Homesick

Today is night 3 of 14 here at my place of employment, now known appropriately and accurately as "work". I'm actually enjoying my new, expanded job description as it gets me up and moving much more than before. Sometimes I wish I could share some details with you, but such is the nature of the security business.

I had a few minutes of down time, and feeling a bit homesick I surfed over to Karen Ramstead's blog. Karen is an Iditarod musher who runs a team of Siberian huskies. Not just any Siberians, though. Some of her dogs are SHOW champions, as well as hard working and hard racing sled dogs.

Karen is currently in Two Rivers, training her team from my friend Jan DiNapoli's place. Karen carries a camera on most of her training runs, and unlike me, she is very good about putting it to good use. If you'd like to see some photos of the trails in my part of world, check out her North Wapiti Blog.

I hope she won't mind me 'borrowing' the photo below.  It shows a 'musher's eye view' of some of her beautiful Siberian huskies, and is also a pretty good depiction of current trail conditions.  Every one of those little bumps you see in the photo is designed by nature to jar a musher's spine.  Some of the larger ones are designed to send one's sled careening out of control, and those little bare patches you see ahead of the team are intended to grab your brake or drag pad and either jerk you around, break your equipment, or bring the whole show to a sudden stop. 

Surfing Karen's blog reminded me that the trails really are as rough as I remember, and my time probably really is better spent earning money to care for the team than doing the 'crash bang' thang out in the woods.  At least, I try to convince myself of that while I'm here at work instead of out playing in the woods.