It's too hot in Alaska

I have now spent a total of nine days in Alaska, if you count the interview trip a month or so ago, and I have yet to see any wildlife. If you don't count the election of course.

But that's neither here nor there. I'm sure a few months from now seeing a moose on the coastal trail will be old hat.

Observing the kids has been interesting. My 12 going on 45-year-old son Cole is already adept at Alaska things. Like navigating us around town using his mom's new iPhone. He's also schooling her in the art of setting up E-mail, downloading apps and otherwise giving her dozens of other reasons to pay less attention to me. Of course, if you ask her, I deserve it for having my eyes glued to a computer 18 out of the 24 hours in any given day.

The darkness is interesting thus far. For example, it's 8:33 a.m., and I'm sitting in my office waiting for some IT help. It's pitch black outside, and yet I can hear the crunching sound of car tires on ice. It will remain this way for another hour or so. But in the evening, the darkness falls around 5:30 p.m., which is not all that different from Oregon at the solstice.

Carson asks about our container of household goods every day. "Dad, is our stuff here yet?" "No, Carson, why do you ask?" "Because I want some toys to play with."

I thought it might be a brilliant idea to buy the boys each an iPod Touch to ease the pain of transition and as a way for them to communicate with their friends back in Montana. For Cole it has been such. For Carson, not so much.

Carson is, after all, a boy in all senses of the word. He lives in his imagination like 90 percent of the time, dreaming up all kinds of scenarios mixing "Star Wars" and "Lord of The Rings" at his will. But he is also in need of props to live out his dreams. The best being a set of Legos whereby he can invent worlds, break them up and reinvent new worlds on a whim.

Gabrielle, somewhat surprisingly, has cried for home more than the others. When I ask her about why she is sad, she says she misses family in Oregon. Her grandma and grandpa and nanny and papa. She was so small when we moved to Montana, I would have thought her affinity for Oregon would be less than the boys.

But it's her affinity for our families that causes her to be sad when she spends too much time thinking about it.

I'm happy to report that Morris the gecko has not only survived a harrowing trip across four states in a U-Haul truck and then an embarrassing inspection by airport security and a bumpy flight to a climate that is nothing like that of his desert home, but he he thriving on mealworms and crickets once again.

We all noticed he got a bit skinny during this whole adventure, but his fat tail is slowly getting fatter once again, and he's happy sitting on calcium sand warmed by his heat pad and his heat lamp in a comfortable 88-degree glass aquarium.

My only complaint so far has been the fact that at night when I return from work, I must dress down to shorts and a t-shirt to survive the balmy temperatures in our apartment. We keep our heat at 55 degrees, because we are warmed, I assume, by the ridiculously high temperatures coming from the apartments below and to the sides of us. It averages about 75 degrees in the apartment, and last night I had to open the windows to allow some of that frigid air inside to scour things out a bit.

Things are about as far from the familiar as it can get right now, but the newness of everything makes it all interesting and fun.

Tim

Thirty seven days in the unemployment line

It looks as though I'm going to have to change the name of this blog. I was originally inspired by the government extension of unemployment aid allowing laid off Americans to collect for up to 99 weeks.

My position at the Missoulian newspaper was cut on Monday, September 30. I applied for unemployment immediately, and to date I've received nothing but slips of paper saying my unemployment aid status is pending.

Last night I accepted a job at the new director of digital content at KTUU, the NBC affiliate in Anchorage, Alaska. Somehow Ninetynineweeks just doesn't seem that appropriate any more. However, I don't want to leave any interested readers hanging, so I'll continue to chronicle the adventure as it progresses.

My wife and I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the early part of our marriage. Having to move away after we had our first child, we vowed to find a way back some day. Since then, we returned to Oregon, spent time traveling and working in Eastern Europe and ended up in Missoula, Montana, which is not exactly a population center. And now Alaska, with an even lower population than Montana, is our our next destination. Things don't always make sense, but I find that big picture stuff is often a little fuzzy and distal. Probably for a good reason.

I have always loved the ocean, but I have come to love the mountains. Anchorage seems to have both in abundance, which is something very satisfying to me.

Several months ago I was chatting with a friend in Alaska about our various moves since we met several years ago when I was researching a story for a University of Oregon publication. We would eventually end up working together at the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon, and we founded the craft beer blog - "Will blog for beer."


On this evening, I was asking about life in Alaska, a place she moved after her husband graduated from law school in Oregon. To my surprise, one of the best print writers I'd ever worked with was now working at a broadcast station.


She took a few minutes to explain that the company was expanding beyond the traditional 5 and 6 p.m. broadcast news to a more web-centric model to provide news digitally in the way Alaskans are increasingly digesting their news.


She told me they were going to begin a search for a digital content director and asked if I was interested in having her forward my resume on to the station president.


I floated the idea past my wife the next day, and I got the reaction I thought I would get. She sort of frowned and cocked her head sideways with that look that says, "You're crazy, and I hope I didn't hear you right."


I let it go and didn't think much more about it until that fateful Monday.


After sort of processing the idea of being laid off and immediately formatting several plans, including grad school, self employment, international job possibilities and cobbling a bunch of local job offers together, I came back to the Alaska job and decided to E-mail my friend to find out if that search was on.


It was, and while figuring out how to navigate the unemployment aid system, I was corresponding with my future boss in Anchorage.


Finally we were invited to travel to Anchorage to meet with the team there and to check things out around town. I've usually done this part of the job interview process myself, but this time Cheryl came with me, as I knew she'd be the hardest sell.

Sunset from downtown Anchorage

Turns out we both loved Anchorage. The sun was just setting as we flew into the city over the tortured ice-bound world of southwest Alaska. I could see a monolithic shadow to the north, something so immense I had to scrunch down in my seat to see the entire mass. This was Denali. The snowless Chugach range framed in the twinkling lights of Anchorage as we landed.


Ocean and mountains. It's like a complete world for me, though neither of us have any illusions about how difficult winters can be up there. We're pretty big fans of the light.


A move to Anchorage is not taken lightly. Not by the prospective employer and not by those seeking a job in that state. So the drawn-out process has been a bit torturous as our funds have shrunk to uncomfortable levels.


To accept the offer last night was rewarding for many reasons, not just the physical need to know that our future is set. It's rewarding to know I'll be able to continue in the job that my journalism career has morphed into. Going from a traditional print reporter to mobile journalist and videographer to online reporter and finally a digital manager is something I didn't expect when I walked across the graduation platform at the University of Oregon, but it's twice the career I planned for and therefore twice as rewarding.


It's nice to know I won't have to wait around for unemployment checks that never come. And searching for jobs is a torturous activity in this day in age. I will not miss it.


Now begins the daunting task of getting ourselves to Alaska. You can drive, but it takes up to five or six days. Shipping items is expensive, as is flying. This blog will likely continue to explore the whimsical nature of family antics, the challenges of moving to America's last frontier and the interesting details of settling in a place that might as well be a million miles away from family for the ease of getting their and back.





Tim