Pictures from Kotzebue

As the plane landed in Kotzebue, I was watching out the window, and I saw fields of this beautiful reddish-tassled grass. This grass seems to grow almost anywhere it can find the space to, including little spots all over town. This is just outside our house.

The tassels are very soft, and they flutter in the breeze...I had no idea what they were but a friend saw the picture and helped me figure it out. We're pretty sure that it's foxtail barley. It is stunning, really.

So here is our house. It's the white one behind all the pallets--that's our door right there in the center of the photo (just right of the green thing).
The pallets are what we'll be burning for firewood this winter. They are readily available in summertime (when a lot of things get shipped in), but harder to find in winter, when everyone wants them for their wood stoves... so our landlord collects them all summer (he lives next to us). We've been helping with the collecting--in fact today Hubby and the landlord built a woodshed to store the cut-to-stove-sized wood in--so we'll be able to use the wood as well. It's a good thing, since this is the arctic!

 

For the first few days we couldn't really move in because of carpet cleaning (which included a broken machine and three days of wet carpets) So even though all our stuff was in the house, this is what it looked like...

In spite of the rough start with moving in, we really like our little house. It's older, but it's clean, has fresh paint, and is very comfortable. I have a gas stove for the first time in my life so I'm adjusting to that (everything cooks faster than I'm used to, so I'm having to adapt all my baking to compensate!).We have nice neighbors--not just the landlord, but another couple and a single lady. And our 60lb dog is the little doggie on the block! Everyone (except the landlord) works at the school AND has a dog. One of the dogs looks almost exactly like Koira, only half again as big. I'll have to get pictures of them together, it's quite amusing as we have already confused them a couple of times, and we've only had them together for two days!

 
Here you can see how far we have to go to get to church (no more phone church!)
The green arrow is our house, the black arrow is the church. Between us there is a mobile home (our neighbor). That's it. It takes almost an entire minute to get to church. It'll take a little longer after it snows if we have to walk around the block.

And this photo is from the corner of the church...looking at the ocean...the ARCTIC ocean...

(You can see in this photo as well as the first one that most of the buildings here in Kotzebue are up off the ground. Apparently this is because of the wind. With the space under buildings, snow is able to just blow through, whereas if they were on the ground then the wind would cause huge drifts against the houses. I remember having to dig our way out from the front door a few times in Pelican, so I appreciate the foresight of whoever built our house putting it on stilts!)


And here are some photos from a little walk I took with Eagle and the doggie the day after we got here...

I don't know what these little white flowers are, but they're pretty. (you can click on the photo to see them larger, perhaps someone can identify them for me?)

an iris, nearly laying down, but clinging to life outside the church. I suppose it was cultivated once, but it doesn't seem to be anymore...

...and the Alaskan classic, fireweed. It's absolutely everywhere, only here it's shorter and smaller than in the more southerly parts of the state