Photos (Facebook)

Big news since I last touched down here is.....

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I'm ENGAGED!!!

Crazy, huh??

I am working on getting my photos posted to Facebook albums (after my strange difficulties posting them here).

Photos:
Superbowl
North Pole Snowshoe
Willow Ptarmigans
Ice Art 2009
Easter
D's Bday 32
Memorial Day Camping
Bluebells, Paxson's (& Max's) Birthday
Chrystal & CJ Housewarming
Ott house fun
Solstice 2009
Garden, Yard, Birds, Bugs
Chrystal's bachelorette party
Chena Hot Springs
Erich's Bday
Chrystal & CJ's rehersal dinner
CJ & Chrystal's wedding pt1
CJ & Chrystal's wedding pt2
Hot Tub Fun
Chitina Dipnetting pt1
Chitina Dipnetting pt2
Chitina Dipnetting pt3
Fairbanks to Valdez and back again pt1
Fairbanks to Valdez and back again pt2
Fairbanks to Valdez and back again pt3

I am still having technical difficulties in allowing others to see these pictures...I have my privacy settings set to 'everyone' on photos (and 'photos and videos of me') but to no avail...any help appreciated!

A.G. aka D. sighted - still alive!

On a hike in the White Mountains last weekend:
(picture that wouldn't post)

Jealous of -50F Weather in Fairbanks That I'm Missing

Long time no blog! The reasons for this include the end of semester rush, and an added 'occupation' of spending time with a lovely man who I like to call my boyfriend... I am currently in Idaho Falls visiting the folks. Very sadly, my buddy near here (who I was supposed to spend half of my vacation here with) was in a horrible car accident with her family (all survived except their dog and tragically, their unborn child) the Friday before Christmas. Banally related to this occurrence, I have already outstayed my welcome (under the thumb of my need-to-know-all mother, even though I love her very dearly), and am now being told that I have spent far too much time on the computer today. So, I will have to finish my long overdue update here on a future date... Extravagantly wonderful belated holiday wishes to all!

Something to Share

Alaska's Wilderness Confounds Self-Importance
by Craig Medred, ADN

Until you have known the northland night in the cold, white silence of winter, it is hard to imagine a landscape lit only by the dim light of the stars, yet this is the way it can be.

Then comes the moonrise and you realize the night can be startlingly bright with the spindly black spruce trees casting long shadows across the frozen muskegs.

To be on the trail on a night like this with a dog or dogs who are among your best friends might be the greatest experience you will ever know if your heart runs toward the wild places.

Even along the edges of Alaska's largest city, this otherworld of winter comprises a special place if for no other reason than that the wilderness of our times, especially now just past the dawn of the 21st century, is not so much in the landscape as in the climate and the weather.

The weather is the last great wild thing uncontrolled and unchanged by the hand of man. We have gained dominion over almost everything else. We manipulate the populations of the animals to our liking. We tunnel the mountains for our roads, and fill the swamps to build our parking lots, and send our steel-glass monuments to modernity into the sky almost anywhere we want.

On a daily basis, we revel in man-made comforts as we move from warm centrally heated dwellings to warm steel steeds that transport us to the warm hum of offices and businesses. That anything lives on the planet other than people and their machines is sometimes almost easy to forget in this work-a-day world, save for those occasions when Mother Nature summons her last wild forces to rain devastation, or at least inconvenience, down upon us.

It is a reminder we might now own the planet, but we don't really control it. We only think we do. We are, if nothing else, the most self-important, self-involved species that ever thrived.

For someone on the trail in Alaska in the dark of night with the headlights off and the world brought back into the natural dimness and the elemental silence of the nothingness which was all our ancestors ever knew, the feebleness of what sometimes passes for significance in the modern world is laughingly evident.

Does it really matter if the screen on your TV measures 22 inches or 60 inches, or whether the TV itself is thick and sits on a table or thin and hanging on a wall? Is it really worth trampling to death some poor Wal-Mart employee to get a bargain on either? Is the size of a TV or the money saved over "list price" on its purchase really the measure of a man or woman today?

Most important, will it matter at the end if you have collected more toys than anyone else?

"For dust you are and to dust you will return," Moses wrote in the book of Genesis, if you fancy the Judeo-Christian version of the history of the Bible. And no matter your personal take on the authorship of that book or of religion, the ancient observation stands as valid.

Our bodies are passing coalitions of atoms that will eventually and inevitably split again into tiny particles only to rejoin in other forms someday. So, too, for our vast piles of consumer goods. Wonderful though they might be in the short term, they do not age well, and you cannot begin to carry them all with you.

All we can really carry in quantity are memories, and those are written not in possessions but in the richness of the people and the places we know.

The latter is the real gold mine of Alaska.

In a world overrun with scurry and noise, the elemental Alaska -- as opposed to the tiny slice of the state that has fallen to the onslaught of urbanization -- remains a place that can inspire awe and inspiration as to our own frailties. Detached from all that protective technology, we become once again the vulnerable animals humans so long were.

