I've been waiting....

Not just for Mona to arrive in 8 days, but for this to show up on the forecast.

afternoon pickme up

stolen from Sjona....me encanta.

why my husband might die in his sleep tonight.

it is dark out when i wake up now. while i like it on one hand because i can sleep past 4 am without waking up, the dark and cold mean i do not want to get out of bed. i swapped out the beautiful quilts for a qualifill comforter this weekend--another month or two and i will add the Chilean wool blanked i acquired almost a decade ago on Chiloe.

this morning, we did the dog/shower shuffle. i take the dog out while adam jumps in the shower--he's the slower of us, so he has to go first. i stumbled towards the lights, flipping on every light in the house i could find, and then wandered over to stare at the temperature gauge. it is remote sensored to outside, so i know what temperature it is by number and because the little man puts on more or less clothes depending on how warm it is out. 37F. i shuffled to the closet and found my parka. Neah spazzed out, chasing something imaginary---might have been a vole, but i didn't see it--and smelling the frost. yup, first frosting. i remember thinking how frost meant freezing and 37 wasn't freezing, but with a coffee deprived brain all that thinking sounds a lot like COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD and Crunchy.

i dutifully informed Adam it was 37 outside when he emerged from the steamy bathroom. But, when i got out he clarified---it wasn't 37, he said.....it was 31 and i should have put my glasses on. i almost cried, but responded with---how the did we get somewhere where it is below freezing in September??? to which, let me preface by saying i managed not to scream in response, adam retorted, "no idea...i wanted to move to Florida."

ARGGGGGGGGGGGGH. Grrrr. Hissss.

40F....

happy friday.when we were off on that camping trip, i took a bunch of pictures of weird mushrooms....and today is the day you get to see the one that looks like a cracked egg.

Weeping egg mushroom



this morning was a whomping 40 degrees at our little apartment. i should probably remember that the next time i pull on my hoodie over my t-shirt, slide feet into flip flops and head out the door to convince the dog to do her business and not to try to play or eat the leash at 745 in the morning.  Let's be real though, the coffee hasn't worked its magic at that time of morning and i, therefore, cannot be held accountable for whatever stupidity ensues. also, for the record, i haven't broken out the winter jacket yet, just the vest....and i've only worn that once.



tastes like pig ear?

also, in tribute to football season, neah tried to bite the football. alas, her mouth isn't big enough. adam did rescue it before she managed to remove the laces....she was working hard on them.  it bounces and moves differently than her tennis or baseballs....so it took some getting used to.

And last but not least is the start of dinner the other night...quinoa, chard, and my favorite hand towel. while one of the ladies i work with will ACTUALLY be making moose in the kitchen (slicing up a kill from last weekend) i will stick with the moose/mess theme on the hand towel.

two weeks and one day

in two weeks and one day i get to do this again:

I am beyond excited that Mona is coming to visit for the long weekend. I cannot wait to squeeze her, hear about all her adventures, and watch West Wing. We will go walking, not hiking, sit in yummy restaurants and laze about.

In other news, i think i am the dog's problem. when Adam drops her off at day camp, she just whines and acts sad he is leaving her. when i drop her off all hell breaks loose and she barks like a nutjob.

also in other news, when it is like 47 F in the morning and i go out in my hoodie with wonder dog, i'm not actually cold. i take her out in the morning because i am scared of the dark...i have no idea why....and refuse to take her out at night. about the cold thing--i'm not sure if that means i'm slowly adapting to anchorage or if i have a really good hoodie or if the part of my body that acknowledges cold has just thrown in the towel out of frusteration at the permanent state of affairs.



Termination Dust

"Termination Dust" is an Alaskan phrase for the first time the snow falls on the mountains....terminating summer (and effectively for me, fall) and announcing the beginning of snow tires and winter. my fearless co-workers gave me advice today on how to not get killed driving the first time it snows and it sticks (expected in roughly a month). per ususal, i stole the shot from the local webcams at borealisbroadband.net. Here's what to do, click on the photo so it becomes giant and look at the mountains for the "dust".

hello, fall. now go away.

When Anna and I were little, sometimes in the fall we would go driving in the Appalachain mountains with Bob and Lissa to see the leaves. Beautiful oranges, reds, yellows and greens in the Great Smoky Mountain mist. the leaves are one of the things i miss most about the east coast. it was like someone's paint brush exploded and covered the world in rich colors.

In the last two weeks, the area around anchorage has completely changed colors. it went from a lovely, rich green to a shade i would rather not admit is yellow and falling off. yup. fall comes the second week of September and stays for about two weeks. this time next month, there should be snow. afterall, we are above the 60th and snowtires are legal again.

This is the webcam from between our house and my office. there are three important things about this photo.

1. at about 3 o clock, there is a drive through----it's a 24 hour doughnut place.
2. this is the start of rush hour. oooooh the traffic. (evil cackle thinking of other's traffic)
3. if you make it big you can see all the leaves are turning.

habitat to call our own.

