Okay, I’ve already admitted to being befuddled by time zones and time changes, and now my computer is living in two timezones at once, which is extra confusing.  The little clock in the corner of my screen says 10:48 p.m. right now, but when I just did my blog post, it goes through the Mobius server in Boulder and comes out the other side as being posted at 12:48 a.m. on July 1st.  We’re straddling our own dateline here.  I’m sure I’ll figure this out, eventually, right?!

It’s just after 9 at night here, and the sun still shines brightly and will shine for another 3 hours or so. It’s great to be here where my desk is completely empty except for a computer and there are no piles of things to sort/file/do and the phone never rings.

In the past 30 hours we’ve settled in nicely. I’ve been doing a steady stream of laundry, mostly the sheets used to cover the furniture while we’re gone, and our travel laundry, and making sure all the towels and bathmats are fresh for our visitors. I like doing laundry and seeing the clean, orderly piles of clothes when I’m done. We’ve gone to the regular grocery store and the good-for-you healthy store, signed up for summer memberships at the health club, and picked up our 12 boxes of books and clothes that my fantastic assistant, Kelli, shipped to us and timed just perfectly for our arrival. The Jeep battery was dead when we got here, but our kind neighbors let us use their battery charger and the Jeep is rolling. Brad magically emailed the nice former owners of our house and found the furnace boiler repairman, Lyle, who came this morning and made the hot water work again and was friendly and cheerful, too. I like this small town.

Tomorrow I’ll vacuum the carpets and wash the floors and finish cleaning all the bathrooms and we’ll be ready for our first visitor who arrives from Boulder via Anchorage at 2:50 p.m. The house needs to have the trim painted, and the windows need to be washed, and the driveway needs to be graded, and the yard needs to be weed-whacked since you can barely get in the front door for all the growing things and and and — all the joys of home ownership. But there’s nothing urgent now that we have transportation, food, and hot water, and plenty of books, of course.

Getting here was quite pleasant except that Brad’s flight from Boston to Seattle was delayed and he just missed the Seattle to Anchorage flight. Just. We were text messaging as he rode the shuttle train between terminals and I really thought he’d make it; but he didn’t. I was sad when the big door to the plane closed and Brad wasn’t on it. Then I put on my new velvety black eye mask from Sharper Image that Velcros tightly to the head and slept soundly through the entire flight. I don’t even know whether they served a meal. When I landed in Anchorage, the jetway wasn’t working, so we walked down the stairs and across the tarmac and in that short time the smoke from a nearby forest fire made the old semi-post-traumatic-stress disorder responses kick in. I wonder how long it will be before seeing television news coverage of fires in Arizona or California or the smell of a lot of wood burning doesn’t make my heart race and acidify my stomach. Still working on that one.

When Brad flew in an hour later, he said the snow and the arctic light on the mountains coming in to Anchorage was beautiful.

We had breakfast at the Snow City Cafe, which feels like a very Boulder place to me — or maybe it’s just that I like cafes with Nuevo Huevos and chai on the menu. We took a DeHavilland Dash 8 puddle jumper to Homer and here we are, both blogging away, connected to the world on our computers, listening to Buddha Bar III, looking out at the Homer Spit and Kachemak Bay.. It’s good to be here.

So I just got home after spending a terrific afternoon taking my neice, Morgan, and nephews, Drew and Jason, with my sister, Wendy, on one of those Crazy Aunty Amy shopping sprees, then to The Dairy Center for an art opening, then to great dinner at Zolo Grill, then taking Morgan home in Brad’s Mercedes SL55 AMG.  I almost never drive Brad’s car since I have an incredible Mercedes CLK55 AMG of my very own, which Brad amazingly negotiated from Mercedes as a replacement for the one that caught on fire in our driveway, which made my heart beat fairly quickly at the time. 

But what I’m talking about today is driving a rocket ship at 120 miles an hour on the new, empty tollway on the way home after dropping Morgan off, having driven her at a sedate 90-100 miles an hour.  Brad’s car handles like a dream, incredibly smooth and responsive and exciting and FAST.  I had Snow Patrol blasting and both hands on the steering wheel as the sun set behind the Rocky Mountains.  I love to drive, like to think that I drive well, and would still be driving at a high rate of speed down the highway if I didn’t have a husband and dogs waiting at home.  If you’re a friend of Brad’s, and you like to drive, definitely ask him if you can drive his rocket ship.  Certainly makes my heart beat faster..

Last Thursday night, coming home from Washington DC, driving through Eldorado Canyon State Park at dusk on the way to my house, I saw the first mountain lion I’ve ever seen.  In fact, I saw two.  And they were big, somehow much bigger than I had imagined them to be, and much scarier.  The small lizard brain that says, "Be afraid, be very afraid," was speaking loudly.  I saw them ahead of the car in the one lane dirt road that goes through the park, and then they climbed up an angled rock ledge on the left side of the road and were gone; so swift and graceful and eerie.  According to the mountain lion entry in Wikipedia, "Adult males may be more than eight feet long (nose to tail), and weigh about 150 pounds (70 kg). In exceptional cases males may reach as much as 200 pounds. Adult females can be 7 ft (2 m) long and weigh about 75 pounds (35 kg)."  I believe it.  These are big, scary predators.

We’ve always known there are mountain lions in our neighborhood.  My golden retrievers, Denali and Kenai, have brought home complete sets of deer forelegs and assorted other big and nasty dead deer bits that were obviously lion kill.  The dogs are always so proud of themselves that they don’t really want to relinquish their trophies to me.  In retrospect, I’ve been pretty complacent about letting the dogs run around at dusk.  That’s definitely over now.  My thinking was that with the two of them, one at 95 pounds and one at 115 pounds, they could look out for each other against a single big cat.  But the "cats" I saw were definitely much larger than the dogs, there were two of them, and they just completely exude the "we’re at the top of our food chain" vibe.  I think the only predator I’ve seen that’s even in the same class of scary as the mountain lion is the spotted hyenas I saw in Tanzania.  Part of why hyenas are so scary is they look almost prehistoric with their blunt skulls and pack hunting behavior.  They’re just plain ugly.  The mountain lion is elegant and fierce and just plain scary.  No more roaming around freely on our property at dusk for Denali and Kenai.

Apologies to my friends for calling them “old,” but after spending last weekend in Chicago with a slew of Brad’s MIT fraternity brothers and their families, I’m amazed that suddenly I’ve known so many people for 20 years, and amazed how many of us awkward, geeky/nerdy, bookworm people have turned out to be decent human beings.  It was great to see people doing well while dealing with the usual life struggles (aging/ailing parents, divorce, parenting small children, career changes, etc), and nice to have the chance to just connect with friends.  Thanks to Sameer and Balaji for initiating and organizing things.  Let’s do this again next year —