kadmium

It’s been snowing for three days straight. We’re already up to 60” for the year, and our normal yearly average is about 70”. I’ve shoveled my driveway five times in the last three days. The berms beside it are about 5’ tall. This coming weekend, I’ll have to dig a trench in my front yard to move the berms so that I can continue to clear the driveway. I might actually have to break down an pay someone with a snowblower to clear some of it for me.

On the plus side, we have enough snow in the back yard to build a snowshelter.

We went camping at Hope over Memorial Day weekend. I took Friday off and after dropping Auggie at the boarding kennel (he’s gotten too old and slow for four days of camping), we high-tailed it for the Porcupine Campground, hoping to get there in time to grab two campsites. The extra site was for some friends who would be coming down on Saturday morning. We got lucky and got the last two adjoining sites.

I know because Saturday I spent four hours raking the backyard. I didn’t do a very good job last fall and we ended up with a bunch a leaves still on the ground when the snow finally got here, which in itself is a testament to my laziness. I had until December to get the leaves up and I still didn’t. Add to that all the blowdown from the big windstorm a few weeks ago, and there was just a lot of stuff to pick up. And I still have to do the front yard.

The other way we know it’s spring is when the merlins show up and chase off the magpies. They got here on Saturday morning and everyone in the neighborhood noticed it. Later in the summer, the adult merlins will set up an impressive aerial defense perimeter to keep the magpies at bay while the fledgling merlins learn to fly. I’ve tried to get good pictures of these birds for the last three years, but they’re really fast and they tend to stay up near the tops of the really tall (30-40 feet) pines in the area.

We had a little windfall last week. Katie’s boss had reserved one of Alaska’s public use cabins for Friday and Saturday, but was unable to use it, so he offered it to us. We weren’t able to get out of town on Friday due to some packing and dog issues, but by Saturday morning, we had Auggie boarded, packs loaded, Lola situated in the back of the truck and were headed down the Seward Highway for Cooper Landing.

I forgot to make note of it on the day it happened this year, but I think it was last Thursday.

There’s one day every spring where the light situation suddenly up-ends itself and it no longer seems dark all the time. It has to do with when we walk the dogs in the morning, which is usually around 7:00. You trudge along through January and February, just about sick of walking to the park and back in the pitch black, then one day you’re walking to the park in the gray light of pre-dawn and miraculously the next day you’re walking in (comparative) broad daylight.

It’s weird, but what’s even weirder is that it (the light situation) doesn’t bother me in the least anymore.

Well, okay. So two days after that last post, it started snowing. And it snowed for a while. We’ve gotten about 6 inches in the last couple of days, and everyone is happy. Especially Lola. She likes to just go out and sit in the snow. I think she would stay out there all day if she wasn’t so attached to our company.

The snow makes things look so much better, all white and sparkly. But I think my favorite thing about the snow is that it makes everything so quiet. All the traffic from the big street a couple of blocks up gets muffled; car doors don’ slam, they thud softly; our voices don’t echo off the houses when we’re walking through the neighborhood. Everything seems much calmer.

So tomorrow Dad and I leave on our Antarctica excursion. I’ve been so swamped at work that I’ve barely had time to think about it, so I’ve been packing like a fiend all night, trying to find the right combination of clothes and gear to get me through 12 days on a boat and tromping around the Antarctic Peninsula in summer. And trying to keep it to one checked bag and one carry-on. It’s going to be close.

Everybody have fun while we’re gone. Penguins all around when we get back!

This winter just isn’t right.

I should be avoiding shovelling the driveway right now, putting the Old Senator into his winter get-up for walks, and leaving work early to go skiing.

Instead we’ve got our normal nineteen hours of dark, but this year it’s unmitigated by the moon shining off the pretty white snow. Instead we&#8217ve got slushy streets, nasty streets that occasionally freeze over into unwalkable ice rinks by morning. Instead we’ve got dimwitted politicians who can’t wait to give away money for more damn oil exploration when that money could be going to tax breaks to encourage people to buy something besides 10 mpg SUVs. (Oops. Drifting.)

Please think snowy thoughts for us.

Lola still has trouble resisting the urge to chase moose when she sees them outside, although she has gotten a little better. If she’s on-leash, she’ll pull pretty hard for a second, but eventually she’ll stop.

Well, today she got nose to nose with a moose and didn’t even bark. Okay, she barked at first, but I told to stop and she did, then she just sat there staring at it. Yeah, there was a window between them, but still, it makes for a great picture:

Auggie seemed pretty disinterested in the whole thing, althought Naboo came to take a quick look:

We’ve elected a governor who I just can’t stand. Every time I see him, he makes me think of a slightly tipsy, just-becoming-belligerent frat boy.

