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.