Another photo of Alaska...

We were at the Westchester Lagoon, in Anchorage. We stopped to watch a couple of salmon swimming into the lagoon from the Cook Inlet (salmon spawning are really fascinating to watch. Although I am certain that eventually the thrill of watching fish swimming in place against the current will wane...). There was a grebe (a kind of duck) floating nearby. It went under to catch a fish, and because there is a white panel under the water -- perhaps to help count the salmon, they are very concerned about how many salmon return each year -- we could really see how the bird swam around. Very very cool...

The Farm

When I was a kid we would go visit my uncle on the farm. The farm where my Mom and her brother grew up. Every kid should be lucky enough to spend some time on a farm. Farms are awesome. Farms are fun. Farms are dangerous, but we were very lucky kids. There was more than one occasion when one or another of us kids could have been badly injured or killed, but we all survived with all limbs, teeth, and eyes intact.

(Brains, I dunno. There were sometimes some marijuana plants growing on the farm, but a really weak strain. I don't know how much of a high was possible...but I am certain one or another of us tried it out anyway...)

My grandfather built the house and the barn and the outbuildings, I think in the late 1800's. The house and barn are still standing, the barn roof is amazingly straight -- no sag at all. Pretty impressive, I think.



This is a great house -- lots of gorgeous woodwork. No one from my family lives there now, but this summer we drove by and it looks pretty good around there. Weird too, since the land has been flattened -- there used to be a small hill behind the house. And some of the buildings are gone. No more chicken coop, no cows, no pig sty. Honestly, though, I don't miss the chickens. I hate chickens. Vile yet delicious creatures that they are. Smelly and stinky and mean. But tasty.

I can't post two days in a row without a photograph of Alaska, so...

The Daily Alaska:



The Little Susitna River, in Hatcher's Pass.

Daily Alaska!

There is a lake next to the airport here, Lake Hood. Float planes take off and land here, and the lake is surrounded by docks where the planes are tied up. It's one of the things we do with visitors from out of state. There are so many places in Alaska that are accessible only by boat or plane that there are lots and lots of private planes buzzing around all the time.

I got a new computer! Because the old one sucked. It just was so unreliable, I couldn't take it. I am trying to get all our photos organized and sorted, a job made slightly more difficult because I really stupidly accidentally told Photoshop Elements to catalogue all the images on my external hard drive...all 100,000 of them. There is a scrapbook program on there and a bunch of games. Each with dozens of images. Plus several backups of our photos, so that there are two or three or eight copies of a bunch of photos.

I am so sick of dealing with it, and still have another 50,000 images to delete, and another 30,000 to organize. I cannot believe we have that many photos, but I love taking photos. Dozens of photos...

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...

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.

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...

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?)

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.

No volcano yet. Other stuff instead.

You know how I pointed out Abe always looks confused or befuddled or maybe just a bit nervous?

Perhaps it's due to his big brother Mojo.

Because while Abe looks confused or nervous in lots of photos, Moj just looks demented. Look at him. Would you want to wake up from a nice nap in a sunny spot, stretch a little, glance up and see that staring at you? You might wander around looking a little apprehensive too.

(And just so you know, I am just kidding. Mojo and Abe get along great. Moj is occasionally cranky, but then Abe has been known to drop toys on Mojo's head when Mojo is sound asleep, so I think they are even.)

The Daily Alaska

Want to come sit on my front porch with me?

Yeah. Me neither. My butt gets cold just looking at these photos.

VOLCANO!!!!!!

Yeah. Mount Redoubt, 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, is gonna blow.



Probably. It's been very seismically active since last weekend, and they are thinking this is significant.

But Alaska has ten percent of the world's active volcanoes -- that pesky Ring of Fire. No, not the Johnny Cash song...



but the Pacific Ring of Fire.

Anyhow. Alaska has ten percent of the world's active volcanoes, so this is not a surprise. People are buying dust masks and air filters for their cars and furnace filters for their homes. We are not going to go anywhere if we have ashfall, so I won't worry about the cars, and I will be rooting around in the garage to find the dust masks we have for painting and fabric dyeing. I have to go out anyway, so I will buy some too, if there are any left in the stores.

We have a freezer pretty well stocked with meat and frozen veggies and pizza and egg rolls, plus several dozen cans of veggies (they had a great sale on them, so I stocked up. Turns out I was planning ahead instead of being cheap.) And Costco quantities of rice, and four or five brownie mixes, so the food is covered.

We will have to cover the computers and tvs and stuff with garbage bags, so ash doesn't get into them and wreck em, and not turn them on, because the fans will suck the volcanic dust into them. whoops.

So I might have something interesting to blog about, but I won't be able to turn on my computer. We have forced air heat, so there is potential for ash to get into the house that way, even if we stay inside. Plus we will have to let the dogs out occasionally.

But the ash can't last forever, and my camera card holds at least 5,000 photos. So sooner or later, if this thing blows, I will be telling you all about it.

For the Daily Alaska...
Today is snowy, but with a very bright spot in the sky...

This isn't a great photo, but you get the idea. The little white specks are not dust on my lens, but teeny little snowflakes, and the bright spot is the sun almost burning through the clouds. It was bright enough you couldn't look at it directly, anyway.

Behind those power lines, usually, I can see the Chugach Mountains. Except today there are a whole bunch of snowflakes and clouds between me and them. Okay by me. I like snow. And as a plus, I really don't think there are any active volcanoes in them. whew.

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.

I told you...

Abe always looks puzzled or confused or wondering or perplexed. I think it's the shape of his eyes, maybe the way his ear always stands up. Only one ear stands up because they wrecked the cartilage in his ear when he was a puppy. I don't know exactly how, one day I noticed it was floppier than the other. But I do know they play really hard. Both of them used to be covered with battle scars all the time. They played really hard. They still play hard, I think they just don't play quite the same way. Currently they try to grab the other one's hind leg and knock him over or they do the chest bump.

Instead of a photo today, I am going to post a link for The Daily Alaska.

It's a post on The Mudflats, an Alaska blogger. This post is a description of what it's like to go buy groceries when you live out in the Bush in Alaska. It's pretty shocking how expensive stuff is -- 2 loaves of bread are $11.98, gas is $7.25 a gallon, and 144 Huggies diapers, a whopping $82.55. (I suppose she could use cloth diapers, but they have to haul water to their house, and it costs them a buck for 10 gallons...She didn't describe how she does laundry, but I would think it can't be cheap either.) I live in Anchorage, and I like Anchorage. I have no desire to live out in the Bush, and can't imagine why anyone would want to. But I know people who love this lifestyle, anything to keep them out of crowds and large groups of people. Go check it out. It's really interesting and surprising.