Inktrails from Alaska

Ten Things that Make Me Happy Right Now

1. Northern Lights. There is no way you can understand what it is like. You just have to see them. It's like God painting the night sky with a living light.

2. Smooth, cold doggie noses.

3. A phone call from Ole, my son. Even it if is at 6am. That just means he can't wait to talk to his mom.

4. C. Howard Violet Flavored Mints. They are just heavenly!

5. Snow, and snow covered trees. I love the white landscape, and I love being able to see all the animal tracks and see who has been here recently.

6. Birds at the bird feeder. Seeing the new magpie who has moved up from down South! Ravens calling and talking, making their wood-clocking noise, their silly yells, their wonderful aerial acrobatics.

7. A moose in the yard. (Except if I am outside at the time!)

8. A phone call from a friend far away.

9. New music downloaded from iTunes (Ashley MacIsaac, wild fiddle rocker).

10. Having five days off in a row!

A Doggy Christmas

What is this stuff?

I'll just slice it open with my wicked claws.

Hey, I got it! It's a fuzzy octopus!

Heh, this is good stuff!

If you lick the end of the paper and then eat the corner off, cat food and Yummy Chummies come out!!
(I've never had dogs open those that way before. Every other dog I've had always just tore it open and ate the food. BOTH Sofie and Ole verrrrry carefully licked one little hole in the corner of the paper and then sort of sucked out one little bitty piece of food at a time!)

Ole: Can I help you with that?

Day After Christmas

Sofie: Mom is making me sit here.

Ole: Is there any more of that cat food around?

The yellow toy isn't tennis balls, it's a *very* squeaky tennis ball bone for playing fetch. There are rules about squeaky toys, you know. Dogs know that the best, absolute best time to run back and forth squeaking the toy as loud as they can is when you are watching Law and Order, or Monk, and it's right at the end where you find out what really happened.

Happy New Year!

Actually....

...it's 30 below at my house, and 40 below in town, where I work, despite the predicted "high" of -35°F.

Weather Report

Zone Forecast: Middle Tanana Valley

Last Update: 356 AM AST WED DEC 19 2007

Hazardous weather condition(s):

Short Term Forecast

Today...Partly cloudy. Areas of ice fog. Highs 20 below to 30 below. Light winds.

Tonight...Partly cloudy. Areas of ice fog. Lows 35 below to 40 below. Light winds.

Thursday...Mostly clear. Areas of ice fog. Highs 20 below to 30 below. East winds 10 to 15 mph.

Thursday Night...Partly cloudy. A chance of snow after midnight. Temperatures rising to 10 to 20 below. East winds 10 to 15 mph.

Friday...Mostly cloudy. A chance of snow in the morning. Temperatures 10 below to 15 below. East winds 10 to 15 mph in the morning becoming light.

Friday Night...Mostly cloudy. Lows 15 to 20 below.

Dogs in Snow II

Every day we go out to play, snow or no snow, cold or no cold. It's been unseasonably warm here, rarely getting below 20 degrees! We've had a few bouts of zero temps, but mostly at night and mostly when we would not be outside playing.

It's not as dark outside as it looks in these pictures. It was overcast when we were out, giving a nice, diffuse-light situation. Unfortunately my camera is old and has odd ideas about how much light is enough for picture-taking. It used to be cool, I mean, two whole megapixels! Nowadays cameras in the same price-range (it cost me $300 or so years ago) have six or seven megapixels. The flash is wimpy, and it's very slow. I haven't included all the butt-shots I took of Sofia as she dashed past me. The nice thing about digital cameras is that when you get crap shots, you just delete them.

Be sure to click on the pictures to see them full-sized. It's hard to really see what's what in the thumbnails.

Let's play!

Sofia: Mom, what are you doing?

Come and get me, Sofie!

Whoa! Big teeth!

Three toys in the yard and what does he play with?

 

Neener neener! I got the stick!

 

Bwahahahaha

Ole: Silently the Tiger in the Jungle crouches, eyes fixed on his prey...

ARF!

SSPROINGG!

And so on...
The strange ghostlike effects are my forgetting to hold my breath while I take pictures. :o)

Those Smart Birds

This little fella knows what he's going to find when he goes into the store. But notice, he takes a second, looks around, hmmmmmm, Cheetos or Onyums today? And goes with Cheetos (a good choice, in my book) and toodles off.

There is a wonderful show on Nature all about Ravens. An ice fisherman kept losing his catch and bait and couldn't figure out why. One day he hid and watched his line. After a while a raven flew down, took the line in his beak and pulled it out of the water, then ate the bait.  Later, experiments were done and ravens easily learned to pull up strings that had food tied on them. They didn't do this just by backing up. They'd pull, then hold the slack with their feet, then pull up some more until the prize was within their grasp.