting to get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff that I need to get before I leave.
The fact that I have about 8 weeks left doesn't help either. But it's a comfort knowing that I am of some help around the office.
Green Star wants to have an energy efficiency awareness campaign in regards to saving electricity in Anchorage through lighting. My part's to figure out how make it somewhat easy to calculate accurately lighting savings without having a ballpark estimate either.
That and still working with businesses on Portfolio Manager and many, many, many little side projects.
I'll get it done. Promise.
-allan
Nothing much has really happened beyond having to bike everywhere, although I am making progress on my work.
For people who don't know, I'm helping three businesses become Energy Star certified through a software program called Portfolio Manager. So far the routine has been
1) I request the information in advance
2) Visit the site along with the contact person to have a face to face interaction (instead of it being a weird phone disconnect)
3) Enter the requested data into Portfolio Manager
4) Find out if the rank for the facility is good enough to be Energy Star certified
5) Write a case study, if a success.
It's a baby program in that it's still got a few kinks like it's inability to work for certain building types, but at least it's a start.
I already got to visit my first business, Anchorage's USPS over in South Anchorage and the guy that I'm in contact with doesn't really care about being certified. He just wants to track energy savings, for a start, at this facility and then hopefully to expand the use of the program throughout the state.
In addition to that I have to complete some side research projects to occupy my time some more
For example, finding out information about carbon emissions from lawn mowers and compiling useful information for businesses to get tax credits as mandated by the energy policy act of 2005.
I really have to bust out an interesting research quesiton for the summer so that I can do more than just "Hey! Look what I did this summer."
Anyways, here's a tour of my house. It's been way overdue and I'd figure some people were interested in my living situation. I live about 20 minutes away from downtown biking which isn't too bad. Again, I can't begin to say how beautiful it is to ride to work everyday. And lately the weather's been letting up so it'll be fun now to travel. Palmer? Denali? Maybe?
Nah, I'll stick with a good olleeeee BBQ
-allan
Ok, ok, ok so maybe I keep forgetting to take pics of my house. What can I say? I mean I live there and will live there for the rest of the summer. There's no rush right?
But anyways, there's more exciting stuff to talk about like...the ACF intern hike around the Chugiach Mountain! ! !
In this pic, there's only a few missing, but you get the idea. We were also a bit tired, hence the expressions on most of the faces but other than that, they're all amazing people coming from all sorts of environmental backgrounds varying from working on water quality testing to helping to track bears.
We kinda didn't really go up the real mountain, but at least it was still a steep climb. Not to mention the view was breathtaking either way. We could've hiked a couple of more miles to get to a higher place, but I think we were running short on time. So anyways, all 17 of us got to hang out for the day on Thursday and also have a nice BBQ over at one of the big guys's place
After eating moose meat and saying goodbye to some folks, Saturday came by with a big old Annual Ocean's Festival which had a lot of fun booths and information regarding the safety of everything Ocean from getting rats off of boats to saving whales.
This is the future of the Environmental sector. We take our jobs seriously.
Oh and I've gotten into really interesting conversations with people here, especially concerning rural Alaska.
No doctors.
No formal education system.
Severe poverty.
Severe weather.
High incidences of rape and alcoholism, especially near the fishing communities.
As one person said it, Alaska's a fucked up state.
Many awkward moments later, ended up spending a lot of time with the other interns. It's gonna be an interesting summer.
Hopefully, I'll get to visit most of the cities that I want to go to by the end.
Homer
Juneau
Fairbanks
Denali National Park
SEWARD FOR FOURTH OF JULY?
-allan
- Mood:
full
Wow I go a few days without updating and I already feel like I'm diservicing the purpose of this blog.
But alas, I have some updates.
I have found out that I WILL NEVER STARVE UP HERE. Kara and Anna are EXCELLENT cooks and I swear I'm spoiled to have been eating dinner every night at their houses and taste their good food. So far I've had home made Pad Thai...Polenta with some beans, salad, and guacamole...vegan banana bread...chocolate chip cookies...oh man.
Oh right and then there's work. I'm gonna have a meeting with the United States Postal Service next week to look at one of their buildings to start collecting data for Portfolio Manager. 
I was also doing some research and lawn mower emissions and it's really scary how much the greenhouse gas emissions in those engines are worse than automobile engines. I think it was something that current engines are 93% worse than car engines. Then again, we don't really use lawn mowers that much. But still.
Also the International Whaling Comission's in town debating over Indigenous rights to whaling around the world. It's amazing that it's happening now cause I'm hearing media coverage all over the national news. Weeeiiirrrrdddd.
