Fireweed.

This is fireweed. It grows all over the place. When the blossoms reach the top, it means summer is over...

And when it turns red, it means 6 weeks until snow. This photo was taken on September 19...so we should have snow any time now. (I think we should have already had snow, last year our first snow was around the 5th of October. This year no snow yet.)


(I think I am remembering this Alaska old wives' tale right, but if I screwed it up please let me know. I have at times a truly sucky memory.)

By the way, I am not complaining about the lack of snow. I know I will be excited for the first snowfalls, but I remember really really well how long winter lasts.

So Let's Pretend...

Let's pretend that I am not a horrible blog owner who neglected you all shockingly for months, in favor of writing very short and not incredibly interesting tidbits on FaceBook (shoot me an email if we are not already friends and you want to rectify that...). I would also like to pretend that I have not neglected the laundry to the point I have about 10 loads left, after doing 10 loads this week. Yeah, I so totally ignored the laundry there, the kids had to dig deep and wear their second string shirts.

I think I am in denial about how much laundry there truly is...I was sitting on the floor sorting clothes -- I had dumped it into one big pile -- and Abe was reduced to giving me the sad puppy eyes, because it was chest high on him and he couldn't get through or around it. Abe likes to lean on me...


(No I am not posting a photo of my enormous laundry pile.)

Yesterday in between folding loads of laundry I vacuumed our bedroom. Mojo has to be with me at all times, and I kept having to make him move so I could vacuum where he was laying. He hates the vacuum, perhaps the fact that I occasionally can't help but suck up his jowls has something to do with his dislike...I sat down to hang out with him for a minute, because he looked so cute and because I was sick of vacuuming.

Abe and Tess wandered in, and since Tess lives to pester the dogs, they ended up having a wrestling match on my freshly vacuumed carpet. Tess discovered that if you blow on Mojo's back, he tries to lick your face. Actually he lunges at your head and licks ferociously. And if you get Moj worked up, Abe has to get in on it too.


Both dogs, looking fairly psychotic. Note that they are mere inches from my head.


Mojo's all time favorite move, grabbing Abe's hind leg and dragging him around. This is not my favorite thing, because Abe has had four surgeries on his knee (congenital deformity. A hazard of pit bulls. We think Abe is probably part pit because of his brindle coat and because there are many many many many many many pit bulls in Tucson.) See how lovely and freshly vacuumed the carpet looks? It so did not look lovely under a fresh coat of dog hair three minutes later. Abe is shedding like crazy lately. Also, proof I did not spend all day on FB -- laundry basket and vacuum.


Mojo with a mouthful of Abe's face. This photo makes me want to rinse out my mouth, just thinking about how much dog hair Mo must have on his tongue after he does this.

Now to completely change the subject.

I have taken some photos lately that I haven't posted here...


Taken on September 19. We haven't had snow yet, but all the leaves are long gone.


Trumpeter swan on Potter Marsh. Potter Marsh is one of my favorite places in Anchorage.


This is why I love Potter Marsh. Big sky, big views, mountains, birds, salmon, lots of interesting plants to shoot.


Deadish weeds.


Even a train.

The downside of Potter Marsh is that the Seward highway runs all along it, and the Seward highway is very busy. There's also a shooting range nearby, so you sometimes get the added ambiance of rifle shots. Makes it feel like the real Alaska.

Spring! Spring!!

It's spring somewhere. It's in the 80's in Tucson. My sister in Washington has bulb-y things like crocuses blooming in her yard. It's hit 60 and the annual giant puddles have appeared in my parents' yard in Minnesota...

And in Anchorage, we have snow. Lots of snow. But south-facing roofs and streets that have the sun shine on them are bare, sorta, or at least bare with icy edges.

But while it's only 30 degrees out, the sun is shining brightly and it feels like spring is way down the block, around the corner and down a couple streets. Because when you step outside you feel a bit o' heat from the sun, even with the breeze having that icy chill to it from blowing across the snow.

Another sign of spring...since the Iditarod is almost over, people on post are finally taking down their Christmas lights. That's right, people leave their Christmas lights up (and on! Turn them off already!) until the middle of March.

Christmas lights are not festive in February. Icicle lights do not cheer the heart in March. Christmas lights should be off by the middle of January. I don't care if you leave them up until a warm day, but damn. Turn the things off already.

In other news I have finally finally finally finally finally finally stopped coughing! No more hacking up the odd lung every couple of hours, no more waking myself up in the middle of the night, and best of all, I can finally start using my CPAP machine! Which is awesome, because I found out last year I stop breathing an average of seven times an hour when I sleep. Which means that on an average of seven times an hour I rouse enough to start myself breathing again, and that means I don't ever get a good night's sleep. But now. Now I don't always wake up in the morning feeling like I got a crap night's sleep.

