I haven't been cooking.

I haven't been cooking. At all, really. Not even noodles. Not even tea or coffee. Really. No cooking.

My fridge is pretty much empty of edible foods, but quite full of the non-edible kinds that were once edible but now need to be deposited in the garbage. I don't so deposit, I guess, because I haven't gone to the grocery store enough in the past two months to replenish my supply of grocery/garbage bags.

My house? It's a pit.

My dog? Neurotic.

My spirit? Alternating between scared and exhillerated.

I left BigLaw, maybe for good this time. And decided to see just how much gumption is left in me after, in effect, 8 years of feeling enslaved to it. So I'm busy - but it's the good kind of busy. The superficialities of my life are in complete disarray - but J. and I talk fun developments and upcoming adventures, I like my job, I like my co-workers, and oh! do I like freedom. And I even like that I'm busy - maybe because this is the voluntary kind of busy, not the indentured kind.

And what makes it all sort of laughable, is that amdist the squalor of the superficialities of my current existence, I have had non-stop guests. Every night that I've been home, with the exception of maybe one or two brief respites to quickly wash a few towels and the spare sheets for the next entourage, indeed - even on the mights when I wasn't home because - I have had guests. J's friend, that told me how to make a beaver roast on my engine when I drive to Barrow and showed me how to roast a camus bulb. British guests travelling in a 70's camper picked up down in Seattle, that arrived in Anchorage as friends of friends and left as treasured friends of mine. J's parents (for whom I shuffled all aside to be able to greet them in my home with a cast iron skillet of chicken and dumpling at 1 a.m., after their 7 hours of travel, but who work prevented me from really visiting and I do express an undiminishable amount of guilt for the fact that I dropped them off on the sidewalk outside of the airport....or actually, the fact that I did so for work reasons). The old college crush of a dear college friend, travelling with a different girl who arrived in Alaska as his girlfriend and, I hear, left it as a finacee. Lawyers from Seattle who waited too long to reserve a hotel room. Friends from Alaska who needed a temporary place to crsh.

It has been a very busy summer.

But it wasn't a cooking one.

Having said that, I did go to Kodiak twice during the month of July.

First, I went for my birthday - I turned 31 on Abercrombie beach, in J's arms, in front of a roaring bonfire made out of driftwood, eating Chinese takeout, and watching our dogs engage in a playful game of tag with a roving band of otters. This trip to Kodiak included, actually, many momentous moments - including a very close, scary in that post-event exhillerating kind of way, encounter with a Kodiak Brown Bear and wonderful decisions made jointly with J.

Second, I went out the other weekend with a big bag of beef hash that I had made for J. before the professional madness kicked in. J's friend came over for brunch, and we made a day of gorging on beef and sausage hash (last minute need to extend the portions), poached eggs, and coffee; resting from the feast of it; donning borrowed crab fisherman gear to take the dogs out for a rain-drenched romp on the beach; watching a $5 matinee of War of the Worlds; napping; and dining on halibut sandwiches at Henry's.

And I did get to make chicken and dumplings for J's parents - the leftovers frozen overnight and packed with some scones, bierocks and moose ragu for them to deliver to Kodiak.

So....little on the cooking front, but much on practicing other arts and necessities of living.