I Have 349560429756349 Roommates.

I finally went down to the Kenai today (yesterday, really, I won't post this until tomorrow evening when we get back and I have internet). The cabins have names, Moose and Bear; mine should be named Spider. Cobweb CITY. I'm not a fan of anything that can bite me because I get bad reactions to any kind of bite, so I wasn't thrilled about the spiders. The cabin hasn't been lived in for a bit, so that explains it a bit. We went through and vacuumed the place and it's looking pretty spider-free at the moment. It's small, about the size of a studio apartment, but it's a cabin, so it could be described as a free standing studio. it's an interesting building, long and narrow. It looks so silly from the outside. I was a little freaked out at first, but I've decided it's cute now. At least I'm going with that. . . .

Frenchy asked me what size TV I wanted and I told her 0 inches by 0 inches. What do I need a TV for if I plan on going on adventures all the time? I'm hoping to spend a lot of time outdoors hiking and such so I don't need this place to be a palace. I've decided it's very livable under those circumstances. Also, she's given me free reign to do anything I want with it, like paint or anything else I want. She's very laid back about things, which is nice.

There's plenty of room for me and all my junk and it has everything I need. Well, except one thing. A toilet. That's right, no toilet. I was under the impression the place had a 'bathroom.' Call me crazy, but I usually lump bathroom and toilet together. I was NOT happy about that. There's an outhouse nearby, but it was filled in recently so I have nowhere to do my duty. The cabins aren't booked up so I can always go over to one of them when I need to go. We're looking into several options for the matter and I've decided at this point that I'm not worried about it. We're most likely going to add on to this cabin to create a formal bathroom, but there are other options to be considered, too. Jealous? HELLO Honeybucket. This is funny to me because when I was looking into a getting a bartending job here I spoke to this girl and she warned me about Alaskan housing and told me to make sure it's got everything I need. She said she once went to see an apartment that had all the utilities included in the rent. When she got there it was a group of old broken busses and trailers and the "included utilities" was a water pump at the end of the dirt road.

We're actually only here overnight. We came down (I always want to say up, but it's down now that I've been in anchorage) to go to a Soldotna B&B association meeting. Too funny. There was only one seriously overbearing personality there, which I was surprised by. I see B&B owners as creatures of habit that know how they want things done and don't take no for an answer. One guy there was a loud mouth. Thought he owned the meeting and had fabulous ideas. One of those guys that's constantly patting himself on the back. He was extremely important. Other than him, everyone was pretty good. Well, except one artist lady that was a bitch. She just wasn't pleasant in the least. I bet her B&B has a lot of return visitors. . .

One of the agendas was to plan the Solstice. The summer solstice is a huge deal here. At home we're not that impressed it's the longest day of the year. If someone tells me it's the longest day I think, 'great, I can do 30 seconds more work in daylight." Here, as you can probably imagine now, it's light all night. They have a big festival or fair or something of that nature for it. It runs for two days and the B&B association gets the door profits for the second day so we're in charge of bringing people in and booking bands etc. They also need volunteers so I might just be walking around that fair selling raffle tickets. I think it would be a fun way to talk to locals.

One woman was in charge of booking bands and as she was reading the names of the bands that were willing to play people seemed horrified and were moved to ask (in disgust) if they were heavy metal bands. I was laughing in my head, especially when they all got excited about a polka band and some guy named Hobo Jim. In addition to recruiting bands, they needed people to recruit businesses to donate prizes for a raffle. They had all sorts of great prizes already, like a flight to anchorage from the Kenai, a weekend trip, a fishing charter, oh, and 5 yards of gravel. Yes, somebody donated gravel. I laughed a little to myself but soon everyone was claiming faux rights to the gravel. This was no joke, either. Everyone was envious of the gravel. They all wanted it. I'm talking about rocks, here. They wanted rocks over a weekend vacation. I suppose they don't need vacations, but they need rocks, which I guess is a good thing when you think about it. If all you lust after in life is a truckload of rocks, you're doing pretty well in life.

I almost forgot, it was a pot luck, so we ate there. I'd say roughly half of everything had some kind of fish in it. Anything mysterious was fish. That white stuff with a crumbled chex topping? fish. That white cracker spread? fish. After the meeting I got a tour of the place and it was amazing. These people had my dream kitchen. They were obviously cooks. Also, they had the largest collection of cookbooks I've ever seen in my life. I commented on them and he told me they actually got rid of 31 CASES of them a few years ago. I saw 4 large bookcases of them. The place was perched on several acres of land with a great view of Mt. Spur. They made a shooting range and a track in the backyard which were out of site in the woods. They're a member of AAA and are rated as 3 diamonds, but were told by AAA that if they would just pave their driveway (it's gravel), they'd be 4 diamond. The owner says he won't pave it because the road leading up to the house isn't paved and it doesn't make sense to him. The place is called Spurview. I also found through talking with him about the kitchen and cookbooks that he loves to cook and they actually do 5 course dinners for their guests in all sorts of different cuisines, but with a focus on french and I think Thai sometimes. They charge $50 for it on top of whatever you're paying to stay there, but that's cheap for a good 5 course meal.

One great thing I walked away with from that was the name of a local fishing guide. The son of the owners of Spurview is a fishing guide. I think I get to go out on a free guided fishing tour with him and then if I like the tour I can refer people to him and get a percent of the price of the tour for the referral. Sounds good to me. Maybe I can take a test drive of one of their 5 course meals. . .

It's funny I saw this amazing house before I was introduced to my shack. I like my little shack. I moved some things and it's looking like it'll really work out well for me. Once we figure the toilet out it'll be just fine. I don't have any good pictures of my shack (I'll be calling it that from now on instead of cabin) but I do have these:

If this (above) was inhabited I would have forgotten the whole trip and driven back to Massachusetts. Bees can go to hell. It's too bad they're such ruthless killing machines because the hives they build are really neat.

This (right) is a tree that's right by my front door. It's about 3 feet from the actual door. There is some sort of animal fur on it, so I'm thinking I'll have visitors. Sorry the picture depth of field is off, I couldn't see what I was focusing on because the sun was in my eyes.

So, that's the story of my cabin. I'll take more pictures once I have it set up and I have more to tell about it later. I'm thinking I'll paint the inside, so please suggest some good color schemes. It's exposed studs inside so I can paint the wall one color and the studs another color or maybe stain one and paint the other? I don't know, give me some good ideas.