Daily Alaska photo...Last September, somewhere on the back forty of Fort Richardson.

Just a little reminder that Alaska is not all snow...

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.

Moose, late at night. The Daily Alaska photo.

Sunday night, as I was turning off lights and getting ready to go up to bed, I glanced out the kitchen window. There was a male moose rubbing his antlers on the tree outside our backyard fence.

Woo! A moose, right outside my back door!

Unfortunately, it was too dark to get a good photo. I got a couple as he walked away, but no good ones. This is the least blurry one...

Yesterday, there was a bald eagle in the tree outside the bank in Eagle River.

I haven't seen that many bald eagles yet. I love watching eagles and other raptors. One of my favorite things about Tucson was watching the raptors circling above the desert.

The Daily Alaska Photo...
This next shot was also taken from the bank parking lot. That is the thing that still startles me the most about living in Anchorage -- there are mountains all over the place, they are covered in snow, and they are endlessly gorgeous. I am looking forward to hiking around on some of them next summer (with bear bells on, of course!)

It was mostly sunny yesterday, and warm! 20 whole degrees! Which means you don't notice that it's cold out the very first second you step outside. You can be outside for at least half a minute before it starts to feel cold! It clouded up over the late afternoon, and we got a dusting of snow. The clouds started in the mountains, as you can see above. Tomorrow they are forecasting possible rain, since it's supposed to be 35 degrees. I find it hard to believe it could rain, since last week it was 25 below.

And finally, a bonus shot.

Mark took our tree down this weekend. The sad leftovers...

There is still a pile of ornaments to be wrapped up and packed away. Actually I think taking the tree down is the only thing we have done toward putting Christmas away for another year. Guess that's my big job for this week.

(I know I have only done the first few months of 2008 in review. I will get back to it, probably tomorrow. )

Now with more eagles.

Lou expressed some concern that the eagles being fed are being habituated to being fed by humans, and thus mucking about with the natural order...

I was initially concerned with that myself, but after seeing it in person, I don't think it's much of an issue.

The feeding lasts only a few minutes, no bird gets enough food for a full meal, much less enough to keep him alive. It's a snack. The birds all look healthy and well-fed, and none of them are being fed enough that when this woman doesn't show up they will be in trouble.

In other news, it's so cold our snow has frost. Hoarfrost, that is.

It is supposed to warm up to 3 degrees by tomorrow, and by Saturday it is supposed to hit 20. Zach leaves Friday to head back to Tucson. It has been too cold most of Christmas break for us to go do stuff outside -- skiing and tubing are not fun in subzero weather.

The hoarfrost on everything is really thick, because it has been too cold to even begin to melt, except for at the tops of trees that have sunlight hitting them all day, like in this picture along Ship Creek. Ship Creek is also much more frozen over than it is when it is not so damn cold out.

Willow trees look really cool with the frost covering them:

Sunday. Cold and Cool.

The cold part...



The cool part...



Sundays in the winter a woman feeds bald eagles in the VFW parking lot in Eagle River. The eagles start showing up about five minutes before she pulls up, opens the back of her Jeep, and starts tossing out meat scraps.



It's amazing. There were probably 30 eagles there today, all flying around waiting for their chance to get some meat. It reminded me of seagulls around a fishing trawler. Others were hanging out in the trees, waiting.



And bald eagles are huge. Amazing. We were about twenty feet from them, they flew almost right over us. So completely cool. (And cold. We were standing outside in twenty below weather. Even the eagles couldn't completely distract us from how cold it was.)









This is a different species of eagle, I think, but I don't know what kind of eagle it is.



Also, Zachary asked me to mention that Jessica is a terrrrible texter. I don't know what this means. Sorry, Jessica.

Oops.

Mark was wrapping up a package of hiking socks for Zachary, and was chatting with me while doing it. Which was his first mistake, apparently. He handed me the tag he had written out, with a disgusted look on his face. The tag said "to Zach from socks". He was either not paying attention to what he was doing, or he didn't want Zach to get too excited about a package of socks. Warning him maybe, just some socks, no money, no video games, nothing to see here.

On the 23rd, Zach and Thor and I went to Costco to buy Mark an acoustic guitar for Christmas. Mark decided he wanted one, and Costco had a package with guitar, lessons DVD, gig bag, stand, strap for not big big bucks.

Let me jump back here for a second...this Christmas was not a successful one for surprising Mark. I bought several of his gifts when he was there, because we shopped together rather too much. Actually there was at least one thing -- snow shoe poles, adjustable fancy shmancy snow shoe poles (like ski poles, pretty much) -- that he bought and handed to me to give to him for Christmas.

