whispers of winter

the days are getting shorter. the sun sets well before we come home from work and is just barely up as we head out. soon, it won't rise before midday. i have been trying desperately to generate the motivation to get up early and head to the gym for an early morning, anti-arm flab, workout and sauna before starting work. needless to say, this is proving tricky.

more importantly, it appears winter is upon us because everyone is driving like idiots--snow tires not on, quick stops fail often.  neah and i were almost hit on our way to the holy day tonight. stopped at a corner facing west and getting ready to turn south, one of the cars coming from the south in the northbound lane (this reminding you of a fifth grade word problem yet) slammed on brakes and in an attempt to not rear end the other cars came careening towards us--only to be stopped (and us saved) by the pole that holds the stoplights about four feet to my right. ugh. dear idiot with the big truck....please please do the speed limit and remember its icy...we'd like to live another day...thanks, EVERYONE.

Been trying out some new recipes....so the roast

is from those adventures. neah was very intrigued---perhaps too intrigued because her tummy doesn't seem to like us tonight. 

It has been nice to have some friends over for dinner and kinect and feel like we are settling into this house. neah has been great about the new people, only barking for a minute or two before warily wandering around until peanut butter pretzels stealthily appear in new hands and the intrusion into her space is forgiven. 

long lost

it seems like ages since i have written something here. i somehow feel like i have let down those of you who follow our adventures through this little blog. in the last couple of weeks people i love have given birth to sons, bought houses, married their lovers, and said goodbye to this world. anchorage had an enormous windstorm (read: cat 1 hurricane) and is now preparing for another tonight.


yet another us picture. i promise, my dress is honestly really cute.


meanwhile, we were in seattle and california soaking up the sun. here's my highlight list, which appropriate photos:

1. we saw a speedo streaker at the mariners game...he leapt onto the field during a boring losing inning, made two stellar laps of the outfield with hefty security guards sprinting after him in his red speedo and orange crocs before the cops threatened to taze him when he reached left field.  He surrendered, placing hands behind his back and accepting the silver bracelets while the announcer blared the jail time and fine amounts to the wild cheers of thousands. 
2. Shane and Lisa danced their way out of their own reception to the sound of music. adieu, adieu, with the stalwart partiers following and waving from the bottom of the stairs.
3. Devin, Neda, and Ara went to watch the bucking bulls with us at the Ellensburg rodeo--my first. Yee Haw y'all. too bad the ellensburg rodeo is a better fair than the Alaska State one. 
4. The last of the stuff in seattle--including count clockula--shipped for anchorage. My rough guess estimate of the weight turned out to be only 11lbs off. damn. i.am.that.good. and yes, not moving ourselves and coughing up cash---excellent for our marriage.
5. celebrating Adam's Aunt Sandee's birthday for the last time. we lost her the second saturday of our trip after a long and stalwart battle with cancer. her best friend regaled us at her party with stories of their forty years of adventures around the globe. 
6. gondolas are a tansik family vacation must! so, we ride a gondola to the Sterling vineyard in napa valley...a vineyard where you tour its mission style facility and hang out on patios with epic views. (see adam pic for gondola proof).
7. celebrating Emma and Aric's wedding in the sun at the Beltane Ranch in Sonoma. it was so warm--both of soul and temperature. the boys were bowtied out and she play Warren G at the reception. LOVE my girl.  We stayed at this place called the Kenwood Oaks Guest House--amazing. Highly recommend it, it was peaceful, inviting, soothing and had a super comfy bed.
   

Thank you, to all the friends, family, and randoms who made our trip so beautiful, relaxing and full of love.

things, they are a changing

this is the view from the hotel.

i whine. alot. mostly about (adam would insert "everything") travelling more often. On Thursday, we are off to Hood River for a wedding and then up to Port Orchard in WA for Adam's grandpa's 90th birthday. this kicks off a frequent flyer month. at the end of the month we are in seattle and then sonoma for two more weddings and the shipping of contents of a storage unit. there may be a garage sale in there too, depending on how i feel about the contents of the storage unit (not the family stuff, mom, don't freak) here's to bringin.on.the.sun!!

