Inktrails from Alaska

The Ups

It's raining again today, but we had a couple days break from it, thank goodness! One night it was clear and there were some outstanding northern lights. I'm not happy it's back, though, and neither is Scott, who has to run a dump truck up and down a steep dirt road. It's not going to help him finish his job if it gets too wet, in fact, it will stop all the work.

And to add more bad news, it looks like we can expect some snow by the end of the week. Actually, I love snow, but I don't like the black ice we get when the sky can't decide whether it's winter or not. Freezing rain happens around this time, which isn't fun for me and is less fun for Scott, hauling gravel in the dump truck.

I actually have to break down and start wearing a hat, darn it!

Winter will be fun, no doubt, as I have plans for teaching Sofia to pull a sled, and for teaching myself to cross-country ski, and there's always the snow machine. I kind of wish we could just throw a switch one weekend though, so we don't have to go through that horrible changing of the seasons. It's my least favorite part of the year. Let's review the Alaskan Seasons: Winter (eight or nine months), Summer (about three months). Then there are the two Ups: Freeze Up, and Break Up. Both awful and accompanied by lots of slippery ice and wacky weather. Everyone gets a cold or flu around those times, too. Our bodies instinctively don't like the Ups.

True, there are gorgeous golden aspens and birches for about two weeks, with leaves blowing and swirling around like alien birds. I do love that time. It's what comes after that I don't like! Winter I like, Summer I like, I just hate the Ups!

%$#@*& RAIN

Okay, okay all RIGHT already! It's been raining for about two weeks or more! I'm SICK of it! If I wanted this much rain I'd go live in Juneau, or Eugene! I've seen the sun twice since this crap started. Arrrggghhhh!!!!!

I'm glad it's warm outside (haven't I done a post on what is "warm" to an Alaskan?) but GEEZ LOUISE I hate mud, and drip, drip, drip and having to see through the windshield while windshield wipers constantly get in my way. Fairbanks is usually sunny, and three days of rain is about it per episode, and then we get some sun. But not this time!

Look, this is why I moved away from Oregon. And yet they say with global warming (which is no joke, it's quite thoroughly apparent up here in the far North) we are going to get more and more of this southern rain bullshit. Soccer moms! Stop driving SUVs everywhere!! You don't need them! What you need is the Brady's station wagon! And send ME an SUV, I DO need it up here!

Actually, as far as global warming goes, I'm doing my bit. I'm driving an old Toyota Camry that gets 38mpg on the highway! Just a little less in town. Front wheel drive gets me around in the winter just fine. Way better gas mileage than most giant THINGS on the road too, such as the Chevy Subdivision, the Ford Exploder and other vehicles the size of Asia.

Rain. I don't care how "good" is is for the "planet" blah blah bunch of smarmy hippy bullshit. I don't have to like it, and I DON'T!

Eileen Ivers Weekend, Master Class

Eileen Ivers plays at the Hering Auditorium at Lathrop Highschool this Sunday at 4pm here in Fairbanks. She's staying over a day to do a master class in fiddling Monday night, September 26, 7pm at the Pomegranate Café on 2nd St. It's all very exciting. She says she's bringing musicians from the band to jam with us afterward. I interviewed her for Alaska This Month and we had a great, fun, hour-long chat. She's a wonderfully friendly person! If you want to attend the master class, you MUST prepay and pre-register with Gail Holmes by calling 457-2552 before the class, preferably by Sunday night. Only 25 slots are available, and at last count the class was more than half-filled.

Move Completed--Unpacking Continues

Some parts of my house are a jumble, with boxes and bags stacked everywhere, baskets full of miscellaneous items, those last few things that just won't pack, laying about taking up space and screaming to be sorted out.

Other parts of my house are quite nicely organized. The books are about halfway unpacked, all the CDs are now in their place, and of course the computer system was the first to get situated. The bathroom is almost there, I'm at the bottom of the last box! Yippee! I should have most stuff put away by the end of next weekend (no, not THIS weekend, I'm going to be too busy).

How do I like my new place? I love it. I have tasty, clear, drinkable well water, Sofia can play outside, the water pressure is remarkable, I can wash my long hair in five minutes instead of fifteen! The landlord is a great guy, easy to get along with and my rent is $150 cheaper! Sure, it's smaller, but I fit in it quite nicely. He keeps things in great repair, and the furnace, watersoftener, water heater and appliances are all modern and in some cases, new.

