Home Sweet Home

This is our home sweet home. You can get an idea of how they keep the houses level amidst the heaving tundra. As the tundra freezes and thaws each year, the ground heaves and throws off the "foundation" of the houses. So people have pros come out with lasers and stack up just the right amount of wood under each of the supports in order to keep their places level. The cost is about $1200 to $2500 each time - and some people do it once or more per year! If you don't do it often enough, your
windows will break and your doors won't shut.







This is the tube that holds our poo. They come pump it out on a weekly basis and take it to Brown Slough. That's why it's called Brown Slough.

Just kidding about Brown Slough. They take it to another slough. But the clerk who was here before me lived in a place with his septic tank outside, which froze, but had to be reheated overnight so they could pump it out once a week. Those days didn't smell too lovely at his place!

This is our water supply. The city comes by twice a week, on Thursday and Saturday, to make sure it is full. It's in the water heater room, which for some reason maintains a constant temperature of approximately 112 degrees. Genevieve likes to sit there in the morning.

If you run out of water, it burns out your pump and causes a shitload of problems. For example, no toilet flushing, which is never a great party. There's a name they call newcomers who run out of water, but we can't remember it. Plus we don't want to jinx ourselves. However, we haven't even come close yet, so we're pretty efficient with our water.

The setup is kind of amazing. It really makes you aware of the footprint you leave behind, in terms of the extent we use our natural resources. It would probably be a good exercise for everybody to live this way for a bit to raise the consciousness about it. Of course, we just read Jared Diamond's "Collapse", a book about human societies that fail, so that kind of stuff is on our brain right now.

In case you were wondering there is no shortage of water here, like in Southern California. They truck the water around because it took them many years to figure out an affordable method to pipe water throughout town without it freezing solid. They now have some pipeline action going, and we'd say (totally guesssing) that about 1/4 of the people are hooked up to it.



Speaking of precious resources, this is me eating some tasty breakfast salmon in our palacial kitchen. We'll try not to hunt the salmon to extinction. But they are ever so tasty.