The daylight has been amazing. We have really enjoyed watching the days stretch out and it's nice to have those long summer days. You can literally play cards outside or garden until 1 am and never need a light. That too, has been disappearing. We are back to having full night and it seems weird. The dark is now beginning at around 10:30 and it is staying dark until around 5:00 am. I get up to work out at 5:45 am and very soon I'll be getting up in the dark. The change is noticeable every day as we are losing about 7 minutes of light daily.
I have been adjusting a teacher from Barrow and he is heading back to the town to prepare for the school year. In Barrow the sun goes down on Nov 20th and doesn't return until Jan 20th! Now that's extreme! I asked him if he does any snowmobiling and he said, "no way! We have polar bears there and they see people as part of the food chain". I would have to say that I sit firmly in my conviction that it is good to live on the edge, but not on the very edge..... It's fun to practice here. I have patients that literally fly in from over 300-400 miles away to see me. Fairbanks is the hub of the interior and when these people come in to shop, they stop in and see us as well. It's interesting to hear stories about living out in the villages or in the bush. We see quite a few people that don't even have running water. You can tell! Haha.
I bought a .22 cal rifle over the weekend and Dominik and I took it to the local range to take a few shots. Dominik is still only 6, but he really likes guns and enjoyed pulling the trigger and pointing it at cans. We are going to go to the Tanana Valley Fair tonight after work.....I'm not that interested since I've been to enough fairs for one lifetime.....but Kari says that it's part of the Fairbanks experience, so we're going. Later this week I am going to take the boys out into the woods and see if we can find some grouse. I bought a small animal license and we're going to continue in the Alaskan experience by seeing if we're cut out to be hunters. I'm going to take Yanik as well, so the birds will have an unfair advantage. He's never been good at being quiet.
We're starting small. I've been on youtube all week learning all the ways to field dress a bird. I don't want to be caught unsure of what to do in case I actually hit one! We're allowed 15 grouse/day, 20 ptarmigan/day and an unlimitted amount of hare. If my shooting is any good, I should be able to get some nice healthy meat for the freezer. We figured we would start small and if we enjoy hunting, maybe next year when we are residents we could go for a deer/caribou/moose, etc. I thought about doing it this year, but we are not residents and it is very cost prohibitive at this point.
Overall, life is great in Alaska. We miss familyand friends of course, but we are thankful for the experiences we are having. I know we'll never regret coming up here, no matter where we end up, but we're planning on staying here for the medium to long term. The biggest shock to living up here was the cost of living and now that Kari is working partime, we have adapted well. Ithink she is really enjoying having a little of her own money and being more independent. My practice has been growing, although it never seems as fast as you would like it to. We had a slow July, but some of that had to do with the high temps and forest fires. Most of July was in the high 80s and we had a record smoke season. The smoke in town was so bad for much of July that it was extremely unhealthy to breath the air and people were supposed to just stay inside if possible. Thankfully it has been raining and the fires are dying down. We saw blue sky for the first time in quite a while this weekend.
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