And best of all, my ride to work is ten to fifteen minutes instead of half an hour to an hour. And it's just a hop and a skip from Scott's place, which makes him happy, too. Previously he was driving thirty miles to visit me.

Life is good.

Pamela Joy, We Will Miss You

Last night I could not sleep. It was 4am before I was able to settle down. This morning I awoke to many messages concerning a friend. She died Wednesday, apparently from smoke inhalation due to a malfunctioning woodstove.

Her name was Pamela, and she was a good-hearted, kind woman, who started a Yahoo Group called Alaska-Living.

Pamela Joy, who used her middle name as her very appropriate web moniker, touched hundreds if not thousands of people through her computer. There are currently over seven hundred folks on the Alaska-Living list, many of whom learned about Alaska from the denizens of that list and subsequently have moved north. Some stay, some don't, but friendships and connections are made, and information and experience are shared equally in that online community. Because of Pamela, we stay in touch.

Pamela, whom I met several times, was a very positive, loving person. When I was deathly ill with flu, she was the one who came over twenty miles to my house to bring me drinking water and food. God speed her soul to further happiness and please comfort her family left behind. Pamela Joy, we will miss you.

Dizzy with Moving

I've changed my place of abode. Instead of a 20-mile drive, one way, into town, it's only 9 miles. This is a vast improvement. It's now only a short 10-12 minute drive to work, instead of a hefty 30-minutes to an hour (depending on traffic and weather). I'm far enough out of the actual city that I get my much needed nature hit, but close enough so that I'm not going to go broke filling up the gas tank.

My new place is much smaller so I've been busy with the giant shoehorn and a can of Crisco, fitting everything I need into the place, and finding new and unusually clever ways to reuse the few furnishings I have. Then there is the setting up the computer, stereo, getting the internet working, and somehow finding the dish soap before I run out of clean dishes.

Every room I enter screams "YOU NEED TO ORGANIZE THIS RIGHT NOW!" One could orbit from room to room, working frantically, and never get more than a little bit of each thing done. For instance, while unpacking clothing, you find some towels, which you dutifully take to the bathroom, at which point a box of bathroom stuff obviously needs to be put away, which you begin doing, but run out of room and return to the livingroom to search for some suitable way to store all the sunscreen and bug dope...and see that there is an empty bookshelf and at least ten boxes of books that need to be put away....but there are some CDs in the book boxes (one mustn't leave boxes partially filled!) so you take those over to where you think the CDs are going to go and start putting those away....

The alternative is sticking to one thing, and making piles of the other miscellaneous things you serendipitously find inside of purses, boxes, bags and so on. This is the method I've adopted and I actually have most of my CDs put away, most of my CD-ROMs put away, and ALL my records put away.

It's not that things are all muddled up. They aren't, with the exception of what is in the pickup truck, but that's another story. We'll get to that one. However I packed very well, keeping most thing sorted and ready to simply put away. But a person with a little bit of ADD can get sidetracked oh, so easily!

On the last day of moving I had a friend, who works as an engineer, help me pack and move the last of my stuff. It was down to a lot of stuff in boxes, miscellaneous stuff, the maddening things that didn't easily fit or pack properly. I made the erroneous assumption that my friend, being an engineer, would be a good person to have pack the stuff into the vehicles.

I kind of forgot he'd been wanting to change careers, thinking that engineering wasn't really his thing. Plus we were down to the last minute, just had to get out of there, you know how when it feels that you won't EVER get completely moved out, that there will always be just One More Thing?

That's where we were with moving that day. And my friend was herocially helping me. I can't say enough as to how wonderful he was to help me. I just made the mistake of thinking that an engineer would pack things methodically.

Nope. Instead, he used the Jumble Method. Remember when you were a student and used to pack that way? When it stops raining I'm going to unload the truck. And when I do, I'm going to be verrrry careful which piece I take out, because if I take the wrong one, lots of other things, if not everything, will fall out in a huge pile!

Regardless, I'm extremely grateful for his help, because I simply could not have done it without him. I'm sure I'll get everything out of the truck okay. I owe him one.

