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but I always get this great sense of satisfaction when I absolutely use up a pen.  I mean, the fact that I haven’t lost it after who knows how many months…or even years!

I’m just thrilled with life right now.

Yes, as we have just rolled over not one but two numbers on the calendar, I thought maybe we should take a look back at the past ten years to see where we’ve gone.  I mean, a lot has happened.  Ten years ago at midnight, I was standing on the hill above Twisp waiting for the lights to go out…oh, Y2K, you really threw us for a loop.

So here’s a list of the top ten best things (or at least interesting things) that happened in the past decade:

10.  I graduated from high school!  And college!  And grad school!

9.  Ran the London Marathon and broke the 2:40 barrier (also ran three other marathons this decade…shooting for ten in the next decade!)

8.  Played with a crazy monkey while living in Ecuador for a year, working at Covenant Bible College.  Also went spelunking with a one-legged man.  Also climbed a 19k+ ft mountain: Cotopaxi.

7.  Travelled all around Europe…from Norway to Greece and everywhere in between!

6.  More and more running…running in high school, running in college, running aftercollege…lots of good times, good races, good people…in the Mountains in Winthrop, on the beach in Santa Barbara, on Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, through the streets of London, through the hills of Thailand, getting chased by dogs in Ecuador, getting stress fractures in the summers…is it sad that I spend so much time at this activity?  I don’t think so.  It’s provided some pretty incredible moments.

5.  Went to Thailand for a four months and loved it…lived in a tribal village, ate great food, had crazy adventures.

4.  Spent a year in Scotland doing my masters degree.  Hung out with some great folks, explored higher theology, got started in professional coffee making.

3.  Worked on a llama ranch in Colorado for the summer after college.  Also fought forest fires for a couple of summers…hence my alter ego: Fuego.

2.  Spent a year with the Canby Community learning to live well.

1.  Learned a lot about life, about God, about people, about myself.

Goals for the next decade: 1.  Get a Ph.D., 2.  Run sub-2:30 in a marathon, 3. Spend another year living overseas, 4. Live well.

I was talking to a friend here at the Canby House (I’m still in Portland for my Christmas Break) the other day and he was commenting on how 2009 was an eventful year.  I proceeded to think to myself, “Wow.  2009 was a pretty boring year for me!”  I mean, it’s not that nothing happened, but it really was kind of just a normal year (whereas the last several have been quite eventful).  Moving to Alaska was kind of the only big momentous thing.  So here’s a list of the top ten small but meaningful things that happened to me this year.

10.  The Canby House community garden project was a success!  Though I wasn’t there to reap many of the fruits of my labor, it was a great experiment that taught me a lot and allowed for

some great time and conversations with great people and plus it felt good just to spend a lot of time outside and getting dirty.

9.  Spent a day with Cousin Shannon hiking around Multnomah Falls and having lunch at McMenamins Edgefield.

8.  I spent a lot of good time with Cousin Jesse and Now-Cousin-In-Law Jen…two people who are great and who I hadn’t seen a lot within the past decade/hadn’t really gotten to know well at all.

7.  I won a marathon.  Granted there were only about 25 people in the race.  Granted my time was twenty-seven minutes slower (that’s one minute per mile) than my previous slowest time…but I WON!

6.  I traveled into the Alaskan Bush to the village of Shaktoolik…a very eye opening experience.

5.  I took on a job that I actually enjoy!  Let’s hear it for jobs with intellectual stimulation!

4.  I got to spend several days with my whole family in the Methow back in April.  I hadn’t seen my brother Ben’s family in almost two years and it had been three years since we had all been together.

3.  East of Eden entered my list of the best books ever written.

2.  When I was driving up to Alaska with my cousin Jesse, somewhere near the Alaska/Canada border at about 3am, we pulled over to the side of the road to look at the northern lights.  It was pretty cool.  But then it got even better when meteors were shooting across them.  Spectacular.

1.  Lots of good time spent with great people doing nothing particularly special but just enjoying wonderful fellowship.  Thanks everybody!

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!

And happy Black Friday Buy Nothing Day!

Well, we’re back to that time of year…the time when I start to feel a little bit anxious and uncomfortable and start blurting out things that are a little more barbed or more sarcastic than I intend…the time of joy and giving and celebration…and stress and over-spending and over-eating and (for some) too much family time.  Ah, the Holidays!