So I was kinda jazzed at the idea that he wouldn't know he was getting a guitar until he opened it. Until we walked into the house when we got home from Costco, Zachary walked up to Mark and said "we have your guitar." Then he clamped his hands over his mouth and had the most shocked and appalled look on his face. I laughed so hard I collapsed against Mark. Zach was devastated. He had meant to say "we have your Christmas present, so you have to get lost so we can wrap it." But he shortcut that accidentally to "we have your guitar."



Turns out that Mark had assumed that we were buying him a guitar at Costco. I should have told him we were going to Best Buy or Target or JoAnn Fabrics.

Poor Zachary has inherited a tendency to blurt, coupled with a manic mind that is racing ahead to the next eight things we have to do. My Mom almost killed my dog once, because of that tendency...

She tied poor Theo to the garage door and then went around the corner of the garage (I know I just told this story to somebody on another blog, sorry if I just told it here too...) and into the garage through the side door. Then she opened the garage door. Yup. The one my dog was tied to, the one she had just tied the dog to thirty seconds before opening it. She turned around to see poor Theo dangling from the door. Lucky for Theo he wasn't a big fat dog, so she could get him down pretty easily.

But it just goes to show, Zach has zero hope of avoiding future "we have your guitar" type incidents. Ze. Ro.

To change the subject completely...

Is it just me, or did my neighbors make a little snowman that looks rather too much like a penis?


Yeah. I thought so. It is just me. But in my defense, Mark has been gone a lot lately...

Ship Creek.

Ship Creek is near our house. I have been wanting to take photographs of it this winter. It froze over and then the ice broke up again, which looked really cool. Thick chunks of ice on top of ice -- chunks of ice that are a foot thick. Didn't make it to take those photos. On Christmas Day, after sledding, we drove past the bridge over Ship Creek and on into Cottonwood Park. The Creek runs along the park, but it is frozen over where the parking is, and plus the kids saw the big wooden fort playground, covered with untouched snow. So the photos that day were not the creek, but instead I photographed the kids and Mark playing in the snow -- those photos were in my Weekly Winners.

So a couple days ago, we were coming home, I had my camera, we were going over Ship Creek, we had a plan to park along the road so I could hop out and take a couple of photos...

Except that there was a snowplow ahead of us and one behind us, so there was no chance to stop along the road. And we had had a bunch of snow, so the road to the park was a no-go. It hadn't been plowed and I was not wearing my snow boots, so hiking through drifts was out.

I said "roll down the window" as I prepared to take a couple photos as we drove slowly over the bridge (the one silver lining in being sandwiched between snowplows, being able to go 10 miles an hour) . Mark rolled his window down. I guess driving behind a snowplow at almost dusk on a snow covered road with our three kids in the back seat is more important than me getting a decent photograph. Men.

So these are my placeholder photos, until I manage to get to Ship Creek to take photos I actually frame and format and think about, instead of sticking the camera out the window as we roll by...I am happy with these photos but running water! I love running water and I love taking photos of running water! I lived in the desert where the only running water came out of a tap, so running water!

In other news, the sun is now so low in the sky it is blocked by the two story house south of us. And it is ten below. A high today of zero, if we are really lucky.

And yes, Lou, I still love it. The air is crisp and cold and fresh, the snow is white and fluffy, and the dogs like to sleep on my feet.

And oh, yeah...the snow on the branches? It's always there. We have had a very calm windless winter, so it doesn't blow off, and the sun is so low in the sky it doesn't stand a chance of melting anything, and it's been well below freezing for months, so no melting there either.

It is colder than normal. Usual for this time of year in Anchorage is 20-ish...I seem to attract weather extremes. I cannot tell you how many times I have been places on record hot and record cold days. It's a curse, bad karma, something. Apparently I was mildly evil in a previous life.

my new toy...

a Bamboo Pad. Awesomely fun. A complete time waster, for sure.

Zach needed it for a project for his English class, but doesn't think he will have much use or time to use it, so it's mine. And Awesome. Last night I was ready to fall asleep at oh, 7 pm, but didn't actually go to bed until after 11 because Tess and I were messing around with it.

Because you can do stuff like this with it. The program I used is Corel Painter Essential 3. There are a ton of settings and brushes and stuff that I haven't even looked at yet....But I did discover that at the moment I cannot recreate the brush strokes that give the grass texture in the work above. Of course. Because I really like the texture of the grasses.

Some stupid texture or design or effect that I don't want to use, I will recreate endlessly and accidentally. But the perfect texture to suggest grass, lucky one-time accident.

You can even upload a photo and create watercolors and stuff outta them. The hardest part is finding time to do all this stuff. As usual.

Since it was rather pricey, it's gonna be my birthday present, I think. No IPod Touch this year. Good thing my old first generation Nano still works...

