timandkris.net

Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Tim
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Posted on July 11th, 2008 by Kris
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Kris or I will write a more detailed description of the wedding in the near future. However, we posted some of the pictures from the wedding (taken mostly by Kris’ dad, Pat) and some pictures Tim took from around Little Cayman. We will be posting additional pictures from our honeymoon dives and those taken by our other photographer (Tim’s dad, Bob) in the very near future, so check back soon.

The pictures can be viewed here.

Posted on July 7th, 2008 by Tim
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The wedding is fast approaching. One week from today Kris and I will enter the bliss of holy matrimony…but in the meantime, a bunch of our friends decided that we each deserved a last evening of the wild, uninhibited debauchery that is singlehood. A few of our lady friends at the university wanted to throw Kris a surprise hen party (British or European bachelorette party). So I spent the past month or so convincing Kris that we were going to spend the weekend in a farmhouse up in Olafsfjörður, a pretty little town about an hour northwest of Akureyri. The big day came yesterday when Heidi and Heather showed up in Akranes to pick up Kris instead of me and whisked her off to a series of adventures. From what I have been able to piece together, they sunned themselves at the beach in Akranes, then went swimming before heading out to a belly dancing class. They then ended up at Erna Karen’s apartment downtown where they ate a sumptuous monkfish and lobster dinner…the monkfish courtesy of Erna Karen’s sampling with the Marine Research Institute and the lobster courtesy of Heather’s Ph.D. research. I was told that they mostly sat around drinking and talking about their feelings, which I imagine does not bode well for some of the longtime boyfriends who probably got a big dose of, “See, Tim and Kris are getting married…” when they got home. The ladies capped the night off by hitting some of the dance clubs downtown.

My bachelor party was no less a surprise, mostly because I was so busy priding myself in the sneaky handling of Kris’ party to notice how odd Bruce, Kai, and Jónas were acting. It started at about noon on Friday when I ran into Jónas. He said that Kai needed a few hands to help with the mast of his sailboat. Kai is an avid sailor and has been working on a sailboat that he picked up relatively cheaply a while back. So we ended up at the marina and the next thing you know Richard and Bruce pop out, slap a plastic viking helmet on my head, put a bottle of Viking in my hand and walk me down to the sailboat. We spent the afternoon sailing around Faxaflói and then headed out to Hafnarfjördur where we all donned wetsuits and tried our hand at wakeboarding…now it may be the middle of summer here and the sun may be up all the time, but that water was still really, really cold. So after an hour of everyone taking turns getting dragged about the harbor, we headed up the local pool and sat in some hotpots until dinner. Dinner was at the world-famous Viking restaurant…imagine a Renaissance Fair and you’ll have a good idea of what the atmosphere of the place was like. At this point, my recollection starts becoming a little fuzzy (beer and brenninvan will do that to you) but I remember going to a midsummer party at Bjössi’s house and then ending up back home around 6:00 AM.

So that was our last hurrah before the wedding and a good time was had by all.

My friend Bruce was the designated photographer of Bachelor Party. You can see the pictures here.

Posted on June 21st, 2008 by Tim
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So I am finally close to being all caught up from April’s fieldwork bonanza. It is amazing how quickly things pile up. Anyhow, I spent all of last week writing a pre-proposal to the Icelandic Research Council to establish a Center of Excellence for Innovative Marine Resource Management. Now, the title sure may sound a bit, I don’t know, overblown maybe, but that’s what the granting agency wanted them called. If funded, we will be eligible for up to 80,000,000 ISK (about $1,000,000 USD at the moment) per year for seven years. If we get this grant, it could mean staying in Iceland for a little longer than anticipated.

So, I know I promised to write a bunch of stories from our field work in Kollafjörður, but instead thought I would just post a picture of a cod instead…

The mighty Icelandic cod

Posted on May 14th, 2008 by Tim
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Hooray! The field season is over! The data was collected. Fish were harassed. A good time was had by all…mostly.

So now that I am not sitting on a small boat in anchored in Kollafjördur or galavanting about the country plotting and scheming research activities, I have time to sit down and write an entry or two. Kris seems to have detailed the events of the past few months quite admirably in the postings below and I really don’t have much to add about that. Aside from minor frustrations and setbacks, my transition from Georgia to Iceland went remarkably smoothly. I have eaten rotten shark (not as bad as it sounds…but still not good), minke whale (excellent medium rare with a side of guilt), and puffin as well as routinely despairing at the produce section of the local grocery stores. I have learned to park my car wherever I darn please sidewalk or no and got to watch Kris bite her lip as I re-learned how to drive stick. I went two months without seeing the sun due to having an office without windows. I have also climbed Mt. Esja, watched the northern lights while sitting in a hot tub in the dead of winter, and proposed to Kris at Gullfoss. I am really enjoying our time here in Iceland…we have made some very good friends, had some good times, and seen and done some amazing things. I really feel like I made the right decision in taking this job…and am glad Kris decided I was worth moving next door to the Arctic Circle for.

