You know where has frozen over

It just occured to me how this looks oddly like an inferno when, actually, it was minus 48 degrees Fahrenheit. Anyhow, that's ice fog and steam from the University power plant with the sun at it's absolute zenith. Taken while I was sitting in the car but with the window bravely rolled down. Go me! Space heaters, electric blankets and hot chocolate will be gratefully accepted.

Sometimes winter is okay

I'm about to commence complaining about winter, so I thought I'd throw in this picture in order to give a false impression that I can be objective about winter in interior Alaska. But actually I was freezing my butt off on the Chena Flood control project levee when this was taken. I'll grudgingly admit it looked pretty. Well, just before my glasses frosted over and I couldn't see anymore.

WTF Weather

After my last post, whining about the weather, it warmed up enough to take the photo on the left. Then 14 inches of snow landed around my house, from two separate storms. After hours of snow shoveling (I have a really long driveway), when everything looked neat and tidy, we were hit with 40 mile an hour winds. Which blew the snow back onto the driveway. Then the temperatures plunged to 40 below zero. This winter's weather is suffering from extreme mood swings.

Unless you live above, say, the 45th parallel, Alaska's weather is inexplicable. After 30+ years of living here, I still have many WTF moments. I grew up in central California, where every 20 some years it'd get cold enough to snow. If you wanted snow, you drove up to the Sierras. So imagine my surprise to find myself living somewhere where it had to warm up to snow! Somewhere where the higher in altitude you got, the warmer it was. Somewhere where fog could be frozen. Somewhere where, on a truly cold day, you can fling a hot cup of coffee into the air and watch it float back to earth in the form of little, brown snowflakes. After all these years, I'm still bemused.

Baby, it's cold outside

Well, okay, actually it's warming up. Last time I looked it was an amazing 1 degree above zero, which, sadly, is what passes for warm in interior Alaska in mid-January. But it was 35 below zero when I took this photo on Monday. It's a picture of the inside bottom of my front door.

Anyway, the weather got me to thinking about an email I wrote to my sister in January of 2006, on a day when it was 50 below zero. (And I don't mean anything wimpy like that was the wind chill factor. That was the actual temperature.) So I thought I'd post it here, on the off chance someone besides two of my coworkers, who read this out of kindness, might happen upon it and be amused by life at 50 below.

Life at Fifty Below

I get dressed in long underwear and fleece pants, and carry my slacks and shoes in my briefcase. I wrap a scarf around my face, put on my fur ear muffs and my giant down parka with the hood up, and I tighten the fur ruff around my face. I put on my heavy mittens. Hmmm ... then I take off a mitten so I can flip on the porch light and open the door. Then I pull my mitten on with my teeth, because I can't get it back on with the other hand while I'm carrying my briefcase stuffed with my clothes. Then I walk fast to the garage, take my mitten off again so I can unlock the garage door, and I scamper inside.

I back my car out and the thermometer in my car breaks the sound barrier plummeting from 50 above zero to 22 below and then turns to two dashes, because it won't register anything colder than that. Meanwhile the automatic garage door creaks down to about 3 inches above the ground and starts back up again. It doesn't like the cold either. I punch the button on the remote about 7 times and the door finally stays down.

I drive through the ice fog to the University gym parking lot, plug my car in so it'll start at 5 pm and head across campus. After a 5 minute walk at 50 below, my breath has frozen streaks on my glasses and there's frost on the fur of my parka ruff. I walk into the library and the humidity fills in the few clear spaces on my glasses with more frost, so I take them off and stumble blindly to my office where, go figure, I'm having a hot flash ...

... and then at 5 pm, I change back into my fleece pants, stuff my slacks and shoes back into my briefcase, take a deep breath and head back out to my car. I punch the button on my key to unlock the doors, toss my briefcase into the back seat, shut the door and head around to unplug the car. Meanwhile, the electronics in my car, their tiny brains scrambled by the cold, proceed to relock the car doors all on their own. So I unlock them again, toss in the electric cord and shut the door. But the door latches don't like the cold either, so, when I get in and turn the car on, the door open icon lights up and the door open bell, which usually produces a vigorous and repetitive ding, lets out a weak bleat every 60 seconds or so. So I get out and slam the rear door shut.

Okay, now I'm ready to go. Backing out of the parking space is a challenge because the lubrication in the steering wheel has stiffened with the cold and the wheel doesn't want to turn. Then, when I put it in drive, I thump along through the parking lot because my tires have frozen flat on the bottom. Oh wait! The door open bell is bleating again because the driver's side door didn't latch. And look! The air bag deployed icon is lighting up sporadically on the dash. Isn't this fun! And I still have the garage door to look forward to! Life in Alaska -- always an adventure.

