Give me your worst. (Kodiak, Wasilla: appointed, weddings, buying)

[lyoness]

Something about a guy in flannel shirts & jeans.....

[HighlandLady]

Originally Posted by lyoness

Something about a guy in flannel shirts & jeans.....

Without question

[suzannewright]

Originally Posted by lyoness

Something about a guy in flannel shirts & jeans.....

...what about a cowboy hat???

[aurorawatcher]

Ball cap for me

[HighlandLady]

Definitely a ball-cap.

[suzannewright]

Originally Posted by aurorawatcher

Ball cap for me

I guess ball caps work for me too. My hubby (my highschool sweetheart) always had one on when we were dating and now whenever he's not in uniform. I LOVE Kenny Chesney (country singer) and I think he actually looks better in his ball cap than his cowboy hat....still

[Marty Van Diest]

Originally Posted by suzannewright

...what about a cowboy hat???

There are people in Alaska that wear cowboy hats...even in the cold. I saw a guy at the Ritchie Bros Auction last week with insulated carhart overalls and a cowboy hat. It was about 15 degrees with about a 20 MPH wind. It was downright chilly. Nothing against cowboy hats but I gotta wonder what a guy thinks when he puts it on a cold windy morning. Most everyone else had WARM hats on their heads.

[suzannewright]

Originally Posted by Marty Van Diest

There are people in Alaska that wear cowboy hats...even in the cold. I saw a guy at the Ritchie Bros Auction last week with insulated carhart overalls and a cowboy hat. It was about 15 degrees with about a 20 MPH wind. It was downright chilly. Nothing against cowboy hats but I gotta wonder what a guy thinks when he puts it on a cold windy morning. Most everyone else had WARM hats on their heads.

No kidding...I absolutely love wearing (warm) hats in the cold. I don't think I fix my hair much in the winter cause I figure I'm gonna cover it with a hat anyway.

[aurorawatcher]

I wear a ball cap all winter long.

And yes Kenny does look better in a ball cap then cowboy hat.

[karibear]

Yikes, I forgot all about the OP's original question! I got to AK so long ago there wasn't any real adjustment as far as noticing the difference in costs of things. I knew they went up bit by bit over the years, but I just figured they did that everywhere anyway.

What I did at times get tired of was the rain. Kodiak is wetwetwet! And it never gets really warm, there used to be a joke that if you were hung over the second weekend in August, you missed summer. The only times I ever wore shoes were when I was working and had to. The rest of the time it was rubber knee boots, and in the winter, Sorels with a lot of mink oil rubbed in. It mostly wasn't a heavy rain, just a steady drizzle day after day. It was like there'd be an inch or so in 8 days, but one memorable day in the early '90s we had about an 8" rain overnight, and part of Pillar Mountain slipped down and shoved a few houses off their foundations at one end of town. Had a perfect view of it from where I was working, too. That was the second time it slipped. The first time was, I think, because of earth tremors, and something like 7 million cubic yards of gravel slid down over the only road that connected town to the airport, base, and the communities at Bells Flats and Chiniak. For several months anyone heving to go back and forth had to use a little ferry, until various engineers inspected it and wrote nauseatingly long reports that ended up saying not much of anything could be done about it. Eventually it stabilized, a bunch of barricades were set up to sort of protect the roadway from falling rocks, and people began driving over it. And eventually, it got paved, now it looks just like any other road.