*tap*tap* Is this thing on?

Well hello there...

For anyone who, for some stalking-related reason, still checks this blog...or for anyone who has the RSS feed of this blog still plugged in somewhere...welcome back!  I haven't posted in earnest on this blog since we left Nunapitchuk and moved into Bethel.  Why?  Well, a whole list of reasons, I'm sure...but that I can name, in rough order of magnitude:

1) Facebook and Twitter make lengthy, en-mass updates really unnecessary...why write a blog post about "what's been going on over the last week" when everyone who gives 50% of a crap has been reading along with your posts on social media in near real-time, anyways?

2) Having kids really cuts into your "free time."  Actually, I'm going to go ahead and change "cuts into" to "eliminates."  Which, really, is a shame...because there really are so many great moments, pictures, and firsts to document.  Though, I guess, see #1...it's a whole lot easier to just shoot a pic of whatever funny thing the boys have broken, pooped on, or defaced with a rogue Sharpie and immediately upload it to Facebook or Twitter for instant highfives/consoling.

3) Honestly, a little of the romance is gone from the "Alaskan Adventure" I started this blog to write about.  Bethel is not the village.  Sure, it has all the problems of the village, some advantages of living in a town with, say, an actual grocery store, but there are also problems unique to Bethel, and some of the things that made the quirkiness of living in the village tolerable and, dare I say fun and enjoyable, are compounded by the "real world" pace of Bethel into a whole bunch of crappiness.

So why revive the blog now, at the point at which after 3 years in Nunap have given way to 3 years in Bethel, giving way to leaving Alaska altogether for at least a couple of years, if not longer?

I'm really, really, wanting to write a final post about all the things I will miss about Alaska when we're not here.  Yeah, it's going to be hard to write such a post without offering the negatives up, too...but I'm hoping not too much of that creeps in.  It's not going to be a post suitable for Facebook or Twitter, though to be honest I'll most likely link to it from both places, if only because if I don't, I'm sure nobody will know it even exists.  Though really, out of sight...out of mind...not a bad summary of the last 6 years in general, eh?

More to come...one more, at least.