Thanks A Lot, Sandy.

Before I show a bunch of depressing pictures of the damage to Narragansett Beach from hurricane Sandy (okay, I guess she had to show me who was boss after I mocked her for days before saying "I can't take a hurricane seriously when all I can hear is John Travolta wailing Saaannddyyy while pots and pans dance around on a movie screen" like sorry can't do it) I thought I'd start with a picture of my lover, the best dog ever, Dukey. His real name is Duke, he is my sister's baby BUT we call him Dukey. He loves getting belly rubs in the grass. Okay, after this, get depressed, or awe'd. Thanks a lot, Sandra-Dee.

Happy Pups

Coast Guard House didn't do too well

What was once a nice sidewalk,

Benches? Not one was intact.

The parking lot didn't fare too well.

Yikes

The road was closed because all this sand was blown onto it! Now it is piled up in the parking lot!

My mom looks so dang cute next to the sand piles, plus this gives you an idea of how tall they are! That's a lot of sand!

Walkway?

Erosion!

More beach erosion

Gate D fence! Gone obviously.

Amazing how the waves can knock this fence over!

Tire on the beach. Check out the sand!

The only bad thing about beach front property..

Serious erosion!

This just plain sucks.

The calm after the storm.

Scott and I sat on these stairs in August (stairs=chunk of wood)

Yup no more stairs.

So unfortunate!

Amazing that the waves were so high only 48 hours ago.. now so calm.

More road devastation

Still so much sand no one could drive on 1A near the beach

What a gorgeous sunset.

Seattle... Second Best Place Ever

I love Friday Harbor!

Awesome porpoise right next to the boat!

So since today I dumpster dove to remove a dead tuna (so it wouldn't stink up the dumpster) and the dumpster was full of corroded butterfish/squid slop and stunk like rottenness and death and I can still smell it in my nose and haven't eaten anything since because well who wants to eat when all they can smell is a rotten dumpster full of tuna (long sentence, sorry), I decided to blog about going to Seattle since I didn't get the chance. So first off, let me say I've met two awesome people online in odd ways. Not like through Match.com or any business like that, but from me being crazy. Example 1: One of my best friends (I swear we are brother and sister and were separated at birth) Jason and I were in a sandwich shop at 7am before heading out fishing. It was the morning after a hard Patriots loss (always gets me fired up) and I am going off about all the refs and different plays with the deli man and Jason is chiming in and finally the guy goes, "Damn Jason, where'd you find this gal". We both looked at eachother, laughed, and said "Craigslist". The deli man's face looked like he just got slapped in the face with a bucket of dead squid (ha, probably similar to my dumpster face). Anyways, Jason was my landlord/roommate this summer so that's the first awesome person I met (psh, and everyone thought I'd get raped for finding a Craigslist roommate..). The second one, who you all know by now, Scott (who I'm now dating) I met because I was a crazy person and needed to go to Alaska so I was like oh hey I don't know you but I'm going to come and live with you for 2 weeks and go fishing and eat sweet ocean snacks and look at bears. Funny how love works out, huh? Anyways, now I can tell people, "In the first five minutes I met my boyfriend in real life, he threw me in front of a 600 pound grizzly bear" That's fact, people. Anyways, since I've been dying to go to Seattle forever (besides, University of Washington SAFS is my TOP (and only at the moment) choice for grad school- obviously I had to go visit and make my point that like, I'm smart and fun and a good student and not a prestigious a-wad but can still be smart and intelligent and a good presenter- well, I don't know if I made those many points, but I hope so). But anyways, we went to Seattle. I loved UW, I loved Seattle, but really the fun day that like, everyone wants to actually hear about was adventuring. So Scott told me he had a surprise for me, but wouldn't tell me what. We just drove North and my hints were "Tulips" and "Shoot something". What kind of BS tip is Tulip? Oh, thanks glad we are going to pick tulips and frolic in the poppies like idiots, could have just watched with Wizard of Oz for that. And shoot something? Well we didn't have guns. I told him if he was dragging me north to play paintball, I was going to kill us both. So we pull into Skagit (never go here, ever) aka the international porta-potty supply city. Seriously, it's a city full of portable potties. I was pissed. So we get out of the worst place ever (thank goodness) and since, well, I'm mad and yelling and won't stop talking, even though I told Scott he was getting the silent treatment- we all know how good I am at that deal- he tells me we are going to Friday Harbor for a killer whale watch. Plot synopsis: Picture Molly, age 5, with her etch-e-sketch in her underwear dancing profusely to "Hold Me" by Michael Jackson. 19 years later, I was almost that excited (I txted my mom: "Mom, me and Scott are going to see the killer whales today! Should I dance around in my underwear and sing Hold Me?" she goes (oh my gosh mother)   " I'm sure Scott would enjoy that" almost hurled up my breakfast, thanks for that Nanco). Anyways, we go to Friday Harbor THE BEST PLACE ON EARTH! I love that town I need to move there like, now sorry Little Rhody, Friday Harbor takes the cake, brownies, chocolate, and guacamole (that's big time). So we get on this killer whale watch boat and within 3 seconds they stop and say "oh, look a sea lion" me and Scott are like wot waa borrrrrring. Then OH LOOK! An eagle... booooooring (meanwhile everyone else is like "A bald eagle, oh my door nuts (please tell me someone knows where oh my door nuts comes from)") Anyways, this basically happened to us all day and uh no killer whales. boo. BUT we saw some awesome dalls porpoises that were riding the boat, they were pretty badass. We took 800 pictures of them and had a ball watching them, and the scenery was just incredible (which we also took 200 pictures of). OH so shooting= with the camera (LAME) and tulips (I guess Skagit, pottyland, has a tulip festival every year? I know one thing, that's a festival you can go to and never wait in the line for the can). Scott and I also illegally photographed everything in sight so we could make it ourselves, and molested (well that was me) tribal statues. Oh, and I'm sure we were really classy because my hair was caught in his beard the whole time- we know how to roll high class. Anyways, Seattle and Washington and Friday Harbor were fantastic. Enjoy the pictures!

