Blazin' the Trails

Greetings from up north -- if I understand latitudinal distances (nowadays the internet does my math), I'm about 1,200 miles north of my familiar northern Michigan 45th parallel.  Tonight the sun will set at 11:15pm, and it will still be dusky enough to see fifty yards or so into the trees at the darkest hour.  It was really quite lovely the first few days, 60s and sunny, and then we had a flurry of heavy snow yesterday, beautiful and hushed, which melted after a few hours.

Usually (in my now-4-day experience) things look like this:

Creekside is aptly named, situated next to swift, chilly Carlo Creek.  The woods are dense but crisscrossed with countless ATV byways, hiking paths, and game trails, and in most places you can blaze your way through springy (now sponge-soaked) moss-and-lichen-covered little hills.

It smells amazing here.  A green, cedary-piney, robust, Alpine-cowherd-yodeling-with-joy kind of smell.  The mosquitoes are big but dumb, easy to clap against my (sort of) white wall.

So far my projected diet of nuts and grains has been supplemented by castoffs from the cafe.  I'm not sure who purchased several large freezer packs of chicken wontons or why they neglected to consume them, but they've made for a few tasty lunches already.

There's not much to report about work because I've barely done any.  We had an actually constructive and fun team-building/ice-breaking day white water rafting through a canyon; the first day of work was thirty minutes of HR policy and paperwork; then I came in for a few hours of burger pattying and vinaigrette whisking; and yesterday we scrubbed out the coolers and I continued down the list of salad dressings.  WHEW...now it's time for three days off.  And what happens on one's day off?  I saw two moose!  Those gals were enormous, like horse-dinosaurs.