Back Home - To Winter! TSA Pet Peeve, And Finding My Voice on Blog World Controversies...

We are home! It's good to be back, after a stressful day of packing and then a long journey. Some beautiful mountains in the distance ushered us back toward Alaska-land

Just before we landed...

Sun on the ocean - Anchorage is another of those airports like San Francisco where it looks like you're going to land in the ocean before you finally hit the runway...

It was 27 degrees when we got there! There's something about it when things get below freezing - bracing, or involuting: I'm not quite sure which. Bracing for Phil, for sure, but I generally feel the need to make like the tortoise.

The overall impression when we arrived was of impassive, impressive mountains that care not a whit about our small humanity, and of brown. Green when we left, now brown with powderings of snow. I was struck once again by the sheer improbability that I should be living here.

It was actually snowing as we drove up into the Kenai mountains - lots of fresh, powdery, beautifully chasing and tracing snow on the hills.

And then some blue sky and even a little late sun when we got home. But it's definitely time for winter precautions - long underwear top and bottom, and don't leave the door open when you step out! The 'solar oven' effect meant that the cabin was pretty warm when we got in, but by the time we'd gone in and out ferrying stuff from the truck, leaving the door open, the inside temperature dropped by 10 degrees in the space of about as many minutes.

Many of the garden plants were looking sadly frost-nipped, but many others seemed to be quite resilient. It was fun to find some good carrots -

Oh, and the larch, or tamarack, trees look just glorious. They are the only conifer that turns color in the fall:

Raspberry canes underneath them, and we actually found a surprising number of delicious, ripe raspberries still hanging on!

That was a sweet welcome home. I found the whole packing and leaving portion especially stressful, because when I first left Hawaii with Phil, the plan was to move to Oregon with the in-laws, and it didn't work out. There were still several pieces of my life (like 5 boxes of books) at the farm, and I had to deal with them again. It'll be exciting to have them here, but we have nowhere to put anything else, and it made me feel like a homeless waif with no place for my books. Again.

Despite the cold, despite the lack of running water (I was so spoiled in Oregon with warm showers every day and being able to wash dishes easily), this is home - it is our place in which we can create our lives to our best. I love being reunited with my Vita-Mix! And having the internet at home is pretty awesome too.

I'm looking forward to re-combobulating here - more on that tomorrow, but I've been feeling out of my rhythm just lately...

After cruising the garden and fixing an impromptu dinner, having Phil's daughter over and catching up with her, we started to unpack. And the TSA had left us a nice little calling card...

You can just begin to see what an awful mess they made... And I had a packet of sprouting seeds that they spilled all over everywhere, having made everything wet, so effectively ruining them...

This has to be a pet peeve of mine - if they have to go into your baggage and inspect it, they should at least leave it in the condition they found it. I have so many annoying stories of having things damaged because they generally manhandled them carelessly and didn't put things back as they were. The worst story being when I was taking some seal oil from Phil to give to someone, and they repacked everything carelessly, and the jar busted all over everyone's baggage, not just mine. That stuff smells so bad, everything that had been near it stunk irrevocably even after five washings! Grrr.

Do you have any TSA horror stories? Or advice (short of 'never pack anything unusual,' which is hard for people like us)? It just makes me feel so helpless, violated and disrespected. Thankfully, going through security was straightforward and missing the 'degrading' quality it sometimes exhibits.

A final comment, and I plan to post more on this soon: I've been catching up on some of the recent controversy surrounding raw vegans quitting the diet and going 'traditional'/'primal', etc. My head has been spinning with the information and I feel like I need to write about it, but don't even know if it's a worthwhile commitment. I feel that I have a fairly unusual perspective, having lived in Hawaii, where there were many raw-foodists, and an uncountable number of 'former vegans,' and now in Alaska, where subsistence hunting and fishing is still very common, and having been/being a raw vegan in both places. It's also unusual, maybe, that I took an excursion into experimenting with animal foods and found myself abandoning them again after about a year.  And then, the whole eating disorder challenge piece that has been so big in my life offers me some insight into and compassion for the obsessive traps that people get into when making diet into dogma. More disquieting is that some of the 'ex-vegans' cite thyroid and adrenal issues as reasons for their departure - as I've often discussed here, those are some of the issues that I'm working through too. (Phil thinks it's coincidental, but my impression is that my symptoms were at their worst when I was eating more animal products.) My current suspicion is that it's more about the sugar and cacao than about a lack of animal products, especially having dabbled in more sugar and cacao during my trip and feeling somewhat sicker again.

What would any of you like me to talk about in this?

love and kindness