Last year, I perhaps crossed the line with my barbs and sarcasm.  So I am trying not to do that this year.  But as we come up on this pseudo-holiday that we call Black Friday, a day when we are encouraged to begin indulging ourselves beyond all that is reasonable, I would like to encourage us all to resist our impulses, take a deep breath, and think…

In my ethics class, I am currently talking about poverty.  On Monday, we discussed that currently, about half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars per day.  Additionally, it so happens that in the U.S. we use approximately 30% of the world’s resources (for about 5% of the world’s population).  This seems a little bit disproportionate to me.

Last week in ethics, we talked about the environment.  Specifically, we talked about how our consumption rates are far, far above sustainable levels.  Now, sustainability is a hot word these days and it’s basically losing its meaning because it’s so overused.  But here’s the thing: we live in a world with finite resources.  Some of these resources are renewable but many are not renewable.  It’s easy to see that someday we will run out of those non-renewable ones.  But what is a little less clear is that we are using the renewable ones at rates far exceeding their ability to renew themselves.  This is especially a reality in here Alaska where many of the people live subsistence lifestyles and where their food resources are dwindling.

We’re also talking about economics.  Besides the poverty side, there is the simple fact that we as a culture are being told that our stuff is inadequate…our houses are inadequate…our lives are inadequate…we are inadequate.  And of course the only fix for these inadequacies is to buy things, to spend money on ourselves…then we’ll be happy!  Or will we…

I want to invite you all to join me in trying to see through this lie.  Join me this month in trying to live a simpler lifestyle, in celebrating Christmas as the time of the incarnation of our God who seeks restoration and justice and redemption and transformation, in reflecting upon the problems of poverty and the destruction of creation and doing something about it.

Here’s two ways to start:

1. Buy Nothing Day this Friday!:  Instead of falling into the temptation to go buy a bunch of junk on Friday, stay at home and read a book or bake some cookies or enjoy family or play some cards…just take a fast from the compulsion to buy, to want, to need, to consume.

2. Join the Advent Conspiracy: Get your church involved!  This is group trying to encourage each other to spend their Christmas money on local projects that help those in need…and also to just spend less!  Last year, my church in Portland was a part of this and a large chunk of money was donated to the city to help with projects for the homeless and for low-income neighborhoods.  Good ministry, yes?  Another thing that they focus on is clean water projects around the world.  Bad water kills about 1.8 million people every year.  And it’s such a easy and inexpensive problem to fix.  Advent Conspiracy estimates that it would take about $10 billion to fix this world problem.  How much did Americans spend on Christmas last year?   About $450 billion. That means that if we just diverted a little over two percent…2%!!!!!!…of our Christmas budget to clean water projects, we could basically solve this problem!

I don’t say all this to sound self-righteous.  As one dude once said, “I haven’t attained perfection and in fact I am the worst of sinners”…or something like that.  I’m not claiming that I spend my money well or that I don’t get caught up in consumerism.  But I am trying to see my materialistic compulsions for what they are and to do better.  I can’t solve poverty and hunger…but if I can give a cup of water or a piece of bread to “the least of these”…well, it’s something.

(This one’s for you Candice!)

After a false start two weeks ago, we are back online to head to Shaktoolik.  The youth conference was rescheduled for this weekend and so (barring any more unforeseen complications with weather, moose, or other acts of God) I will be heading out on Friday morning.  Sadly, this time I won’t be taking along any students.  They have obligations this weekend.  But I’ve been set free to go experience life in the bush.  Hopefully the polar bears won’t get me…but on the upside, I’d be able to take that one off the of the Alaska Wildlife Checklist.

Exciting times!  I’m off to the bush this next weekend to a little village called Shaktoolik.  I’m going to be leading a small group of students to do a service trip at a Alaska Native youth conference.  It’ll be a pretty cool opportunity to experience a bit of village life and culture.  Shaktoolik supposedly is a “one road village.”  Just one street down the middle of the town which sits on a little spit on the west coast southeast of Nome.  Cool stuff.  More to come after the weekend.

Last night was Nikapiak (nik-a-pak) night.  That’s a word that roughly translated means “real food” or I’ve also heard “good food.”  Either way it basically suggests the good, hearty stuff that all the native students grew up on and probably would still be eating a lot of back in the villages.

