Sniffles and blooms.....

 It's been awhile since I did a post so I thought I would do a quick one!  A tad more than a couple of weeks ago I caught a cold, just your average snotty, sneezy cold.  After a few days though it started turning into something else.  My ears plugged up and I found myself sleeping for most of the day with a mild fever.   My sinuses were bags of slimy pain.  When I was a cigarette smoker I used to get sinus infections at least a couple times a year, but since I had quit I haven't had a single one.  Till now!  It was a doozy.   Getting sick in the village is different than getting sick in the city.  For one thing the store usually doesn't stock much of anything more than aspirin, so you are left with whatever you remembered to buy in your last trip to the city, or whatever you can scrounge up from relatives.  Even our clinic can't give you more than tylenol most of the time.  So you become really good at knowing home remedies that work and you drink tons of water and sleep.  Eventually my husband trucked me over to the clinic so that they could send for antibiotics though as it became obvious it was an infection.

Fall harvest is here, and I dream of drying meat on the racks and filling our freezers and our trading partners freezers with multicolored berries.  Last week the mountain tops were covered in snow, which made everyone panic, but eventually the snow melted.  The weather has been odd and random. So what time I have is spent readying our stuff for fall and winter, cleaning out the freezers, picking as many berries as is possible till my back goes numb, and fishing for fat grayling and char when we get the chance.  So you will not see me very often till at least mid September, weather dependent.  We have to store enough food to get us through winter, or it can get incredibly expensive. 

Some photos! 

moose hide and coral bead bracelet. I always have a few art projects in the works, they make really good stress relief projects!

Family picking blueberries

these are what we call 'blackberries', but they are also known as crowberries or moss berries.  They are amazing frozen with a bit of milk and sugar and they also make the best jelly.  Good for stomach aches too.

view from one of our berry picking spots.  While I pick berries my husband keeps watch with the rifle in case any bears come too close.  He also walks around looking for artifacts and caribou shed antlers.

we have been seeing mushrooms the size of our heads peppering the tundra.  Inupiaqs do not eat mushrooms as it is easy to eat a deadly type.  In our language the word for mushroom means something like 'it will make your hand fall off.'  Good way to keep kids from playing with them!

I noticed these plants growing around the dog houses.  At first I pulled them out as usual, but I realized that they are seed from the straw we use for the dog bedding.  I was going to try and figure out they were and see if I can plant them next year on purpose.  Barley maybe?

My oats have gone to seed, they are short but they look all right. 

A tomato bloom on my spoon tomato plant.  The tomatoes have all got blooms.  I'm excited to see if they produce anything.

mini lettuce plants. 

I think I will get tiny cabbage this year, they are beautiful plants, though I haven't found what being is nibbling the edges and nibbling on the potato plants.