On the move

Seward said goodbye to me with a snowstorm this morning. The cab driver let me ride around with him until the “bus station” opened. (The bus station in Seward is more like a large cabin, and the bus is one of those half-sized Citibus rigs, pulling a trailer for luggage.) I am stuck on a [...]

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Tiny determinations of great import

I have decided that I want to name my Kona mountain bike Firenze, after the centaur from Harry Potter. There was a tiny little field mouse sniffing around the mud room earlier today. He was tiny and fat and dark gray. Oh. Mud rooms are attached to just about every home in Seward. They are [...]

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And then the sun went away

It is almost 8am and it is pitch black outside. It isn’t raining for the first time in a week, and I am trying to work up the nerve to don several layers of cold and bike to work this morning. I crawled out of bed at 6:30 to find Wolf still playing video games [...]

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Bits and pieces of nothing at all

It has started to freeze during the night. The wind feels like a wall of ice shards slamming into my body whenever I am feeling dumb enough to try to bike anywhere against the gusts. The sun has been out and painfully bright every day this week, which just confuses the issue. Being a pharmacy [...]

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Rhythmically Confused Circadians

Sometime late last week, as I was making my way down Nash road to the grocery store where I work, a glance up through the the break in the trees revealed the snow that had dusted the mountain peaks the night before. What only a few weeks ago was a veritable jungle behind my house [...]

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Notes

I start in the pharmacy next week (praise to the paradoxically nonexistant Powers who Are), and am more excited about that than I have been about anything since landing in the Damp but not yet Frozen North. However, this also means that my sleep cycle has to readjust all over again, as I will be [...]

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The beauty of dynamic relativity

According to the cycle of Nature that I am accustomed to, there is not even a hint of Autumn in the air before the very end of September. The leaves are still more likely to be burned from the summer sun than yellowing from late night chills, the fields are still full of cotton, and [...]

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On customer service

I feel all the time like I’m being punished for being marginally competent. And the margins are very wide. Currently, my incredibly mindless job consists of selling tobacco, renting out the paltry selection of videos the grocery store has, answering the phone and dealing with the unwashed masses who need rolls of quarters and discount [...]

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Termination Dust

Today was bizarre; the inside of the grocery store could have been somewhere in Japan. A cruise ship from Asia pulled in this morning, and hundreds of people from Indonesia needed to wire money home through Western Union. After 2pm most days of the week, I am the only Western Union agent available in Seward, [...]

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Observations of Alaskan Culture

I absolutely can NOT stand most of the men in this place. I know that I joked about it a little bit before I left Texas, but I didn’t come up here to get hit on by every single adult male I interact with. It pisses me off beyond words that I simply can not [...]

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