My film camera has film, i have outfits, and neah has a babysitter (love you, matt). most importantly there are plans for a spray tan in place for Thursday so that i am not the goddess of pasty. i know you people all think i am a little dramatic, but even adam--whose favorite refrain has to do with me getting skin cancer from loving the sun--suggested that i think about a tanning bed. no need for a flashlight people...the moon can reflect off me and light ANYTHING. maybe the hotel has lounge chairs--i can sit in the sun and read statutes.

speaking of statutes: the other big news is that i am leaving state service tomorrow (yeah, i worked for the state in case you missed that) to go into private practice doing worker's compensation defense (same thing adam does).  I'm not going to name where i am going here, mostly to protect both me and them from my ramblings. suffice to say, i am not going to have time to blog at work anymore--so, i will have to be better about after hours ramblings. the new gig should be very fast paced, allow me to exercise some actual lawyer muscles, and comes with a view of Mt. Susitna.

fishing

So, it is that time....fishing time in alaska. the king salmon run here this year was really weak---no one knows why, but the reds are running. So, we are off to try and catch our family limit of 35 of these bad boys and 10 flounders. In anticipation of the plentiful harvest, we bought our first smoker!

Our friend Shannon's family has a cabin on the river that she says we can camp at--which sounds like fun. Mostly, i am just hoping the sun holds out so i can tan myself while the boys stand in the cold water with the dipnets. God only knows what Neah will think of the fishies.

This is the Kasilof: 

Single lady weekend?!

my olive oil, herb infused ice cubes for cooking.

adam is running away to Seattle tomorrow for a Bachelor party. I'm not sure what that means for Neah and I other than we are going to have a single ladies weekend---which means, oh honestly, i don't know what it means.

the high here is in the low sixties. this high in seattle is low 80s. adam has already started whining about how hot it is in anticipation.

i'm contemplating painting the upstairs bathroom.

Any other suggestions? Neah doesn't do well on trails, so hiking is kinda out of the question. i already looked at plane ticket prices, which are exorbitant.

zombie apocalypse food, or why is my cupboard full of top ramen??

in the kitchen, i have a can stash--you know, for snowed in, lack of creativity/fresh veggies days. it is one layer of the lazy susan thing. up for debate in this post is not my can stash (kidney beans, refritos, and condensed things made by campbells only come one way people). what is up for discussion are the invaders in my beautiful can layer: the top ramen.

Why oh why is she dedicating an entire post to top ramen? i can hear you asking from here people. the reason is because i feel a strong need to explain that my husband is convinced a zombie apocalypse is upon us following the cannibal things in miami and china. because the zombies are OBVIOUSLY about to eat everyone on planet earth's brains, we--for some reason i can't quite figure out--MUST keep the the top ramen guarded closely. it cannot live in the garage, nor can it be given away even though no one has touched it since it left the pre-zombie Apocalypse emergency food stash in SEATTLE.

For the record, there are lots of sites that tell you what the best foods are. For example:
1. Yahoo http://voices.yahoo.com/how-survive-zombie-apocalypse-food-guide-6353698.html
2. Metafilter: http://ask.metafilter.com/189433/How-much-food-to-survive-the-Zombie-Apocalypse
3. Some site in NY: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/forkintheroad/2012/06/the_gourmets_zo.php

You know what they have in common??

Damn right--not a single one has top ramen on them. (hands on hips, mhhhhmmmmmmmmmmm).

So, help a girl out people...what are acceptable ZA foods that are NOT RAMEN NOODLES.

Fern Gully

For as far back as i can remember, meaning last year, whenever we talked about a garden all Adam said he wanted was ferns. I like ornamental plants, don't get me wrong, but i couldn't figure out the obsession with ferns. I tried going to the source of all knowledge--wiki--which just told me that it's a plant. thanks. that was no help. so i dropped it. clearly, personal tastes in plants are personal tastes in plants--until they invade your backyard.

you see...wait, here's a cute picture for while i tell this story...adam was charged with weed whacking the back yard (read weed patch) ahead of our house warming this past weekend. it was going smoothly until he realized that three little ferns had sprouted in the middle of the weeds. next thing i knew, he had whacked most of the yard and was meticulously pulling the weeds by hand from around the ferns to save them from any potential damage by the weed whacker. After half an hour of delicate precision, i threatened to put up a sign renaming said weed patch "Adam's Fern Gully"

He kinda-sorta-not-really-but-bear-with-me, looks like the character from fern gully, minus the tan:

Neah's House

Just in case anyone had ANY doubt who thinks she owns this house....

not before and after...

i know you are waiting for photos---and i am waiting for a room to be complete, so hold your horses.

this post is a product discussion. yes, brace yourself, there's a new gadget in the house and i think it warrants discussion. for weeks, every time we walked into a store with vacuum cleaners a noise erupted out of adam that reminded me distinctly of moo-ing. it would start low and the longer i ignored it, the greater the intensity with which it's name would be repeated.

Yes. Roomba: 
See, the problem here is that a roomba was not in the budget. that and i was pretty sure that Neah, herder extraordinaire might in fact try to eat it the way she tries to devour the other vacuum cleaners in the house---leaving us with iRobot-pieces.