Haha oh hey totem pole man.

More dall porpoises (seriously, we took 800 pics)

INCREDIBLE scenery- those are mountains!!!!

They like snacks.

Pike Place Market- so much delicious seafood!!!

Haha my favorite picture! Oh ducks, here's a treat... why are you running away? Oh the dog, yeah.

The Bears are getting FAT!!!!!!

I'm so fat I can't reach the fish anymore..

"I don't wanna move...awhh"

Porky, go to hibernate. You really shouldn't eat anymore.

So this is basically just pictures that Scott gave me of the bears in Alaska from a few weeks ago ( seriously, what would I do without him sending me pictures of all the awesome Alaskan creatures?). This is going to be how I look and feel in about 24 days on Thanksgiving- lethargic, fat, and tired.

Want A Good Workout? Try picking up an 80 pound tuna.

Have you ever seen Shark Wranglers? URI used this boat!

Transferring a yellowfin from the truck to the tank

Poor guy didn't make it, but it was pretty successful otherwise!

So when my colleges do cool things, I just have to get involved. Whether that includes ripping out moose teeth, or sticking my hands up a deer's butt (see my previous blog posts), I always am up for something new and exciting. So, when I found out URI was trying to raise false albacore, bluefin, and yellowfin tuna for spawning and egg rearing, I just had to get involved. After talking to my teacher, a niche was found for me on the URI "Tuna Team". I'm more of an assistant: I clean filters, vacuum the tuna tank, and prepare food for tuna feeding. I do other random things too, but the coolest of all assignments I've had on the team happened on Columbus Day weekend. I had a great weekend visiting friends and family and on Sunday night, I was pretty tired and ready to have Monday morning to sleep in! Around 7:45, I decided it would be a good idea to figure out where the heck my cell phone was at, only to find a text from my friend Chelsea saying "Hey, we are transporting tuna tonight! The boat will be in around 7:30". Instantly, I threw on some rain clothes and boots and headed down to the tank. Prior to Columbus Day weekend, URI's tuna tank held a suite of false albacore and four bluefins. All the fish were no more than 30-40 pounds. The fish that they were transporting were big yellowfin tuna, all between 60-90 pounds! When I arrived at the boat, we instantly got into transporting these tuna. So since the purpose of the research project is to keep the tuna alive, they had to transport them in the least-damaging way possible. So, one of the students was in a wetsuit swimming in the tanks below the boat trying to scoop the tuna up in a bag. These bags are the same bags you see on Animal Planet when people are moving whales, manatees, dolphins, etc. Once they scooped the yellowfins into the bag, the clock was ticking! We got the first tuna, around 85 pounds, and rushed him into the back of the truck on the dock. The truck had a tub in the bed full of water to keep the tuna moist. We drove the truck up to the tank (pretty close to the dock but time was of essence!) and run the bag and the tuna into the tank. After the first tuna was successfully transported, we had four more to go. When we were about to start with the second tuna, our teacher looked at Chelsea and I. "We need to keep an eye on that first tuna!" He told us. That tuna had just basically committed suicide in the boat tank by impinging himself in a corner. Tuna need to have a constant water flow moving across their gills for them to survive, so one of the divers in the tank had to "swim" the tuna to keep him alive. Chelsea and I rushed up the hill to the tank! When we got there, he was laying belly-up on the bottom of the tank. CRAP! We rushed to get a net to try to poke him to get him to move. He was motionless. We then tried to flip him over. Finally, after some serious effort, Chelsea flipped him over and just like that, he started swimming again! So you know how cats have 9 lives? I'm pretty sure tuna have about 60. For the next three hours, Chelsea and I moved ladders around the sides of the tank, moving up and down the ladders flipping this guy over to get him back to life! At midnight though, we decided he probably wasn't going to make it (I mean, we weren't planning on staying there all night to flip the poor guy over). But, the other four tuna were doing wonderful! I got home around 1 AM, soaking wet, and totally exhausted from ladder sprints and tuna flips, but it was such a cool time.

