TCP's ALASKA: SUMMER

It's officially summer in the Last Place You'd Ever Want To Live Frontier. This means that yahoos from the lower 48 in rental Winnebagos are streaming in by the duh-full to catch salmon on the Kenai River. The contempt felt by the locals toward these fair-weather (for here, anyway) visitors is palpable. I find this odd, since many of the locals got their start this way, or at least their parents did. There is something very territorial in Alaskans, even if they just arrived themselves. They call those who haven't survived a winter here cheechakos, which is an Aleut word that means "haole". As it is in Hawaii, my status is somewhere to the left of cheechako/haole and to the right of sourdough/kama'aiana. Well, I'll never be a kama'aina in Hawaii. Once a haole, always a haole.

I've been here three months now, and my project hasn't even started, which is very disconcerting. I've been trying to get out ahead of things, nonetheless, and as of Friday we issued the PO to our vendor, which I hope means that things should start picking up. From tomorrow to the middle of December should be a long, boring slog of meetings, e-mails, designs, drawings, revisions, more revisions, even more revisions, even more even more revisions. and them some actual work, all happening as the daylight hours get shorter and shorter very quickly. It'll be fun when the vendor folks are in town and we can get free lunches and the occasional free dinner, and sit around bullshitting about our respective companies and management.

Hey, there goes a Winnebago with a moose laying across the windshield!