Weekly Winners....Fur Rondy Edition

Weekly Winners courtesy of the Sarcastic Mom!

It's been an exciting weekend here in Anchorage. Thursday night we had a moose visit...





The whole story, complete with the dog trying to protect us from this moose, is here.

It's also Fur Rondy time -- The Anchorage Fur Rendezvous celebrates Anchorage's history. We went downtown today, to watch the sled dog races and check out some of the other events.


A musher about to cross the finish line.


Dogs pulling.


Musher. If you look closely, you can see that his right foot is off the sled. He is pushing along with his foot as the dogs race toward the finish line.


A race to the finish.


The dogs looked like they were having a really good time.


Tess watching the race.


Snow sculpture contest.


model for the snow sculpture above.


Waiting for the hatchet, machete, saws, shovels, picks, and creativity.


Ready for a long day of hacking and sculpting and chopping.


Most interesting and unique sculpture. (I think it is modeled on some kind of fruit or vegetable, like in the photo on the sign in front.)


It was snowing pretty heavily all day.


Snow building up on Tess.


Fur auction. I have never seen so many fur hats.


The carnival. First time I have ever been on a Midway in the snow...


Thor and Tess went on the Ferris Wheel. There is a guy hanging off the thing pounding on a wheel with a hammer. I don't know why, but it made Mark and I a little nervous. Thor and Tess thought the ride was great.


Heading back to the car.

Thor throwing himself down the hill so I can take a photo. What a guy.


I shoveled the drive. I hope Mark wasn't planning to use his Jeep before the snow plow clears our street...(also, you can see our dogs watching us in the living room window.)


Mark removing the pile of snow in front of the Jeep. Guess he thought he might want to use it.


Lots of snow. No snowplow yet.

And finally, last Sunday we took the Suburban through the car wash. (Everything is grimy and filthy, because we had some warmer weather...lots of slush and muck.)

Mark.


Water being blown off the windshield. I really really like this shot.

Daily Alaska...my big backyard!

For some reason the mountains around us the past couple of days have seemed bigger. It could be that they have more snow on them again, or that I get used to them and just don't always see them. As in really pay attention to them, not in as they vanish or anything. I am still not used to seeing mountains out there every day. Right there, out my back door.

Last night, right out the back door, we had a visitor. She ate some of our bushes, and left a little pile of poo by the neighbor's fence. Tess was working at the computer when Abe started barking, around 8:30, I think. She looked out the back door and saw a moose reaching over the fence eating our bushes! No wonder the dogs were getting excited. There was an interloper in their yard. (In the photo above, the bushes on the right were the same height as the bushes on the left before the moose showed up...)

This was taken from upstairs...I like the enormous shadow of the moose behind her.

The moose snacked on several of our bushes, cropping close to a foot off of a couple of them. Then she wandered along the fence to the neighbor's yard, where she laid down in the snow for quite a while. We could see her ears sticking up. She was just laying there. It's really quiet around our neighborhood on winter evenings.I too this photo this morning. Those are all moose tracks, the area to the right is where she laid down for a while -- we thought it would be a bigger area. The brown up to the left I believe is some poo.

When the moose got up, she nosed at our bushes a little more and then wandered around the side of the house. Tess and I and the dogs were looking out the window at her, and she stepped closer to the window, seeming to look at us. It was a little freaky, she was just a couple feet from us. Then Mojo jumped up at the window barking furiously and she spun around and walked off across the street. Mojo startled the heck outta Tess and I, jumping up like that. It was dark and hard to get any good photos, but there are moose tracks leading from our window, and the moose is standing eating a tree across the street.

A while later the moose was right in front of our house, two feet from the front window. We locked the dogs in the bathroom at that point, because I was rather concerned for the windows and the woodwork. I took a couple photos, but they really didn't turn out too well because it was so dark. (They all have a yellowish cast because our outdoor lights are yellow. They also come on slowly, which is great when there is a moose around, because it doesn't flash on and startle them. Handy.)
One of the last photos I took turned out to look like there is the ghost of a moose walking through our yard.

It was pretty dang fun and exciting to have a moose wandering around last night, although I think it is a little hard on the dogs. They were quivering with excitement or something while we were all standing looking out at the moose. And it was lucky we have a DVR, because we had to keep rewinding and pausing whatever it was were watching, because the moose was far more compelling than any TV show...

