Thursday, May 08, 2014

So it Was Aggressive

I really thought I'd be a blogging machine, but hey! It's been weeks already. What's new… the weather is AMAZING. Yes, we're still in Alaska and no, it's not hot but seriously, it's great. We're in the mid-50s to 60s every day (the former me never would've believed those temps could feel warm), it's sunny and it rained one day this week so now - boom - everything's turning green. The explosion of leaves might also be helped by the insanely long days that are only getting longer. It's 11pm and there's still a sunset sky out there. We're still totally off our normal schedule (or perhaps it should be known as our previous, lower 48, schedule) and routinely eat dinner sometime around 7:30. I believe it's a result of many factors: Wyatt gets home from school an hour later than he used to, Jeff gets home from work late every night and it just doesn't look like it's time to fix dinner until at least 6:30 or 7. We've had another moose sighting, this time in the front yard, and reports abound that the bears have woken up for the season so we're all about making extra noise while we're outside. Speaking of noise and outside, I didn't predict how annoying chirping birds would be at midnight. Extra daylight seems to mess with every species equally.

Natalie and I have found our happy place of doing-not-much-and-being-okay-with-it but Wyatt continues to miss his teacher and friends from South Carolina. Moving is not for the weak. I will say that I think my kids play better with each other than they did pre-move, so maybe there are upsides, too. Slowly but surely, we're getting settled.

Other random things sucking up my very limited attention span:
1. our house in Virginia will be up for rent again this summer and we're learning how to turn it over/handle that when we're not there. We've been lucky to have great renters in it since we left, so this is uncharted territory. I'm not sure I'm a huge fan.

2. Alaska doesn't have smog, but we do get to enjoy the crud that blows in from Asia. Thank you so much, China and Korea, for giving us days of hazy skies. Gross. Thank goodness for the rain that washed it away.

3. There's currently a couple of inches of water in the crawl space under our house. It's not supposed to be there and it only destroyed the boxes we save for our high value electronics (totally a military thing, I think?) but it's just there and I'm not really sure our landlord understands that there's quite so much of it.

4. We're heading out Saturday morning for our first 'real' Alaska adventure - whale watching near Seward. The weather's supposed to be great, we're going with friends and it should be fun. Maybe I'll even share some pictures on here, better yet maybe I'll do it by the end of May!








3 comments:

Leslie said...

Keep the Alaska-isms coming! We never had the chance to live there and I always love learning about the random oddities of life in different places. Question - do native Alaskans have an accent? Do they talk like Canadians or Washintonians? Curious. Didn't Natalie become Southern in SC? Do they notice her little accent?

SStites said...

Next time you see Bob Monier, ask him about birds that chirp in the night. He has a great story about that!

SStites said...

Next time you see Bob Monier, ask him about birds that chirp in the night. He has a great story about that!