I’m approaching the end of my second year here in Alaska, and I’ve been thinking about all we’ve been through since moving up here. So much, some of it is starting to get fuzzy. I’m going to do a little time-line here, so we can all grasp just how much has happened since 2008.

January, 2008: Skippy accepts a job working for Libby Riddles as a sled dog handler. We start planning our move to Alaska.

March, 2008: Skippy and Ashlee dog fly to Alaska and start working with sled dogs. I stay behind to finish up my degree work and find my replacement at the School of Journalism.

May, 2008: Skippy’s mom visits her in Alaska. The following week, I fly up and see our future home for the first time.

June, 2008: Skippy gets a job in town to supplement her sled dog income so she can eat more than once a day.

July, 2008: Skippy gets fired by one boss (apparently everyone does with this one), unfired by another, and then quits.

Kim, Mary and Jamie visit Skippy.

August, 2008: In three days I: graduate, pick up Skippy at the Indy airport, sell/give away everything we don’t want to take, eat our way around Bloomington and Indianapolis with our friends and family, pack up the car and Macgee dog and drive north. And west. Mostly west at first. 12 days later, we arrive in Alaska. (Move=1)

September, 2008: Skippy burns out on being a handler and gets a job in town. I take over handling duties while founding Bigwoofs Technology.

I attend a meeting of the local Mac User Group.

November, 2008: Liam visits!

We enjoy our first Thanksgiving away from home at Gregg and Sarah’s glorious banquet of smoked turkey and other delicious foods. We form the Foodie Family with Gregg, Sarah, and Jules.

Winter, 2008: Snow, wind, manual labor. Repeat.

February, 2009: I burn out on being a handler, and we make preparations to move.

I start selling photos to the Homer Tribune.

April, 2009: We move into a vacant house owned by a former coworker of Skippy’s while trying to find a more permanent place (Move=2). It seems all the rental houses don’t like pets. We have 2 cats and 2 dogs. Some of the property managers laugh at us when they find out.

I start working at the Homer Tribune, doing layout, web design and computer work.

May, 2009: Faced with a very limited rental market, we opt to buy a house. Also, a wildfire starts a short distance (fire-wise, at least) from the sled dog yard and other friends out that way.

We find and attempt to buy a house, with plans to rent it for one month before closing. 3 days before moving in, the house fails its inspection (rotting foundation) and we lose financing.

I’m elected to an officer position in the Mac User Group.

June, 2009: Somehow we find and rent a pet friendly house in 3 days. (Move=3)

July, 2009: We take our first trip across Kachemak Bay to do a 3-day hike up and down a mountain. It is awesome, but destroys my knee.

August, 2009: I interview Jewel.

September, 2009: Ashlee dog gets a faceful of porcupine quills.

Skippy accepts a job caretaking a dog-sitting business for the winter. It includes housing, so we prepare to move again.

October, 2009: I get hired by the Homer Public Library to teach monthly “Computer Basics” courses, which are offered for free to the public.

November, 2009: We move up to the dog-sitting house on Skyline Drive (Move=4) and restart our life of being outnumbered by dogs.

January, 2010: Bigwoofs Technology takes off big-time, and I reduce my hours at the Tribune to one day a week. It’s so busy, I neglect to make a single post to the blog for several months.

March, 2010: Skippy takes a job at Era Aviation in Homer, facilitating an early exit from the dog-sitting job. We start looking for another place to buy.

I rent office space for Bigwoofs Technology, next to the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies.

After planning a much-needed vacation to Puerto Rico, along comes a blizzard the very weekend we’re supposed to leave, stranding us not only in Alaska, but in our house for 3 days. We made to the airport for the last flight out, but it was canceled due to snow and wind.

After finding another house we want to buy, we are denied financing because of my crappy wage while working as a sled dog handler ($250/month plus a place to live) and unimpressive salary while at the Tribune. We scramble to find another rental.

April, 2010: While searching, we move into the temporary staff housing that Coastal Studies maintains above my office space. (Move=5)

I’m appointed to seat on the South Peninsula Hospital Service Area Board

I fully separate from the Tribune, as there is more than enough work with Bigwoofs.

