Tundra Tales: Part 2

So, the second day of travel.

Waking around 10ish, we started to make sense of what was left to do, and had a lovely conversation with the crazy B&B owner, who is a climate change denier and frequently sleeps out with her sheep in the shed.

Everything outside is drenched, leaves are yellow and coming down, but the worst of the storm has passed.  Our goal was Tok, about 6 to 7 hours ahead.  The drive was gorgeous, passing by glaciers, following the Matanuska River up into the mountains, then down into the Copper River Delta.  Unfortunately, the road was very rough, and just outside of Glenallen we hit a bad bump hidden in a puddle and our check engine light came on.  We limp into the gas station in Glenallen (there are only 2), and check everything.  The jeep is running a little rough, but nothing is obviously wrong.  I ask the attendant if there was anywhere in town we could get it checked out, and he tells me nobody in town has the sensor to hook up to the engines computer, but that the mechanic will be in tomorrow and can look at it.  Or we can drive 2 more hours to Tok, and get it looked at there.

That was an incredibly stressful 2 hours, along a bumpy road, the roof flexing at every jostle from the weight of the carrier, and me entering a full panic mode.  Still beautiful, and the clouds have lifted, but hard to enjoy when something is wrong and we might not make our ferry ($1500 ticket going to waste looming, and about that same price in gas and lodging and another 4 days of driving if we miss the boat).

We get into Tok around 6ish, and are too exhausted and stressed to do much, so we find a hotel room, set an alarm for 2am (The northern lights were supposed to be fantastic that night), eat and fall right to sleep.  Next thing we know it's 9am, the power had gone off in the night, and we have 8 more hours of driving to do before being at the ferry at 6pm AND figure out what's wrong with the car.  We run around to a few different places and one finally has a computer to tell us the #5 cylinder is sparking to the boot (it came loose and got some water into it).  This means it's been dumping un-ignited gasoline into the cylinder for the last 2-3 hours of driving.  They tell me they can't fix it for another 2 hours, which means we miss the boat, so we try 2 other places in town, then come back to the first place where they unplug the wire, plug it back in, and suddenly it's working again.  We haul ass to Haines, through the Yukon territory, with gorgeous scenery and weather, and make it right before the boat starts loading.

We have sunny weather the whole way down, but it's hard to let the stress of the past week go.  To be continued in Part 3, sailing the inside passage!

Epics without Orcs: Part 1

So,  since the last post I've changed offices (not jobs or company), moved 2700 miles, spent nearly all my money, and have been without a safety net.  I'm jealous of friends travelling Europe and South America, but I'm very happy to finally have a working home kitchen again (for relative values of working).

This has been a soft landing after TMFH (the move from hell).  I'm going to sketch out the details and troubles of the past month and a half.  I'm not doing this to complain, or compare, I just want to set it down before it becomes one big repressed blur of worry and pain.

August -  lots of preparations done to move have been discussed, planned out, and purchased.  We had a lot of packing to do, but we had planned on a month and a half to get it done in.  Charlie has begun to recognize soy in all its forms as a horrible migraine trigger, and is trying to plan on taking all the food we will need for the trip.  We've had to stop eating at some of our favorite restaurants in Anchorage because of the soy problem.

Beginning of September -
Then we both got sick.  Charlie got a weeklong migraine and I wasn't much better with sinus crud.  Our planned schedule fell off.  This left us a week or so to catch up.  Both of us have learned not to push too hard against illness, since it prolongs it and makes it significantly worse (especially for Charlie).

Second week - mad scramble to complete all my promised workload (I worked right up until Friday at 2ish), and get things packed/donated/organized/cleaned.

Friday before the move, our wonderful friends have a party for us, and it was amazingly bittersweet, and fun, and a great send off.  We get home at 12:30am, pack until 2:30am, sleep for 2 hours, and are up and going again by 5:30am.

Saturday (also, my 30th birthday) - We overslept an hour.  Charlie rested a bit here and there, but we were both packing like mad fiends.  Noon was our target 'out the door time', and when we had coordinated with the landlord to be out by.  By 8am it's pretty clear we're not going to make it, so we call the landlord and ask for a short extension.  At 10am, we hit up our favorite breakfast venue for the last time, and dropped off a very full car of donations to the Ark of Anchorage.  We're back at cleaning and packing by noon, but still nowhere near done.  At 3pm I call and ask the landlord for another hour or so, and when he comes by at 5pm, we're still scrubbing.  He says to leave the keys and things on the kitchen counter, and lock up after ourselves.

