Starting with this little dream...

Let's see. Since July, we've...

• Got a job.
• Bought a car.
• Bought a house.
• Watched the kids sail into school with nary a look back, and barely a hiccup along the way.

Things seem to be going just about as well as we could wish for in our re-introduction to land life after 10 years away.

True, my job has been more or less eating me alive. That will get better in time, I trust, and I hope that the University of Alaska will eventually be a great place for me to practice my science. But for this winter, I am laboriously laying the foundation for that hoped-for future.

So science demands have completely overflowed into the discretionary time that I was used to having on the boat. But more than this (hopefully temporary) time poverty that I find myself living through, I think that it's just the nature of the transition that has kept me away from this blog lately.

This was so much the place for sharing my impressions of family life afloat. Which, after all, was my life, and our life together, for these last ten years.

As our life turns into whatever shape it will take back here in Alaska, I don't think it's unreasonable to hope that I'll end up with some new sort of stories to fill these pages.

I'll make a nod towards that new beginning with these pics of the boys learning to ski.

I had a go at learning to surf when we were in Australia. It was fun, but trying to learn a new sport in my 40s mostly just left me yearning to do something I already knew how to do. Which, for me, is Nordic skiing.

I'm not a particularly good skier, but I am very comfortable on the boards, and Alisa and I got up to all kinds of long trips back in the old days, skiing for days along frozen river valleys and over mountain passes, camping each night in the snow.

And, for all these years that we were away from Alaska I had this little dream in the back of my head about how wonderful it would be to teach the boys to ski. I loved the idea of passing along this thing  that has given me so much pleasure through the years.

My parents came up to share the holiday with us, and they gave the boys skis for Christmas. A few days later we finally got some snow on the local golf course (it's been a terribly warm winter) and the whole family went out to have a go.

And well. The boys loved it, and are crazy to go as often as our paltry snow will allow. And not incidentally, they're pretty good at it to.

Mark it up as another part of life in Alaska that is suddenly that much richer for being able to share it with the boys.