Weekend re-cap

16 days until I go to Alaska.  Planning for this trip has got to be one of the most confusing and stressful (for lack of a better word) undertakings.  I'm feeling a little better, but there are still so many small details and some not so small ones, including getting all my equipment up there.  I've been having trouble sleeping because I keep making mental lists of stuff that needs to get done.  And my advisor is gone until way after I get back, which is pretty annoying.  Actually, he doesn't really have much/any say in what's going on, so it probably doesn't matter.  I'm still not sure whether I'll have one or two field assistants, and if I'll be able to get batteries for what I need to run.   I am also freaking out about what to do in case we have visitations by bears.  Hopefully, we'll be close enough to or on the ice, and I just assume that grizzlies aren't really interested in glaciers or glacial erosion.
Shifting gears a good bit, I raced on Saturday down in Olympia.  It went okay, but that's about it.  We finally had a reasonably long crit: 35 minutes instead of 20.  That was really good, but I seriously need to get more aggressive in these races until just waiting until the end.  I've also decided to save the upgrade for next year, as there's a decent group of about 6 women who show up and race pretty competitively.  I think if we had a real 3s field, we could all sit solidly in it but probably not in the current 1,2,3s configuration.  I certainly don't want to have another embarrassment like Ballard before I absolutely have to.
This weeks seems to be a little more calm than last week, though with more bike racing (Wednesday crit, Friday night track with the cat 4 guys, and Saturday crit) and hopefully some useful meetings with people in my department.   I won't have the added anxiety of never knowing when my advisor will or won't be in, as I can guarantee that he won't be in touch with me until mid-August.