Daily Alaska -- weird and random edition

It's been filthy here. Grime and road spray and yuck. I would use some snow to clean off the back windows of the Suburban and a mile down the road I couldn't see out of them again. (The window on the left is the side window, the one on the right is the rear window. Can't see a dang thing through it...)

It's been hard to tell what color some cars are, and also, license plates are unreadable. On the plus side, all the stupid political bumper stickers are not visible. Which is okay with me.

So last Sunday evening on our way home from Costco -- where we got Tess a new pair of Sorel boots, black, which she was very happy with, unlike the gray ski pants we got for her (we truly did not notice the pink lining. Tess HATES pink. She is not at all a girly girl...) but we did not get spinach. Both the commissary and Costco were out of spinach this weekend. Which is awful. I love spinach. I need spinach. Although I was reading a book yesterday which reminded me that I should really be eating a variety of leafy greens, like romaine and arugula, so I want to add those to the spinach, not give up the spinach...back to the point! we stopped at the car wash.



I took a bunch of photos in the car wash. The best one was this shot of the water being blown around on the windshield.


Yes, I do take my camera with me most of the time, and I will try to take pictures of just about anything.

Daily Alaska, Days are Getting Longer Edition!

This is a photo I took on the 6th of February. It's a gloomy cloudy day, but it was also still pre-sunrise at around 9 am. The street lights are still on, and everybody had their headlights on. You can even see the headlights of the snow plow shining on the road ahead of me.

And yes, I took this photo while I was driving. I point the camera in the general direction of what I want to photograph, and hope for the best. When my sister and I were driving from San Diego to Tucson last February, we took a bunch of photos this way...many of them ended up being shots of the sky with just the very tops of the rocks and trees and mountains. Sometimes it works better than others.

This is a photograph I took at around 9am on Monday. We are gaining almost 6 minutes of daylight a day right now. Which is awesome. Sunday night we were surprised to be driving home at 6:15 pm and it was still light out. Before we know it, we will be having the all day all night sunlight thing happening. Once again we will lose all track of time, and find ourselves preparing dinner or thinking we should run to the store and realize that it is actually 11 pm...At least I have made curtains for our bedroom so we can block out some of the light. I had trouble sleeping with all that light last summer. Funny how i can nap on the couch in the middle of a bright sunny day, but any light at night makes it really hard for me to sleep.

See? It's light out! Sunrise is already happening, we don't need our headlights, and woo! some of the snowpack is gone from the roads, because we have had more days with sunshine than snow lately. The freeway (that's right, we have a freeway in Alaska...one freeway, that ends in downtown Anchorage) is bare and dusty. There are long stretches where the lines are completely hidden by dirt and grime. Which sometimes makes it a little exciting to drive, since people wander between and straddle lanes.

I have lost 7 pounds, I feel compelled to use the elliptical trainer every day, and I am keeping track of every calorie I eat. I have more energy and I am still excited about the whole idea. And, amazingly, I still love spinach, even though I eat it almost every day...

Mark came back from Thailand, was home for about a week, and is leaving again for several weeks very soon. I will be relieved when he stays home for a while. I am so done with him being gone.

Daily Alaska -- the yucky slushy mushy dirty edition

It's snowing today, so we are not having the slushy mucky day that was yesterday. Everything on the ground is white, everything else is gray. Not a faboo sunshiny day here in lovely Anchorage, AK.

Last week Thor and I spent hours (well, okay, an hour at least) on the driveway, dealing with all the ice leftover from the ice coating we got in January. It was not fun fluffy easy-to-shovel snow, it was the grimy mucky nasty dirty stuff.



I am so proud...this is Thor wearing his pajama pants while shoveling. He takes after me, for sure.

I'm still here!

I am just adjusting to the changes in lifestyle I have instituted lately. I am still (starting my third week! A couple more days and it will officially be a habit...) tracking everything I eat, keeping my daily total calories below 1,700 for the most part (I accidentally first typed 17,000 calories. That would be a really really easy diet...) and using the elliptical trainer almost every day. For an hour.

Lucky for me Thor hooked up his portable DVD player to the TV in the garage, so I can watch DVDs while I kill myself...Today I watched Hairspray! while I ellipticalled away. It was great. There is so much music and so much music with a fast tempo it helped me go faster.

The first time I saw that movie, during the scene between Christopher Walken and John Travolta as the Dad and Mom (Travolta plays a hefty woman in the movie, plays her really well in fact) I was distracted by the thought that "oh, man, they are not really going to kiss, are they? " I am very open-minded but that is a step too far even for me, I think. If you haven't seen it, I won't tell you if they do or not...

