Where to begin?

At the beginning, duh, which is my second trip to the Ice Park.

The single-block competition was done, so I decided to get a couple of snapshots of the finished pieces. To get the full effect, the night time is the right time. But I was going to see a play later, so I'd just have to make do with high-noon sunlight.

What I didn't plan on was the gusty winds causing a painful chill at the base of my skull. Making matters worse was the tunnel effect of the paths at the Ice Park. I'd always conceded that a -40 day in Fairbanks is more pleasant than a zero day in Minnesota with strong winds, but now I had empirical data to support it. I didn't stay for longer than 30 minutes.

I'll package the pics from that trip in a later post with the ones I'll take tonight.

But the day wasn't a bust. I met Christi downtown for Thai food and a play later that night. Having never tried curry before, I was lucky to have someone there. Christi would notice when I was staring at my food in a perplexed gaze and let me know what the heck to do with it. Honestly, if it ain't a sandwich, I'm confused. It took me three months to understand salad.

We hopped across the street to the Empress Theatre to see "Camino Real," a Tennesse Williams' play that substitutes a narrative with a head trip. There was a plot, I think, but I instead took interest in the minor aspects of the show. Throughout the play, there's gypsies, whores and the like reacting to the play's events, and I found myself watching them as much as the central action.

I enjoyed the play itself, but what I enjoyed more was forgetting that I was in Fairbanks.

This is a great place, but my existence the past six months has revolved around either discovering Alaska or working for the newspaper. I needed a break. I had been having recurring dreams where I was in Tampa, Gainesville or Bradenton with the Armstrong All-Stars. I haven't been homesick (consciously, anyway), but it is jarring to awake 5,000 miles from where you thought you were.

Someone once described Interior life to me as "hyper-life" because everything you do is complicated by the environment. It's like when Justin and I went on a beer run during Hurricane Francis and got hit by 70 mph wind gusts running back to my dad's SUV: All we did was buy a 24 pack of Bud Light, but we did it in a hurricaine. Same premise here: I didn't just go Christmas shopping, I went Christmas shopping in -40 weather.

But hyper-life wears on you, and it was refreshing to spend a few hours forgetting where I was.

My back was sore from sleeping in an awkward position earlier that day, and plopping in a theater chair for 2-plus hours didn't help the fact, so when it was time to hit the Midnite Mine for a few rounds, I was more than eager.

At the Mine, Christi and I met up with Mary, who played a -- ahem -- practitioner of the oldest profession in the play. A pretty girl who can drop a dirty word like a SCUD, I immediately took a shine to her. She's a design geek, and I try to understand design (seeing as it's part of my job and all) so I limped to keep up in the conversation, barely getting by with a few well-placed eyebrow raises and head nods.

At 1, I headed to the Big I to catch up with Adam, who had turned 24 at midnight. The place was unusually dead, and Adam was beat from a rough night on the job. We had a drink and shot the breeze about the NBA trade deadline before admitting the night was done.

The next day, I attempted to treat him to a birthday lunch, but most of the downtown restaurants wouldn't comply. That's the thing about Fairbanks: Nothing is open on a Sunday. There was a time Rich and I tried to order a pizza one Sunday while watching football. No luck. I had to go to the supermarket. Coming from a town where every other building is a restaurant, being closed on the day everyone has free time is absurd to me.

Speaking of free time, I finally am spending some of mine at a gym. Adam gave me a 10-day pass to the Mary Siah rec center (a community pool with a less-than-modest weight room) which he had adopted from Rich a year ago. It takes some creative engineering to get a full workout in, especially when none of the equipment is made for 6-foot-plus individuals, but it's enough and I'm already waking up with a little more energy after just a week.

Well, this is a long post, so I'll end it ...

here.