Volcano Vigil

We are on the watch for ash again as a volcano that hasn't erupted in 10,000 years is about to blow. This year it isn't Augustine that has our attention, but the funny-named Fourpeaked. The color code is yellow. Click here for more information and updates. Be sure to check out the webicorder graphic of seismic activity. I see 3 big rumblings so far today. This volcano is not far from Augustine so any ash emitted could come our way. Time to buy more duct tape.

Inevitable?

Four days into winter - I mean fall. It is shocking every year.

Duck Remorse

John and our daughter went duck hunting last night - about 2 hours after I posted the picture of my favorite type of ducks. They returned triumphant and we were all happy as we have no meat in the freezer right now. Our daughter walked in clutching these feathers and I asked, "What kind of duck was it?" "Merganser." "What? The duck that is my favorite? The one I want to be?" "Yep!"

I was a little offended that they targeted the type of duck that I felt the most affinity with. I guess when I said that I would like to be that duck I forgot that they were hunted. Now the dead duck is hanging out in the shop to age.

John also discovered that his retriever, the same one who will fetch sticks and fake ducks until her lips fall off, won't fetch a dead duck. Sophie described it like this: "When the duck dropped Rynda didn't see it because she was busy with other stuff." The "busy with other stuff" I'm sure will always be a problem with this particular dog. They had to throw sticks to the spot where the duck was floating to point her the way, but when she would get there, she would just get the stick and return. After throwing 11 sticks, her wake finally brought the duck in close enough for John to grab it. It will be a long duck season with that method.

Duck Patrol

Is this a squad of my favorite ducks? It looks like the girls are out on a shopping trip for bugs or whatever it is they like.

Good Question

I saw this on a jacket at the store today. It seemed to match the question I've been asking lately. I considered buying it but the price made it not-so-cute.

Sunrise on the Fly

I enjoyed this pretty sunrise on the way to work the other day. The reason I took the picture through the windshield is that we ended up buying that car with the low-tech windows and I was too lazy to roll them down to get a clear picture. Electric windows - you would have seen a much better picture.

Fast-Forward Fall

I've been in a panic this week because it seems like everything moves too quicky this time of year. Fall is my favorite season. It lasts only 4 days here. I was thinking this morning about how we are losing our daylight so quickly and that all the leaves on the trees have already turned yellow and it isn't even officially fall until next week. Then I saw a pretty tree on the way to work and made a mental note to take a picture of it on my way home. We had a big wind while I was there and that gorgeous, full, yellow-leafed tree looked like THIS when I got off work. I guess that's it then...fall is over before it even began. Sniff.

Daddy Short Legs

A new species of daddy long legs has been found in Alaska. This one is thumb-tack sized, and has short legs. I've never seen the new type, but we were more than familiar with the regular long-legged kind when we lived in our trailer.

When it gets cold here the daddy long legs group together in huge billion-legged balls to try to keep warm. We had a bedroom floor in the trailer made of rotten particle board. We would be fast asleep in the middle of the night and one of the legs of our bed would suddenly fall through the floor, jolting us awake. This happened so many times that the floor looked like a cribbage board. We would have to keep our bed positioned JUST SO to keep the legs clear of any holes. The worst part was that we had millions of daddy long legs living under our trailer. All houses here have them underneath - that was a normal feature for houses here. But the holes in the floor were not. Daddy long legs would sometimes get through the underneath of the trailer and crawl out through the holes in the floor. Then they would crawl into our bed. I would go to brush a hair off my forehead and find that it was a spider. After a while I suspected that every tickle on my skin was a spider. I would jump up, flip on the light and throw back all the covers in search of daddy long legs. What I would have given if they could have just been daddy short legs! Just before we sold the trailer I found a spider on my stomach while I was in the shower. Even so, I never got used to them.

Click here to read the full story on the new species.

Another Award-Winning Shot

This is the place that John, his dad and our son went moose hunting. Our son is very noisy to have along on a hunt, and the moose weren't cooprerating, so all they came home with were some spectacular pictures and a tray of cranberries.

Why We Like It

This is a photo that John's dad took on this flight out of Alaska last week. We think it is Skilak Lake. The jade color is from a glacier that feeds into it.

Screaming Slugs

John dug up most of our plants that were played out and started phase one of the bug-killing plan. He was delighted to find out that slugs roll up and turn white when they are burned. That gargantuan plant next to John is brussel sprouts. When our daughter was four her favorite food was brussel sprouts. Seriously. One day I was at the grocery store and she was begging for me to buy some and I said, "Not today." A man was standing next to us, jaw gaping, and said he had never heard such a conversation before in his life.

So that summer she decided to start her own little garden box and grow her own brussel sprouts. We hadn't ever grown them before. The plants grew quite large and she tended them all by herself, watering and weeding her 4 plants. We kept waiting to see bunches of brussel sprouts showing up like broccoli out of the top of the plant. Finally in late September we said, "Sorry, it looks like the sprouts aren't going to grow." John yanked the plants out of the dirt and when he threw them down he noticed that the sprouts grew all up the stalk. We had no idea. Now we've perfected the art of growing huge brussel sprout plants and she doesn't have to beg at the grocery for them anymore.

E. coli Evaded

You can see in this picture that due to all the rain, we haven't been outside getting at the chick weed lately. This weekend John plans to harvest the last of the veggies and till up the entire garden. Then he is going to use his flame thrower to burn any remaining pests out of the dirt, and their eggs with them, because gardening just isn't fun unless you finish the whole shebang off with some fire and some tiny bugs screaming in agony. This will be the last of our stellar double crop of spinach, then. We usually eat spinach 5 times a week, year-round, so we were glad that we had been eating our own spinach this summer and had thus avoided any E. coli concerns. We've blanched many packages of ours to last us well into the winter.