Anyway. Keeping track of everything (absolutely everything. Every bit of margarine on my toast, every tiny little Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Mini, even the creamer in my coffee.) and using the elliptical and cleaning out the closets (I started spring cleaning early this year, I guess) is using up alot of my energy. To the point where even looking at a blank "create post" page is too much work, never mind filling it up...

But Mark will be back from his latest trip to far off countries today, so life will be back to more or less normal (and I can sleep a little later in the mornings, since Mark gets up with Thor, who has to catch the school bus at 6:30 am. I know. It's crazy.) so I will be back to trying to post something, at least my daily Alaska photo, every day. You lucky lucky people.

(Plus I really need to catch up on your blogs. I have been neglecting them shockingly lately. I am all apologies.)

Terri tagged me for this meme. Fifth folder, fifth photo. For some reason my fifth folder only has one photo in it -- my digital photos are horrifyingly unorganized, chaotic like the rest of me, but it's one I really like. It's me and Mojo, the day we brought him home. Valentine's day, 2005. I think it was 2005. Pretty sure it was 2005. This was Mojo back then, back when he had been starved and neglected. He weighs about 20 pounds more these days, and is very secure in our home. He's such a good dog.

I need to get to the airport now, so I will hopefully be back in a couple hours to post my Daily Alaska!

The Daily Alaska...Thor and I were using snow to "clean" the back windows of the Suburban...and since we were standing there with all that grime blank slate...



Yup. It said "DIe CaPITalIsT PIg" for a couple days, until the road grime got too think. Oh, yeah, we are having a heat wave -- it's hovering around freezing -- and so we are dealing with grime and muck and slush and all that wonderful stuff.

Happy VD!

Daily Alaska -- Thor Falls Down Edition...

The Re-enactment...

Because for no discernible reason I feel compelled to post everyday...

Here's another photo from the toilet.



I have started using a new app on my IPod touch, called Lose It, which is awesome and wonderful and amazing. You tell it how much you weigh, how much you want to weigh, how much weight you want to lose a week (unfortunately this is no Biggest Loser, no Bob and Jillian to make you work out for twelve hours, so the most you can hope for is two pounds a week. Bummer.), and it tells you how many calories you should eat every day to meet your goal. Then you enter everything you eat and all your exercise (vigorous sexual activity burns 55 calories an hour. I am thinking the people doing the figuring weren't doing it right, if that's all the calories they burned...).

I started using it a week ago, I have been tracking my food for a few days before that, and I have been using the elliptical trainer almost every day since the beginning of January. In the last week or so, I have lost three pounds. Woo! And lost it without "dieting" -- I still eat chocolate and salsa con queso (but with multigrain baked chips, not tortilla chips), Doritos, Coca Cola, pastrami sandwiches, and my hotdish made with breakfast sausage and pasta...I just am careful about how much of the junk I eat, and I love apples and spinach and sweet mini peppers, so there's lots of food I can eat as much as I want.

It's feeling like a real change -- I love being able to figure out if I am eating too much fat or not enough fiber, too many calories (or freaky! not enough calories, according to my daily log, I can still eat 1,000 more calories, but I had a huge salad for supper and am so not hungry! Weird.)

And I have actually started needing to use the elliptical trainer. I feel better when I use it.

The big question is, can I keep this up?

The Daily Alaska

The moon was full, and going over the horizon quickly this morning. I stood on the toilet in my bathroom to take this photo (the only window in that bathroom is a high narrow one that doesn't open -- which is really stupid in a bathroom!) -- that was the best angle for the shot...

favorite photos that I did not take

Me. In St Peter's Cathedral, Vatican City. I am wearing red shoes, jeans, and a sweatshirt with white letters. It's like Where's Waldo, but way easier...

weekly winners

Weekly Winners courtesy of the Sarcastic Mom! Find more great photos and great people here!

Taking the day off from blogging...

Since it's noon and I haven't eaten breakfast, used the elliptical trainer, vacuumed, answered some email from my husband, or had lunch. Basically I have showered and fed the dogs. Two very important things, to be sure, but hardly a strain.

So here's a photo. Enjoy.

Daily Alaska:

This is the pile of snow at the end of the driveway. The photo was taken before the sun came up, so I ended up with an obviously digital and over-saturated photo, but that's the way you can see the detail -- the way the wind was blowing when it snowed,k so that there are little tiny drifts behind the lumps of icy snow.


