Good morning! Hello! How are you? I am good! I am HOME! I just got a ton of sleep! In my bed! With my non-crappy, non-travel CPAP machine. And my mattress, with its nice little dent for me in it. And my blankets. It was lovely. It is 7:30 AM. The sun is just coming up over the pond. My wife and Janie and our friend Abby are all sleeping upstairs. It is lovely.
Let’s see… Where did I leave off with you? Saturday I went over to Mom’s and cleaned out my dad’s dresser’s top drawer. It was remarkably unchanged from when I was a kid. That was emotional. I found my original birth certificate and vaccination record. I packed it up, wrestled with mom’s printer for quite a while, made use of the shipping station that they have in the common area of her community home, and left the packed box at the spot you can leave packages.
Man. Raven is so cool. Like there are five or so buildings for living, but they’re all connected with these breezeway common areas, and, like, if it was a dorm, or a hospital, or something, those common areas would be pretty sterile. But this is a home and so all the common areas have amazing common-amenities. Like the usual stuff like ping pong tables and kitchens and stuff, but also tons of bookshelves with communal books, and tons of plants that the various residents maintain. Like if you were into gardening you could just find a window and set up a bunch of plants. It’s cool. And there is a box are and a shipping station with everything you need to mail out packages. I like it very much. There is also a recycling are and someone in the building drinks Zevia. Good for them.
Zevia is filing for an IPO, by the way. Good for them. You go, Zevia.
So once that was done, we had maybe 4 hours to kill so Val, Lucas, Mom and I just drove around Fairbanks, up to Fox, and then down to Salcha. It was great. I bought Jane another Alaska coloring book at the Knotty shop, which is remarkably unchanged, and had no toddler sizes for their t-shirts, alas. Lucas napped for a long time on the drive, which was good. And I did a video call with Janey at her bedtime.
Then Jack and Fred and Bonnie and Matt met up and we all went for a family dinner at the Salmon Bake, which my drunken idea a couple nights earlier. The food was… well, not awesome, and it was hella expensive but also it was kind of nice? It was outdoors, not too many mosquitoes, chill ambience. I liked it. I had the fried halibut which was almost good, but the salmon was, well, just kind of garbage. First off, they don’t bake it anymore, which is pretty freakin weird for a place called the Salmon bake? Like it used to be baked and it used to be good. Now its grilled with this garbage weird sweet glaze on it that is just not good. Kind of a disappointment. But I still love the mining tunnel entrance, though. Almost as fun as when I was a kid.
After dinner, I said goodbye to Mom, Jack, Fred, Bonnie and Matt. Then Val and I dropped off the car I’d been borrowing at her work, and then we went and did a loop of the airport, drove out onto the dykes and out to the Tanana river, which is just beautiful, I love it out there.
I will make a special exception and put a photo of myself into this email.
Val was going to meet up with Jamie and Derek and Rochelle at Pike’s at 8. My flight was at 10:30. I was sort of social’d out. Normally at this stage in an Alaska visit I’m exhausted and socially overwhelmed and content to just sit in an airport for, like, three hours, but the mask mandate makes that somewhat more unpleasant. Plus I wanted to see Rochelle and hadn’t seen her yet, so I joined them at Pike’s for an hour. There weren’t many seats, so we sat with this very drunk woman who had driven up from Anchorage for a Tinder Date with a very nice seeming GI guy from Wainwright who grew up in Georgia and it was very awkward and man I am super glad I’m not on that date.
Also I forgot to take a picture of Rochelle, that was dumb, but here are Val and Derek and Jamie!
And then the airport, except there was one more emergency, I had accidentally taken Val’s car key with me, so I had to go back out through security and Derek had to drive Val back to the airport, and I got her the key, and then went back through security and boy that was fun.
Then the flight home which was hella fast. Like nine hours. It was amazing. It was, however, a nine-hour redeye with an hour stop in them middle, so, like, basically impossible to get any sleep. I got maybe 2-3 hours on the first leg and maybe an hour on the second leg. But still! I was home! Well, I was at RDU. And you’ll be happy to know I remembered to check for RDU Balloons and there were four! I did not, however, take a picture of them. But I was happy they were there. It is a human tradition that deserves to live on past the pandemic.
OH! I also have to say that using the selfie-stick for reading on the plane performed flawlessly, it is a fantastic invention, my neck is much better on this return trip for not having spent seven hours looking down. All of the flight attendents marveled at my genius, I am fairly sure this is a brand new invention and I must say I am well-chuffed, even if I look completely ridiculous using it. I didn’t get a picture for you, though. I’m sorry.
