Chaos and Adventure

Confession: I have been such a slacker on the blog gig lately. I have enjoyed reading and commenting on other blogs, but couldn’t bring myself to note all the craziness in my cold and windy world. There are lots of huge changes all at once and all uncertain.

BEN IS GOING ROTATIONAL!

This is great news, but really, I’m kind of torn between the thrill of adventure and the fear of the inevitable. With this position change, he will spend 2 weeks of each month in a village that was originally established as a banishment community for criminals too tough to manage. That in and of itself is scary, but he will also be ALL ALONE out there. He will be the only officer in the village of 400 with questionable backgrounds. I understand that the emergency call volume is pretty high, and I am sure he is going to see some pretty wild things without any form of backup, but I think it will be great career experience.

Another inevitable is the move. This is what I have been wanting for the last year, but now that it is here, I am getting cold feet (literally and figuratively). Not only am I dreading the packing and moving and unpacking of all of our stuff, I am really going to miss the friends I have made up here. I have even been experiencing some Barrow nostalgia.

This has been a great time to get in touch with who I am and what I want. Even under all the fluff and insulation required up here to survive, this place has stripped me down and taught me a few things. I have even begun to appreciate things that I couldn't see or understand when I first moved up here to this Arctic wilderness.

The whaling boats bringing in their hunt, the community coming together to process the subsistence for their families, the incredible animals that survive here in the wild like the foxes, owls, caribou, walrus and polar bears, the smell of the ice taking my breath away and the sun bathing everything in oranges, purples and pinks, the snow drifts snaking across the tundra and the beautiful ribbons of the Aurora Borealis all inspire me in ways that I could have never known without living this adventure. I know this kind of experience is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, because there is no other place like it.

Our next adventure is off to an amazing start too. We have made an offer on our first house and it has pretty much just landed in our laps. We are pretty much ready to close with the exception of the appraisal and we haven’t even seen it in real life! If the appraisal comes back at or below what we are offering, we will reconsider, but for now, it is kind of like waiting to see if we won the seeds of our dreams on e-bay.

I HATE THE WAITING GAME! I just want to know where we will be moving in just 3 weeks. I want to know if this is the place that we can get our financial boost into our Adventure Resort. It seems an unlikely place, but I am oddly comfortable with the shape of this wild ride. Whoodathunkit?

Anyway, there are no deep thoughts or big self-awareness revelations to report, just a bunch of chaos and adventure. Wish us luck!