So speaking of the job, I suppose I should talk a little about the work that has kept me so busy over the past 6 months. My boss Gudrun Marteinsdottir hired me to investigate variability in the Icelandic cod stock. Cod seems to be a species that is highly variable in appearance, behavior, and possibly physiology. My job is to determine the extent of this variability and figure out if it matters for the purposes of managing the cod fishery in Iceland and other places. To do this, I have been doing a bunch of different research projects that are detailed here… This spring, Gudrun and I wanted to find out if the various components of the cod stock in Iceland displayed differences in spawning behavior. To do this, we needed to find a way to do something that has never been done in the wild…observe spawning cod. We decided the best way to go about this was to use acoustic telemetry, but we were unable to secure money to buy the extremely expensive equipment necessary to do this. So we collaborated with Jeff Isely, my former Ph.D. advisor, and his current doctoral student, Beth. Jeff brought over his toy, an acoustic telemetry system capable a keeping track of a large number of tagged fish in 3D at very fine scale resolution. We (eventually) decided to deploy the system in Kollafjordur just across the bay from Reykjavik…

I will continue the story with details of thrilling high seas adventures, the fickle nature of cutting edge electronics, and the terrible vengeance Jeff wrought upon said electronics. Until next time…

Posted on April 25th, 2008 by Tim
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Everything here has been quiet recently- winter continues and everyone is starting to get grumpy and impatient for spring. It’s been kind of crap since the beginning of the year, but it’s started to seem a little better. Some of the fields are actually green! They must have very resilient grass here. We’re looking forward to being able to get out of Reykjavík more now that we’ve bought a car. Eventually I’ll put up some pictures, but right now it looks grubby since it’s a white car at the end of February. We like it very much- it’s a Toyota Yaris, so the hope is that it’ll be reliable, and since it´s got studded winter tires we can do our part to tear up the roads of the capitol region. My boss says it’s a very good choice, but then again she does have the same car- same year, same color, luckily ours has white bumpers or we’d be all confused. Tim says he feels like the protagonist´s family in Independent People (highly recommended Icelandic book) when they got a cow so they could have dairy products and not just soured sheep balls and half rotted dried fish.
I think that since our first household beast purchase has gone well, we should now buy a sheep from the new Icelandic buy-a-sheep website www.kindur.is. You can buy a sheep and get the wool off it and the meat from it’s adorable lambs, and you can go visit it up on the Snæfellsnes peninsula. Sadly, the website is only in Icelandic, but it has pictures if you want to know what sheep look like here. They’re pretty cool as sheep go- hugely wooly with horns, and about half-wild since they roam free in the mountains all summer. I suspect Tim isn’t as enthusiastic about this idea as I am though. We’ll have to be careful we don’t accidentally buy a sheep this summer- if you hit one with your car, apparently you’re supposed to pay for it…

Posted on February 21st, 2008 by Kris
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We’ve been having some wintery weather the past few weeks- lots of snow and wind. Last Friday it was nasty enough that they shut the road between Reykjavík and Keflavík, and they were advising people not to drive in Reykjavik until the afternoon when they had the roads cleared. However, we struggled through to Akranes, because there was the promise of both pancakes and þorramatur. Friday was the first day of the old viking month of Þorri, and during this month people ‘celebrate’ by eating traditional foods like singed sheep head, testicles in jelly, manky shark meat, blood sausage and whale blubber. Most of these are normally found pickled in soured whey. I tried all of them but the blubber, and really they´re not as terrible as you would imagine. The hákarl (shark) wins top prize for nastiness, since it kind of tasted like the strongest blue cheese imaginable, and a little fishy. Not good, really, but not as bad as imagined. It´s possible we got the less intense kind since it would be gross for the whole office to smell like a cat box located in a truck stop men´s room. The pancakes were delicious, though.

Posted on January 28th, 2008 by Kris
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It’s been so long since our last post that not only have we gone back to the US for Christmas, we’re already back! It was wonderful to see everyone though. Since Tim’s parents are moving to Texas, this may be the last time we go to Illinois for the holidays. It was an excellent visit- everyone seemed to like their gifts, and it nice to talk to everyone without having to wear a headset. While we were at my parents’ we also had a little engagement party, so we got to hang out with some of the extended family too. It was a pretty busy week, and now we get to look forward to seeing our families again in about 6 months when we get married…

Posted on January 1st, 2008 by Kris
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Tim is now all healthy, although I got sick on his birthday so he didn´t get to go out to dinner. I figure a raincheck is fine given how much it rains here. This weekend is the Christmas party for his lab at the university, and apparently he went out with his boss Gúðrun today to pick out an enormous frozen turkey that he will transform into something delicious (most likely a roast turkey). Should be a good time. Of course, this means that we miss my office Christmas party, so we´re 0 for 2 with them this year. We missed the surprise party in November because we were busy getting engaged. Next year, for sure… It continues to get even darker here- sunrise this morning was just before 11am, and the sun set a bit before 4pm. It was pretty cloudy today, so it never got too light. On the other hand, the late sunrise means that you can see it when you´re awake enough to appreciate it. We finally put up some Christmas lights, which look so nice I think more will come this weekend. I´m even tempted to get one of the tiny little potted cypress trees at the grocery store, but I´m not sure if they make tinsel in dollhouse sizes. I wonder what the Icelandic words for “miniature house tinsel” would be?

Posted on December 4th, 2007 by Kris
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Long time between postings

Underwater pictures from Little Cayman

Wedding Pictures!

“The first rule of Bachelor Party is that you do not talk about Bachelor Party.”

Tim’s First Post (Part II)

Tim’s First Post (Part I)

The Yaris cow

Proper winter

There and back again

Party time, excellent…

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