Following my policy to always try a bite of the cultural food, I consumed some interesting bits last night.  Yes, I did suspend my vegetarianism for the sake of the cultural experience…and because I feel that subsistence type living is a different story than the industrialized food system to which I really object and which is the cause of my anti-meat stance to begin with.  Anyway, here’s a few of the delicacies:

A, B, and C: This is muktuk (sp?).  This is basically skin and blubber.  A and B are Beluga (poor Baby Beluga…not swimming so wild and free anymore).  C is Bowhead.  Yep.  Both whales.  I’ve eaten whale!  You have a good perspective of B and C there.  On B, the white part is the skin and the brownish is the blubber.  On C, it’s the black that’s the skin, with a nice piece of chewy blubber attached.  Apparently, the Beluga stuff was cooked, but the Bowhead is raw.  Let’s get a closer look at that stuff:

Mmm.  Tasty.  I have to say, the white Beluga and the Bowhead made my stomach freak out a little bit…it wasn’t quite sure what was going on.  But by the time I got to the black Beluga muktuk, I actually thought it was pretty good…pretty chewy, a little fishy, but not bad at all.

Moving along…D: that’s moose.  Over rice.

E: frozen raw trout dipped in seal oil.  I was a little sketched out by this.  Especially after a couple pieces of the muktuk.  But turns out it really wasn’t bad at all.  Kind of like sushi…minus the rice.

F: good ol’ salmon.  Finally something my stomach recognized.

G: various kinds of dried salmon.

H: that’s dried seal.

Also on the menu: caribou stew, fishhead soup (see to the right), clam chowder, salmonberry jam…and for dessert, eskimo ice cream which is traditionally “whipped blubber” but more commonly these days, it’s Crisco (Mmmm.) with sugar and berries.

I truly feel like I’m a little more Alaskan now.  And as luck would have it, I don’t even feel weird today!

Yep.  I saw ‘em.  Two.  On campus.  This morning.

Next up on the Alaska wildlife checklist: walrus.

I saw my first bear(s) today.  I was driving back to Soldotna along the Kenai River and there were two of them on the other side of the river.  They were a bit far to get any good pictures.  But these are some fuzzy ones.  I guess they do exist…I was beginning to have my doubts…

I wasn’t actually awake for the event.  It happened somewhere around 3 am on Wednesday morning.  We’d been driving for the past 22 hours…ever since I crawled out of my sleeping bag at that rest area somewhere west of Prince George at 5 am, sunrise, and hopped in the car to get us going again.  The idea was that Jesse was going to drive until he got tired, then he’d pull over and we’d sleep and then I’d probably be up early again and get us going again…but Tuesday night, Jesse was just feeling awake.  So he kept driving.  And he was doing a good job.  He managed to not hit the group of elk that were in the middle of the road.  He missed the coyote too.  Hordes of insects fared not so well, but no one will put up a fuss over them.  We hadn’t seen any moose.  Or bears.  There was one cow that was wandering along the side of the road, but she stayed to the side and we passed without incident.  So why, fuzzy bunny?  Why did you feel the need to dart across the highway right as my sleek, V4 missile  of doom came rocketing down the road way up there in the remote regions of the Yukon Territory?  Why?

I never woke up to the incident.  But Jesse confessed to me later on.  Poor bunny.

Well, that’s my way of trying to make a rather uneventful trip sound a little more exciting.  Yep.  I am up here in Alaska now.  My cousin, Jesse, and I drove up.  I left Portland at 6am on Monday, picked

Jesse up in Olympia and started driving north.  Jesse kept us going until about midnight on Monday until we were a little ways west of Prince George.  We pulled over and slept a bit and when I woke up at 5, I got us going again (we made a good tag team).  We then ended up driving straight through to Eagle River…Jesse driving through the night, me taking over again at 5am…crossing the border into Alaska at about 4…getting there before noon on Wednesday.  Overall, it took us a grand total of 54 hours to complete a trip that was supposed to be 46 hours of drive time.  Pretty good.

A few highlights:

1. The Cassier Highway (highway 37 in BC) was beautiful.

2. Somewhere up in the Yukon at about 2am on Wednesday, we saw the northern lights shining and so we pulled over to get a better look.  There were no lights anywhere (you know, the Yukon is basically empty…).  So it was pretty cool.  And then it got even better when several meteors went streaking across the sky as accompaniment.

3. We only hit on rabbit and a couple of birds.  No moose.  No bear.  No elk.  No deer.  No caribou.  Not even that porcupine that I saw.

4. Alaska is kind of pretty.

5. My car rocks.  No breakdowns or blowouts or anything bad like that.  And on the positive side…I think I averaged about 34 mpg.

So here I am in Soldotna now.  Getting settled, preparing for classes, trying to figure out what life is going to be like for this next year.  That’s the scoop.