Black Butte

Now how do you pronounce the title? I had no idea before last week, and I made the mistake of pronouncing incorrectly. This is totally a pointless tangent but I have been paying close attention to the way people speak here in Alaska. Like for example I've noticed that many people say "right on" in Anchorage a lot. I feel like it's the most popular phrase here. I've told my roommates about that but they think I'm crazy, but probably for many more reasons than just that. But now that I've started noticing I feel like I'm more prone to hearing it and I just can't figure out why this phrase is so popular here.

On another note, I had a really good day yesterday. So we have been slammed with Beanie Boxes the past two weeks and probably a reason why I have been so slow at updates. So we give away all these beanie boxes during the Holiday time but we got so many. I would say we gave out close to 400 boxes and I would have to say that we have over 300 left over. It's gotten so bad that we can't walk into our main office, the other 2 offices are so packed that the door won't open. So the solution my supervisor came up with is storing all of it. So thats the goal for today, transporting all this stuff to a storage container where it will sit for months and months probably. Now I see the problem as not that we don't have enough space but just that we have way too much stuff and we need to get rid of it. It has really started to bother me the waste and abundance of this place. We threw away so much wrapping paper, pointless packaging, and other random crap. I am tired of all this packaging, after this I don't want to buy another thing. It makes me want to get away from society and just live of the grid.

But on a brighter note, yesterday was going to be a hard day. We worked till about 8, sorting all the Beanie innards which was kinda a pain. But it actually turned out very nice. One of the FJV's who had the same job 2 years ago came over and helped us sort which was really nice. Then she invited us out to dinner which was so so nice. It really meant a lot to be able to go out after a hard day and have some really good food. Plus when I got home I received a package which was just the right timing. The weather has been below zero for a few days now so the hat was so needed. So a bad day turned into one of the best days.

I must say that Alaska is pretty nice during the winter. There's lots of snow on the ground and that means skiing. Last week I got to go ski at Kincaid, which is a really nice state park by our house. One of my roommates teaches cross country ski lessons to kids there so on Thursday I asked to tag along. It was great, I got a free ski lesson along with some six year olds. Kincaid is a great place to get away from Anchorage. Anchorage is like any medium/small sized city. What makes it stand out is that you can drive in any direction for 20 minutes and be in total isolation. Plus there are some really nice trails and it's kinda refreshing to be more afraid of moose when walking around than people. The moose are surprisingly quite plentiful in Anchorage. As long as they stay away from our apple tree, I think that we can get along just fine.