welcome to my world

here's a new one - blogging from a village on the Yukon. i turned on my laptop this morning to download a few interviews i'd conducted yesterday here in Nulato and what did i find? a wireless connection. in a village. wow.

now i don't want to romanticize this. the internet has long been in the villages of interior Alaska. schools depend on it and a teacher friend of mine who lived in Teller in the NW part of the state told me recently that the internet possibilities in her school far outweighed what they found when they moved to Fairbanks. when you're not connected by road and at the whim of the weather, you turn to the ether.

but this is different. this is me, in the tribal council building, turning on my computer and by some alchemy of software and air waves, i'm connected. to my husband in Fbx, to my email (a mixed blessing), and in the picture above, to my friend Ned, who's half-way through a 2 week snowmachine trip along AK's NW coast helping a scientist taking permafrost and ice cores.

and here's my morning: in the way back on the left is the tribal administrator for Nulato - a hard-working friend who puts up with me setting up shop at his conference table every now and again, breakfast in the green bowl there, the latest knitting in front (the skittles sweater), ned's blog, the most recent paper in the villages (last Thursday's), my digital voice recorder downloading interviews, and my field notebook.

welcome to my world.

i'm on to Kaltag tonight for the Stickdance. i'm not going to even hope for wireless.