Plenty of mountain shots to come; UAF Faculty Development took us on a trip through Denali National Park last weekend, and there was plenty to see and document. Mountains. Lakes and streams. Bears. Wolves. Mountain goats and Lynx. Very sweet.

Before we arrived in Alaska, as we were making plans and coming to terms with such a big move, Sarah relayed a couple of times the truism she'd heard from a UAF colleague: that in Fairbanks, we'd never forget our location on the globe. There are plenty of reasons for this... our weather shifts dramatically and rapidly, daylight hours are first abundant and then rare and precious, and access to amenities can never be taken for granted. But the mountain above, Denali, is perhaps the most dominant and dramatic reminder of our unique position and landscape. One hundred and twenty miles away, the mountain is plainly visible from Fairbanks on a clear day, and the closer one gets, the more intimidating and surreal the vision becomes. It's a monster.

Yo y'allz, sorry I've been off the grid for a hot minute, but I'm back in the blogging game now and ready to drop some skillz.

I'm gonna stay on the 'time' tip for a bit, since it's really what's made it difficult to get into the site for the last week. I've had plenty to say about concepts and adjustments to schedules, but all those changes really make it tough to imagine the wedding and reception were just a couple short months ago. The kind of changes and experiences we've seen since then make me wonder whether the kind of 'standardized' scales we use, with little exception, are always effective and useful in the way we want them to be.

Bakhtin, for example, wrote about the 'chronotope' as a way of distinguishing linguistics and narrative characteristics according to ideas about time and space present in the culture from which stories originated. The notion that respective temporal and spatial adjustments can both characterize, and result from, unique communal experience, is especially resonant to me now, after months of upheaval and readjustment. Quite literally, spending weeks and crossing countries when traveling leads to 'big' feelings and expressions, and translating these signals back to daily patterns and charges is a process that deserves attention.

This whole thing should sound at least slightly familiar to anyone back in the varied rigors of a school's semester after a summer of more scheduled and leisurely daily work, or to those preparing again for Saturdays and Sundays now consistently full of student activities or regular yardwork or college and pro sports on TV. I suppose this is about habits, too: how long does it take before speedy- or expansive-seeming behaviors begin to feel 'natural' or normal? Still working to establish effective personal rhythms and itineraries here, I wonder exactly how flexible and adapted our sensibilities can be, and how influential our adjacent cultures and lifestyles end up.

Chesterton: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land."

There are stronger forces than culture. Maybe.

We experienced some pretty abnormal-seeming places on our way here, including plenty of Canadian towns on the Alaska Highway that appeared to be little else than bouquets of eateries and lodgings collected around the vital fueling stations and washrooms.

Driving the Alaska Highway through sparsely populated areas of British Columbia and the Yukon can add up to revelations about important things like space and time. It's odd and sort of refreshing to experience the marriage of modern roads and vehicles with much older ideas of isolation and long-distance travel. Pace and distance are largely undefined, left for individuals to scale and log. Infrastructure carries a different meaning, something both leaner and more extensive.

Along with new and more robust ideas of geography, we've stepped into time that is more fluid and tonal. Since the heavens leave us with progressively little from which to map our daily structures and limits, we strive to grow new or newly apparent qualities, termed maybe something like "mental rhythmic rigors" or "temporal biopower."

In other words, if you're ever writing about the "Heroes" song and album by David Bowie, don't forget the quotation marks.

The joys of Silly Season in Alaska. Enjoy Singin' Sam's Web presence here. As you can see, he loves punctuation.

First day of classes down (for me anyway; s42 is finishing up with her grad students now). And along with a liberal use of apostrophes, I'm preparing for lots of everything. The undergrad population at UAF is notably diverse; it's fantastic. My Tu/Th Technical Writing course ranges past the 18-35 demographic and past the North American continent. It includes hockey players and musicians and a mother of seven and a veteran of Alaska Pipeline construction.

There's a open spirit of learning at UAF, and it's a pleasure to have students with wide interests and experience, with whom to build a semester of progressive writing and discussion.

Tomorrow: Academic Writing about the Social and Natural Sciences. Whether they indulge as willingly as technical writers in nostalgic Neil Diamond quotes? We shall see.

As Matt Damon says: yeah I'm a doorman. To the SKY.