Life in Alaska

David and I spent the greater part of September and part of October looking for a job.  This meant that every morning we would get up and try to 'share" the computer as we did our job search work.  Many resumes and many letters of inquiry liberally mixed with walks in the woods and trips around Fairbanks.

The people here are so nice and have been so helpful.  Everyone we have spoken to has given us job leads and suggestions and they paid off.  David has started his job at Design Alaska, a very community minded long time all purpose engineering firm in Fairbanks.  I was directed to do volunteer work at the Yukon Quest, the 1000 Whitehorse to Fairbanks ( or vice-versa every other year) which has been very satisfying.  The people in the office are wonderful and, of course, the dog sled is so quitessentially Alaskan.  And the vocabulary...mushers, dog drops, check points, handlers, vet checks, pilots to fly dogs here and there.  And the stories.  One woman musher has been on dog sleds since she was a few months old.  Her mother, a musher, lived on a trap line 50 trail miles from the stores.  Once she was strapped to the sled and her mother lsot the dogs and off they went.  The little girl was found a few miles down the trail still in here little box that had jiggled off the sled.  Or the musher who found she was pregnant whilerunning a race in which she had an accident and got a concussion...and, by the way, found she was pregnant. What a world.  But I can bring Fred when I go in and he is quite a hit.

I really want a job at the University.  I met a woman at synagogue whose husband helps chair the Resilience and Adaptation program and she suggested to him that I would be a good coordinator.  Thsi is a wonderful PhD program that takes an interdisciplinary, holistic approach at training scientists, policy makers and advocates and academians to look at problems affecting the circumpolar north.  I went to an all day colloquium during which some of the students presented their papers.  Wow!  Traveling with carabou; working far out in villages; looking at water issues for folks who pump water directly from rivers and on and on.  Right now I am working as a contract employee putting together their website, hoping that I can apply for the coordinator job hen it is offered. 

Lots of fun, but now we have very little play time.

We took a wonderful trip into the White Mountain area outside of Fairbanks before we got our jobs and spent a day in snowy mountain paths.  We also went past a gold dredge.  In the course of a conversation at the Obama headquarters with one of the field staff we told about our little trip and the gold dredge.  She said, "Oh yea.  My mother owns it."  and then she just kept talking.  'Stop!"  We shouted.  Go back and explain.  And sure enough, her mother a historian, bought the thing and 50 tailings acres to save it from being torn down.  We will get a tour.

We also stopped at a campground and saw a spooky, empty tent covered with snow, and then, further down the trail a snow cat. Strange.

The next weekend Fairbanks held an Obama rally.  David and I volunteered to stand on a streetcorner with signs advertising the rally.  Street corner standing is what you do here. Not my favorite activity.  But the rally was fun, especially the pig.What was even stranger is that everyone knew the pig and the woman who owned her.

Having great fun and looking forward to Thanksgiving in Homer.