(I suppose this sort of counts as blogging, but since it only took me two minutes it hardly counts, I think...)

No Running Water in the Alaskan Bush: The Daily Alaska

Last week, I linked to Mudflats.net, to a story about buying groceries. There is another post, from the same woman, explaining how they handle life without it. Again, I really am very sure I would not want to live like this. I hate laundromats and I love showers too much.

Here's the link...Life in Nunam Iqua - Water.

Last night we had a pretty good snow for a while, and I took a couple photos.

I had just gotten the snow off the Jeep and shoveled around it. Didn't last long...


Snow swirling under the street light.


And the pile of snow that used to be the kids' fort.


This morning I shoveled all that lovely snow off the driveway. There were 3 or 4 inches of snow on it, so it took an hour. But an hour of shoveling is 500 calories. So it's not all bad.

The Daily Alaska

tiny little flakes
falling for a long long time
make for lots of work

Zach! Don't Look!

My son Zachary is kinda obsessive about his cell phone and his Zune and his books and his video games and the cases his video games come in and, well, pretty much his stuff.

Seriously. Like a year and a half ago, I was holding his Zune while he was driving, and it slid down my leg onto the floor. If you bring this up to him, he still gets a bit ranty about how I carelessly hurled his Zune down onto the floor of the car. Although, really, his car is very low to the ground and I don't think you could drop anything from a height of higher than two feet onto the front seat floor...

So when he gave me an IPod touch, he bought a really nice leather case for it, and he mentioned I might want to (read SHOULD) get a screen protector for it.

So, Zach, really, I am right about you and your phone and your Zune, and I totally did nothing to it in the car that could have even gotten it sticky, much less scratched or damaged it - admit it -- but now, I think you should look away.

Because this is what the screen on my touch looks like today...



That's just sad. This gadget that is my most favorite inanimate object possibly EVER, and yet it looks like I use it while eating chips and sneezing. (But, hey, this photo has some totally awesome depth of field to it, did you notice? Plus, I think you could lift my fingerprint.)

I really like the case, it's made with recycled and leftover materials, so no cow died directly that I might encase my toy in leather. Nope. The cow died for my shoes and my car seats, but my touch is encased in the leftover scraps. I feel noble.

This is why I love this thing...

Sneezies. A ridiculously easy and mindlessly addictive game wherein you trigger a sneeze chain reaction:

and food IQ, in which I keep track of everything I eat and which makes me really think twice before I eat that potato chip. It tracks calories and fat and stuff, and so far it is really making me stay on track. Like for lunch today I had carrots, spinach, grapes, walnuts, and a string cheese. What I wanted for lunch? A Kirkland chicken bake, which is really delicious chicken and veggies in gravy encased in dough, and 600 calories and 22 grams of fat. Yeah. An hour on the elliptical burns about 500 calories, so while the chicken bake is in fact delicious, it is not an hour on the elliptical trainer delicious.


Now my special chocolate cake with the chocolate glaze, totally worth an hour on the elliptical.

(This is a screen shot of my breakfast -- an apple with cinnamon and sugar.)

And because my sticky messy screen has absolutely nothing to do with Alaska and everything to do with the fact that I misplaced that little black cloth that came with it...

The Daily Alaska.

Yesterday's sunrise, or perhaps more accurately, yesterday's a little while after the sun came up. I think,even without me farting around with my Photoshop Elements, that it has a sort of impressionist painting feel to it.

Later the sky cleared, and we had a beautiful, bright, sunshiny and whoa cold cold cold cold cold cold day. Like a high of FIVE cold. Sixteen below once the sun went down cold.

Still, I am very happy to be here, and not in Tucson, where I would be dreading the very soon return of ridiculously hot weather. (But I really miss my friends and family in Arizona. sigh. Can't you all move to Anchorage, just for a couple years?)

Still no ash. But there's more snow, with seedy underbelly

First, yeah, no ash, no lava, but lots of seismicity. The best Anchorage can hope for anyway is 1/10 of an inch of ash and a couple of days of being inside. The kids have already had three days of school canceled due to ice, so if we get hit with ash, they will be making up days at the end of the school year, since they only built in two snow days into the school year. Bummer for them.

The Seedy Underbelly of Our Winter Wonderland...

Let's skip right to that, shall we? You know you want to know. It's my own bit of seediness, this time. Not the cars in the ditch, the snow melting on the garage floor (though I will be documenting that stuff later, and worse. Much much worse. Slightly nauseatingly worse.).

