As I start to write this (it won’t be finished in one night) I think of several things.  The first is that the clock on the computer says 9:54pm and I can see a beautiful pink-orange-yellow sunset on the horizon.  The sun has returned.

 The second thing I think about is that it’s still cold!  I must admit that it has been above zero when I leave the house in the morning, but I don’t think the high has reached 20 degrees in a long time.  And the wind howls!  I went for a ski yesterday and I swear that the wind was blowing me along when I tried to stand still.  The sheer ice crust on the top of the tundra helped a little.  I no longer look at what the Weather Channel app says the wind-chill is because I just don’t care.  I can’t do anything about it but put on long underwear and make sure my face is covered when I go outside.

I’ve learned a few things here in the 49^th state.  Wool is my friend.  I had on a pair of very cute socks the other day.  I had to change them out for a pair of wool ones when I came home for lunch because my feet were just too cold.  Even with the space heater in my office, I still had frigid toes.  A thin wool shirt under my work clothes is an asset.  Except for our trip to Hawaii, I haven’t gone without 2 shirts since sometime last fall.

We have also learned to watch the ravens.  The ravens do not migrate, but stay in the cold tundra year round.  They get really puffy and fat, but don’t sit very still.  They seem to live off to the south because every morning they fly in groups of 3 to 10 and head north to the dump.  We took the snow machine out near the dump and there the ravens were in vast numerous, very loud and cack-y.  They eat their fill and in the evening, they fly back south.  Even when it’s frigidly cold, they still make the daily trip to their abundant food source.  Not all ravens go to the dump—some hang out near the dumpsters.  We don’t have curbside garbage pick up so we take the trash to one of the many dumpsters around town.  There are 3 industrial sized and one regular sized one in our neighborhood.  I forgot to stop by the dumpster with our garbage before work one day and when I got to the truck at the end of the day, the ravens had indulged in our trash and it was strewn all over the parking lot.  Of course, I was embarrassed and got in the truck as quickly as I could so no one would notice (yah right!).  The frozen banana peel was still stuck to the ground several days later.

Have I ever mentioned the post office?  It’s a very large building that handles a lot of mail.  Most of the mail order packages end up at the post office.  We do have UPS and FedEx, but only for deliveries, not for send outs.  The post office puts a “yellow slip” in your box when you have a package.  It’s like Christmas sometimes when one is eagerly awaiting a package from Amazon and the yellow slip is in the box.  The yellow slips are 8x11 card stock cut in half and will have your box number, the date the package arrived, and I think the number ID of the person who scanned the package in.  Once you get the yellow slip, you have to go stand in line and turn the slip to get your package (usually there only one USPS employee at the counter).  I'm always dismayed when I’m the next in line and then 15 people come in behind me all with yellow slips.  The USPS counter person takes ALL the slips at once and then takes what looks like a laundry cart to go retrieve the packages.  Sometimes I think they are gone for 20 minutes although I doubt it’s ever been that long.  I’ve had to carry out 3 big boxes trying not to trip as I go down the steps.  We don’t have to pay for our post office box though.  The federal government has a “fee exempt” category for people like us that live somewhere that doesn’t offer mail delivery to the house.  Maybe the new president will cut funding for that too.

We had the pleasure of traveling to Hawaii in late February.  Alex and I attended a conference and Brad got to hang out with Uncle Ben who lives in Honolulu.  We were in Maui, which I’ve decided is a very pretty place.  There are too many people though.  I would not recommend staying a the Westin, or any other huge resort for that matter—over priced food, small rooms, AND they charge you to use a beach chair!  I had the pool boy come take away my chair our last day there.  I didn’t steal it because it was broken and was laying discarded in the bushes.  Nonetheless, the pool boy made me give up the luxury of the plastic chair.  I had a few choice words for him and he left saying he was sorry.  My response was that he wasn’t really sorry because if he was, he’d let me keep the damn chair!

The "Blowhole"

Someone had too much activity . . .

I didn't know Pilot bread was sold anywhere else.

We had a rental car (a Hyundai in honor of my dad) and drove around a lot of the island.  Alex took great pleasure driving on the one lane road, which abutted the cliffs and had no guardrail.  It’s a good thing there is no ice there.  The rocks and landscape were really interesting and frequently changed.  The rocks were volcanic and then appeared sedimentary then looked like conglomerate then looked like something from under the sea.  We did take a lot of pictures, but they never do justice to what one can see with the eye.  Ben joined us for 4 days and assures me he had a good time.  I think he’s bluffing, but I appreciated that he spent time with Brad when Alex and I were sitting in a conference room that was cold and musty smelling.  Alex and I also had the opportunity to dive one afternoon, which was very cool.  The fish and turtles were abundant, but the most amazing thing was that we could hear the whales talking to each other.  We saw the whales when we took an evening trip on a catamaran, but hearing them was so much more enjoyable.

Who wastes time playing on a device in Hawaii???

Aquarium in Maui

Yes, those are real flower leis

 Brad has become the little joiner.  He continues in Judo and swimming and has now taken up club wrestling.  Kids of all ages can wrestle and I think the funniest ones are the kids that are about 3 ½ feet tall.  They grapple and throw each other.  The Bethel high school wrestling team, which consists of boys and girls, is quite good and has won state several times.  (The high school basketball teams are good too and both boys and girls made it to state again this year.)  Brad has a practice of some kind every evening and had begun to eat like the boy he is.  I may have to find a moose to shoot so I can feed him.  I have been swimming at 0600 on Mondays and Fridays for the past 3 months.  I can’t say that I’m a better swimmer, but being in the pool allows me to eat extra chocolate as a reward for getting up so early.  

