Wolf Moon Dogsledding

Location: Armuchee, GA
Time - 6:39am Eastern Daylight Time
Temperature: 72 degrees F (22 C)
Conditions: Mostly cloudy, humid
Forecast: Sunny today and tomorrow. Highs in the 90s, lows in the 70s

This Summer has not turned out at all the way I expected. That said, I’m not exactly sure what I expected but it certainly wasn’t this! Not that this has been a bad Summer. Far from it, it has been an excellent Summer!

When I came down from Minnesota in May, I had several main things I planned to do during my time in the South.

Expand the dog pen. I did this, with help from my Dad. I’d come up with some elaborate plans and somehow saw myself working outside for a few hours every day fixing several areas. Yeah, I really did forget how hot it gets here. Still, the pen is now almost three times as big as it was…and took three times as long to build as I thought. However, I am NOT complaining. The expansion is GREAT!

Get a car. Did that too. Finding it took up a good bit of time but was worth it! I love my little red Shuttlecraft.

Type up the novel I wrote longhanded last Summer. Didn’t do that. Nor did I write the sequel I planned. I will at some point but I chose to do some other things.

Print some things offline. I’m still doing that.

Take a roadtrip. Didn’t happen the way I meant for it to but it is happening - we’re combining it with the trip back to Minnesota.

Prepare for college. I got accepted into VCC in Ely. I went to their college prep days before I left. It seemed right at the time. I would start classes at their Fall 2009 semester. Then I started thinking about it more. And then it all started to weigh down on me and didn’t feel like the right thing anymore. So I have pulled out. At the time of this writing I intend to go to vet tech school in Fall 2010. I will probably take a break from full-time sled dog handling at that point and just play with my own dogs. We’ll see what transpires.

Hang out with my friends. DEFINITELY did that! And here lies part of where the Summer turned out differently.

It was what I didn’t plan. And the thoughts came about after hanging out with my friends in situations entirely unlike the quiet of the Minnesota wilderness.

On this blog I write about my mushing life. I write about dogs and sleds and snow and puppies. I don’t usually write about the other side(s) of my life that don’t exactly involve sled dogs. And since sled dogs are so firmly entrenched in who I am, it’s sometimes easy to forget that that isn’t ALL of who I am. Sometimes even I forget.

But then I remember. A friend of mine will bring something up that is so seemingly apart from the mushing life that it’s not even funny. And yet, I will totally relate to it. I am comfortable in two different places, in two different roles. As if I were two completely different people.

And so I have been trying to bring those two facets of myself together. So far it has been a challenge. From reading this blog you might not know that I want to get involved in filmmaking or that I am a YouTube junkie or that I can happily wander around Wal-Mart wearing a metallic silver scarf or that I can quote Monty Python until the cows come home.

So one of the things I have figured out this Summer is that I am a musher and I am also a geek/nerd.

But think, for a moment, about my choice in music. If I were to set my playlist on random it would probably come up something like this:

Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, Enya, Big & Rich, Sixpence None The Richer, Dropkick Murpheys, Star Pilot On Channel K, Weird Al Yankovick, Deep Purple, The Beatles, Pierce Pettis, Dixie Chicks, Nickleback, The Killers, Allison Kraus, The Police, The Cars, Stevie Nicks, Taylor Swift, Cake…

Just to name a few. Completely different music, artists and styles yet I like them all equally. Obviously I don’t feel the same when I listen to Enya as I do when I listen to Dropkick Murpheys. But I am the same person and I love both.

And as my love of music is a broad spectrum, so is my personality. There are some artists I especially love and I tend to listen to their music more and have more of their music in my collection. So are there facets of my personality that I am especially interested in (mushing for instance) and that hold my focus. But that isn’t all of who I am.

I listen to Sixpence None The Richer. And I listen to Nickelback.

I run sled dogs under a starlit night. And I wear silver nail polish and watch sci-fi.

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