Adam was determined, however, that the house would clean itself. His folks kindly gifted him the toy of his dreams as our housewarming. Now, by way of some background, let me tell you that if you believe that your animal might be a prolific shedder (read: can't figure out how it's not hairless already) just get all non-carpeted floors. Then you will be sure that a small animal or large winter coat could be made out of the leave-behinds.

Roomba had its work cut out. We finally got rid of all the boxes on Saturday so there was space for it to do its thing. We took our battle stations: adam next to his prize contraption and me as far away as i could get to avoid another injured thumb. He pressed clean and Roomba lept to life.

Neah watched it, and then true to her Aussieness tried to herd it. Thing is, Roomba reinforces herding behavior because if she nips at it, little-Bot changes direction! Finally she decided that she wasn't sure if she liked this thing that moved on its own all the time and started following it around, but hiding behind Adam to watch it. By day two, she just ignored it entirely. Phew.

Roomba's not bad. You definitely have to be in for the long haul---it doesn't clean efficiently, but in the end it gets it done. It has trouble with thick rugs and transition areas--tends to leave behind dirt/hair in the crevasse. Also, it is confused by the base of our bar stools and tends to run up the side of one and get stuck. It does a great job of not falling down the stairs. It does not like dark rugs--thinks they are some kind of void or something, nor does it like air vent grates. Adam loves it. I love anything that doesn't mean i have to vacuum 6 times a week to keep up with the shedding.

paint and moose and paint

My hands are covered in three different colors of paint. Actually, four. Well, actually, i lie---because i did manage to shower before work this morning and scrub off most of it. There is still some unknown white color on my finger nails. Clearly, the trauma of spending three days straight painting has not washed off.

We spent the weekend painting:

1. bamboo forest bedroom
2. teal dining room
3. dark blue accent living room wall
4. light grey-blue bathroom
5. enough touch-ups to walls to kill anyone

Here's the's the problem. Wait, first, here's the moose mama and her brand new twins from our backyard for you to look at while i bitch. They were super cute--she musta just dropped um.

 So, the problem is this, aside from the fact that i have NO expertise in painting and all our walls are strange heights and shapes, the old owners left the color they painted the walls, but not the ceiling. Should be an easy fix right--get some samples, paint little corners, blah blah. Well, here's what i have to say to all you DIY junkies---pffffffffft. I mean that in the nicest possible way. We went and got a million paper samples of the whites, held each up to the ceiling, eliminating all of the creams, grays, etc. We finally found a potential match and headed off to home depot for what must have been the 5th time in two days. They mixed up one of them three dollar containers and we headed back to the house, where i climbed my little ladder and painted in three different places. There's something about the lighting in the house that makes it so that the same color looks completely different in three places in the same room. Strangely, the pure white color i thought we had picked had a strange pinkish/brownish hue to it. Just enough that it looked like a cross between the old wall color and the ceiling. Mostly out of frustration we decided it was close enough. I hopped back in the car for HD round 6--where i insisted that they give me not only a quart of the offending pink/brown/white, but also pure honest to god white. Low and behold when the offensive color came out, it looked NOTHING like the sample. Seriously. So, that left me with THREE (yes i am using screamy capitals on purpose) different whites and i headed off home. Needless to say, i don't think we did find the "perfect" match, but it is close enough that unless i tell you we are playing spot the cover-up, you probably aren't going to notice.

Here's what i learned about painting this weekend:

1. Buy an edger at the start and don't load it heavily with paint.
2. Don't even try to free hand. Seriously.
3. Don't ever color match to a different store--it will result in the loss of half a day's work and you will have to redo the whole thing because the colors will NOT be the same. 
4. Invariably, you are going to get paint EVERYWHERE, including but not limited to floors, hair, face, and dog. 

Before and after photos as soon as we get all the art/pictures/SEA paraphernalia mounted on the walls. 

1. 
   

Adam's eating Adventures...part II

Anyone who knows Adam (feel free to be witnesses and testify to the truth of this post, oh Adam friends) knows that there is just about NOTHING that he does with any sense of urgency. This is ESPECIALLY true when it comes to eating. The quote from last night being "Why does everyone have bills and to go boxes?? I'm still eating!!"


Part of this stems from the fact that he likes to compose each bite of food perfectly. It's been a couple years since i explained the Pho creations, but last night's efforts let me raise the specter again. Generally speaking, each bite of food--regardless of what it is--must contain the perfect proportion of ingredients, must be chewed the requisite 25 times, and must, must, must be pretty.




