From here at home:

Greyfox has informed me that our total phone time is only 1,350 minutes
a month, not 1,850 as I had said.  That must mean that the minutes
on the basic plan are only 350.  So, this relationship takes a lot
less time than I’d thought, and the time-pressured testiness of that
month when we tried to get by on only 350 minutes makes a lot more
sense than if it had been 850.

From not so close to home:

The Andreanof Islands are not everyone’s favorite vacation
destination.  They are a subgroup of the Aleutians and include
Adak, where the U.S. has a remote military base, and Atka, which was forcibly evacuated
and its residents’ homes destroyed by U.S. military troops in World War
II.  If it is on your summer itinerary, you might wish to
reconsider unless you enjoy standing on shaky ground.

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might know that I subscribe
to the USGS’s earthquake notification service.  After weeks of
occasional emails telling me of quakes in the Fox Islands, just east of
the Andreanofs, in the past three days I’ve gotten alerts for 28 quakes
over magnitude 4 in the Andreanofs and one 5.6 in the Rat Islands, just
to the west.

The only thing I can definitely say about what this means is that the
North American Plate is on the move, but that’s nothing new.  The
plates are always on the move, even if it’s only movement in geological
terms.  But movement here now is followed by movement somewhere
else later, as the pressure gets transferred across the crust.

I have also noticed more than the usual level of activity lately in the
Macquarie Island area, waaay down in the Southern Hemisphere. 
That caught my eye because some strong quakes there preceded the big
tsunami in Indonesia a couple of years ago.  The whole Ring of
Fire seems to be more active than usual.    Locally, I
have felt a few small shakes in the past weeks, and have gotten emails
about a few others I didn’t feel because I’d been asleep at the
time.  Currently, as far as I know, there is NO unusual volcanic
activity in Alaska.

Three years ago, when Greyfox moved his business fifty miles into
Wasilla and started staying in a cabin there, he developed a
routine.  He’d walk across the Parks Highway (Alaska’s busiest
road, and the stretch of it with the highest accident rate) every 
morning to get a newspaper from the convenience store and call me from
the pay phone outside there.

Much of his conversation, as much as half of it, was about the ambient
noise, the diesel fumes from the trucks there at the gas pumps, the
wind, or rain, or whatever weather was currently targeting him for
misery.  I’m not kidding about the weather.  His narcissistic
personality disorder was in full expression back then, and NPD tends to
magnify small affronts or ailments and to take everything personally.

After
much discussion, research and comparison shopping, he bought a cell
phone.  Even after he had made the decision, the transaction was
delayed because the AT&T kiosk at Wal-Mart was sold out of the
bargain phone he had decided to get.  Eventually, he settled for a
more expensive model with a bewildering number of “bells and whistles”
that he swore he’d have no use for.

His cell plan gave him unlimited off-peak minutes, so every night at
nine he’d call me for long conversations, and we’d call each other ad
lib all weekend.  For a while, it was very enjoyable, a distinct
step up from his having to run across the highway to the pay phone and
my not being able to call him at all.  He even learned how to play
solitaire on his phone.  Then AT&T sold out to Cellular One.

Immediately, the quality of transmission plummeted.  It became
more invective than conversation during our calls.  He’d curse and
scream every time I’d ask him to repeat something or tell him he was
breaking up.  Consequently, I hesitated to tell him if I didn’t
quite hear everything he said, and I’d do my best to fill in the blanks
rather than listen to him screaming.  That NPD magnification of
affronts thing — remember? — I was half expecting him to work himself
up into a heart attack or pop an artery in his brain.

Then, last winter, his original phone quit working.  Along with
his new phone, he went for an upgraded service and the quality was
suddenly back to what it had been when it was with AT&T.  The
downside was that there was no longer any free off-peak time.  He
got 850 anytime minutes a month, and our relationship became very
attenuated.  He’d call me up, tell me about his triumphs and
troubles, and just about the time he’d start to run down he’d notice
how long he’d been talking and say it was time to “ring off.”  If
that’s an obscure phrase to you, you may be too young to recall when
phones had a little crank on the side which you’d turn several times to
ring up the operator so she could connect your line to the line you
wanted to call, and then give a quick turn when you hung up, to let her
know she could disconnect you.

NPD being what it is, he didn’t realize that there was any problem with
that until I confronted him one night last winter as we were waiting
for the optometrist to see me.  Out of boredom, he had been
playing with his new phone, trying out new ringtones, and that gave me
the opening I needed.  I described the patterns our nightly
conversations had settled into and gave him an ultimatum:  spend a
little extra to get some more minutes so I could get a few words in
before he rang off, or divorce me.

The receptionist at the optical shop got a chuckle out of that. 
It seemed reasonable to me, and after I gave her some background, she
agreed.  Her husband works in the oil fields on the North Slope,
so her marriage is largely conducted by phone, too. 

Greyfox spent five dollars and had 500 off-peak minutes added to his
plan.  We spent our time like most people on fixed incomes spend
their money, so that at the end of the month we were down to one- and
two-minute check-in phone calls each night.  Thirteen hundred and
fifty minutes (minus whatever time he spends on business and calls to
or from his sisters), just wasn’t enough time in which to maintain a
relationship.

Now, since he sprang for another 500 minutes a month, we’re doing
okay.  We still tend to splurge on time at the beginning of each
month, and keep an eye on the clock later on, but we both have time to
have our say and the marriage is intact.  So now we know how much
time our relationship takes:  1,850 minutes a month.