Spring Cleaning

My room is a catastrophe. It is littered with used camping gear, brand new camping gear, empty beer bottles, freshly cleaned (and folded!) clothes, half-filled boxes of things I mean to keep, random piles of things I mean to annex, a pile of items I've already promised to someone else, and much, much more. It's April, it's spring, and it's six weeks from the point where I no longer live in a solid building.

No, that's not actually true.

In six weeks our lease expires. Actually, it's ten weeks, but our landlord lost the paperwork, we lost our paperwork, and he wants to move in at the beginning of June, so in six weeks our lease expires. At that point, I collect the items I want to keep, the used and new camping gear, and a good assortment of those freshly cleaned clothes, and mail a good portion away while keeping the bare essentials for what looks to be four months of camping in Girdwood, Alaska. The picture at the top of this is, more or less, the tentative site for camping. Our campsite should be relatively easily accessible from the town, but tucked away enough to prohibit attention. Proximity to running water is a huge plus, though this may also draw bears, which is probably the largest concern for camping in Girdwood for an extended period of time. I can't promise frequent posts at that point, but there will, at the very least, be more pictures.

It's been at least a month and a half since my last post, maybe two months, so to my faithful followers, I apologize for that. I've gained a higher respect for blogging now, as I realize that for me it is a balance between wanting to place content and wanting content to place. F Scott Fitzgerald said it well:

"You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."

It's true enough, I want to have something important to say before I commit anything to a more permanent medium such as a blog site! :) That's not to say I haven't done anything interesting for the last six weeks, though. I was contracted to help write/design a text adventure, and I'm still stoked about that. From what I can tell, I am one of the few people to actually get paid for that in recent years. On top of that, the experience broadened my scope of writing for various mediums and here is how:
Writing for a text adventure consists largely of writing a description for a given 'room' or area in which the player stands. Easy enough? The description cannot be too short, or it is dismissible. The description cannot be too long because the player will be visiting this location repeatedly. The description cannot imply initial discovery of anything in the location, because the description must hold for any occurrence of entering the area. The description must also, fitting those guidelines, give casual mention to any objects which are to be interacted upon by the player. So take those guidelines and craft a world in which the player can feel immersed. It was just a wholly different writing experience for me, and very exciting. I'm still excited over it. Okay, that's the end of my rant on that.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the other thing that happened is we had a volcanic eruption 140 miles southwest of us, and since it continues to erupt, we occasionally get the Anchorage airport canceling flights and warnings of ashfall heading toward Girdwood! Exciting! :)

Being that it is now spring, Girdwood is transitioning from long underwear and jacket weather to shorts and a t-shirt weather, which leaves us, currently, in pants and sweatshirt weather. The sun doesn't set until 8:30PM and there are plenty of blue sky days to be had, while the piles of snow (some 15+ feet tall!) slowly melt away and the roads become a fragmented mess of sectional gravel and three-inch-thick ice transitions. Next on the forecast: three days of rain. And I can finally say I'm happy to see it. It's time for the sun, the rain, and higher traffic volume to wash away the lingering snow. Six months, biking and camping season.