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.)

My children always say I am mean...

That when they were worried about their little dragons rather than me when I fell in front of a large group of Europeans, it was no more than I deserved. That when Zeke asked me if I was going to remember it every time I said ouch after my concussion (I fell skating, hit my head, and have a gap of several hours in my memory.), it was my own fault that my children are sarcastic little rats. That the smart aleck answers should be no surprise.

So it should be no surprise to anyone that I would choose this (insert downward pointing arrow here) as my Daily Alaska:



This is the first in my new series...The Seedy Underbelly of Our Winter Wonderland.

This morning there was a weird whumping sound going on. Actually it's been going on all day. Just "whump. whump. whump." don't know what it is, but it bugs the dogs. They keep barking at it. Weird damn dogs. I opened the curtains to see if I could see anything going on, the source of the whump, and instead I saw this...



A bunch of guys milling around in the parking lot down the street from us. At about 9 am (and could I just point out that it's 9 am in that photo, and yet looks like early morning or late evening. I am so done with these late sunrises...and yes, I will be cranky about the sun being out all night. It's not natural.) they lined up, yelled "hooah" or something, and then scattered:

I didn't realize we lived that close to some unit.

Also, I find it really annoying that I managed to make those two photos such different colors. They were taken just a few minutes apart, and yet, I didn't do exactly the same thing with Photoshop, so they look different. Ugh.