I don't think we're in Dixie anymore, Bubba...

Oh my. Snow, snow, and more snow.

Seems a lot roads they don't even bother cleaning off up here at this point - I reckon they just figure it's a lost cause.

Buh. Mid week busies. More when I've time to do more than mutter giberish about "first this, then that, then the other thing" while flighting about between work and school and all.

Sure is purty though.

Party!

What a wonderful weekend! Off to a party at the Claus place for an early Halloween. First we drive hours and hours from Anchorage to Chitina, where Paul comes to pick up us in his turbine Otter:




Last night was just settle in and hang out - dinner and board games. This morning was the "Alaska Challenge" - an adventure game based off something Paul went through some years back. He had a forced landing way back out of the way, and had a two day walk back into the lodge through the wild. So to give us just a taste of it, we broke out into teams that had to (in no certain order) -

• Cross a thread of a glacial runoff river
  
• Start a fire on the sandbar and boil half a coffee can of water
  
• Cross back
  
• Shoot a .22 rifle into little target
  
• Chop six rounds of wood into quarters
  
• Haul a five gallon bucket of water from the river up to the top of the hill.
  

(Note the Kayak paddle brought up so later teams couldn't get across the river as easy. Not that anyone else cheated at all...

After that we all got together to carve pumpkins, and tonight.... a Costume Party! Yippee!

Love.

My new favorite song.



Could you look into the eyes of your killer, and with your dying breath say "I want to be your friend?"

Now that's a special kind of love right there. God's love for His children, and I think I'm just starting to remember a whisper of it. It was what I asked for, a month ago while wandering the woods along the Chitina River in the middle of the Wrangells.

I knew of God in my head, and somewhere in my spirit I could feel His presence, that he was. I never in my life can recall feeling truly alone. Like when you're sharing a room with someone, both of you just sitting reading. Whether they're in your field of view or not, you can just feel that someone else is in the room with you somehow. Same thing.

Except... I didn't comprehend his abiding LOVE. I'd heard of it of course, and said the prayers and sang the songs, but I don't think I've never truly managed to comprehend His love.

As I faced my earthly loneliness, my earthly hurts and most of all came to see the armor I'd built up around my heart, I stood face to face with the root of it all. I found I didn't trust His Love... and by extension blocked off my heart not just from Him, but from everyone.

It's a hard thing to keep your heart open all the time. It's so easy to slip back into an old habit of thinking, whether it be aggravation in traffic or irritation at another's view of the world. "Love your enemies" Christ said. And if He can do that, if those men on Palm Beach could do that while being murdered... I suppose it's not much at all to ask that I not get all huffy with people over political disagreements or traffic or whatnot.

And yet I do.

Hatred is easy. Irritation is easy. Mocking is easy.
Even occasional vulnerability in the comfort of friends and loved ones is easy.

Being and staying open and loving, among those who'd hurt you?
Good Lord is that hard. Nothing for it but to do it though.

How else can I expect to truly feel His love, if I armor my soul so much I can't even share my own?


G'night all.
Y'all take care, eh? Love.

-Jenny

wow.. guess I'm acclimating.

Driving around town this morning running errands, I look up at one of those clock/temp things. I thought it felt a little chilly, but not cold really... turns out it was -2C.

Wuh. Guess ya can get used to it up here after all.

Oh, and I got a little toy Cessna Caravan and model Super Cub to convert into 9Q-CAUand 5156H respectively. The latter will take a bit of work to change from a 2-seat PA-18 to a (nominally) 4-seat PA-14, but I think it'll work out okay.. and they'll make some dandy pieces of inspiration to sit on the bookshelf with my textbooks and all.

Back to work... got some webwork to do for the lodge, then studying, and at some point make up a nice portfolio for a job interview Wednesday!

wuuf. Busy.

The Cow Plane

"There is a cow plane down at Merrill Field." I say one day.

"Oooh! I wanna see!" say some friends.

So for Momma and others who wanted a picture of the Flying Holstein, well here she is:





Apparently the local dairy sponsors the traffic report.. or did a few years ago anyhow. As part of the deal, the plane got all dolled up heifer style.

Ain't she cute? :)

Edumacational Toys...

Just a quick look at what I've been playing with in my off time. Painting the darn things isn't my best skill, but they're at least starting to look right. And more than anything, it gets the shapes of the darn things in my skull. I'm finding that I learn best with concrete objects to handle, so... toys it is. :)



That right there is a shelf full of models I've been playing with off and on - Alaskan planes all. The far left is a Beaver on skis and wheels, the far right is a Super Cub that's slowly getting painted up to match the one the good folks at Ultima Thule run (just 'cause it looks cool) and in the center is a copy of the WASP engine, big brother to the one that powers the Beaver.

The engine is gonna be the trickiest but I'd like to enlist the help of a couple friends eventually in making some pistons and connecting rods so I can see how they all do that little jiggy dance inside:



The two planes are more conventional models I suppose. Painting the darn things is a pain, but it's neat that they actually detail things like the engine mounts and such. Nice to see how it all fits together in three dimensions... that aren't hundreds of pounds and bigger than I am.



And finally, this is school. Neat place.

Laying down arms.

Wow.

See, some months before I came up here I started looking around for work. One of the places I applied was a little family gunshop in town. Lovely people, incredible stock.. nice little place. And my interview, such as it was, was today.

And I was dreading it. Not because I thought I'd not get the job... but because I was afraid I would.