So, We Caught A WHOLE Lotta Trout

This fantastic (horrible) hurricane has allowed me to catch up on some things I have been slacking on aka writing on my blog (well, in my defense, homework and grad school apps came first.) So Saturday morning we woke up to pouring rain on Lake Francis- figures. No rain was going to pull us away from the fishing though, well especially me since I drove so long! So we got in the boat around 6:30 and started trolling some live shiners, needlefish and mooselooks on top. I was DYING to try my orange Kodiak Custom spinner that I picked up in town in Kodiak in August. We left the shore and within 2 minutes of trolling my spinner I hooked up a nice rainbow trout!!! I was so excited. It not only hooked one, but hooked up about five more as the day went on. The rain continued pouring down, but the bite was on, so really fishing > staying inside in the rain! The lake was like glass in the rain, so we decided to go into the inlet where Cedar Steam comes into Lake Francis. Our usual goal when fishing Lake Francis is to "get into Cedar". We try almost every time, but my dad's old 14ft aluminum boat cannot handle the whitecaps from the wind blowing across the lake! Cedar is a place where we always can catch fish. When I was in high school, my dad and I went up to Lake Francis for a weekend and slipped into Cedar. In an hour, we had caught 17 salmon, all of which were keeper size. I remember I was trying to reel in 2 poles at once as was he! This time in Cedar, we had pretty good results! We caught rainbow after rainbow. The rainbow trout were beautifully colored, as was the foliage surrounding Cedar. We fished all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday catching  a total of 27 rainbow trout and 5 small landlocked salmon between my dad, mom, and myself. Not bad at all! We released most of them, but kept just enough for a good fish fry! I would say it was a successful trip!

Nice landlocked salmon I caught! No, it's not orange, that was my mom's rain gear!

Dinner!