Fast forward....11pm we're finally loading the car.  There is a storm coming in to town, rain, cold, winds above 65 mph.  I'm packing a rooftop carrier, Charlie is doing the last loading.  Only it doesn't all fit.  So we unpack and try again.  and again.  and again.  Eventually, at 2am we take five boxes and a suitcase to the fed-ex, then return, load eeeeverything, and make our escape.

We'd booked a room at the best rated B&B in Palmer (45 minutes further along our way out of Alaska), but driving through the night at 3-4AM, through dark, wind, branches, and moose.  There were no lights on, but our door was unlocked.  We washed and slept briefly, Anchorage behind us.

It's been an exciting few weeks.  A great mix of friends, car troubles, anxiety, and apartment hunting.  I've been coming off one medicine, but I feel like the stress of this move is getting to me.  I still haven't been able finalize an apartment (anything with a credit check is terrifying after years of medical debt).  I have a short list, but still haven't one that meets all our preferences.  I'd really rather not get trapped like we did moving to Seattle, but we've got much better tools for finding a place now than during that move.  Between walkscore, padmapper, and placeofmine I've been able to put together a short list, and ensure they're within close enough to work/groceries, and not in high crime areas.  Just need to contact them and confirm somethings, then decide which of our preferences we can compromise on.

It doesn't help that for the past few weeks I've been dizzy and fatigued.  I'm not sure if this is brought on by stress or illness, but pseudoephedrine and mucinex seem to help with the worst of it.  Of course, those knock me out, so that doesn't help with getting things done.

On the plus side, we've really pared down what we're bringing with us, and picked up a roof top carrier that will hold almost all the clothes.  The ferry is booked, the cat's flight and the shipment of supplies are booked, everything in my slowly failing hard drive has been backed up onto an external, we have all the gear we'll need to sleep on the boat, the couch is at the dump, and I've got a good checklist of next steps going.

selfish

So....masks.  Keeping up appearances.  It takes a lot of energy to maintain the pleasant fiction that I'm not screaming inside my head.  Unfortunately, it's been 9 months since this bout of depression started, and now I'm having more and more trouble keeping up that mask.  I want to hide.  I want to howl.  I want I want I want.

How selfish.

And so my mask stays up in public.  My wife has had to deal with seeing me take it on and off.  See me fake it for other people, but not for her.  I don't want to be fake, I really want to be the generous, outgoing, and likable guy. (again, selfish).  Would faking mood for her be a good thing?  Or would she see it as a vain attempt to appease and please her?

I know that everyone says to act the way you want to be, and you will be that way.  I want my battery back so I can do that.

</selfish>

Only cause work is slow today

Without work to keep me busy and buried, I've had too much time to think at work.  While friends of mine joking plan for a zombie apocalyse, I regularly dread the collapse of modern infrastructure, mass starvation, the end of life as we know it.  At the same time I'm oddly comforted we can't manage to extinguise all life on earth, only most of it.  Reflecting on this, and the various steps I see as helpful but not strictly necessary to continuing my family/tribe's survival after such an event is perhaps a red flag on the anxiety scale. 

I live currently in a remote part of the United States.  It's a very large town, with very little agriculture or other renewable natural resources.  Most everything to keep this city of 300,000 people going is shipped in.  Things are already very expensive here, about 12-25% more than in the rest of the country.  If fuel prices spike to where we can't afford to ship food in, it's hard not to imagine large scale starvation, resource competition, devestation of natural resources.  I don't believe I stand a good chance of surviving that, especially since I'm not a hunter or fisherman.

Prior to the Russian fur trade, human life here was managed by severe resource limitations, and while not the most populated area in the world, it did manage to support several thousand people.  However, these were scattered into small, mobile groups, rarely settling in one place for overlong.  Combine that with incredibly high mortality rates, it's hard to find a better example of sustainable life in these high latitudes.  Certainly not one similar to the western methods of consumption.

Life and climate is beginning to change all over, and the general trend seems to be that it happens quickly rather than slowly.  Gotta get out now while I can.

Bit by bit.  I've been ill these past few weeks.  With that said, I spent a perfectly gorgeous Saturday sitting in the living room, eating anything I can get my hands on, and watching my little pony with my partner.  Good weather has been so hard to come by up here, but when the mind and body can't function it's impossible to enjoy those things.  The guilt about wasting this time is toxic.

In medias res

So, facing another big move (several thousand miles), and starting over with new doctors/therapists, no nearby friends (3 hours is not close), I'm attempting to do something I have not yet been able to complete. 

Keep a journal.