And I got home and was reunited with my beautiful wife and daughter and our friend Abby who has been down here helping Emma not go insane with solo parenting for the last week. YAY!
Traveling was great but it’s nice to be home, and I am not dying to go anywhere else for a while. Wearing a mask for 12 hours is mildly unpleasant, but it’s not so bad if you just go to sleep. I’m still suffering from having unpacked for the first time in twenty years, my backpack didn’t have any sleep masks in it, and kids on airplanes like to open the windows and look at the midnight sun at 2 AM and it’s hard to sleep when you’re being blinded. There are no pre-flight drinks anymore in First so, like, if your approach is have a glass of wine with which to take your pills, then pass out, you gotta wait, like, an hour into the flight. I’m a regular curmudgeon over here. What can I say. I am getting old and like my routine, after six nights straight in bars. Yeah you go try six nights straight in bars in towns without your bed and tell me if you don’t start to miss your bed.
It was a good trip though, and it was wonderful to see so many friends. I am really kind of stunned at how many friends you can see in Alaska if you go in the summer. It was just amazing to see Jamie and Frank and Carrie and Vern and Val and Derek and Dustin and Andy and Rochelle. In the winter, that doesn’t really happen. In the summer you get friends and mosquito bites! It’s a decent trade.
While I was gone, Abby seems to have gotten Emma to actually leave the house, and by the time I got here they were just, like, going out to dinner (outdoors) left and right, so we went to Town Hall Grill and got burgers out on the patio which was super weird. Like, I’d been eating out for an entire week on the trip, but not with my baby and not around here. Jane has no idea how to actually, you know, be out of the house. She’s not loud or crying (too bad) or anything, but all of the things we taught her about staying at her seat at a restaurant are out the window, and she was wandering around like some sort of free range kid. But all in all it worked out. We got her back on track with the routine when I got home, we did our walk, we did daddy bedtime, it was lovely, she did her normal stalling and had two giant poops, normalizing back onto her normal evening poop time. Nature is healing.
The garden is doing… okay. It’s been hot, so all of the spring stuff is kind of done. The beans have been eaten, the beets too. The remaining lettuces all wilted, which is sad, but, yeah, heat. Abby had to cull the last of the brassicas because they had some mite on them. But the summer stuff — the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the peppers, the luffa, the watermelon — it all seems okay. I am going to start cleaning things up for doing the fall planting in a week or two. I have new cages and netting and I am going to have a kick-ass fall garden, just you watch. Don’t think we’ll get a gardening video in this week, or a podcast, so next weekend I am ambitiously going to try and do both and rearrange my office, which might be a bit much, but I am very excited to be back home.
After Jane’s bedtime, Abby and Emma and I watched two episodes of Mythbusters, which was really great, that show is great.
I took today off and really all I want to do is sort of finish unpacking, water and fertilize the garden, take a shower, and… oh, god, right. I have a doctor’s appointment today and I have to fast till 1PM that is going to suck. Oh well. I’ll manage. I’m so excited to do Jane’s breakfast this morning. I really did miss her.
Also, I can kind of see both worlds with the pandemic. Like it was really nice to be up in Fairbanks, going out, seeing friends, not worrying too much about masks. But every once in a while… it is kind of like, I don’t know. Driving without a seatbelt? Every once in a while you think huh this is nice but maybe it’ll kill me or something and you get mildly freaked out about the Delta variant. And it is really nice to just stay in your home and not worry about such things. I had my fun but I am happy to be home. I kinda want to take a COVID test in a week, even though I know that’s irrational.
I also like that you can wear a mask everywhere if you want. Even at bars at night, there were one or two people in masks and no one looked at them that weirdly. You can just do you. I appreciate that. There does seem to be a thin chance that America can be a bit more like Asia where mask wearing is normalized. I would enjoy that.
Let’s do a mix! Oh it’s so nice to be back home with my giant monitor and I can take decent screenshots again. God, that old computer and that slow internet were so slow. Slow internet is slow. Anyway, ladies mix today. I am into it. Enjoy. Hopefully this week I can get ahead of the game on the mixes again, have a bit of a backlog instead of making them on the fly. Still, though, this one turned out well. I think maybe I should have put “epiphany” on here instead of “the1,” but Belinda Carlisle makes it all worth it.
Talk to you guys tomorrow! I have to go back to work tomorrow! It’s gonna rule.