To those who are concerned: Sorry that I have not blogged lately. I have been super busy and the internet here has been shoddy. The reason that I have not blogged lately is not because I have gotten a tattoo of a bear or a salmon, as I understand is the current belief of some members of my family. I have an extreme fear of needles. I am not going to get a tattoo. And if I was, a bear or a salmon? Really? Yeah, on my lower back, tramp-stamp style. I’d like to think that I have expressed better taste than that. But whatever.
Last week I was afforded an awesome opportunity to go PARAGLIDING. It was so great. So Brandon (the cook) sweet-talked Wolf Eyes into letting me have the morning off so I could go with Emma and him and his
sister. Because prior to my trip I did not know,
paragliding is like hang-gliding, but you are sitting in a seat, not hanging on to a bar (like parasailing, but off of a mountain, not behind a boat). First you have to take a ski lift to the top of a mountain. Then you ride tandem with an experienced (and probably licensed or something) glider and they do all of the steering (which is done with a system of ropes and pulleys, not by shifting weight like in hang-gliding). They get the parachute all set up behind you, strap you in, and then tell you to run as fast as you can down the mountain (yes, slightly terrifying).
You feel like the parachute has opened and caught you, but it hasn’t so you keep running. Until they s
ay jump, and then you just jump off of the mountain and it catches you. So my guy shows up, he’s just finished a jump, and he is literally covered in opened wounds, still bleeding. Confidence inspiring, right? But he said I’d be fine, and so I went. And I was. Apparently he tripped and fell walking up the stairs to the ski lift. Go figure. It was completely amazing. It was a gorgeous sunny day and you could just see everything. Probably the closest to legit flying that we can get.
So after paragliding I head back to work. I went to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter the night before (It was epic. Amazing. I dressed up, the only one in the theatre to do so, which was disappointing. A young boy mocked my cloak. The jerk. But the movie was amazing. So intense. I cried through about 75% of it. Just sat ther
e behind my 3-D glasses (
I hate 3-D, but it was the only option; wasn’t that bad though) and sobbed.) and then woke up super early the next day for the paragliding, so I was completely whipped. But Wolf Eyes came in and helped me make sandwiches and then let me leave early. She’s actually been awesome lately. Except for I am pretty sure she thinks that I have autism, because I have started to time myself making sandwiches (1.76 minutes per sandwich today, new record!). “I just came in to ask Megan a question and she wouldn’t even look up at me until she had finished wrapping and bagging her sandwich and then wrote down the time! It’s adorable.” Uhh. That is totally not how that interaction actually happened. Pretty sure I don’t remember that at all, actually. Anyways.
So for our last weekend, Brian and I went to Homer. Homer is a small sea-side, artsy town, about 3 hours south of Cooper Landing. It was probably the best weekend we’d had so far this summer. We stayed in a cabin at Sea View Farms that looked right out onto the ocean. It was tiny and didn’t have running water, but it was so pretty and had a little wood-burning stove to heat it up. But it was so sunny and gorgeous that we didn’t need it. It was a pretty lazy weekend. Lots of eating (delicious pizza, seafood, and then Thai!), lots of lazing around, reading on the beach and going for walks. We walked around town, too and checked out a lot of the local art galleries. I found this one woman’s greeting cards with prints of her paintings of these crazy distorted people with bizarre “pondering” quotes. They are amazing. I bought nine. I was only going to buy eight, but I just couldn’t choose. I would have bought one of each, but that would be a little out of hand. I am going to cut out the print
s and frame them. So excited. Amazing weekend.
Fishing update: The second sockeye salmon run has started. And it’s big. First they travel through the Lower Kenai, then the Middle, then through Skilak Lake, and then to the Upper (where camp is). They were expecting between 700,000 and 1,250,000 fish. But the counts for the Lower and Middle (where they are now) are around 2,300,000. So they raised the limit on the Middle and the Lower from 3 fish per person, per day, to 6. And now they are allowing dip-netting on the Lower (which normally only natives are allowed to do). They should be flooding the Upper in the next few days. Brian, Andrew, and I went out the other night and had some success, even though it was getting pretty dark (which means the fish mostly stop moving). Our fillet count for the winter is up to 34 lbs, which is very exciting. Fish for friends!
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