Out on the trail in the Alaska winter, nothing about you really changes, but everything does. You discover silence has its own sound and a whole other reality.

The snow collapsing with a noisy "whomp'' beneath a ski seems somehow almost alive. The airborne crystals of ice that twinkle in the moonlight become an echo of the stars above, a miniature universe within the bigger universe. The crack of sap freezing in a tree makes you wonder what life is like in that whole other community of green things.

Though we might each think ourself important, we are no more important than grass, except to those we touch along our journey.

In the end, that's what matters. The only really important things we leave behind are what we also take along -- the memories.

And there are few better than those of a night on the trail in Alaska with the winds calm and the snows fast and a whole universe above seemingly looking in at the same time you are looking out wondering in the quiet what exists beyond.

randomness

...on being a sleep-deprived grad student...

mmm warm soup
firing neuronsmy pet spider
lame but funny school humor...must sleep now...

Goose Egg

How sad is this? I hope I get to see the aurora at least one more time before summer...

A few things I am thankful for...

at Idaho Falls Volehollow: birchleaf mountain mahogany, cercocarpus montanus; feathery "achenes" protrude from each seed

random swirly clouds

sundog (parahelion)

sharing good times, including Thanksgiving, with friends

Cool Blasts from the Past

My mom's on this page!
"Ground Magnetometer Survey in the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes"

And my dad's on this one!
"Geochemical analyses of rock and stream-sediment and soil samples from Ambler River, Survey Pass", "Mineral occurrences in the upper Wood River, Edgar Creek, and West Fork Glacier areas, central Alaska Range"

Totally of no interest to anyone but me and my family, I know. Pretty cool, nonetheless!

Logging the Day

This morning my tires were a little flat on the bottom as I bumpled out of my driveway and down the road.

Today I learned the difference between my car battery being dead (the engine makes a clicking noise when I try to start it) and my car battery being cold (the engine makes a weak grring reving noise when I try to start it). For the former, I need to get a jump start (as I did one morning a couple of weeks ago). For the latter, the battery will warm itself up a little from trying to be started and if I wait a little while and try to start it again it will probably start (avoidable if you always keep it plugged in when you're not driving it - or at least for a while before you plan to start it). I did this yesterday morning; after I called for a jump, I tried to start it one more time and it started!

The inversion seemed the worst I've experienced so far this morning, with a slight sickly yellow seeming to hover near cars (or at least their tailpipes)...and I could smell something a bit breath-catching as well. According to the FNSB Air Quality site it was "good" today, however, and much better than yesterday, so I must be nuts. 8^)

It is now about -15F and the cold usually sort of lodges in my throat when I walk outside so that I cough a little bit (though I'm not sick yet, knock on wood).

It's been snowing off and on. I like the light fluffy snow dry weather and cold temperatures evidently produces. It usually (lately anyway) consists of clearly visible snowflake crystals and tiny snowballs mixed together.

I can understand why so many people are excited about "auto start." This is where your vehicle is outfitted such that you point a remote key towards your car (i.e. from inside a nearby structure) and it starts the engine and warms up. I thought this was just to warm up the car so that it ran better, which I view as hockeypuck (for newer vehicles anyway) based on listening to Click'n'Clack (at least until we're proven wrong somehow). Now I realize that it's all about human comfort, because dang my car is cold when I first hop in! Even my heated seat warmer doesn't really take effect for a while. I typically fill the time to warm-up looking at my heated breath in the frigid air and doing a little cold dance in my seat.

The method used for winter road traction by the Fairbanks North Star Borough is tiny gravel. This gravel really does a number on your windshield. My poor car got her first star on the Mitchell Expressway and the second star on the Johansen Expressway. I regularly hear loud glass cracks and know that where there isn't a star, there are many pits in the glass. Luckily the light here at this time of year hasn't highlighted these myriad dings, and I can still see fine out of my windshield.

The exhaust around many vehicles' tailpipes (which is primarly water vapor) curls and billows up around their cars and makes crunchy white frosting grow where the steam deposits.

I have grown quite used to sliding a bit while driving, especially near intersections, which tend to be more icy. I prefer not to, of course, but it doesn't even seem to give me a good scare the way it did many times in Idaho Falls (hello snowbank). That said, I don't think that the ice here is the same...here it never gets a chance to really melt and refreeze (forming a perfect and continuous car-skating surface). The road tends to clear under tire tracks first, and then whole lanes become clear with snow only in a stripe down the middle of the road and along the edges.

Thus conclude my various observations for today on life in Fairbanks during my first winter...this Thursday before Thanksgiving, 2008. Cheers!

1.18%

1.18%, as reported yesterday by the Alaska Division of Elections, ends Uncle Ted Stevens' 40 year run representing Alaska in the United States Senate. It is bittersweet, but I think for the most part we're ready to move on. I for one am glad this tiny percentage of votes brought about this change, and that the Senate wasn't forced to vote him out in light of his recent conviction. Happy Birthday, Ted: enjoy your retirement.