Hopefully you will forgive that i was ignoring this until close to the end, when i turned to notice that each piece of chicken had a little mushroom laid delicately upon it---waiting to be graced by his chopsticks. It's kinda artistic, no?

Please feel free to share your Adam eating stories as a comment!

Adam's a Lumberjack

I thought i had written a post about laundry---but it seems it might have been a Facebook status update instead. The summary version is that at the end of January, a horrific accident occurred (washing in luke warm water) whereby I inadvertently shrunk what i have been affectionately calling Adam's lumberjack shirts.

These were jackets we got on clearance from Target that were fleecy on the inside and various patterns of plaid on the outside (blue, green, mixed, etc). For weeks, they were all Adam would wear, combined with a camouflage color anti Pebble mine hat and hiking boots.

When i shrunk them, I honestly thought i would be sleeping on the sofa for weeks. Which isn't a bad thing, because he snores, but the "sofa" is a loveseat that even i am too big to sleep comfortably on.

He was actually more ticked off than when the dog ate his favorite hiking boots. Damn you, Target, and your clearance lumberjack shirts.

As an emergency back-up plan, i scoured the internets (yes all of them) and ordered the shirts again, plus an extra one for good measure. Happy Ayyam-i-Ha, babe (Baha'i holiday at the end of Feb). May you long continue looking like a "woodsman," as you like to say. *cough*lumberjack*cough*

This morning, however, Adam arrived to work in his usual state of un-caffeinated confusion. He took his lunch into the break room, placed it in the fridge, and noticed a Paul Bunyan poster on the break room door. My innocent, sweet husband *cough*, decked out in formal attire for a deposition, didn't think about it again until he got to his office, where the same poster was lurking.  Thinking there may be some hi-jinx occuring, Adam trekked out to talk to the women who rule the office.

As they emerged one by one, every female staff member was wearing plaid lumberjack clothes in honor of Adam's usual Friday attire. For the record, I adore these ladies!!!

none of that mushy crap...

My valentines, doing what they love to do most--play outside.

Adam's old.

In honor of Adam's birthday this weekend, here's a list of his loot and two videos of his adventures.
Loot:

1. Snowshoes and accompanying trekking poles
2. Snowboard magazine
3. Hat that turns into a Balaclava
4. Blue Fox t-shirt
5. Dinner out
6. Assorted cards/love from parents, grandparents, and in-laws
7. FB birthday shout outs from far and wide

We were at a bar that is going to have the Anchorage Hells Angels Halloween party. No, i didn't see any bikers while we were there. For the first hour or so, there was blaring country music and the only food i could find was stale popcorn. I was pretty sure that i was in hell. After a round of darts, Adam decided to change up the music---which also livened up the bar quite a bit. This is what happens when Adam and Matt get dancey:

We finally had to flee when the music went back to country and Matt couldn't stop singing along. Dia and I held our heads in shame---feeling the onset of "dog ran off with my ex-wife" headaches.
Big thanks and love again to Dia, Jake and Matt for coming out to play for the birfday!! Much love to Neah, who slept in until 10am on Sunday with us.

An Adam update....

Since a lot of the people who kindly read this blog are originally friends of Sado....this blog is about what he's up to. I know you usually glean this vicariously from what me and the dog are doing....but here's one all about him. Today, he's out in King Salmon...see the map. It is just to the west of the Katmai Reserve (you know, where all the pictures of millions of grizzly bears fishing are taken).
He's at this: http://www.adn.com/2011/10/17/2124678/results-are-due-later-today-for.html

Adam's been working on the Save our Salmon Initiative about Pebble Mine. Today, the ballots will be counted, since out in that Borough all voting is done by mail. And so, he has gone to watch the counting.

While it's pretty cool for him, it means that i get to go to Yogurtland (think Seattle Red Mango) in the airport when i go to pick Adam and Scott up later. a-mah-zing.

in the fields of Tar-Jeh

Once upon a time....in a far away land called Alyeska, there lived a young man. The young man was a handsome fellow, with green eyes, a fetish for Sanuk shoes, and a compulsive need to smell things.

One day the young man and his bashful bride went wandering in the aisles of the field of Tar-Jeh, in search of new cleaning product for their millions of loads of laundry.

As if pulled by a magnet, the young man found himself in front of the natural "green" detergents (you can tell because they put a big green leaf there to make sure you know), compulsively smelling each in turn and demanding that the bashful bride do the same until, after what seemed like the better part of the afternoon, he finally settled on an acceptable scent.

Ladies and Gents, i am honored to introduce Adam, the king of compulsive smelling. Believe me, the only place worse than the detergent aisle is the hand soap aisle.