One should never assume...

Look who finally surfaced to once again dazzle the 1's of 10's of those who have actually feigned tepid and obligatory interest in my literary fart in a skillet. To those, I thank you. 

I digress.

So, let's see, it's been a while and I can't seem to decide which little anectodal Alaskan truffles I should impart first!  Shall I start with my hair breaking off at a 3:1 break to grow ratio due to retarded amounts of iron and arsenic in my drinking/bathing water? I don't even know if I said that ratio bit properly, someone writing this happened to have hooked and crooked their way through statistics, so, like, whatever. Or how about the time when the temperature stayed on the business end of -27 for a month (straight! HA! *insert girthy, lunatic chortle*) and my landlord, the spastic self-monikered "Wild Bill", neglected to schedule that pesky- oh, how do they say it in english- propane maintenance?  Refill of propane?  Yes, refill of propane; the incumbent heat-source in my little cabin in the witness-protection woods.  Instead of calling his tenant (yours truly) he calls a neighbor to come "check on it".  Jim, real nice, quiet, unassuming, and completely negligent in that he neglected to tell the new-comer to the party (muah) that a) the tank was down to fumes, aka OUT and that b) nobody who knew fuck about shit had any intention of rectifying what was quickly morphing into what I like to refer to as a motherfuckin' "situation", given the ambient daytime temp was -27 and quickly dipping since at that time the sun bode farewell around 3pm daily.  Anyhow, Jim instructed me that I might have to start a fire, and that I also MIGHT notice the aromatic notes of propane tickling my olfactory upon entering the fucking shotgun shack I was currently inhabiting. 

Yeah, might. 

Here's how the rest of this shit went down:  Thanks, Jim.  Bye, Jim.  Walked in.  Smelled propane.  Immediately thought of the Rocking R Bar.  Realized I had not yet penned an adequate eulogy heroically chronicling my hardships in the frozen arctic permafrost, not to mention a playlist for my double-denim-mandatory-wake-kegger.  Saw breath in air.  Snot froze.  Promptly shut off water.  Drained pipes. Poured Glycol down aforementioned drains.   Quickly dredged floor of room for matching (clean and of a wool blend persuasion would have been nice, but I had to settle for cotton, questionable integrity, of similar thicknesses) socks and clean underwear (no dice, commando it is).  Got the fuck out of dodge.  Hello, hotel.  It's nice to see you again, climate control.

At this point, I'd like to take the time to mention that had anyone bothered to give me the run-down and "stuff you should know" about the cabin before they told me to hit the ground running, I might have been more inclined to help and probably a hell of a lot less indignant- hell, I probably wouldn't have assumed this cabin was not unlike any other dump I'd squatted in during my glory (read college) days in that the heat keeps going when you pay an all-inclusive "rent check".  Because the internet and the electricity sure do, why wouldn't the heat?!  But congruent with my previous experiences in the second shittiest state in the union, this was not the case.

Flash forward through chaos complete with frantic, disjointed miscommunications between "Spaz Bill" -who was currently up trapping wolves in buttfuck-ask-me-if-I-care-north Alaska- and pissed off, displaced me to refilled propane, renewed heat and running water. I return from work three hours after what I would soon come to look back on as a premature-disaster avoidance celebration, clambered out of my work "rig", shuffled toward the door of my now toasty abode, only to stop dead in my tracks with a look on my face that I'm sure could be likened to confusion or trying to decipher simple arithmetic/translating the dead-sea scrolls off my very forehead, tweeking to consternation, and then melting to horror as I realized that in this climate and season (January, Alaska, respectively, for those of you who haven't actually read anything until now), running water is not a sound one would hear in nature without accompanying abject panic.  So, yes, without further adieu, my pipes had exploded in grand fashion and were currently spewing out of the back of the house like my own private water park.  Oh, joy unending.

The rest is history, although I'll admonish the readers to learn from my mistakes and not assume that a harsh, inhabitable climate will weed out the schmucks and genetically inferior (I'm still alive...so...yeah, theory disproven) to create an elite super-species of humans that operate on common sense and necessity, and preemptively anticipate things such as, but not limited to:  finite heat resources.  Ask questions, and then ask more questions when coming into an unfamiliar situation.  That's all the preaching I've got.  Needless to say, I no longer live in that secluded little slice of hell.  With it's subtle nuances like iron-fraught tap water that stained my artificially blonde, yet beautiful tresses, a ruddy hue, whilst retexturizing each strand with a signature, rope-like grit.  Gone are the nights when I layer on electric blanket on top of electric blanket on top of psychosis to stave off ol' jack frost in the confines of my retna-burning lime green bedroom.  Night after night pulling those electicric blankets over my head for fear of ghosts wandering over from the adjacent cemetery, telling myself that the story Charles Manson and The Family was a fable, no different from Rumpelstiltskin, meant only to teach the naive and unworldly not to buy into strange men's bullshit.

