Summer Happenings and Beyond

A lot has happened since my last blog post (par for the course, these days), which if you don't count random video clips, includes hiking a valley,

building a suspended, wooden platform, biking a 24 mile trail,

losing a suspended, wooden platform to vandals, hiking a backyard mountain,

hiking another backyard mountain,

moving into a pre-existing house in the woods,

backpacking another backyard trail for three days,

and squatting in a tent outside a shed-turned-cabin.

Forest Fair, treasure maps in progress, and dog-sitting at various houses throughout Girdwood also fit the bill of 'Ye Olde Summer Events'.

Oh yeah, and the heading picture for this post is from the Waikiki Beach Camp-out 2009 in Cooper Landing!

Not that I'm trying to pass buck or anything, but there are a plethora of photos covering these events on my facebook page, or you can visit the individual photo albums without a facebook account by clicking these links:

Upper Winner Creek Hike
Biking Johnson Pass
Hiking Max's Mountain
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 1
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 2 (backpacking trip)
Hiking Crow Pass, Part 2 (10 minute backpacking video)

And for those of you who've been following these events via facebook and questioning whether this post is just a rehash of previous events and not worth reading, you'll be glad to know that getting this far in the post warrants a prize and a warning all wrapped up into one tasty tamale-of-a-heads-up:

Krikkit anyone?

"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." ~Lao Tzu

I'm collecting quotes for a project I'll be working on over the next few weeks. Quotes I'm looking for should be on the subject of nature, solitude, and treasure hunts. If anyone feels compelled to add to my compilation, please note the quote and who uttered the words of wisdom. I've got a healthy 15-20 right now, but I'm welcoming more as space allows.

"Look closely at Central America, and try to imagine what would happen if this vital region were to fall into Communist hands. What would happen is a lot of Communists would be stung repeatedly by vivious(sic) tropical insects the size of mature hamsters." ~Dave Berry

Planning continues for a vacation in the heart of America, and by that I mean Central America. The current itinerary is as follows:

October 29th -> Fly from Anchorage to Seattle to visit Emily, Toby, Tiny Toby, Michelle, and Michael.
November 3rd -> Fly from Seattle to Cancun to begin the journey from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico into Guatemala (and beyond?).
Tentatively, January 15th -> Fly from Cancun to Anchorage to embrace the Alaskan winter once more and collect money as work allows until the next summer. Possibly considering Cancun -> Medford, Oregon in lieu of Anchorage.

This all depends on how much money I can collect in the next couple months. :)

As always, apologies abound for the delay between posts and thank you for reading.

Indoor Waterfall

Here's a waterfall for all you inside at your computers. Cheers! :)

Girdwood is a Rainforest

Girdwood is a rainforest with bears and lots of mud.
So, we are building a suspended wooden platform to keep us out of the muck! I've thrown this mini-movie together for a brief look at what we're up to out there. :)

A snippet from Seattle

Here's a short video or "mini movie" of my sisters, Michelle and Niki, playing cards in Seattle. A good friend of mine, Paul W., has been posting mini movies to the web and I love the idea and plan to contribute my own bits as well. Cheers! :)

Bad Poetry

 
A morning breakfast, eat.
Cup of coffee, remind me:
Gone are the nights of Thai food gas
And a million sensations
of beer-soaked imaginations
Flying cards and towers of glass
Camraderie between relations
Man the stations, our creations
Frozen images show us patience
A river has divided then and now

Now there's a mirror and a comb
A million tiny hairs returning home
And thick, grey clouds on the fly
an ocean-blown breeze across a clear blue sky.
Ducks on water and boats on glass
Tadpoles swam just beyond our grasp.
Here's a Singer sewer and Tom Waits
and two days from our departure gates.

And books
so many books
a piano
a gazebo
bad poetry and
a speeding clock

Visiting Seattle

 
I'm in Seattle. It is raining.

Niki and I are currently in Seattle to visit our littlest sister, Michelle, and her boyfriend Michael. I'm also here to check out the city and get some first impressions. And I'm also here to visit Bellingham and produce pictures of it for Emily and Toby, who will be moving there within a month's time.
I've been taking pictures and there will be more comprehensive Seattle posts soon to come (or maybe just one post with a bunch of pictures) but for now, it's an hour after midnight and I've been spending a lot of time walking around the downtown area. Good night.

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.