This is me, shoveling, this afternoon. Note the fab-u-lous leg ware...not the stunning blue suede boots, but the wonderful pajama pants. I didn't wear them to bed, I don't actually wear pajama pants to bed much because they tend to twist around my legs or bunch up at my knees, which I find unpleasant, but I do wear them when I am just hanging around the house. And since I had not yet showered and was planning on sweating on the elliptical after shoveling, I chose not to change into jeans just to shovel the drive. Plus at times I am deeply deeply lazy.

Not only that, but I did a fairly half-assed job of shoveling. And I took this photo at a very weird angle. Hopefully I will not receive a threatening letter from the Housing Office...I don't know how long I can get away with messy edges, icy patches, and generally unacceptable amounts of snow removed. (That's one of the things you get when you live in Army quarters...guys driving by to check out how well you have shoveled. Or mowed the lawn. Or put your garbage can in the garage in a timely matter. Which judging from the bear bites and claw marks on our garbage can the previous tenants of our quarters failed to do.)

Ouch...and the Daily Alaska. plus volcano watch.

I have been using our new elliptical trainer almost every day. Burning 500 calories! Which is swell, except I think I ate about 47,000 calories yesterday watching that sad sad Superbowl. I had to watch, but of course the Cardinals lost.

Also, there is a really cool app I downloaded onto my IPod touch (have I mentioned lately how much I love love love my touch? It is awesome and wondrous and fab-u-lous.). This app allows me to enter all the food I eat and it keeps track of calories and fat and stuff. I can even include the calories I burn by exercise. It's much easier to bypass that handful of chips if I have to look at how many calories I am eating, and I know how long it takes me to burn that many calories on the elliptical trainer.

(The touch has been sucking up my time, which is why I am remiss in reading the blogs I try to comment on regularly. I promise to get back to reading and commenting, I miss you guys!)



The Daily Alaska is a shot of a raven hanging out waiting for the eagles to clear out so he can go check for leftovers. I love watching ravens. They are one of those animals that look sorta regal and majestic, until you see them hopping around the neighbor's garbage can or trying to fly off with a slice of bread.

latest entry from the AVO...

Redoubt: Restlessness at Redoubt Volcano continues. Seismic activity remains elevated and is well above background levels. A vapor plume is intermittently visible in the AVO web camera. It appears to rise no higher than the volcano\'s summit.An observation and gas-measurement flight to the volcano is en route now.AVO continues to monitor potential activity with seismic, satellite and radar data. The volcano has not erupted.The Aviation Color Code remains at ORANGE and the Volcano Alert Level remains at WATCH.

Woo. Elevated seismic activity! Maybe we will be watching the ash fall soon. I am very happy to be far enough away that ash is the only danger.

weekly winners...no volcano yet edition

Driving is annoying these days. The roads are a combination of snow pack, ice, and bare roads, so around curves the lanes sort of unexpectedly merge. Or it's just plain hard to figure out exactly where the lanes are.

Thor took this photo of steam rising from a local power plant.

This was a little weird...I could see the moon, but it was snowing.

Mean Mom photo.

Zach, who lives in Arizona, is the only one who regularly drinks tea, but still, my cheese box in Anchorage is still full of tea.

Some of my favorite cups and saucers. I bought them in London a few years ago, even though I knew it would be a pain in the neck getting them home in my carryon. Cute dishes are worth it.

The snow plow leaves trails of snow for the snowblowers and trucks to pick up. Sometimes lately we have these piles of snow running down the side or middle of our streets for a couple days. It's not the handiest thing.

Waiting for the snowblower.

Outside the front window.

Another footprint from one of the dogs. And the snow that's easy to shovel, because it's very light.

These plants are much prettier in the summer.


Weekly Winners! Thanks, Lotus, you Sarcastic Mom!

And oh, yeah, the volcano is still at Watch status. No change. Here's the latest message from Alaska Volcano Observatory:

Unrest at Redoubt Volcano continues. Seismicity has remained relatively constant over the last 24 hours and is still well above background. A vapor plume is intermittently visible in the AVO web camera. It appears to rise no higher than the volcano's summit.

An observation and gas-measurement flight to the volcano yesterday noted continued vigorous fumarolic activity and runoff of muddy water down the north flank of the volcano. Volcanic gas was detected; data analysis is ongoing to compare these measurements with previously measured gas output.

Staff are currently monitoring the volcano 24 hours a day. We will issue further information as it becomes available.

I didn't know Seismicity was a word.