Inktrails from Alaska

Happy Hogmaney!

It's past midnight, already into the last day of the year. I just got home from a potluck/jam party. Whew, good food, good folks, lots of fun. I'd forgotten how many old timey tunes I knew. The first half of the jam was old timey, the second half Irish, and we ended singing The Duct Tape Song in three parts.

The hostess made ice ball candle holders, and it was like the Alaskan version of luminarias. You make them with balloons! Fill a round balloon with water, and then put them outside to freeze. When the ice is about an inch thick (inside the balloon, you realize) you cut the balloon away and pour out the unfrozen and slushy water. And you have a bowl made of ice!

For an experiment, we brought one inside with a candle in it, put it on the food table and waited to see how long it would last. I didn't see it go out, but it was several hours, at least.

So it's going to be 2005. It's hard to believe. So many things have changed. I'm extremely happy to be in Alaska, and even more happy to be a Fairbanksian. Maybe sometime next year I'll become an Esterroid. You never know. Here's a link to the Ester Republic, the small newspaper from that village, in which I've been published a couple of times.

Then again, maybe I'll just stay where I am. Which is here.

Happy Hogmaney! (Happy New Year, Scottish style!)

Welcome to 20 Below

Before I go to bed tonight I will step outside to see if there are any northern lights dancing. I will look like a fat, cartoon terrorist with my balaclava on, my parka and my bunny boots. In case you don't know what bunny boots are, they are white rubber boots that give you huge clown feet, but keep your clown feet warm down to 70 below. Pretty good trick, and all you have to do is look stupid. Hey, I'd rather look stupid but be warm, than be stupid and have frozen feet.

This is a one-week vacation for me from work, and all the millions of things I thought I'd have time for are mostly undone. So far. If I made a list of all the things I want to get done I would run out of time and have to go back to work before I finished writing it.

At least I got this blog up. Let me know how you like this little place on the web.

This Blog Has Moved

It's final. The blog is officially moving and you can now find all new posts at Click HERE .

I'll be meddling with the format and so on as weeks and months go by, but I think it's workable just as it is right now. So click on that link and bookmark it!

This blog will remain up for a while, but eventually I'll remove it. See you over at the new place!

Moving Days

I'm going to be moving my WordPress blog over here, as Typepad is far more robust and responsive. Stay tuned for more content and a much prettier interface! The old blog is still at http://www.celticandmore.com/nnblog .

Possibly moving the Blog

Well, I'm disgusted with WordPress, the engine that runs this blog and I'm thinking of moving this whole site to TypePad, which I think is more robust and more cleanly written. The bit that I've learned about CSS has taught me that whoever wrote WordPress didn't know how to write a good bunch of CSS. It's buggy, and it takes major surgery just to do basic things. The sidebar has never been right, for instance...and I just don't have time to fix all the problems. In fact, I'd have to rewrite most of the site just to get it to work right.

PLUS there are a couple of spammers who must be using robots to spam the site. I deleted 59 spams from the comments today, all having to do with online poker and coming from a variety of IPs. If this were a good program, I'd be able to easily block the IPs, but it isn't and it's major surgery to do that. As far as I'm concerned, being able to block IPs and avoid this situation altogether should have been a part of the program from the get-go.