I’ve been home bound lately, mostly because I got sick two weekends ago and am slowly recovering. I’m not entirely sure, but I have the sneaking suspicion that my chimney deconstruction (still not complete, but I’ve got eight feet cleared) had something to do with it — inhaling all that soot and dust on the first two days. Man, I hate being sick.

One of my projects that I could still manage, whilst sickly, was to start converting my old VHS tapes to DVDs. I bought a Sony machine to do it and once I’ve finished I will take it up to Delaware to start in on my parents massive collection. Paramount are the many tapes my dad made, and continues to make, especially around Christmas time; we have them all the way back to 1981! There is some truly fantastic stuff in there that would be tragic to lose to the forces of electromagnetic entropy. And let us not forget the video of my 2nd grade, directorial debut, performance of Cats!

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I’m a big fan of the show Dirty Jobs on the Discovery channel. Every week I get to see Mike Rowe engaging in insanely dirty, greasy, messy activities that most of us never stop to think about. You can watch Mike get filthy doing jobs such as cleaning grease traps, processing human food waste, mining coal, emptying septic tanks, making charcoal, etc. If you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend it.

So I’ve had my own dirty job over the past few days. I’ve been removing an old brick chimney/flue from inside the walls of my house. My house was built in the 1930 and, I’m almost certain, was initially heated by coal. To vent the coal smoke there is an old chimney that runs up the wall of the original kitchen (which has its own flue for what I presume was a wood stove). I believe this project qualifies as the dirtiest (corporally speaking) thing I’ve ever encountered or attempted. You cannot believe how dirty an 80 year old chimney is!

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What have I been up to, you ask? Well, working mostly of course, thanks for inquiring. But here and there, in betwixt, I’ve done a few interesting things. {Andrew} and I went to a decent concert at the Cat’s Cradle a few Mondays ago. The headliners were the Electric Six who are probably most famous for the very humorous “I wanna take you to a gay bar” (this is an even funnier third-party video using their song, circa 2003). They were pretty good, but honestly better were their opening acts. The Blue Van is a really good Danish modern-day classic rock band, akin to Led Zeppelin or The Doors. It’s not normally something I spend much time listening to but I could definitely appreciate their talent.

Aberdeen City were the true standouts for me though. It’s somewhat hard to categorize them: a bit Interpol-ish but more like early Radiohead. I picked up their CD and it is pretty damn good, especially for just $10. I did make one fairly large blunder though; I forgot my earplugs. We were standing fairly close to the stage and were too close to the left speaker and I had ringing for days. This was worse and longer than my previous run in and it scared the crap outta me. Seriously, I had resigned myself to a life of slightly impaired hearing and it was a sad few days there. Fortunately it did fade away but I have to be way more careful — there’s a set of earplugs in my car now, just in case.

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The party’s over. I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately, ever since I got back from Alaska really. I know it’s very common to feel a sort of anti-climax at the end of a trip, especially a really good one. So I’m sure that’s part of my current mood, but there’s something more I think. Despite all my wonderful friends, family, and pets, when I’m alone I really feel it: lonely. *sigh* Yes, that’s right, you read it here first: the dude who lives alone feels lonely. Details to follow…

I’ve spent the past two weeks hanging out with various friends, partially I think to help chase away my low spirits. I took Sandra and Andrew out to dinner in return for pet-sitting. They, as always, assured me that it was unnecessary but I feel like it’s the least I can do and I’m happy to. I’m just so lucky to have people that I like and trust that are so open to the idea. I also helped Ian move in a new bed into his new house, as well as a washer and dryer. He’s got a nice place, I predict there will be some good parties goin down there. And I went to a nice party at Deborah’s.

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Got up a bit earlier than normal today, around 8, as I have an 11 o’clock flight. Kodiak’s airport is pretty small, but still I felt like I should be prepared for a slow ticket counter agent. The airport is so small that they don’t have any TSA screening, or security at all for that matter. Because of this I would have to go through security in Anchorage (of course, I had to switch terminals anyway, so security would have been an issue anyway). Anyway, I finished up my packing and grabbed a quick breakfast. Andy had an early charter and Betsy and Renee were still asleep. So poop, I didn’t really get to say goodbye to any of my new friends.

As we still had a bit of time, Matt suggested a final but brief hike out on Miller Point, not that far from his house. So that’s what we did and it was pretty nice. During WWII there were some big guns at that location and they’ve since been turned into a small landmark/museum. Anyway, it was a nice quiet place and gave me one last cloudy look at the Kodiak coast and Fognak island.

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