Well, I know it may seem that I have completely abandoned this blog, but I haven’t! In actuality, I stare at a computer all day long and when I come home I don’t want to look at the computer screen anymore. Instead of making excuses, perhaps I should just get to the updating.
I think I last left off way back in early October, shortly before leaving on our honeymoon. Gosh – I’m almost hitting 6 months from my last update? Sorry guys. Well, we had a fantastic time on our honeymoon. It may have taken us 28 hours to get there, but we are already discussing going back again. Funny enough I started writing a blog on our way home from our 3 weeks, giving a detailed description of what we did. But I never had a chance to finish it and so I never uploaded it. Perhaps after this one I will put that up. A short recap, then.
We flew from Juneau to Seattle to L.A. to Auckland to Nelson, at the North tip of the South Island. We spent our 2 weeks there road tripping along the Northern coast and then down the West coast. Everywhere we went was absolutely stunning. We had some pretty awesome experiences – stealing mussels from a Mussel Farm with a local and fearing that we might wind up on that show Coastwatch; hiking on a glacier; seeing a 360˙ view of a beautiful Sound; seeing baby sea lions, baby dolphins and penguins; seeing an adult dolphin jump 6 ft. out of the water; spending 2 perfect days on a boat in Fjordland with still waters, clear skies and beautiful scenery. I could go on and on, but I’ll save that for the next post that goes into more length and has photos.
After 2 weeks there, we flew to Raratonga in the Cook Islands for a week of sun and beach fun. While the temperature and relaxation were great, the island and beach were only so-so. Florida has better beaches than Raratonga. We don’t ever feel the need to go back here, except maybe for the bananas. They were the freshest, sweetest bananas we had ever eaten and probably consumed about 20 of them while there. When we first ate one back home, I couldn’t even finish it – it tasted awful. We also rented a scooter and Eric had a blast driving that – he had to get an official Cook Islands driver’s license in order to do so and proudly shows it when at a bar and is asked for an ID. Another highlight was we got inked by a squid and then got to see him swim quickly away – we think we woke up him and he got startled. We did have fun, don’t get me wrong but Florida or Hawaii is closer. J
Once returning home, life was utter chaos. Work consumed my life through the rest of the year. I was working long days every week trying to get everything done. Around Thanksgiving, since we have the holidays off, we had 3 days to get out 6 papers. And of course, normally have 5 days to get out 6 papers. On top of all the daily’s we also had to build our Juneau Guide – the tourism magazine for the year and the Legislative Guide - for the legislative season. On top of all that I had 2 designers leave and finding a replacement even now in February has been a hard task to accomplish. There is a lack of designers in Juneau, and an even harder time finding one with any experience.
Around Thanksgiving, we decided that we would drop into the local animal shelter and see what dogs they had available. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned this, but dogs hardly ever exist in the shelter up here unless they are old or have a serious medical problem. Most people will adopt their dogs in the Lower 48 and fly them home to Juneau. Well, on the one day we stopped in they happened to have a dog they found on the street just go up for adoption that day. Once they find a dog, they give the potential current owners 10 days to claim their dog. If nobody calls asking about them, they go up for adoption. We came in on day 9 or 10, before this dog was ever even listed as an adoption option. After 3 days of them checking our references, we adopted Awesome – of which we have changed her name to Sadie. She’s a 1-1 ½ year old mutt with short black hair and a white chest with glacier blue eyes. The shelter thinks she’s a husky/lab/hound mix. She’s become our baby – totally spoiled.
In other news, I successfully cooked my very first Thanksgiving – not only was everything delicious but everything was ready at the same time. I was impressed with that and how much easier it was than I thought it would be. We had our first big snow storm and found out our car could not handle the hill we live on or really even the roads, so we bought a new 4-wheel drive Subaru Forester. Mom and Dennis came up between Christmas and New Year’s to spend the holidays with us. Unfortunately, they were here during some of our shortest days and didn’t get to explore too much. But they had fun and relaxed and Mom now misses Sadie more than me.
Winter has been tough for us, but now we have about as much sunlight as Chicago does. Our shortest days were about 5.5 hours of daylight. But if it rained and was cloudy – it almost seemed like it was night the whole time. When we have sunny days, even if it was only for 6 hours Juneau covered in snow with the sun shining looks like a Christmas card. It’s just beautiful. Fortunately, we got Sadie just in time because she forces us to go outside to walk and play with her. One of our favorite things to do here in the winter is to go ice-skating on the frozen lake down the street from our house. We’ve started taking Sadie with us and are trying to teach her how to mush. She loves running and she’s got husky in her – so she pulls us on our ice skates and we just glide along. Eric’s training her on the ice in order to get her to go cross-country skiing with him. The glacier lake froze too, so we were able to go walking all over icebergs – that was pretty awesome! And we’ve taken our first snowboarding lesson – it was rough! I was sore for a full week afterwards, but we had a lot of fun. We spend the daylight hours of the weekend taking Sadie on trails and trying to teach her how to walk off the leash. Weather wise, the winter has been great. We’ve had only one really cold day and during the big Chicago blizzard we had 2 days of record high temperatures in the mid-40’s. That is something I love, because we can go out and play outside without freezing our butts off after 20 minutes.
In the New Year, work has calmed down some. It still remains busy, but more so because we are trying to get organize from all the chaos of last year. Eric’s job suddenly got really busy in January, but it’s since calmed down. He still enjoys it all.
As I write this, we are on a plane to Hawaii – my bribe trip of the year. (Eric said if we moved to Alaska he would take me to Hawaii once a year.) We’ll be spending a week on the Big Island of Hawaii, the one with the active volcano. Fred, Eric’s brother, came up to Juneau a couple days ago for 2 weeks and some winter fun with Eric, although now he’s watching Sadie while we’re gone. He was super awesome and brought us some Chicago pizza! And from this point on we have a guest coming through August. We also officially have 2 trips home booked, July and October, and are planning on another one over the holidays.
I think that just about covers everything exciting on our end. We hope everyone enjoyed their Holidays and survived the blizzard. Stay tuned for the next couple blogs for my full detail and pictures from the honeymoon.
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