You see, that event I mentioned last weekend? The "No Fear Forward" - well... that was where I finally laid down arms as it were. After some nastiness and uncertainty as a kid and young adult, I'd taken the Sarah Connor / Laura Croft school of thought. I learned all about self protection and arms and suchlike. I learned to shoot, and after my time in California was so disgusted with the 'victim disarmament' crowd that I began regularly carrying a weapon - as a matter of principle more than anything.

To this day I could probably pick up any infantry rifle on the planet and use and maintain it effectively. If I've not owned one, I've used one close enough in design as to make no nevermind.

But oh Lord was there a price to that!

The more time I spent in that world, the more my soul hid behind another layer of armor. I'm not saying it's a bad thing in itself - God BLESS those folk who can and do step up to the "sheepdog" plate. But for me... the internal cost was just too much. My heart was hardening daily.

So I had to give it up.

The crowning point of my trip last weekend was regaining my vulnerability. I walked out alone, no dog and no gun, into the woods. The woods of the Alaskan wilderness, mind you - where I'd already seen wolf and bear sign. Maybe not the smartest move for my body, but something I desperately needed to do for my soul. And oh was it cleansing. Like shrugging off an old scratchy snakeskin.

And so here I was a week later... showing up for the interview I'd already arranged with the owner of a gunstore, trying to think of a way to say "thank you but no thank you" to something I'd asked for myself not a month ago.

So imagine my surprise when the owner sits down with me in the back of the store and after some small talk basically says "honey... you're a sweet, kind soul. You know your stuff, you're warm and genuine with people, but I just don't see you working in a place like this."

With relief, I smile and say "you know.. a year ago I'd have argued with you. Today I can't."

So we continue to have a nice little chat, and I leave relieved and on good terms. Oh, and my old carry gun someone finally bought on layaway to. One more step away from my old life.

Soft.
Gentle.
So much more comfortable.

Thanks all.

Girl's night out.. and heart's shadows.

Church has this thing called "RefresHER" that's basically a party for the gals of the congregation. So of course we had to go - I met a couple friends there and had a grand ol' time. Aside from the usual music and message, the night started out with a riotous parady of a talent/reality show.

Is it always this crazy? I ask one friend.

"Oh, this was fairly sedate" says she.

Um.. wow. Not exactly gramma's church social. But fun.

Now let me say this though - the structure of these things seems to large extent geared for those married women with families who need to just get out on their own for a little bit. It's just the feeling of the thing, and the context in which the message is given - all family life. And so I'll admit it resonated quite a bit, but had the classic single gal's reaction of "easy to say... what of those of us without families?"

So yes, the ol' loneliness bug hit pretty hard that night. With my birth family broken apart or dead, and no family of my own, sometimes this kind of function can really set me to moping. It's easy for a gal without a family or husband to feel... extraneous in the world. Purpose-less. No it isn't PC in this "post-liberation" era to say, but at least in my experience it's what it can feel like sometimes.

All of this tailed in with the chapter of "Jungle Pilot" I've been reading, about Nate Saint. If you've ever seen "End of the Spear" - yeah, that guy.

So in the chapter I read last night after getting home, Nate had just had his plane blown into the ground on takeoff, and was injured. One of the letters he penned after the accident had a short essay on the nature of expendability. Keep in mind this was just a few years after WWII, and legions of men had grown accustomed to the thought of "mission first, regardless of the personal consequences." Which is not to say he was reckless - the man was extraordinarily safety conscious, and pioneered quite a few safety innovations on MAF planes apparently.

But all that said, he still took the viewpoint that he and those with him in the field had to still consider themselves expendable - that their mission did have dangers, and someday the bill might come due (and in his case it eventually did). But it was still worth it.

So let me admit, in my darker moments, I can let myself get distracted with that. "No family," whisper my demons, "might as well take a somewhat riskier way of serving - it needs to be done anyway, and there's less loss to the world if *you* fall than say your friends who are mothers and wives and fathers and husbands."

Ouch.

But we're not called to "stand in the puddle" out of self pity or a desire for martyrdom. We're called to stand there out of love. Love for our God, and love for our fellows in this world.

Yet even those most noble desires can be twisted into a mockery of themselves if we are not careful. How sad. I'd like to say I have some kind of great philisophical truth I can pull from this, or that I've licked it, or that the shadow has passed for good and all now that I've named it. But I haven't, and it still haunts me sometimes. So I guess I'll just keep asking for more grace and love, and the wisdom to do the right thing regardless. So if you're a praying type, toss that in there for me to if you don't mind.

Anyhow, off to feed the horsies. Housesitting is fun. :)

Well that'll be good practice..

I just went to talk with the Civil Air Patrol folks tonight - interesting folk! Reminded me a lot of the search and rescue folk in Idaho, although a bit more regimented.. I'm still kinda fuzzy about how the whole 'auxiliary' to the USAF works, but at least the flight suits are snazzy.

The really cool thing though is the planes the local outfit runs - a Beaver (a favorite of mine so far) and a Cessna 206 like the MAF flies.

I couldn't ask for better flying experience, once I'm finally properly licensed and checked out and all myself. In the mean time, hey -- plane rides are always fun. :)

No Fear Forward!

So last weekend I went up with some of the gals from church to a No Fear Forward back at Ultima Thule Lodge. It was great seeing Donna and Logan and all again, but the forward itself was incredible. A pretty dramatic life change happened there for me - more about that later.

For now I'll just say if you get the chance... go.