Goodbye Ft. McStink, I shall not miss you.
I sincerely hope I'm not jumping the gun in saying this, but I think that my days in Ft. McMurray have finally come to an end! I arrived home today after a week of collecting tree cores, finishing vegetation sampling, and doing soil testing. All the work that I planned for this summer is now finished, and barring weird numbers in the data.... that means I'm done!
I had a great time getting to know my assistant, who was in one of my classes last fall term. We had a lot of fun, went a little crazy, and decided at the end of the day yesterday that we needed to commemorate the moment with a mini celebration at one of my sites. We set my camera up on a rock covered in tailings sand, I set the timer, and then we jumped for joy!
Things I will miss about Ft. Mac:
1. The boreal forest
2. The smell of the boreal forest (when it's not eclipsed by the stink)
3. Ummm...
Things I will not miss about Ft. Mac:
1. The stink (there's nothing like the smell of bitumen first thing in the morning!)
2. The shameless destruction
3. The gross dust storms in town
4. Rush hour traffic at 6 am
5. Rush hour traffic at 6 pm
6. My beetle infested hotel room
7. The 'life in the fast lane' mentality
8. The men
9. Rental truck break downs
10. The sad sad town with nothing to do but get in trouble
11. The annoying Tim Horton's drive through line up that wraps around the building, through the parking lot, and down the street
12. The tent caterpillar outbreak that had caterpillars and caterpillar poo raining out of the trees onto our heads - super uncool!
13. My assistant's stinky steel toed work boots!
In the future I may have a job that takes me back to Ft. Mac, but for now I am relishing the thought of not having to return. I have new things to look forward to for the rest of the summer: close to 1000 moss samples that need to be sorted and identified and about 150 tree cores to age! I foresee many hours spent in the lab.
4 comments:
That's great that you don't have to go back to Fort McMoney. Definitely something to jump for joy over. Maybe it's the stinky/toxic air that makes Fort McMurray people so strange.
I like the antennae you sprouted in the last photo.
The U of A lets you drive their truck?!?!?
Have fun being a lab rat this summer.
Mum, QOTU
You make Ft. Mc sound disgusting Brenda. And I'm sure it is. Nice photos but I'm wondering how you managed to be off the ground when the camera clicked!!! Phil says the same thing about Tim Horton's in Edson....always a line up.
Love,
Grandma
Mom - You make it sound as if the U only has one truck! Robyn (another grad student in my lab) and I have a truck for the two of us to use while we're up there. Does that mean we're trustworthy? Well, I may or may not have driven through a few very large mud holes instead of driving around... so you decide.
Grandma - It took us a few tries to get the timing right, but we eventually managed to jump up just in time for the timer on the camera to take the picture.
Ft. Mac is pretty gross, but that's my opinion. I've met people who live there and think it's great. On the way home I was trying to think of positive things about it, and I couldn't come up with very many, hence the short list of things I will miss. I'm glad I don't have to live there.
Welcome to life outside the Fort 'B'...!!! Enjoy your summer!
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