We’ve been in Alaska since the 6th, mostly in Anchorage but also Seward and Wasilla and around.  It’s been cloudy but for a day or two, mostly chilly or cold, and reaching a dusky semi-darkness only after midnight.  I’m surprised by how disorienting the extended daylight is.  I’ll feel like it’s six or seven in the evening and find that it’s ten or eleven at night — sometimes I can hardly tell whether I’m hungry.

From Seward we went on a Kenai Fjords tour from Resurrection Bay to Fox Island for a salmon lunch, then into the open ocean of the Gulf of Alaska.  Despite the medication, I was pretty green once we hit the ocean swells, but I did manage to keep all the salmon in me.  We saw humpbacks and porpoise, and all manner of sea bird.  Around Anchorage we’ve seen dall sheep (not mountain goats, which I misleadingly tweeted), bald eagles, and moose several times each.  One moose gave us quite a scare, standing in the bushes right at the side of the road where we didn’t see him until I could have put my arm out the passenger side window and touched him (I did not).  At the end of a week the only thing I still hadn’t seen was bears, until sitting at the kitchen table tappety-tapping away at the laptop I see two smallish black bears ten feet away out the window.  I grabbed for my phone to get a picture but by then they were barely visible in the bushes, and then gone.

Some photos are already on flickr, and others will be soon.  We’re leaving tomorrow, for Seattle briefly and then back to Santa Fe for a few days before California.  I hope to be settled in New Mexico before August.

Ando H. sent me an email, pertaining to the linguistic observation from the Wire:

In honor of my move to New Orleans, I’ve been re-reading A Confederacy of Dunces, and came across a passage that reminded me of your Wire post.  One of the Levy Pants workers in Ignatius’ Crusade for Moorish Dignity says to Ignatius:

“You a bad man.  I believe a police be looking for you.”

So the a police construction was floating around in 1960′s New Orleans, too.  If they were to make another Wire season, it should center around a character like Ignatius J. Reilly.

I left off in the middle of the second season, and it adds to my overall excitement about returning to Santa Fe that I will be able to pick it up again.