#alaska problems

The agonizing decision of whether to dry my hair first so it doesn't drip water down my back, or dry my back first so I don't get chilled...only to have to try it again because the water from my hair has now dripped down it.

The rush to dry whichever one I chose as quickly as I can before the air makes me cold.

Today, at work, I was informed of a customer on my route having put in a complaint.

The reason for the complaint?

She had ordered something from Virginia to be shipped via Ground Advantage, and she expected it to arrive in 3 days.

So this was my car yesterday before I finally dug it out, which took 45 entire minutes

Please stop!

Full Moon lore. Ok so hear me out; where I live there's no smog/emission pollution and up until very recently zero light pollution. My little Alaskan village didn't have electricity until a couple of years ago, there are 9 street lights there and only 4 of them are turned on. Sometimes. It's like that for about 60-200 miles depending on the direction.

The night sky is so clear you can go lay out on the lake in the winter, and if you look up long enough you feel as if you're falling into the sky because there's so much depth. Every time you focus on a point and think "that's the farthest star!" You take a deep breath and settle farther, finding another, and another and another until you have to laugh and panic and grab the ice to make sure it's still up and you're not falling into a solar sea.

I've gotten into arguments with people I've brought out, they think Sirius is a satellite, or that Jupiter is a really slow commercial jet (? Yeah that's happened, but I've seen city skies so I can't blame some people). I've seen people panic because they'd never seen the Milky Way, and thought something was dreadfully wrong. No, my friends, I hope that everyone gets a chance to see the pure, untouched sky. Natural light is so bright if you let it shine.

The full moon, or even the half moon, shines like the Hunter's friend; making night a time of blanketed cool, the soft wind rustling, masking your breath and footsteps, allowing you to see as unhindered as a nocturnal predator.

I've never felt fear under the light of the moon here, not hunting, trapping on my fur line, fishing, listening to my wolf pack play and sing, or just running into the night to watch this stark yet loving light reflect off ordinary things. The moonlight here glows off of the august fallen leaves like hot dragon's gold against the dark ground, shines off the lake like a mirrior, and reflects off of snow so encompassingly the night shines brighter than the day; for in this soft light you're sheilded from the harshness of the sun and can look upon the land unharmed.

So growing up in that environment my question would be who's the smarty pants that made all of the negative folklore about creepy things happening around the full moon? Like? Ok I just described how effective natural light is, imagine what it's like out there without light. Pitch. Fucking. Black. Ok, I don't think many people have experienced what it's like to not be able to see AT ALL because the universe decided for a night or so out of each month the moon needed to hide.

Do you have any idea. What it feels like. To be a single person awake in the middle of the night, in a community of maybe 6 people, who live hundreds of yards if not miles apart, hundreds of miles from the nearest electric source of light, and there's no fucking moon out? Or it's cloudy and you can't even get bearing off of starlight? Do you know how terrifying it is to experience a darkness so complete it feels like a blanket? We had outhouses, which are small little houses placed FAR AWAY from our living quarters to use the bathroom in because we didn't have running water until recently either.

I still have an outhouse, because the idea of shitting in my own house where I eat, sleep and live bothers the hell out me. Cue back to HOW FAR AWAY we place these things from our actual houses; I don't want to shit anywhere near where I live ok? That's gross. So yeah, 1am, half awake, in the middle of nowhere and if you're lucky enough to have a lantern (like a kerosene fire-lit thing that Filch and Harry carried around) or a flashlight (torch to my U.K./Aussie's) it's still literally so fucking Dark that the light looks like it was drawn from a cartoon and the darkness is a tangible thing pushing back against your teeny little bubble or stream of light. You can't see shit. Anywhere.

So, I took Olaf to the lakes for the first time in a bit, because it’s a good place for him to run off leash. 

Or, it usually is. It’s bordered on two sides by the Tanana River and one side by a lake that connects to the river. 

Anyway, I forgot:

The time of year

So, yeah. 

Olaf found a salmon skin of roughly 20x4 inches with mostly intact fins. He then proceeded to scarf it down as fast as he could (no chewing because he can’t run and chew and he correctly assumed that if he stopped running to chew I’d catch up and take it away from him). 

So, now I get to watch him like a hawk for 2 weeks (or until he starts showing symptoms) to make sure that:

Whatever remaining vertebrae and small bones were in the fin/tail successfully pass through his system without causing problems

He didn’t pick up any live Neorickettsia flukes in whatever remaining flesh might have been on the skin (which I don’t think there was much flesh, but paranoia paranoia)

He didn’t pick up anything else from eating a half dessicated/half rotted large bit of fish carrion.