It's just after 9 at night here, and the sun still shines brightly and will shine for another 3 hours or so. It's great to be here where my desk is completely empty except for a computer and there are no piles of things to sort/file/do and the phone never rings.
In the past 30 hours we've settled in nicely. I've been doing a steady stream of laundry, mostly the sheets used to cover the furniture while we're gone, and our travel laundry, and making sure all the towels and bathmats are fresh for our visitors. I like doing laundry and seeing the clean, orderly piles of clothes when I'm done. We've gone to the regular grocery store and the good-for-you healthy store, signed up for summer memberships at the health club, and picked up our 12 boxes of books and clothes that my fantastic assistant, Kelli, shipped to us and timed just perfectly for our arrival. The Jeep battery was dead when we got here, but our kind neighbors let us use their battery charger and the Jeep is rolling. Brad magically emailed the nice former owners of our house and found the furnace boiler repairman, Lyle, who came this morning and made the hot water work again and was friendly and cheerful, too. I like this small town.
Tomorrow I'll vacuum the carpets and wash the floors and finish cleaning all the bathrooms and we'll be ready for our first visitor who arrives from Boulder via Anchorage at 2:50 p.m. The house needs to have the trim painted, and the windows need to be washed, and the driveway needs to be graded, and the yard needs to be weed-whacked since you can barely get in the front door for all the growing things and and and -- all the joys of home ownership. But there's nothing urgent now that we have transportation, food, and hot water, and plenty of books, of course.
Getting here was quite pleasant except that Brad's flight from Boston to Seattle was delayed and he just missed the Seattle to Anchorage flight. Just. We were text messaging as he rode the shuttle train between terminals and I really thought he'd make it; but he didn't. I was sad when the big door to the plane closed and Brad wasn't on it. Then I put on my new velvety black eye mask from Sharper Image that Velcros tightly to the head and slept soundly through the entire flight. I don't even know whether they served a meal. When I landed in Anchorage, the jetway wasn't working, so we walked down the stairs and across the tarmac and in that short time the smoke from a nearby forest fire made the old semi-post-traumatic-stress disorder responses kick in. I wonder how long it will be before seeing television news coverage of fires in Arizona or California or the smell of a lot of wood burning doesn't make my heart race and acidify my stomach. Still working on that one.
When Brad flew in an hour later, he said the snow and the arctic light on the mountains coming in to Anchorage was beautiful.
We had breakfast at the Snow City Cafe, which feels like a very Boulder place to me -- or maybe it's just that I like cafes with Nuevo Huevos and chai on the menu. We took a DeHavilland Dash 8 puddle jumper to Homer and here we are, both blogging away, connected to the world on our computers, listening to Buddha Bar III, looking out at the Homer Spit and Kachemak Bay.. It's good to be here.
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