As for me and the memories, we'll always have hipstamatic.

Sincerely,

Wyoming

I've been had.

Warning:  Eye-muffs.  I'm a potty mouth. 

Boy, howdy!  Look who finally made their way into the world of buuuuh-logging!  I'm always a little behind the curve in matters of science and technology (math, politics, socio-economic issues, geo-physics, HDTV...), so this is just par for the course that I should make my debut 8 years too late.  Maybe more.  Whatever.  I guess it only takes 3 months of solitary confinement in a cabin out in the thick woods of a witness protection area in buttf*ck Alaska to motivate me to commence the oversharing of my personal triumphs and defeats as I take this one-woman shit-show on the road to the only other state with enough room to handle it. 

As a brief introductory obligation, I feel it is my duty to bring those of you who mustered enough energy to click the link and read this surly, literary turd (had a bad day, work has been a real whore lately, and I'm not going to lie when I say that I've made it to the 9th line of my 1st blog and I'm already 3/4 of the way through a large bottle of the goofy juice.  Calculate THAT, EPA.  Cocksuckers.)...

*blah, blah, blah, wherewasiwherewasi*

Oh, yes!  Why am I even in Alaska and just what, exactly, am I doing.  The abridged version goes a little something like-a-this:  Summer of 2010 I said "ttyl" to gainful employment in Bozeman, MT, packed up my little man (The Chanch) and sauntered back into the belly of the beast, i.e. hello, Wyoming, and the attic of my dad's 100yr old ranch house. "The penthouse", if you will, and I say that in a very, very not-hot kind of way.  There I spent the better part of the next 7 months bartending and being awesome (standard), and then for some reason decided I was sick of that, so I decided to start my little Biznass.  For which I needed steady-er income..and more of it.  Enter stage left, Arcadis!  An environmental consulting firm that seemed so unassuming at the time but would prove to change my life (on what scale, the jury is still out).  I started on as a project assistant (read: office bitch) doing odd jobs like moving tires and bags of cement around to the "right side...no, now move them to that side" of the warehouse and, true to form, quickly bulldozed my way into field work- archaeology and water sampling for various projects; mainly oil and gas companies.  This brought me my first opportunity to visit Alaska, a water sampling project for a company looking to build a gas pipeline through a nature reserve.  I jumped on it.  Flew around in a helicopter, punched a couple holes in somebody else's chest waders (sorry!), saw some cool country, made some friends, and then back I went!  All in a day's work, see ya never, Alaska! 

Not so fast...

Two weeks later my boss popped his head around the corner of my "office" (rat hole) and asked if I would be interested in finishing (operative word:  finishing) a project for Marathon on the Kenai Peninsula?  It would be for approximately 2 months and I would be home, back to being everyone's favorite free-loader, before christmas!  Perfect!  I didn't even ask what the "job" entailed.  The word "No" in the context of Arcadis didn't happen to intervene since it had apparently packed it's bags and taken an extended vacation a loooong time ago.  No postcards, didn't want his security deposit back...just...gone.

Great.  So, I'm off to Alaska again.  For what?  Who knows. WHO CARES!  I'm going to live in Alaska for 2 months and it's going to be fuckin' rad.  Only after I had partied my way to my 6:30a.m. departure out of Logan Int'l in Billings, MT did it remotely cross my mind that maybe I should have put my pants on before I tried flying to the arctic circle by the seat of them...?  No time for rational thoughts, I had to sober up to get through fun-hating TSA.

So, here I am.  January 25th.  Still...in...Alaska.  Looking back at those times through my rose-colored glasses that Alaska has all but ripped from my face and stomped into a pile of pink shards while John Conlee croons softly in the distance...now a battle hardened Greenhouse Gas and Air Compliance Professional (whatever that means...) who puts on her sauciest lesbian lumberjack-meets lollapalooza circa 1996 outfit- 800 fill down parka, steel toe boots, and flannel lined carhartts- to trot down to the local gin palace to swill some brews and maybe catch a hockey game with all the "slopers" who work on "mashines"- and no, I won't go out "n a d8 w u".  But I can't complain.  i'm getting a completely,  105%,  new and authentic experience that I tell myself few are priveleged to.  It's goddamn gorgeous here, I can't swing a dead-bald eagle without hitting a moose, and I've met some stellar (colorful) individuals who are willing to bitch and drink with me when my job drives me into the arms of another bottle...

And I'd like to quasi-end on a sappy note (Whole bottle of wine, down the hatch. It happens.) by saying don't be afraid to say "fuck it, let's do this." because you don't know what you don't know until you put yourself out there.  Some of my favorite people foster that mentality (Justin Vander Werff, honorable mention) and I just respect the shit out of somebody with that kind of chutzpah.  

Tune in next time for "Eskimos love basketball and the day it was -27 degrees and my landlord let my propane run-out and then the house got kind of cold and my pipes froze and exploded"...