Dear fellow shifters,
Hello, this is Joe from the University of Alaska Fairbanks Office of Admissions again. Just wanted to give a quick post about a meeting I sat in on last night. The meeting was sponsored by the upcoming Power Shift event which will be happening in Washington DC at the end of February. This is an opportunity for people all over the country to come together to share their thoughts, concerns and hopes for the future of the environment. I was impressed to see such a wide variety of students attending this meeting on campus. It seemed like a real community event. Parents with their children attended, undergraduates, graduates, staff members, and more were present. I was impressed with the dedication to the environment, and I can only hope that the response was as positive on other campuses throughout the nation and world. I know that some students and community members from Fairbanks will be attending, and I hope that many more attend. I won't be able to attend, unfortunately, but I will be following the event and related events closely. Remember, that's powershift09.org!
Thanks for reading, and have a great day. I'll post again soon about some more excitement!
Joe
Friday, February 6, 2009
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Rejuvenation!!!
Winter break is the perfect opportunity to get out and explore!!! After a hard semester, the best way to get back in the game in the Spring is to explore and learn new things! This winter break I went home to Anchorage for Christmas to visit family and house sat for a family with dogs!


After the holidays, my boyfriend and I took off to the East Coast because it is so easy to get around with all of the public transportation options! We started off in Washington DC with a tour of the capitol and checking out the museums, and then just walked around exploring all DC has to offer. Our first day out of DC we traveled to Annapolis, MD the capitol of Maryland and home of the U.S. Naval Academy. The Naval Academy and the town were exciting to see for me because I had almost gone there before I came to UAF!

The next day we went down to Mt. Vernon, George Washington's home and learned a lot about him and walked all across the expansive acres of the Washington's farm. A self-taught man, he experimented and designed upgrades to farming and its equipment!

We had many other adventures during that break, but the biggest one of all was attending the Inauguration of President Obama! This was a very exciting event! We had taken the train, which was jam packed with people, down the day before and when we got off and entered the train station, there were people everywhere we could barely move! We headed over to the Senate Office building to pick up our Inauguration tickets and had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get into the building! After I went up for the tickets I found out that some people had waited nearly 2 hours earlier in the day! On the day of the actual event we got on the Metro with so many people that there wasn't even standing room available after a couple stops! We couldn't find the gate we were supposed to enter through because there were so many people we had to snake our way through the mobs! When we got to a line we were not even sure if we were in a line!


The next day we went down to Mt. Vernon, George Washington's home and learned a lot about him and walked all across the expansive acres of the Washington's farm. A self-taught man, he experimented and designed upgrades to farming and its equipment!

We had many other adventures during that break, but the biggest one of all was attending the Inauguration of President Obama! This was a very exciting event! We had taken the train, which was jam packed with people, down the day before and when we got off and entered the train station, there were people everywhere we could barely move! We headed over to the Senate Office building to pick up our Inauguration tickets and had to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get into the building! After I went up for the tickets I found out that some people had waited nearly 2 hours earlier in the day! On the day of the actual event we got on the Metro with so many people that there wasn't even standing room available after a couple stops! We couldn't find the gate we were supposed to enter through because there were so many people we had to snake our way through the mobs! When we got to a line we were not even sure if we were in a line!
