It has been a while since I've been able to write to this blog! But certainly much has happened.
We are all moved in to our new apartment in Anchorage. It is not a bad spot. Pretty cheap and in many ways, we're getting for what we pay for, but we have made our space really nice and cozy. We signed a 6 month lease with the hope that we can find a house to move into in the fall. Apartment living isn't really what we had in mind when we decided to move to Alaska. But we're really happy to be farther away from Koots, and finally able to unpack all of our treasures. Pictures up of friends and family makes it that much more enjoyable.
I got a job working at a cool breakfast/lunch restaurant called Snow City Cafe. Its going pretty well there and I'm working a lot.
Cole is working hard trying to figure out how to start a business. It sounds like he will be calling it 'Coleman's Tile and Finish.' There is a lot of encouragement here for him to get licensed and start working for himself. There have been quite a few people who have shown interest in hiring him for tile and finish work as a subcontractor or otherwise. It's a lot to understand and figure out, but he's staying busy working for this nice young guy named Ryan who is a painter, and now another guy with a contracting business who will hopefully be providing Cole with a lot of work including tiling.
So things are starting to settle in. It's a strange place to be in our lives, and always a lot of decisions to be made, but we're really happy to be here and going through these things together!
The highlight from the last few weeks has been a visit from Cole's mom and brother, Joan and Brock!! Joan has some work clients up here so she had planned a business trip with a weekend extension to hang out with us. But little did we know that Brock was going to be joining her for an awesome long weekend with both of them. They did a great job being sneaky and we were really surprised and soooo excited.
We drove down to Seward and spent a couple of days down there, staying in the Oceanview Inn (which was actually a spare bedroom in someone's house). It was beautiful and right on the beach so we did a lot of beach walking, despite the constant downpour. When we first got to Seward we went right to the docks and hopped on a wildlife boat tour that was SO COOL! Over the course of a few hours we saw sea otters, seals, dahl porposes, sea lions, eagles and more. It was a lot of fun, especially the dahl porposes.
On our way back to Anchorage, we also stopped at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center where they have a bunch of animals who have been injured or orphaned in the wild. That was a lot of fun too. We got to see a bunch of bears, a mom and two baby grizzlies, a young black bear, and two orphaned Kodiak brown bears.
The whole visit was so much fun. Lots of exploring, moose hunting, good eating and laughing. We missed them immediately but are so excited for Joan, Kevin and Lexi to be up here in June!
I posted my pictures to Google's Picasa so if you want to see photos from our time with Brock and Joan then follow this link:
Picasa photos