We have had the pleasure of having snow on the ground this winter.  Apparently, the last two winters have been very brown.  I don’t think it’s snowed in over a month, and the snow that is left is mostly ice and hard packed, but it’s still white.  It makes things so much brighter.  Alex actually fired up the snow blower a couple of times, mostly because the wind caused big drifts.  We have also had the opportunity to use the expensive snow machine that was purchased last fall.  Alex has been as far as 60 miles from home and Brad and I have gone 40.  We have all these mountains on the horizon and last weekend, we came quite close to some of them.  The snow is almost gone in some areas, but the snow machine trail is hard packed and still traversable.  

The trail goes by the dump in a village

Eagles looking for food at the dump

We picked Brad up from school on the snow machine

Russian Orthodox church.  Most villages have one.

Lunch along the trail

The river is still very frozen.  There is the Kuskokwim Ice Classic (https://www.facebook.com/kuskokwimiceclassic/ and http://iceclassic.org/cam/ ) every year.  This allows people to buy tickets and guess when the official break up of the river will happen.  Jackpot is $12,500 this year, so I will be buying my tickets!  Since I have not been here for the break up before, what I know is based on what I’ve been told.  A huge tripod is built and painted and set up on the river.  It is somehow rigged to a wire and a camera and when the ice starts to thaw, the tripod has to move 100 feet in order to have break up be official.  After being in the middle of the frozen river with about a quarter of a mile of ice on either side of me, I realized that there is a lot of frozen water.  I think seeing, hearing, and watching the ice float down to the ocean will be fascinating.

There are many traditions in Bethel.  There’s the K300 dog sled race.  This weekend is the Cama-i (pronounced “Cha-my”) Dance Festival (will have pictures up soon).  There’s a children’s actor’s guild that puts on plays every few years.  And then there’s the Bethel Dog Show.  It happens the same weekend as the Westminster Dog Show and it’s quite entertaining.  I took Brad and his friend Elias and we had a good time.  There were different classes of dogs and a winner for each category.  There was an obstacle course and a costume contest.  The best category was the “tundra dog”.  These dogs are the mutts that are the offspring of all the stray dogs.  They sometimes look like labs or a German Sheppard or a husky, but they all seem to have legs that are only 4 inches long.  The curse of the tundra dog is to have very short legs.  There is a vet that comes about once a month and he will often spay and neuter dogs for free because there is an abundance of strays.  

The dog Brad was rooting for won.  Eilas was bummed.

 We took a long weekend and ventured into Anchorage to ski.  There is a nice resort in the mountains called Alyeska.  I decided that I hated it, despite the fact that they had a turn down service at night and brought chocolates and water.  Brad and Alex easily and skillfully raced down the blue and black runs and I managed to slide down the hill on my butt occassionally losing a ski.  There is something quite fearful for a 42 year old with very little ski experience to look down a 60-degree hill and expect to be alive at the bottom.  Add to that the fear of being run down by a skier or snowboarder racing by at 45 mph and it results in a tear-laden frustrating experience.  So Alex got me an appointment at the spa.

 Before we returned to Bethel, we had to stop at Costco.  We filled our plastic totes with cheap food and had 9 bags/totes when we got to the airport.  One perk of flying Alaska Air is belonging to Club 49, which gives each person 3 checked bags when traveling within the state of Alaska.  That's 450 pounds of stuff we can put on the plane.  We picked up 2 bags of dog food and checked them as they were—no tote required.  The lady at the check in counter had never checked dog food before.  I’ve seen packages of toilet paper and cases of Gatorade as checked luggage on the baggage claim in Bethel.  I took notice of the flight board when we got on the plane because it’s not digital.  It has the old fashioned plastic numbers for the flights and times in and out of Bethel because they are the same every day.  Just like Ford Airport in Iron Mountain (wonder if the new president will take funding away from that).

We have gotten out in the tundra to cross country ski.  It’s hard to do without any tracks to follow, but I’ve managed.  I usually only fall once or twice.  There is a big wide snow machine trail about ¾ mile from our house that we can ski to and then ski on.  We can make about a 4 mile loop and always have our house in view because there are no trees here and the ground is pretty flat.  Sometimes, when skiing seems like too much effort, we just play in the snow.  

The wind blows huge drifts next to the driveway

Using Brad to measure the height of the drift

This has become quite a long blog.  I have not lost my ability to ramble, which is surprising because a lot of people here don’t say much.  Guess I need to say more to make up for it.  It’s nice to have the sunlight back and I am planning on starting some plants from seeds, once they come from Amazon and I get to the post office to pick up my yellow slip.  We have 2 small raised beds in the front yard and I hope to grow beets, carrots, lettuce, any maybe pumpkins.  I hope to have some flowers too.  That will keep us busy for the short summer.  I guess life in Alaska isn’t much different than life anywhere else.

Setting of the full moon

He spent some time out in the frosty air

Lots of STDs here so this was the way to encourage prevention.  The administrative assistant in Alex's clinic made this poster board.

The rainbows on either side of the sun are called sundogs and are seen when it's cold

One little, two little, three little Eskimos.  Four little, five little, six little Eskimos.  Seven little, eight little, nine little Eskimos, all on Alex's sled!

This is overlooking the bar at a restaurant in the Anchorage airport