Batman Begins

The conditions were not ideal, as the speakers and screen at the Blue Loon leave quite a bit to be desired. For a movie that is quite a lot of fun to make fun of (I could barely contain myself during the movie) the Ester crowd was deadly quiet. Then again, it could be, like me, they were straining to hear the dialogue over the incessant soundtrack. Not to mention that Christian Bale barely opens his mouth for the first quarter of the movie. His mumbling isn't mysterious, it's impossible to understand.

The movie mixes 30s genre sets with 21st century cars and fashions. Mostly. It's incredibly inconsistent. The fight scenes are the usual way-too-fast-to-tell-what-the-hell-is-going-on that makes your head hurt and your eyes water. Liam Neeson as a French/Oriental? villain is interesting. Audiences in Alaska will find the scenes near glaciers rather amusing.

I dearly love Michael Caine, but he should have put on a more Alfredesque accent for the part.

It was fun, it was a comic book. It certainly didn't live up to the original comic book, despite all the DC COMICS labeling.

Busy Weekend

Not only am I physically moving (closer to town, but not IN town) but cybernetically as well, moving the bulk of my websites to another hosting service. Somehow I managed to screw up my pop email so I can't access it. Drat. It's the sort of thing that makes you crazy, but then again, I can access it on the web. It will all be cured by Monday, I am sure.

Meanwhile I'm up way too godawful early to head into town for the first of a series of watercolor classes. I love painting, but have always worked in oils. Oils are forgiving. Oils you can mess with if you have made a boo-boo. Watercolor, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. You make that line on the paper and it's THERE. Very scary.

Supposedly we work in pencil a whole bunch first. Great. I don't draw, not really. I paint very well, but I don't do all that shading and crap with pencils. For me the depth comes in colors. I've never been able to make credible pencil drawings. Ah well, we'll see. I'll just try to have some fun.

Then at 3:30 my band, the Tanana Highlanders, is playing at the new Alaska Museum up on the UAF Campus. We play until 5, kilts, wenchware and all. It's going to be lots of fun and I'm looking forward to it. At first our guitar player was going to be out moose hunting, but I guess the rain discouraged him, all the better for us, because it means Dennis and I won't have to switch between melody instruments (fiddle and pipes) and bodhrán (so we can accompany each other). Much better to have our guitar player, Brock!

It's been raining for two days. I'm rather sick of that, but at least it is warm. Dear God please keep it warm until I'm finished moving into my new place, the Bat Cave, tomorrow. Sofia is looking forward to being able to play outside, I swear she is!

Sofia Update #3

As far as I can tell, she's better. Although she did have a "reverse sneezing" episode last night for a short bit. All of my dogs have done that and it bothers me. I must research it some more. No vet has been able to give me a valid answer, no one seems to know what causes it. It's certainly not bacteria, as she just went through mondo antibugs. I think she has some allergies, because her nose is just a little bit wettish, but then, so is mine. And I have allergies that kick in this time of year. Plus, it was the Benadryl that made the dramatic difference in the number of "sneezing" episodes she was having, though I stopped giving it to her when the antibiotics ran out.

I suspect it must be fungal in nature, mold or somesuch. I am pretty sure that's what's setting me off, too.

Roll in the Winter Lights

The northern lights are out tonight and dancing up a storm. This is the first night I've seen them this season. It means winter is just around the corner. We could get snow any day, any week. I brought my plants in from the porch as it seemed just too crispy out there when I got home from the Celtic Jam. It's a good thing I did.

I wasn't ready for winter. Fall isn't long in the Interior. The trees turn golden and WHAM, the winds blows off the leaves and the snow falls. It can happen in a matter of several weeks. Then it's winter. Sometimes the leaves don't even have a chance to fall. But the lights make up for a lot.

The lights tonight are white, with some red tinges. They look like clouds gone mad, shooting all over the place, huge skyfulls appearing out of nowhere and spearing each other, or curling into spirals then fading out, recoalescing into more snakes, whorls, fences. It all happens in the blink of an eye. They will do this for up to an hour. And then they'll "rest" for twenty minutes, a half hour, an hour, and the whole show begins again, but different. It's always different and I never get tired of watching it. Just too cold!

Come November 30 degrees will seem tropical, but for now if summer has to end, at least we have the sun's treats to glow at us at night.