We arrived in Greenland today, and I've spent most of the day in the airport hanger in Illulissat, helping work out some of the bugs of the systems.  I haven't yet seen a musk ox (apparently they hang out in Kangerlussuaq more than Illulissat, and at airports not at all), but I have seen advertisements for burgers made out of musk oxen, which is a little creepy.  At the moment we're about two hours closer to the North Pole than we are to New York City, or Copenhagen.  The weather is quite nice, I'm enjoying the 50's temperatures.  Greenland is extremely rocky and gray, and the only ice I've seen is in the water, but there are huge amounts of that.

We've got jobs up and processing pretty well down, still working on getting the full range of processing options running without problems.  Most of the concerns have been dealt with, but we want to make completely sure that we're up and running as well as possible.

Equipped with a ridiculous amount of gear and orange suitcases, I am headed to Illulissat, Greenland today.  Via Copenhagen.  To talk to people about how well our computers are doing for them.  Yes, I will be back very soon, meaning our travel time will nearly double the time we're on the ground in Illulissat.  No, I will not bring you a musk ox, even though I think they are cute, too.  I will indeed take lots of pictures, although Link's pictures will undoubtedly be better than my own, so I will provide links to Link's pictures.  

Biggest threats:
• Mosquitoes
• Customs Officers (I'm guessing you get some funny looks trying to cross borders w/ 72GB of high-quality ram in your briefcase)
• Skraelings (don't tell them I said that)

Coolest stuff:
• Mermaids
• Vikings
• Friendly Skraelings
• Faxe Beer

I will update this with less fantastical silliness later on.

It was not long ago that Ula and I were in the local StarBookstore and I was lamenting not being able to find anything I like.  My favorite shelves at McBooksRUs are filled with new fantasy and science fiction, which I'm sure has a lot of fine literary qualities, but I'm feeling a little skeptical about.  Thank the solstice, those days are over.  I'm actually in a surfeit of books, with nary a lycanthrope in sight.  Maybe one or two.

In the ecstatic early summer of May and June, I've had the opportunity to rip through a number of books that have really made the cravings go down.

• I finally found some of Kathe Koja's work (at the library, natch).  Extremities is a fantastic story collection that has all of the great creepiness you'd find in The Cipher, which is where I first found Ms. Koja's work.  Neither of these books appear on http://www.kathekoja.com, despite the fact that they are not exactly the type of things that Koja's new target audience of young adults should be reading.
• I forgot this until I saw it on the nightstand the other day, but The Raw Shark Texts was probably the first thing that I ran across this summer that made me think it would be a worthwhile one for reading.  Thought fish that live in texts, feeding on humans in the conceptual stream?  How could you turn it down?
• Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors is differently creepy and a fast read.  Everyone else but me has already probably read it.  Bargain bin.  Worth it.
• Also in the category of "everyone's already read" is Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon.  I picked this up during one of the lamenting times, thinking "everyone else says this is pretty good, maybe it's time that I read this".  Everyone else is freakin' right.  One time.
• Peter Watts' Starfish, yea, unto the entire Rifters series is available at http://www.feedbooks.com.  I read this before, didn't realize it, and I'm having an awesome time picking it back up.  Crazy people at the bottom of the sea.  You can't go wrong with biomodification and bathyscaphes.  Holy crap, there's a lot of good stuff on that Feedbooks.com, more and more varied than on http://www.gutenberg.org, which is still good.
• Geek Love, picked up at an antique store selling out of business, sadly.  A fine tale of carnival life and love and evil.
• Kirby, comics artist biography that hits the spot.
• Edogawa Rampo's stories collected in Japanese Tales of Mystery and Imagination.  It's more than just a play on words, it's a fantastic festival of terrifying and mysterious stories.
• HPL's Dreams in the Witch House and other Weird Stories.  Published by Penguin, Edited by the Joshi, whose footnoting borders on the obsessive-compulsive.

Circus Circus hotel has a channel when you can watch the dog kennel, with music over it.  When I turned it on (it was the best channel available, natch) it was playing Depeche Mode ("Shake the disease"), followed by the Cure ("Love Cats")...it was so absurd I had to leave it on for the whole duration.  There aren't any dogs in the kennel right now...you just see empty cages.

A terminal holds the world's most frightening Au Bon Pain, I mean anywhere.  You walk up thinking, "Oh great, fresh bread around something tasty and maybe a muffin or something."  The counter over which you submit your order is queerly stained with fingerprints as if this were the world's most-traveled ABP, not just some outpost at the very end of A terminal.

Selmon, the cashier, is polite with the kind of politeness you get from people who are keeping their dignity in tough circumstances, she dispatches your order to a silent man behind the sandwich counter who has your sandwich eerily ready before you can even make it down to his station.  The sandwich is wrapped up tightly, inexpertly, so that when you bite down you get fragments of paper, if you're not careful to unwrap.  Unwrapping the sandwich causes it to spill apart across the back of your hand, staining you with sandwich juices.

As you eat you notice a barrier of paper towels around the pepsi cooler, feebly holding back condensation.  Odors pass through, some delectable (cooking bacon), some distasteful (toast burnt to pure carbon).  A girl in those giant suede boots skateboards down the concourse, wheels announcing her presence from far away across the tiled floor.  She carries a cardboard box in her hands as she skates implacably past.  

I bet there's weed inside.