Sorry it's been so long, winter update

So, I know it's been a long long time since I posted on here, sorry. Hopefully life is calming down and I will be able to do this more. I have noticed I have  a tendency to post more when I am living in a new place. This August I moved down to Homer Alaska, and have some fun pics to share, so I'm more inclined to post again. Here's a quick update about our winter. We had record snowfalls, about 144 inches. It was incredible, and I felt really incredible fortunate to live in a place where the snow was plowed for me. It was a lot of snow, as evidenced by this picture:

There was so much snow, it was above your head, so if you fell you had to literally swim across the snow to get to firm footing. I got skiis for Christmas this year, and had a blast cross country skiing with friends. There are a lot of wonderful groomed trails free to use in the community. Tsalteshi trails are my most favorite. I'm not good on the hills, still trying to master them. Tsalteshi is not too far from the dump, which results in a lot of eagles in certain sections. Not sure if you can see them well in this picture, but there are about 20 eagles in the trees here

I also got to see the ceremonial start of the iditarod in Anchorage. It was my first time, and it was pretty neat to see. They had downtown closed off so that the dogs could run:

Fur Rondy also takes place during this time. There's the running with the reindeer, which I didn't make it to see, but there were some other events that were fun to see, including a fur auction where trappers bring their pelts in to be sold:

And an Inuit Blanket Toss (mis-named in that they use skins rather than a blanket).

We stayed in a vacation-rental in Girdwood, a ski town close to Anchorage that weekend. Here's another shot to see just how much snow there was at that point:

I'm sorry it's been so long since I posted. I realized I hadn't loaded the pictures from my camera to my computer for about seven months, and that as a result, I hadn't updated this blog. I will work to rectify that!

Radio Show!

So I think I mentioned before, but one of the highlights of my year last year was becoming a volunteer dj at our local NPR station and doing a music show with my friend Dan. We both really love music, and get excited about sharing it with others, and so it's been a really fun thing to do. The show is called Musicology, and each week we choose a theme, and then pick songs based on that theme. It took us a long time to figure out how to record our shows, which I really regret, because there were some phenomenal shows that went unrecorded. Anyway, we have figured it out, and created a blog so friends and family can stream the show and listen to it whenever they want.

You can find it at:

http://musicakology.wordpress.com/

We air every other Tuesday for 2 hours, and will try to get new shows online as soon as we can after- it takes a while to load 2 hours worth of media online with the slow slow internet up here in Alaska! It's been a ton of fun though!

Winter 2011

I have very little to post for winter 2011. It's been quiet so far. For Thanksgiving, I went to a friend's cabin and we had nachos. I did make grandma's dressing and pumpkin pie though, because those are my Thanksgiving favorites. I didn't go home for Christmas this year, needed to save up my money. It was a quiet two weeks with Mr. Darcy and me, but I have incredible friends, and got out and spent time with friends every day. For Christmas we continued the tradition and again had nachos, and watched the Packers of course. It was a nice quiet time, and it made me so appreciate the incredible friends I have up here.

Fall 2011

Fall 2o11:

I covered a maternity leave in Homer this fall, so I was down there most Fridays. It was really nice to get paid to drive down to Homer. I have good friends there, and Homer always has so many more fun things happening than Kenai does. Casey and Lenny were two of my favorites, and I stayed with Casey to spread out the time in Homer and have less driving each day:


One of our favorite Homer activities were the wine tastings at the Homestead- good food and wine is always fun- we even tried pate for the first time, one bite was enough for me:

I never stayed in Homer too long though, cause Mr. D was always waiting for me, and with his diet, he would follow me around purring from the moment I got home, hoping for some extra food:

Halloween in Homer (this sign fell over, and I'm not sure if you can see, but there are witch feet sticking up from under it):


We had some incredibly strong wind storms this fall, that resulted in a lot of lost power. The first time we lost power, a bunch of friends got together and we played cards by candlelight. The next 3 times we lost power, it was just a lot less fun. This tree broke in our driveway from the wind (Tons of trees have fallen from it) and I dragged it off the drivway:

My favorite thing about this fall was starting a radio show with my friend Dan. We called it Muiscology, and it's on Tuesday nights. Each week we choose a theme & play songs based on that theme. This upcoming week the theme is winter songs. We hope to have a way to post digital recordings of our radio show soon, and once that happens, I'll be sure to let you know. Here's Dan in the studio during our first show:

We had a bunch of moose in the yard this fall, I always love seing them!:


Creepy stack of moose legs that sat on a neighbor's driveway for months, completely untouched:

Blog Fail 2011

It was pointed out to me over Christmas that I had failed to post any blogs pretty much all year this year. I'm not sure why exactly I stopped posting, I realized I hadn't taken many pictures this year, which is likely a big part of it, since keeping this blog going is mainly so that my parents can see what's going on up here. I guess some of the novelty might have worn off being up here a while, but there were still some good things to see this year, so I am going to try to do a quick survey of the remaining part of 2011 a year late to try to make up for it!

Bear print in our yard:

Homer & Time Bandit, from the Deadliest Catch:

Our friend house-sat a really really odd house, and I couldn't help but take a few pictures- this staircase is filled with heads, only a few were captured in the picture. And the gun rack made out of feet was pretty interesting....

Every year, my friends have an annual burning of faces. They get play props that contain faces that are no longer being used, and we burn them on the Kenai beach. It was kinda cold, but the props burned really nicely, and the fire was warm:

In June I was up in Anchorage for a follow-up visit with my surgeon, and I stopped by the Anchorage museum, there was a wooly mammoth exhibit:

One of the few hikes I had time to go on this summer:

Worst smell of my life: a black bear Josh killed & left in the garage for 3 days... sometimes even now I still can smell it:

Porcupine creeper peeking in the basement window:


Mr Darcy was diagnosed with diabetes in July. It was a rough time, but cats can sometimes heal and not be diabetic anymore, so we did a strict regimine with expensive insulin and diabetic food, and he got better really quickly; so much better that he had to go on a diet as well. Giving him insulin shots was easy, but testing his blood levels was tough, I needed to wrap him up in towel:

I worked at Custom Seafood again this summer. There was a record red run, which was incredible, and filled the entire cooler with fish for days- we worked really long hours, and more fish came in than we could handle, we were way past capacity. Lisa, the owner's partner Matt is an incredible taxidermist- this was the new addition to the front area:


Some huge kings came in this year- I can't imagine getting my hand anywhere near them, they're so big, and the teeth are so creepy how they go all the way down their throat:

The cooler where fish first goes once recieved, was filled to the ceiling during the peak of the red runs- we ran out of bins to put them in, and space:


My roommate Josh has a supercub, a little 2-seater airplane. On the few times that our schedules matched up, we flew across the inlet. Those flights were some of the highlights of my summer. I went fishing only once this summer, when the red run was winding down, and the silvers were just starting across the inlet. We flew across and I caught my limit of silvers, they are really fun to catch, they fight a lot on the line. We brought them back and smoked them, because silvers are better smoked than fresh, they smell fishy when you cook them. It was a ton of fun, and the best part was not seeing another person on the river the whole time.


Flying across the inlet near the glaciers & mountains:

At the very end of summer in August, the weekend before school started, Lucero, one of my most favorite bands, came and played in Girdwood. A bunch of friends came up with me, and we had a blast, it was so so good to see live music again! Hanging in Girdwood:

Lucero! Lucero! Lucero!