I'm meeting the rest of the interns tomorrow at this big ass BBQ! And we're gonna go hiking and hang out over the weekend at Anchorage's big Ocean's Festival on Saturday.
I will take LOTS of pictures. Promise. With a better deserved update.
: )
-allan
- Mood: full
I'll leave the talk about my living situation for another post cause I really have to jot down this weekend before I forget the details.
After work on Friday, I hung out with a coworker of mine who goes to APU, Jessica. She was really nice because she knew how it felt to be here and not know anyone in town. So she showed me around town with a car, which is always really nice to do instead of biking. Speaking of biking, the following video's a little short clip of me explaining the coastal trail while being short of breath. Hopefully you can make out my voice amidst the winds but still it's a pretty nice sight to look it none the less. 
On Saturday, I went with Jessica to the Market downtown which was pretty nice and touristy. We found it kind of odd that they had this booth where you can take a picture in "REAL ALASKA." It consisted of a picture of mountains and parkas on the side that you can wear. Then we joked around cause her boyfriend is Innupiac (Eskimo), and so we could set up our own booth.
TAKE YOUR PICTURE WITH A REAL ALASKA NATIVE $5! ! ! 
After grabbing a bite to eat a few blocks over in Snow City, a Green Star business, we picked up Kara who's the other person from school who's doing the program with me.
All 5 of us went to Palmer, which is east of Anchorage, to visit a Musk Ox farm. It sounds more exciting than it actually was, but the Musk Ox(en?) were soooooooooooooo cute. The guy that gave us a tour of the farm knew a lot about Musk Ox and tried to get us closer to newborns, but the moms were grazing way far away from us. It's really dangerous to get near them cause they can charge at you at about 35 mph with enough distance. 
Coming back, I went back to Kara's where another intern from the program, Anna. We all cooked a pasta dinner and walked around downtown to see how dark it can get at night. It didn't hit twilight till around 12:30 which was when I biked back to my place.
It was nice to be able to relate to hang out with people who are involved with other great organizations here that are working really work to make Alaska more sustainable/green.
I'm hoping that I find more things to explore this weekend since I have tomorrow off! But it should be nice going back to work on Tuesday and start doing research.
SO SO SO excited! ! !
I'm getting phone cards later today so I shall be talking with some of you very soon.
Love you all!
-allan
- Mood:
tired
My flight left late on Wednesday and pissed off a lady near me, going from New York to Chicago. Reading The Half Blood Prince on the way there definitely made the time pass by quickly.
I got into an interesting conversation with an old couple, Dale and Ingrid. They were Alaska natives and were against protecting ANWAR. They said that the only reason why ANWAR was protected was to protect the oil companies.
Me: So what about the Caribou and other species?
Dale: The Caribou population has actually increased because of the fact that it is protected, more so than the land is able to support. Oh and while we're on the subject, make sure to get yourself a bear bell.
...yeah, it was interesting none the less. 
The flight to Anchorage from Chicago was also delayed. It took over an hour to get that plane the proper electricity to run the Air Conditioning. Had it not occurred to anyone that we didn't need the A/C on? WE'RE GOING TO THE ARCTIC!!!!
But anyways, the flight was bearable and all the flight attendants were super nice. I peered out while Harry was still trying to figure out what Draco was doing and saw the Chicago skyline. The grid citylight pattern looked like a bead pattern; almost like a Christmas tree.
Then as I was reading that Harry and Ginny had just kissed, outside my window I get a breath taking view of the mountains in Alaska. 
So pretty much, the extent of this mountain range was infinite. There was nooooooo end and I literally stared at it for a good 2 hours. I know the video sucks but just take it as AMAZINGLY AWESOME!
Anyways, so I got into Anchorage and my boss picked me up from the airport. We walked to his car and he brought along my bike that he bought for me. After thanking him 1,000,000 times we forgot to take the bike off the car roof and we ran straight into the roof guard of the parking lot. Luckily, the bike was unscathed.
He dropped me off and I've been pretty much on my own since.
This weekend I'll put up pictures of the place where I'm staying as well as some more stuff about my job soon, but so far I'm just tired and wanting to go to bed. Still have to figure out my phone situation.
Oh and by the way, when I came in, the sun was still out and it was midnight.
-allan
- Mood:
anxious
I also have a link to the video blog: www.youtube.com/systrophe
It'll be fun to watch me this summer. Promise.
-allan
- Mood:
lazy