Eventually, we find the only viable rental, a 3 bedroom house in town. (Move=6)

With the extra space, we decide to rent out part of it for the summer. Through Craigslist, we find a couple from St. Louis who have jobs up here for the summer.

May, 2010: We go halibut fishing for the first time. Also, the summer roommates arrive.

I obtain financing for expanding Bigwoofs Technology, and begin creating a technology training facility in my office space.

June, 2010: Tyra visits!

July, 2010: After planning a trip to Indiana for Skippy’s high school reunion and to visit family and friends, all flights out of Anchorage overbook and we’re stranded in Alaska again.

I’m hired to do another monthly technology class at the library. I also complete my training space and open registration for the first set of classes.

August, 2010: We are here.

…Did I call that a “little” time-line?

Life

While Tyra was visiting, we took a trip with The Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies across Kachemak Bay to tour their field station in Peterson Bay. They have a house, a composting toilet complex and 4 yurts, where schools can bring classes for 3 to 5 day stays. There are a number of trails on the peninsula they occupy, as well as some spectacular tide pools.

Everything here in Homer is based on the tides. Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay have the second highest tides in the world, next to the Bay of Fundy in Canada. Depending on where the moon is, low and high tide can differ by 28′! The best low tides are in the negatives, where the ocean recedes further than it usually does. We get a -4′ or -5′ tide every month or so, and everyone goes clam-digging since so much land is exposed.

All of that just to say: our low tide for this particular excursion sucked. It was, at its lowest, a +3.5′. So we took a hike in the forest with our naturalist guide, Dan. I learned an incredible amount on the hike, like the 4 different types of fern (Fox, Lady, Oak, Wood), elderberry leaves stink a lot and why the spruce beetle killing off huge swaths of trees isn’t a bad thing.

Fiddleheads unravelling to become ferns

I've been hoping to see this carnivorous plant since I learned they grow here, but I've never been able to find it. Dan had us get down on our hands and knees and search the sphagnum moss to find them. They're tiny! Smaller than a dime!

Fungus, ferns and wood

Some sort of seed case that was hanging from a small tree

Some sort of flower (obviously I didn't retain as much as I was hoping)

Some...other sort of flower. I think I need a review, Dan.

A lichen has taken over this dead tree.

All the standing dead spruce had these huge fungi all over them

Tyra was really excited about them

I didn't know fungus could sweat

This lichen, apparently somewhat rare, is called Fairy Barf by some lichen enthusiasts

We learned that a tree's second line of defence, after its bark, is to ooze sap everywhere. This one was putting up a good fight.

This spruce grouse let us follow it down the trail to take pictures

Animals, Life, Photography, The Great Outdoors, Travel

This and the next are going to be picture heavy posts, to prove the thesis of my previous post. I had to wait to display more photos from the halibut tagging trip, as some had yet to be published in the newspaper. Three of them were put on the front page.

So, here are more from our day-long fishing excursion:

We were fishing at 160′ with 3 pound weights to sink the hook and bait, so it took a good 5 minutes of reeling to bring in a fish (or usually, the bait with a chunk missing or an empty hook). There were fewer smiles near the end of the day, so this was definitely a morning shot.

This is a tagged halibut. As of Saturday, if you go fishing and buy a derby ticket, and catch a tagged fish, you win a prize!

I think this is a sculpin, or maybe an irish lord fish. Either way, it wasn’t what we were hoping to pull up.

As requested, here is the best picture I could get of the mountain goats. I only took one lens, a 24mm, so unless I had jumped in the water and hiked up the bluff, this is as good as it could get. Can you make them out?

Here they are, Tenzin, cropped in close. They’re still just whitish blurs. Next time I’ll bring along a bigger lens.

Animals, Life, Photography

One of the best and worst reasons to live up here is Kachemak Bay: best because it’s beautiful, and there are a million things to see and do on it, worst because most of the coolest stuff is across it. For a couple of n00b/broke mofo’s like we were last year, getting across the bay is prohibitively expensive.