One day, neah, adam and i will have a home. until then, i will spend free moments looking for pictures of homes i love and dreaming of winning the lottery. here's today's collection:



68 mil anyone?

bali?



heaven

 

a bear-tale.

You know the saying about something being a fish tale...you know, it was THISSSSSS big (with arms dramatically outstretched). so forget fishtales, this is Alaska!!  Let's change that to a bear-tale.

This week was my last Ruhi Book 8 Unit 1 class. It has been a real joy both to me and to Adam who gets to go hiking the night I am at class. He jokingly calls it God-class, but really, we both get to do magic for our souls---me through Ruhi and him through nature.

So this week i get home at 930, its dark outside and there's no sign of adam, neah or matt. i know they've gone to an area that's supposed to be closed because of a bear running over some guy (literally...not maiming) a couple weeks ago. when they finally appear at like 1015, they start telling me in excited voices how neah chased off two bears with her ferocious barking. i asked, "seriously?" like 8 times before they finally admitted that no, in fact, they didn't see any bears, although she did bark at some phantom in the bush that could have been a bear. or it could have been nothing. with her both are about equally plausible.

gullable, folks.  also, you would think i should have figured out when my spouse is not speaking the full truth....gullable.

Booties, bike, and a bear??

Sadly, this is going to be epically less dramatic than watching her prance, highstepping down the stairs. Here's Neah's first time running in the booties with the bike. Adam only had to run over her a couple times today ;) It does give you a good idea of the pulling that caused those damn blisters.

Oh, and the crazy neighbor downstairs says there was a good sized black bear in the back yard two days ago.....

pawgress report.

Here's Neah's Day Camp Report card:



Too bad Domino (her friend from last week, too) is the world's most slobbery English Sheep Dog EVER. Also, apparently Neah dominated the slide...because there's a window to the kitchen and she wanted attention from the humans.

two

my weekend can be summed up in two pictures:

This is mostly what we did all weekend. The boys stuck things in the fire to see if they would burn. We learned that pennies evaporate, bottles melt, so do marbles, and bottle caps don't change. Then they argued about who messed up the fire and tried to find ways to dry out damp wood.



Believe it not, within three minutes of getting her bone, the dog began to dig and promptly buried it. I had never seen a dog actually do that....god only knows where she learned it. But instinct is everything, so there was a massive pit that had to be filled in at the end of the weekend from repeated bone protecting.

southernisms

it may surprise those of you who didn't know me as a child or adolescent to discover i have a rather thick southern accent. it creeps up at inopportune times like when i lose my voice, am terribly sleepy or have been yelling at concerts. it is thick. my whole cadence changes and i sound like an entirely different person.

the first time (apart from "fixin to", numbers, southern states and naming single objects at a time) where i noticed i had picked up a weird word habit because of the accent was grilled cheese sandwiches---which until i was 13 i thought were GIRL-Led cheeses because little girls ate them. in my accent it always came out GRLLED cheese....so i never knew where the I went. ah the embarassement of high school lunches.

the monotone bland accent nonsense from nowadays was cultivated over years of practice at boarding school, where i systematically taught myself to speak without the accent--it drove my bff crazy. most of the time, i have no problem jumping back and forth between the two (southern and bland) and can occasionally throw in a third that sounds like english is my second language. i speak spanish with a chilean accent, depsite my best efforts otherwise.

anyways, this weekend i discovered another of my southernisms, which i am documenting here to prove i was right. our campsite (see blog posts later this week) was covered in granddaddy long-legged spiders. of course, when i called them that Adam and Matt immediately announced i had the name wrong and that they were called daddy long legs. nor did they let me live it down for three days.

because i do not like being wrong, i looked it up.

Tahdow.

No. I didn't get it wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pholcidae and http://www.chattanoogan.com/articles/article_130290.asp both agree with my name choice. so there.

how to embarrass your pet 101

Heh. Adam and I were DYING laughing in pet smart when we first put them on her. Here's to my dressage dog.

first day of day camp

this morning i got up, went through the morning routine and hustled neah out to the car, bringing along some food and treats. she clearly thought i had lost my mind since she never goes anywhere this early. we walked into pet smart where neah anxiously relieved herself on the floor (yeah, great way to start the morning). she then proceeded to bark and shy away from the people at puppy day camp. finally, the nice girl there asked if she was better when i wasn't around--that they had another dog who is overprotective of its "father", but is fine as soon as dad goes away. i replied i didn't actually know, but i was more than willing to wander away.


forgive the crummy phone picture.


i headed up the aisle and the barking stopped. lo and behold, as soon as i was out of sight neah the ferocious turned into neah the love bug, kissing the pet smart people and wanting to be petted. it seems I am the problem.

i called (like all anxious pet parents) to check up on her a couple hours later. They said she was busy herding an english sheepdog, wrestling and playing and doing great.

i figure this feeling must be just the slightest akin to all those parent friends of mine who dropped their children off for the first day at school---you hope they do well, make friends and don't pee on the wrong things. Often they freak out until mom dissappears, then no worries.

anyone want to share their first day of preschool stories to make me feel less crazy?