Picture shortage

Okay, the title isn't really accurate. I don't have a picture shortage. Because, god knows, I'll point my camera at virtually anything that holds still long enough. And, if it's moving, I'll make another bad stab at panning. So I have a boat load of pictures. But none of them are about anything I currently want to write about. And see up there in the Snaps North banner, where it says it's an illustrated journal?

So I made big plans for a picture taking/cranberry picking weekend (that's right, MizMagee can multi-task!), but now look - it's raining. So do I want to slog out to the dank and dripping woods and muck around on sloppy ground foraging for berries and photos? Well, I might. But as a certain cynic, philosopher and relative of MizMagee's often says, "Meh."

After autumn is, um, summer, right?

In keeping with my cheerful, sunny spirit and innate optimism ... ick, okay, I'll start over: In spite of my general air of grumpiness and my normally pessimistic assessment of life, I seriously love autumn. I just pretend this will be the year that winter doesn't arrive after autumn fades. Autumn is my favorite season. How can you not love autumn?

Okay, it's true that, in spite of nearly 60 years of pretending, winter has followed autumn with an impressive and perfect regularity, but the moment the leaves start to change I forget all about the fact that I live almost precisely 130 miles south of the arctic circle in the heart of the subarctic boreal forest. A place where, on the shortest day of the year, the sun hoists itself a meager distance above the horizon, looks across the frozen landscape, loses heart and plummets sadly down and out of sight again, and we're left freezing various mentionable and unmentionable body parts off in the dark and entertaining ourselves by seeing who comes up with the weirdest manifestation of seasonal affective disorder.

Instead, autumn arrives and I happily run out and admire the fabulous color of the same leaves about which I will later mutter inventive curses while fishing them out of my rain gutters and raking them into towering piles on my lawn. I take giant breaths of crisp air, fragrant with the scent of the forest floor, forgetting the fact that the forest floor smells that way because mold, my favorite allergen, is busy making compost out of the fallen leaves. Do I care? No. Because nothing looks as amazing as a stand of bright yellow birches against a deep blue sky, unless maybe it's a stand of bright yellow birches, illuminated by a shaft of sunlight breaking through the clouds, and posed against the dark background of an autumn storm.

So pass me some kleenex and Nasonex, and don't you dare mention snow. I'm in denial.

Driveway Zen

I just spent two and a half hours weeding my driveway. I estimate that it might take another six hours to get the whole thing done. Sometimes when I'm weeding the driveway, I think about what my reaction would have been if, at sixteen, I had been told that my future held hours of driveway weeding in Alaska. I'm pretty sure I would have smiled politely and then backed slowly away from the crazy person, who, it would have been clear to me, was about as out of touch with reality as if they'd chosen to announce that Abraham Lincoln was living in their garage. I'm not sure a weed ever dared poke a head above concrete level in a single one of the driveways of the ultra-tidy, landscaped, manicured and sidewalked neighborhood where I spent my teenage years, but you can be sure if it had it would have been quickly fried to a mutated crisp by a brief but intense skirmish in the chemical warfare that passed as gardening at that particular time and place. "Driveway" and "weed" were mutually exclusive terms. And, of course, my disbelief would also have had to do with the fact that Alaska wasn't even on my particular map of the world (which featured Santa Cruz, the closest surfing to my house and, later, San Francisco and flower power, and not much else).

But now, here I am, weeding my driveway in Alaska. Actually, I'm pretty casual about weeding the driveway, only getting serious about the whole thing when the house starts looking like an abandoned building - since I'm not anxious to come home and find squatters setting up housekeeping on my porch. Well, and even that isn't too probable in Alaska. Up here we cultivate an air of gentle dishevelment in our living spaces, and the sophisticated squatter would know that, barring a fallen in roof and 24 inch gaps in the flooring, the most crumbling and humble of homes is still likely occupied.

I've gotten particular about what I pull up from the driveway. Every year I'm visited by the progeny of a group of pansies I planted the first year I lived in my house. I planted them in an actual flower garden, and how they migrated to the driveway remains a mystery. But I love them and so every year, at randomly spaced intervals scattered across the drive, their colorful heads wave happily at me when I come and go from my house.

Anyway, the picture is an actual close up of a bit of my driveway. The moss is nice, don't you think?