I believe he was elected primarily because he promised he wouldn’t institute an income tax, wouldn’t allow the Permanent Fund to be touched, and would build a bunch of new roads. He never once revealed any details about how he would accomplish all this. All he ever said was that he was going to encourage development, meaning natural resources development, which means oil, gas, timber, and mining.

The Permanent Fund Dividend is a golden calf and Alaskans pay no state tax of any kind. No state sales tax, no state property tax, no income tax. (Some localities have a small sales tax, and all localities have some sort of property tax.) Alaskans seem

Fran Ulmer (Democrat) and Diane Benson (Green) both acknowledged that state services have been on the downturn for years, and that the Permanent Fund can no longer carry the state; that there would have to be some sort of tax program instituted. You would have thought they said we could turn the state around by eating babies.

Murkowski (and his running partner Loren Leman) ran around the state promising that there would not be a need for any new taxes and that the PFD would be protected — that our free ride would continue. Sound familiar? Bush the Elder promised no new taxes and had to eat those words, GW gave everyone a “tax rebate” that was nothing more than a sham loan.

I’m going on record here saying that by the end of Murkowski’s term as governor, Alaska will have some sort of state tax program.

For those of you wondering, we missed the big earthquake. We were still in San Francisco (more on that later), of all the ironies. According to our friends it was quite an event, though.

If you get a chance, go see this movie. It’s three hours long, has an all-Inuit cast, and it’s in Inuktitut with English subtitles. And it’s great.

The production company, Lot 47, also has a site.

On Tuesday, termination dust appeared on the Chugach Mountains. Last night I had to wear a sweater and a jacket when I walked Auggie.

I took this last night while Katie and I were walking the dogs. Looking southwest over Cook Inlet, toward Fire Island. (Click on the image for a 480 × 640 pixel version.)

Suddenly it’s dark in the morning when we get up. The sun isn’t high in the sky by the time I get to work. We only have thirteen hours of daylight today, and it&#8217s decreasing by about five minutes a day. The temperature of our morning walk now ranges from 40 to 50 degrees. The birch trees are suddenly half brown and the leaves are falling – all in the space of a couple of days. It happens so quickly. Just last week it was summer.

Friday night was a good class. The class was getting friendly with each other and talking pretty openly about things. Most of the class had some sort of Native Alaskan background. I think there were two white guys (including me), and one black guy. Everyone else was either native or part-native. I told the class about a dream that I had the night before where I took a Bad Man mask and a Good Man mask and split them both between the upper lip and nose, then used the halves as drawer handles on a two-drawer dresser. (The idea being that when the drawers were closed, the masks would be whole, one on each side of the dresser.) I was kind of embarassed after I said it, because it suddenly occured to me that it might be offensive. These masks are considered a very important part of the native culture and you don’t monkey around with the traditional ones lightly — using them as drawer pulls would pretty much qualify as “not traditional”. Then one of the native women said, “Oh, sure. It’s always the white guys who have the good dreams!” and started laughing.

No class on Monday because of the snow (we’re going to make it up on Saturday), and I’ve been too busy to get back and update, so here ya go.

My mask now looks like a mask. I’m starting to think about what decoration I might put on it. Traditionally Bad Man/Good Man isn’t painted like some other masks, but it does have feathers or hair attached to it. I’m thinking about some non-traditional attachments, like bolts and wires, but I’m not sure yet.

Oh, and pictures of the mask after Class 6 and Class 7. The earlier pictures will be posted after I send the film in.

A two-wheel drive mini-truck is actually worse than useless in deep snow, and because the city hasn’t gotten to our neighborhood with the big plows yet, I walked to work this morning. Because I am obsessive about my new toy (the digital camera), I took it with me.

Then this evening, I used my mother-in-law’s 4 wheel drive Honda CR-V to drive to my mask carving class. It was canceled (yes, I called ahead, but nobody answered the phone, which was a pretty good sign that nobody was there, but heck — I had a car that could make the drive …). On my way back home, I was heading due west and saw the most amazing sunset.

Here are today’s photos. There will probably be more tomorrow.

Man. I’ve never seen this much snow at one time in my life. The airport (which is only a couple of miles away as the raven flies) has recorded 28”. I’m pretty sure we got more than that.

Here are some pictures.

Luckily, we bought a digital camera yesterday, so I’m able to upload pictures tonight! We got an Olympus D-510 Zoom. All the reviews that I read called it a good entry- to mid-level camera, and so far I&#8217m tickled with it. It even shoots QuickTime movies. (Of course, this also means pictures of the mask in progress from now on.)

August 14 was a fine Saturday morning and we were up really early for some reason. It was something like 7:00; I have no idea at this point why we were up so early on a Saturday, but we were. Katie was on the phone with her mom when suddenly the dogs started snorting and running back and forth through the house. This usually means somebody is driving into the cul-de-sac or up the alley behind the house, but we already had our paper, so it wasn’t that.