All the best stuff is over here.

For the entire 12 months of 2009, we managed to get on or across the bay exactly twice. The first was a $10/person trip around Gull Island during the Shorebird Festival in May. The second was our Grace Ridge camping trip. Other than those two events, we just looked wistfully at the water and wondered about the secrets hidden on the far shore.

This year, things are different. We are slightly less broke, which is good for many reasons, one being we might be able to afford a trip or two across. Even better, we are far more integrated into the community. That translates directly into more opportunities.

As of today, I’ve been on the bay more times in the past 5 days than I had the entirety of last year. 3 trips so far since Thursday. Total cost: $0.

Thursday, I was sent by the Tribune to participate in and take pictures of the annual halibut tagging quest. Every year, Homer has a halibut derby, where fisherpeople can purchase a derby ticket for the day, and if they catch a tagged fish, they win fabulous cash and prizes. Skippy also participated for Era Aviation (her employer), so we spent the day catching fish and enjoying the weather (sunny, cloudy, snow, rain, sunny, really sunny, cloudy).

Yesterday and today, I volunteered with the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies to help teach marine ecology to school groups on a big tour boat as we cruised around the bay. We dropped a crab pot to catch tanner crab, caught plankton with jars attached to pantyhose, looked at said plankton under microscopes, tested the water for salinity and pH, learned about oyster farming in Kachemak Bay, and saw: otters, cormorants, murres, bald eagles, thousands of gulls and a pod of orcas.

Friday, CACS is sending Skippy and I over to video and photograph a group of local school kids as they explore the tide pools. Expect some interesting photos to be posted following that excursion!

We saw mountain goats along this bluff.

Life, The Great Outdoors, Travel Fun, Kachemak Bay

This is my attempt at describing what it’s was like for me in Alaska as a sled dog handler. I’ll take a typical day and break it into separate posts, so you aren’t overwhelmed by text. This is the sixth post, which discusses why we left the sled dog job. Don’t miss the other posts: Mornings, Afternoons, Evenings, Nights, and The Dogs!

I’ve left our little sled dog adventure story unfinished for a year now. Whether I did so out of simple laziness or a desire to not talk about it is open for discussion. I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Anyway, here we are. Not taking care of 40 sled dogs.

In February of 2009, we notified our boss of our intention to leave the handling job in April. From the laundry list of reasons to leave (most of which I will not discuss on a blog. Sit down and talk with me if you want the long version.), the two most prominent factors are the two most common: time and money.

Over the course of 4 months, I received 1 day off. Occasionally I’d get an evening or a morning off, but nothing regular. For one month, I negotiated to get one day off a week. That lasted 3 glorious weeks. Exhaustion was a good friend of mine, especially at the height of winter.

More importantly, we were losing money. Skippy’s job paid decently by Homer standards, but it was only part time. I was getting some work through Bigwoofs, but I had no time to really dedicate to it. Driving into town took at least 30 minutes, and I had dog duties 3-4 times a day, 7 days a week. That sinister friend (fiend?) of Americans, debt, meant we paid slightly more a month than we were making. With no improvement in sight, we needed to take steps to create our own improvement.

So we left.

No more buckets of dog food, no more chopping up frozen salmon, no more chipping turds out of ice. No 3am dog-house-turning-in-a-blizzard. The sound of 40 hungry dogs, excited to see their food trundling towards them on a bright orange sled, no longer reaches our ears. Except when we visit, of course.

We continue to live in or near Homer, and while our struggles to make a life up here may not have necessarily lessened, they certainly aren’t as exotic.

This is the end of this story, but not an end to our story. There is more yet to come!

Gone doggy, gone
In the year since we left the dog yard, several of our four-legged friends have passed on. I will keep track of them here as time takes its inevitable toll.

Ace, 15 years old. Ace got loose from his pen, and disappeared last fall. He was never found.

Redoubt, 16 years old. Redoubt began suffering from congestive heart failure, and was eventually put to sleep.

Skyler, 16 years old. Skyler got old, and his body failed. He was euthanized as well.

Goodbye, furry friends. Run on.

Life