Instead I got this new fabulous item for Christmas.
It's really nice to have a reliable source of espresso again. My old red beast is adorable,
but has become increasingly unsteady and unreliable.
Never a good thing when you rely on it for creamy goodness of the coffee variety. Old Red still made espresso, but the pump for the steamer seems to be kaput. Espresso without hot steamy milk is just wrong and a waste of caffeine.

Incidentally, that white box next to the source of all things espresso is my Happy Light.

Seems appropriate. My morning psuedo-sunlight and my source of happy caffeine, snuggled up together on the counter.

I turn it on in the morning and it blasts my retinas with the white hot light of a thousand fluorescent tubes. To make my brain think that I do not in fact live so far north that polar bears go "damn. The North Pole must be right around here somewhere."

Fortunately for my retinas, I have been waking up so late lately that the sun is already up, thus negating the need to sear said retinas with psuedo-sunlight. Or it's a day like today, when the sky was completely cloudless and bright sunshine shone down on us for all five and a half hours of daylight. That does mean it was zero degrees out. Step outside and your nose hairs freeze within 37 seconds, but it looks good from inside, especially if you are standing directly on the heater vent. Sunshine and cloudless skies and cold, or cloudy gray and slightly warmer. I go for the sunshine every time. We have lots of heater vents, and the Army pays our utilities.

Today in the snow, Now with EXTRA ZACH!!!

Today we took Zach dog sledding, Holmquist style.

Unfortunately the snow is really deep these days, and Abe absolutely loathes deep snow. Loathes it. Fortunately the street is snow-covered, so Zach got to experience dog sledding anyway.



Tor gave it a try too, and we were momentarily concerned that one of them would be damaged...the dogs were really moving out, and coming to a stop was rather problematic, since the dogs stopped before Thor and the sled...


Zachary has been living in Tucson, where it was 60 degrees last week. It was closer to 6 degrees this afternoon. This is Zach's face on cold:

And the familia, in the snow. Mark was making goofy faces when Abe was looking at me, and as soon as I got Mark to start smiling, Abe was fascinated with something behind them. Of course.

Snow Removal

Snow removal and storage is a big deal here. We get lots of snow, and they need to do something with it...so they load it into dump trucks and haul it to vacant lots, big fields, special lots designed specifically for the snow, and stash it there.

It's a big deal, because the snow really piles up. We got about a foot of snow, and they hauled ten or eleven dump trucks worth of snow off just my street, which is probably two blocks long.
In the photo above, you can see one of the lots they use for snow. It's mid-December, and there is a shocking amount of space left for snow...Everywhere we go, I see huge piles of snow, and lots that are like a quarter full of snow. I am thinking this winter has a very long way to go.

Good thing I am still thrilled to have snow!

Also, you can see the sun going down...I think I took this photo between 2:30 and 3:00. The sun sets at 3:30. Still weird, that. But there is sun sometimes, which is very important to me. It's also very important to those around me. Very very important to those around me...

Mojo killing Eggnog Carton. Abe feeling Left Out.

Thor buried Tess in the snow again...

Today I saw three moose running along the fence line. It looked like a fully grown male and female and a calf. The calves are getting close to fully grown now. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me...I really need to start carrying it again. I see ravens all the time, but never when I have my camera.

We are having a heat wave. It's been in the mid 30's today and yesterday, so there is slush on the roads, and snow sliding off the roofs. The snow banks along the edges of busy roads have gotten black and dirty, and when we drive now, we get that caked up on the bottom of the vehicles and drag it into the garage. Yuck.

I slid through a stop sign for the first time this winter, and have been seeing the occasional car in the snowbank. Lucky for me I grew up in the snow, learned to drive in the snow, and so it's not a big deal...except when I am following someone who is going 10 or 15 miles below the speed limit because they don't know how to drive in this stuff.

I am still very much happy to be here instead of the desert.

thursday thirteen, snow edition

I lived in Tucson for four years, then this summer I moved to Anchorage. We have already gotten more than a foot of snow. I am really enjoying the snow, and taking lots of photos of snow. It's a really nice change from photographing cacti and scrub and dirt...

1. snow clinging to the fence.


2. and the side of the house.


3. the chugach mountains. my backyard.


4. snow on pine.


5. and on the roof.


6. I like all the various roofs and angles outside Thor's bedroom window.


7. a roof wave. and yes, it is snowing.

8. bench and rocks.


9. I like the snow piles on top of the poles.


10. snow striping.

11. the kids' fort, after I shoveled the driveway and partially filled it in. ooops.

12. my new hero.


13. but not the dogs' hero...I was mean to them and left them outside on the deck as the snowblower went by, coating everything with a fine layer of snow. the dogs were not amused.

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