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.

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.

Hey look, it’s a post! Mostly because I see that people are reading the blog for one reason or another, and the sound of crickets is not intriguing.

I’m currently in the throes of launching my business into a fully operational battlestation technology support and training center. I’ve rented space, applied for a loan, and worked a whole bunch. We’ve also managed to move twice since my last post (out of the dog-sitting house once Skippy got her job at Era and into the space above my office, and then out of the space above my office into the house we just rented), so that was fun.

Let’s see, we also did several months worth of preparation for a vacation in Puerto Rico, only to have a blizzard arrive and totally obliterate the road to Anchorage, all flights out of Homer for several days, and our carefully planned vacation. That was also fun. (I think Alaskans must all be masochists)

A couple of weeks ago, I imported all my old saved email from my indiana.edu account while searching for a receipt from an order I made before moving to Alaska, and promptly forgot about it. Today, while searching through my mailboxes for an order I had just placed with Apple, I stumbled upon this message:

From: Apple Mailing Lists Info
Subject: Info – Apple Mailing Lists
Date: January 22, 1996 8:51:18 AM AKST
To: Ryan Ridge

Here is the current listing of Apple Mailing Lists maintained in the
info.apple.com domain by the Apple Support Information Services group. Thank
you for inquiring!

How To Subscribe to Apple Mailing Lists
Article Created: 12 May 1995
Article Reviewed/Updated: 20 December 1995

Apple Computer, Inc. provides a number of mailing lists that can keep you
informed of the latest information in the following areas.

NEWS FLASH: AS of 21-Nov-95, all commands (subscribe, unsubscribe and help)
for Apple Directions Express mailing list should be placed in the Subject
field.

NEWS FLASH: AS of 23-Oct-95, all commands (subscribe, unsubscribe and help)
for infoalley, pressrel, newhdw and swupdates mailing lists should be placed
in the Subject field.

1) Apple Press Releases – receive copies of all press releases created by
Apple.

2) Apple Information Alley – receive notification, a table of contents and the
a compressed text file of the Information Alley, Apple’s technical support
journal, twice per month. Important Note: In order to use the compressed text
file of the Information Alley, you’ll need to know how to de-binhex a file
using either a commercial decompression utility like Stuffit by Aladdin
Systems or a freeware utility like DeHQX by Peter Lewis.

3) Apple Software Updates – receive notification and descriptions of each new
Apple software update posted to the Apple Software Updates areas on Apple
supported online services and Internet
sites, including eWorld. We’ll also send you information on fee-based Apple
software upgrades not posted online.

4) Apple New Hardware – receive information on the newest Apple hardware
releases, including Macintosh computers, printers, and imaging devices. All
information is extracted from the Apple Tech Info Library, Apple’s official
technical support database, which is located in the Apple Technical Support
area (shortcut: support) on eWorld.

5) Apple Developer Directions Express – Summarizes the latest Developer News
from Apple – what’s happening at Apple, how we’re doing, what we’re thinking
about, and where we’re headed. What we send you will be the latest, most
interesting, and–we hope–most useful information Apple has to offer. We’ll
try not to bug you too much–three or four times each month is what we
currently plan, but both the content and the frequency of this mailing list
may change, depending on reader feedback.

6) What’s New on Apple Developer Web Pages – receive a weekly mailing
detailing What’s New on the Apple Developer Web Pages.

7) Newton Press Releases – receive copies of all Newton related press releases
created by Apple.

8) WON (World of Newton) Weekly – a weekly review of Newton platform
information, software updates, online chats and resources, compiled by the
Newton Platform Marketing group at Apple.

Let’s see, in January of 1996 I had just been put on academic probation at IU for spending more time fiddling with my Power Macintosh 7100/80 than sitting in class during my first semester there. My parents had moved me out of the dorm room I shared with Mr. Sean Bartel, and I was living back at their house in Nashville. I was still taking a few classes, including the one required to get me off of probation, “Fundamentals of Academic Success,” or something like that. It met in some decrepit and long-forgotten one-classroom building in Ashton, with a giant furnace that never worked and a ceiling-high pile of boxes along the back wall. That building has since been bulldozed and is being replaced with something much nicer. I was also taking 2 computer classes (I originally enrolled as a biology major, with an eye towards being an optometrist – ha!), because technology captured my attention in a way that no other subject had.

Within a few months, I would start a job in landscaping and continue to perform just above adequately in whatever classes I was taking. I was still a year and a half away from making the jump from proto-geek to geek-apprentice when I would take a job at the campus computer store. But you can see the roots taking hold, right in that email up there. And this was in what we call “Apple’s Dark Days,” when they were on a serious downhill slide. A stagnant operating system (System 7.5 woo!), mundane hardware (which beige box do you like better?), and lackluster leadership. The following year would see Apple’s stock price drop to $12 a share, and then the return of Steve Jobs. I loved it all, the good and the bad.

We currently have 8 dogs in the house. This is down from the high of 10 just a few short hours ago. If you haven’t heard, we took over Tails by the Bay for the winter, and get to live in a nice house and take care of dogs all day. Well, Skippy gets to take care of dogs all day. I still have to work in town, but the tech support business is picking up, so I’ll be doing less of the 7am-5:30pm gig and more of the open schedule gig.

The house has two floors. The main floor has the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and our bedroom. That’s the dog’s floor. Upstairs has a closet, a sitting room/office, and a small hallway that overlooks the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other. That’s the cat’s floor.

Jacques and Cousteau have adapted surprisingly well to their new living situation. They occasionally wander down to the main level and thread themselves through the many many dog legs between the stairwell and the kitchen, where they greet us and remind us to feed them. Most of the time, however, they just sit upstairs in their cuddle cups, snoozing in the amazing amount of warmth generated by the wood stove. They sometimes don’t even muster the energy to look over at the door as I come through to work at my computer.

We will sometime hear them going nuts, running around and attacking their scratching post. Today, we watched as Cousteau flung himself off the edge of the loft and onto the big window frame just below it. And then he jumped back up.

During the day, Skippy and I take turns escaping upstairs to work on the computer. With a house full of dogs, including a 4-month old Great Pyrenees puppy (who gets into everything), the computer/kitty room has become a Fortress of Solitude for us.

We’ve been here just over a week.

Here are some of the dogs we’ve been taking care of:

Tia

Jak

Cub (the GP puppy)

Bubba (Cub’s older, smaller brother)

Kayla (Ms. Sneaks Into The Bedroom For Naps)

Belle, the droopy dog