We Laugh At All Those Changing Trees; Autumn is Falling Down Again

Driving through Franconia Notch on the way to Pittsburg always gets me thinking deeply about something. Sometimes it's, "Gosh, how the hell am I going to hike up that mountain today without rolling over dead", other times it's "Yes!! I cannot WAIT to ski, even though the wind is whipping 8000mph, I'm probably going to complain the whole time and fall down the entire Gary's trail". This time was different though. So I had been stuck in traffic for like oh 3 hours- absolute nightmare if you know anything about my relationship with traffic, it's not a friendly one by any means. I'm coming up on the beautiful part of 93, around exit 32 and this MASSIVE bank of fog completely engulfed the entire mountain range. The fogs billowing belly swept up the roads, and everything that I was so looking forward to looking at. Greattt. I'm like blind driving at night (my friend Jason learned this about 2 weeks ago when we were driving at night and I didn't have my glasses on: our light was red but dang the red was so bright on my poor little eyeballs that I just focused on the green facing the other direction. Jason was like Molly, red. Molly, red. Molly, red. huh? Red light! Oh, yuh can I have my glasses?). So on top of the blindness from glares, there are moose and deer everywhere. AND It was only like 5pm at this time- totally unfair to take away an hour of my vision from me with the fog. Anyways, I'm royally pissed off at this point- thanks a lot traffic and fog. Then like out of the blue, the fog totally cleared. It was the most incredible thing ever because this fog was so thick I could barely see in front of me. But right when I got to Cannon Mountain, it just completely cleared and all the gorgeous colors just took shape. So then this is when the deep thinking came into play (mainly thanks to Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Mumford and Sons playing on my ipod). I started thinking about my school (oh god, right?) and a lot of the girls that go there. They spend all this time in the morning caking so much makeup on their faces that they look like plastic dolls to be this view of what is "beautiful". But is that really beautiful? I'm sorry, but beautiful to me can't be found in a bottle of foundation (granted, I like wearing makeup on occasion because it's like painting your face and since I suck at painting paintings, at least I can kind of paint my face nicely). Anyways, that's besides the point. The point is, beautiful was the fall leaves taking their color. Beautiful to me is how alive you feel when you breathe in the smell of wet leaves, fresh snow, spring flowers, and summer tides. It's exploring the world around you. Feeling alive isn't when you finally wake up from a 3 day hangover (sorry UJS), it's having a grizzly bear within 10 feet of you. It's sitting on a rock with your finger shaking on your trigger as you hear that stick break and see a deer ear coming up the ridge towards you, only to find out it's a doe and her two fawns (if you're me, you drop your gun and grab your camera!). It's finally getting to the top of a 4000+ foot mountain and scanning the landscape. If you can find satisfaction in that, you will be happy and feel beautiful and satisfied everyday, whether or not you look like a plastic face. I just recently read the book "Wild Men, Wild Alaska" and there was this great Henry David Thoreau quote in it (which is not the one I'm going to use because I found one better) BUT it got me looking into more and here we go this was basically my life decision as I was driving the rest of my way up to Pittsburg for a weekend of fishing: "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature". Anyways, I made it through the fog up to camp, and I'll write more about fishing soon (it was frickin awesome). "Many men go fishing their whole lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after"

Oh My Gosh, Look At My (not so) Little Fuzzy!

 

Okay, so not being in Alaska is seriously depressing. I'm ready to go back, um NOW! Things I have attempted since being home for the month: bear hunting and tuna fishing. Well, bear hunting (I originally wrote "fishing" before I just read this over- yea, I don't think bear fishing would work well, though maybe it would!) was a flop. First of all it was SO HOT outside, and the pollen was seriously irritating my allergies so instead of valiantly shooting an awesome bear, I caughed my brains out on a log then my face swelled up and well that was the end of that. November though, watch out bears! So then I tried tuna fishing twice. The first time, we didn't even bother because it was rough but we caught 800 billion bluefish-  my fingers were so cramped by the end of the day I had to stop fishing (um, when do I ever want to stop fishing!?) because I seriously could not reel anymore! They looked like that guys fingers from Scary Movie 2 when he dips them in the potatoes-woof. The blues were like 10 pounds just so you know, I'm not a total baby. So anyways the second time we tried we were all ready to go. I got to the boat around 5:30 and it was still pretty dark when we were leaving the marina. Within a few minutes outside of the safety of the marina, we got SLAMMED with big waves. We were all soaked within like 5 minutes. The boys were like "Hey Molly, when we duck, make sure you duck because it means you're gunna get wet" Simple enough, right? Yuh, not to me at 6AM with only 1 cup of coffee down. The boys both ducked and my big dumb mouth opened right up to say "What are you ducking for?", but instead the stupid words were drowned down with about a gallon of saltwater. Fail. We decided shortly after that that um we might as well go home and go to bed because this wasn't going to happen! So anyways, the real point of this blog post is that I am still living vacariously through Scott with his Alaskan awesome life and obviously if you've been reading this blog, you know I was OBSESSED with this bear cub that I named Fuzzy because geez he was just so dang cute and had such a lovely personality-true little doll. Anyways, Scott finally tracked little Fuzz down 1 month later to get pictures for me sooo obviously I'm going to share them with you. He got SO PUDGY! And he is so dang cute I seriously just gushed and smooshied aww'd for about 18 hours over this little gem. Sooo I hope you are getting some pleasure from watching this little chubby cub pork out because I know I sure am. Now, if only I stole him, imagine I could have that cute little fuzzball cuddling with me on the couch right now...lame. Anyways, I'm heading up north fishing this weekend sooo I will post about that on Sunday and Monday! Again, enjoy baby. 

Baby Fuzz- mid August. What a little cutie with his little belly and feet!

Fuzzy as of the end of September- what a little pork!!! I so love him.

Okay Seriously, the cutest bear cub on Earth, right? I hope you are totally gushing over this little pig right now like I have been for oh only the past 2 days!

Fuzz and his mommy in August!




Fuzzy's got back now... no joke.