Hi everyone! As always I hope this post finds you doing well! 

  It has been a rough couple of weeks around here for me. For whatever reason I've just been really homesick. I don't even know where home is but I know that I miss it. And I know that this new place doesn't feel like home yet. I suppose for it to feel like home at this point is a bit too much to ask since it's only been 7 weeks. It definitely feels longer than that but objectively I know 7 weeks is not a lot of time. 

  Anyway, today I got to do something really fun which was go blue berry picking up on the tundra. Berry picking has been going on for thousands of years around here and the natives are total pros. They're also pros at making things from the berries. 

 Of course I took some pictures so I could show everyone. 

Above is the tundra and this is where all the berries grow. Currently it's blueberry season. It's very expansive and very serene. You do have to look out for bears though so it's hard to get into a meditative head space but it is beautiful. 

    This is another pic of the tundra but it's a little closer view of the ground and vegetation. One of the tricky things about the tundra is that the ground is very soft. It's kind of like walking in wet sand, if you stand in any one place for too long you'll start to sink and each step you take you are definitely sinking into the ground. It's very uneven and easy to roll your ankle or lose your balance. 

    They don't call it "foraging for berries" for nothing. The berries surprisingly blend very well with the surrounding vegetation and you have to get real low to the ground to see them or find them. (I found this stressful as I have a real fear of bears). Anyway, the benefit to being so close to the ground is that you can smell the wonderful tundra smell. I know that sounds nuts but it's honestly the best. It's sweet but also earthy smelling. It's the best. 

   One of my coworkers told me he'd never seen anyone with matching jacket and boots. I told him I was happy to be that person for him :) 

Above & below are some berries before I picked them!

 They are smaller compared to the store bought berries but they taste so much better! 

Another pic of the tundra and the nearby lake! 

I did pretty okay for it being my second time! Here's my yield: 

 Here they are all washed and leaf and twig free ready for me to make muffins!

This is what washing berries does to your hands: 

All in all it was a great experience and I had a great time. It definitely repaired my first experience berry picking which was a low-key disaster. It was super hot out, I was wearing the wrong clothes and shoes, I didn't find any berries (I didn't look that hard to be honest), and I threw up when I got home because I drank too much water too quickly because it was so hot. 

Tonight I am trying to stay up late because supposedly if I do I will see the northern lights!!! Ahhh!!! I'm SO excited! 

Hope everyone has a great weekend! 

Veronica 

 

    Hi, everyone!!! 

   I hope you everyone is doing well! I decided to write a post sharing a little bit more about my work because I haven't really talked about work very much on here. It's one of the bigger reasons I moved here to so I figured it's time to include it! 

   I work as an art therapist for a counseling center affiliated with the local hospital here in town. It's essentially a community mental health setting which is very different than what I was doing before (residential and PHP care for eating disorders). The clinic I work for also does outpatient substance use and IOP substance use care, although I don't work on the substance use team. I have dreams of starting an art therapy group for the substance use IOP once all the groups are back in person though! I think that would be really fun!

   So my job title is "Itinerant Therapist" and I got to do the "itinerant" part of that last week when I traveled out to one of the villages in our service area via bush plane. Our service area is about the size of the state of Illinois and includes 12 villages that are only accessible by bush plane. When a village has a tough week or crisis/tragedy strikes some of the therapists will travel out to the village to provide support and psychological first aid to the community. So that's what I did last week for the first time. I didn't say too much about during that post but it was an awesome experience. After the trip I was having all of these feelings that all of that schooling and hard work I did was totally worth it for moments like talking with the community members. It was an awesome feeling.  It just brought me back to why I wanted to be a therapist to begin with. And, I got to be traveling on my dad's birthday which if you know me you know is something I always try to do to honor his memory and our relationship. 

  On Friday I moved into a new office! There are multiple good things about my new space, one is that I have a closet which is perfect for storing all my art supplies. The second thing, and probably my favorite, drumroll please, is that I have a window with a view of the sea! Yay! 

       On the really clear days (not what we've been having lately) you can see the mountains across the sea. You can kind of see them in the pic above but on the clear days you can really see them, like this: (The quality of this pic isn't great but you get the idea) 

   Anyways, life in Alaska is pretty good. The homesickness has subsided, I'm learning to live with the midnight sun (helped tremendously by black out curtains lol), and now my focus is just on my building a life here and making new friends. Not easy during a pandemic but my coworkers are great. 

Until next time! 

  Veronica 

 

     

  

 hey everyone, 

 So the other day I took my first work trip! I have been looking forward to riding in a bush plane and it was awesome! 

Here's the plane we took, it seats around 7 people. I think it can seat more if needed but they tend to move the seats around to make room for all of the cargo. I'll be honest, I was a little nervous about being in such a small plane but the views were so amazing that I pretty quickly forgot all about it. 

Here's the inside of the plane! The inside has one longer row of seats and a shorter row. Behind the shortest row is where they put boxes of mail and other things that are being delivered to the village. 

The flight was only about half an hour and as I mentioned already it was beautiful! 

The village that we were visiting was very quaint and sweet. It was inland from Kotzebue so a little bit chillier than I was expecting but nothing too cold. The village is located just off of a river and so it's very marshy. I'm guessing that's why the whole town is basically on stilts. There aren't roadways through the town, there's this boardwalk-y type path that goes all over. It looks like this: 

There aren't any cars either, just boats and 4-wheelers! Once we got there we met the clinic staff and put all of your stuff away and then we headed out to meet the villagers! "Eskimo" is considered an offensive term. I call them people in the villages, natives, or native alaskans. 

All in all it was an awesome trip. I traveled with one of my co-workers and I really enjoyed getting to know her. I felt like we made a good team too. She was really great at engaging people and initiating conversation which is something I feel like I'm not so good at. I can't wait for the next one!