Rain and Shopping

In some ways life in Anchorage is just like  my life before.  I spend too much at the grocery store and at the Farmers Market.  I quilt at every opportunity and I love to watch movies.  It just that things happen in a slightly different manner.

I have no car here, so I try to organize a bit more my stops.  I did previously, but really plan my route before I ever leave the house now.  The weather in the summer here does not slow me down.  In East Tennessee, the summer weather stopped me dead in my tracks and influenced every aspect of my life.  What I wore, what I ate and where I went was determined by how hot and humid it was outside.  I like that those are not factors now.  The rain really does not faze me either.

It rains more here than at home and my only regret is that I did not bring a solid raincoat.  I brought one with a zip out lining that works for rain and cold and has a hood, but not just rain.  Kind of like the New England fisherman wears in the commercials, that bright yellow slicker is what I should have brought along.  Something more like that would have been good. And rain boots.

Even the clouds are different here.  In the Smokey Mountains, the clouds drift into long thins wisps that look like smoke coming out of the mountains. Here, the clouds will stay large and fluffy and just sit for days on the mountains.  Sometimes they cover the tops of mountains and sometimes they cover the bottom or somewhere in-between.  Many days we don’t see all of the mountains because they are covered with clouds.

Shopping is restricted to where I can walk for the most part.  No running over to another town in my car because I want the soup that is only sold there.  Not a very difficult thing to get used to.  Much like moving into a new neighborhood in the same town. A new grocery store, a new bakery, a new gas station, a new dry cleaners all are thing you look at differently.  Are they convenient, are they on my route and what is the quality.

Rain does not seem the same because mostly it is a slow steady light rain that will last for hours.  Nothing like the thunderstorm in the Midwest that build  for a few hours, then unleash a downpour with a lot of noise.  Then those rains turn into sunny days to dry everything out.

With three months of living in Alaska, I am still loving the differences here, especially the cooler summer temperatures.