Life cycles

This time of year I go through all of the photos that I took during the past year and print the best ones as 8x10's. I found a pretty good website for printing photos: www.iprintfromhome.com. I'd highly recommend them. They do a good job and are reasonably priced. They can print in luster, which in my opinion is much better than glossy or matte.

Anyway, in going through the photos I've realized that my life is becoming a record that loops over and over and over. Around this time of year Inari and I usually do a couple of overnight ski trips to remote backcountry huts. Even the destinations seems to be almost the same. In February or March we'll probably go winter camping, freeze our butts off, and then say that we're never doing that again. In May I'll leave for field work and Inari will plant the garden. We'll be busy working on the garden in June. Then comes July, which brings fishing, blueberry picking, the Gulkana Glacier field course, and hopefully a hiking or canoe trip. I go back to the field in August, then to a conference later in the fall, and then hang low until mid-winter.

There is something about the isolation and strong seasonality of life in Fairbanks that makes this sort of cycle almost inevitable. I haven't decided if I like it or not. I also realized the other day the I'm not as attracted to the Alaskan scenery as I once was, its like I've become desensitized. I kind of feel that its time to try someplace new, someplace with more connections to the rest of the world. Then again, I know that once/if I leave Alaska, I'm definitely going to miss it.