{"id":1180,"date":"2008-09-05T10:56:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-05T17:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/?p=1180"},"modified":"2012-05-14T09:34:50","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T16:34:50","slug":"alaska-dinner-at-the-trout-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/2008\/09\/alaska-dinner-at-the-trout-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Alaska – dinner at the Trout House (30)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trout House, or Windbreak Cafe<\/a>, was exactly the sort of place I was hoping to have dinner. It was not a chain, like the kind I had too many where I live now.
\n\"IMG_8236\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Pretty fancy fish, and pretty homey kind of cafe.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t seen Ray in a very long time.\u00a0I\u00a0am terrible with\u00a0faces, so\u00a0I was a little nervous.<\/p>\n

But Chris and I walked in, and I saw a classic computer nerd\u00a0type sitting there, his back to me and his pony tail far down his back.<\/p>\n

That was Ray.<\/p>\n

He and his wife Sherry\u00a0were there, very happy to see us, and we\u00a0scooted into the\u00a0chairs around the table to catch up. Of course I had to tell them about the massively long day we’d just had.<\/p>\n

Chris, who’d never met these two, was able to chime in at various points. I’d never had a chance to get to know Sherry very well. I think the only time\u00a0I her was when I crashed their wedding.<\/p>\n

I was hanging out\u00a0on\u00a0the UAA campus visiting some other people that day, and someone said they had to go to his wedding. I’d known he was getting married, but I didn’t know\u00a0it was that day. The two guys (another friend from that first year of college and a guy who happened to have been my neighbor in Wasilla) encouraged me to come even though I’d not been invited.<\/p>\n

It was a great party. They were very happy and\u00a0I was welcome to take\u00a0part of it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Sherry (by reputation) was super cool. Getting her PhD in English Literature,\u00a0which is way cool to begin with, and in addition, Ray had never said a single negative thing about her ever. That’s got to be a very good sign.<\/p>\n

She was a smart and\u00a0charming as my expectations had led me to believe.<\/p>\n

We talked about the changes that had happened.\u00a0All the stores and restaurants there. The demolishing of the mall, which I regretted. And the installtion of\u00a0more stoplights and–god forbid!–overpasses.<\/p>\n

“It’s starting to look like Los Angeles!” Sherry said.<\/p>\n

Before I could visibly roll my eyes at such incongruous comparison, Ray\u00a0told us that\u00a0Sherry had done her undergrad work at UC Riverside. So she actually DID know a little about what LA looked like.<\/p>\n

The difference was stark to me. But\u00a0if you equate overpasses with LA, that’s not far from the truth.\u00a0And when Wasilla (the Mat-Su Valley, really) goes from zero overpasses to three…..<\/p>\n

okay…i guess…I’ll give it to you.<\/p>\n

Ray told Chris how we’d met. “I was a nodie at the computer labs at Mat-Su college..”<\/p>\n

I’d forgotten he was a nodie. The tech guys who answered questions at the various computer labs were called Nodies. Each computer lab was associated with a “node” and therefore the guys called themselves…oh…nevermind…it was a super nerd thing to be.<\/p>\n

But it was hard to tell who was nodie and who was just a lab rat. I was a labrat, because of the tremendous joy that email communication brought to my soul. I didn’t know anything though. So when I had a question, I turned to whoever was handy and asked for help. That might be a more experienced labrat…or it might be a nodie…I couldn’t tell. And the nodies hung out in the lab even when they weren’t working.<\/p>\n

I thought nodie was a very cool job. I wished I could be a nodie. I think there was one girl nodie…In Anchorage…but I knew I wasn’t good enough. They seemed all-knowing to me.<\/p>\n

Ray went on “..and this ray of sunshine appeared in the lab.”<\/p>\n

who, me?<\/p>\n

I had no idea.<\/p>\n

It was great to see Ray after so many years. He was very much the same. We were done around 9:30, settled the bill and took our leave.<\/p>\n

The sun shone like late afternoon, and we’d had a good nap.<\/p>\n

“Where do you want to go now?” Chris asked.<\/p>\n

THIS was the Alaskan summer sunlight I remembered.<\/p>\n

“Let’s go back to Hatcher’s Pass!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trout House, or Windbreak Cafe, was exactly the sort of place I was hoping to have dinner. It was not a chain, like the kind I had too many where I live now. Pretty fancy fish, and pretty homey … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookworthy","category-travel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writtenbymurphy.com\/wonderblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}