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Do-o-o-orm livin' is the life for me....


Here I sit in the West Residence Hall at the University of Alaska Anchorage.  Rainforest blog, you say?  Well, a girl's gotta get off the rock sometimes.  I guess I've been off the rock more times in the past few years than most get off in a lifetime.  Hey...it's kept me sane.

After just over a day in the beautiful city of Seattle with my most fantastic of friends Gail and Janine, I found my way through the air to the last frontier.  We had a short but pleasant visit in Seattle.  Janine is training to hike Mt. Whitney so we walked.  And walked.  And walked some more.  As we walked after dinner on a quest to find the shore of Lake Union, we happened upon a Mexican restaurant.  It's not where we ate.  But the fact that we found it right when we did was truly a miracle.  I had eaten a few too many Ranier cherries at the Pike St. Market earlier that day and it was just then, at that very moment in time that they decided to kick and do their colon blowing thing.  So I just kept walking right on in to the restroom like I owned the joint. After a brief but dramatic bonding of my posterior to the porcelain, we were off and walking again.  We did find Lake Union and saw the sea planes.  We walked some more.  At one point along our journey we landed on bar stools at a place that serves 160 different beers on tap.  Like a dope, I decided to try the pear cider.  Sounds kinda good, right?  Well it wasn't even alcoholic and tasted not unlike 7-up.  Not bad, but not what I'd hoped for either.  Anyhow, it was a lovely day with the sun shining, hangin' with my pals for a short but sweet visit to the city.  I do dig Seattle.

Anchorage, on the other hand, is what I would call aesthetically challenged.  If not for the majestic mountains all around, it would be a tough sell.  Downtown is nice.  There are some cool shops and quaint watering holes.  The flowers are beautiful.  The colors here seem especially vibrant.  
Tonight, I met my professors and fellow torturees - a.k.a. MFA in creative writing students - for a lovely dinner and conversation.  What an eclectic group of creative thinkers.  They come from all over the country, although many now live here in Alaska.  This is going to be a cool experience.  No risk, no reward, right?  No guts, no glory.  If you don't jump off the cliff, you can never know what it's like to fly.  So here I am, trying to fly.  I'm going to learn how to make stuff up and then write it in such a way that someone else might actually want to read it.  

The dorms are far more secure than I remember way back when.  We have a card key that gets us into the building, then into our suite area shared by two rooms, then into our individual rooms.  Sheesh!  There's also a dorm monitor sitting behind the desk in the front lobby 24/7.  Times have changed.  The facility is fairly new and very clean.  Again, times have changed since I lived in a dorm.  This is much nicer although I will say my experience was better for building character and testing one's mettle.  Anywho, tomorrow's another day, although you'd never know that here in Alaska, since it never seems to get dark.  

I wore a maroon aloha shirt covered in tiny pineapples to dinner tonight.  Nobody else was sporting one of those.  

A hui hou.  Aloha! 

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