Morning Volcano

Here's the view as I went to work yesterday morning. I'm feeling a little generous with my morning photos because soon they will be black voids. I'm mourning the loss of daylight already.

Hay Day

After many years of begging, we finally gave in to our daughter's request for a horse - sort of. We are leasing a horse for a year to see if she can survive the early morning chores in screaming cold weather. We are getting the sweetest horse, Blessing, whom she has been riding frequently over the last year. Just the right kind of horse for her.

But first John had to make hay while the sun was shining, which hasn't been much all summer. He got a call that the hay was being baled today so he hauled 150 bales. He was getting help from the horse girl and not much help from our son.

Bounty

Take THAT Ann's greenhouse! Just kidding. I wanted to show off what John brought in today since it is close to the last we will be able to haul in.

Car Parts

My son and I got into a car and he first said, "I like this car. It is dirty like ours." That's nice to hear for everyone involved. Then he puzzled over something and finally asked, "What is this for?" He was pointing to the handle that rolls down the window. Are manual windows that rare? He was ecstatic to find out that I couldn't lock his window controls. He spent the trip rolling his window up and down.

Football foible.



This was the scene at the high school football game this weekend - a testament to how much rain we've had over the last 3 weeks. The teams were completely covered in mud, making it impossible to watch were the ball was. Our colors were blue and gold. The guest team's colors were blue and silver. When we got there we sat in the section that was the loudest, assuming that the home crowd would have the most people. We cheered with the cheerleaders and joined in clapping for a really cool rah rah chant. We were having a great time. The crowd went wild when there was a touchdown and we got excited about that. Then I realized that the scoreboard said Guest:28, Home:0. We were sitting in the middle of the supporters for the guest team and they were really hopped-up about the score. We casually moved over to the subdued home-team crowd to root them on. They scored later so our cheering obviously helped things along.

Death by Trailer.




The first eight years of our marriage we lived in a mobile home, which is a fancy name for a trailer. This trailer had its own personality, as any house that can move from one place to another easily, will. It was originally a summer trailer made for a warm climate such as Texas. This feature alone made this a very interesting home for Alaska. After surviving earthquakes and herds of voles in the trailer, we decided that we should move into a house that someone couldn't hook up to their truck and drive away with. We quickly sold the trailer and felt sorry thinking of someone else having to endure the leaky roof and the bathtub on the verge of falling through the floor.

The man who bought our trailer pulled up in a small truck and John tried to talk him out of using it to haul the 63-foot-long house. He would not be deterred. As the man pulled out of our driveway John commented that when the guy tried to drive the trailer down the North Fork hill, the trailer would overpower the truck and cause a wreck. We then left our house, passed the slow-moving trailer on the highway, and drove down the very same North Fork road to pick our kids up from a friend's house.

On the return, as we started down into the big dip on the road where the predicted wreck would occur, we saw our trailer coming down the other side. I was driving. John yelled out, "We are going to be killed by our own trailer!" I panicked and asked, "What do I do? Stop here or keep going?" John said, "Floor it." I zoomed past our house safely and we stopped at the top of the other side of the dip to watch the impending crash. The truck made it safely, only to break down further down the road, where the trailer sat abandoned for a week. It must have finally made it to its destination because it disappeared later. Our kids still reminisce about the good-old-days in the trailer. John and I are happy that we survived both living in it, and driving past it.

The End of Green - For Us.

I had FROST on my windshield the other day! Summer is really, really over! Our greenhouse is still hanging in there, though. More tomatoes and cucumbers ripen every day. We've been really proud of our hothouse veggies. Remember Ann's greenhouse? I hadn't been to her place all summer and had to go there the other day to open her greenhouse and water her plants. Immediate greenhouse envy! While the cold nights have killed a lot of the leaves on our plants, hers are still lush and green.


Ann's Greenhouse.


Our Greenhouse.

On John's fall list? A new greenhouse. He must not be outdone in any gardening area.

Street Sign.



I thought this was a cool name for a street so I took a picture. I always imagined that someone typed the name of a street into a computer and a machine printed out the sign. But look at the letters on this sign. It looks like someone hand-applied them; they are all crooked. I will now have to pay attention to the lettering on other signs as I drive around tomorrow to find out if they all have shoddy lettering.

The Gorgeous One.



While our three-legged boxer stayed at home lounging on her rug in the yard, our four-legged lab went to Tustumena Lake with John to hunt. Nothing was 'caught' except for a fish, but the dog had a great time exploring.

Out the Window.



Hmm, something that you normally don't normally see in a yard is just outside the window. I'll give you one guess who was involved in that. For your hint, look here.

John had to plunge the toilet and was so creeped out by the plunger that he opened the window and threw it out! It sat there for months while we discussed who had to retrieve it. I finally gave in and went after it.

Thunder Cloud.



I was just saying the other day that I missed hearing thunder. We never have those great big storm that are frequent in Kansas. Yesterday I walked outside and saw this! We rarely get these clouds that pile up. Then we heard thunder and saw a few flashes. No rain on us, though. it moved on.

Sunrise Time.



This was the view as I drove to work this morning. We are losing over 5 minutes a day now of our daylight. The sunrise is at 6:50 and sunset is at 9:07. I took this picture at 7:30 a.m., so pretty soon this view will be darkness.