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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.

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!