Land of Fire and Ice

My eldest brother, who lives in the L.A. area, keeps joking that living in Fairbanks is a little like living in George R.R. Martin's series "Song of Ice and Fire" (otherwise known as "Game of Thrones"). We do definitely go to the extremes, with an annual temperature swing of 140+ degrees (F). Frequently the summers, such as this one, are smoky. And the motto of pretty much everyone is, of course, that winter is coming. We spend all summer gearing up for the long, cold winters. Outside to do things, of course, but also to soak up the necessary vitamin D and to enjoy the sun while we can so that the winter doesn't seem quite so cold and dark. When I pick berries, it is with the knowledge that the season for them is so short and I need to get as many as I can to stock up for winter. I'm not alone in this.
This summer has been unusual, it's not just in my head. We've easily broken the old record for 80+ degree days (at least 36), when the average summer only has 11 such days. It's still smoky and the fires are flaring up with the lack of rain. (Over 2 inches less than normal.) The Tanana Valley Fair was in town and the old joke here is that fair weather means rain. Well, this year that wasn't the case. We haven't gotten any noticeable rainfall (a few drops here and there, but that's it) in what is usually the wettest summer month.
This is good in one way, because the family friends who've needed help creating a fire break around their property still need help. So Shane's been spending his afternoons up in the hills, helping to cut down, limb, and stack trees. He's not making the big bucks doing this, of course, but enough to pay for our most recent trip to Wasilla (for a kick-ass wedding!) and, soon, the snow tires we'll need for our car. I asked him how much more work he thinks is left and he said, "Probably they could keep me working until the snow falls." Ah. Well, it's good. Beyond the financial aspect, I can tell that Shane is much happier simply because he feels useful and productive again.
And now, the leaves are starting to change. It feels early to me, but I don't think that it actually is. I think that we're all a little confused by it, however, simply because it is still so hot during the day. It gets a bit chilly at night, but the days are scorching.
And now, we're even making plans to head down to the Mat-Su Valley once again to go to the state fair in Palmer over labor day weekend, with family. My first inclination was to be like, "Traveling, again? No." But to see family, it is worth it, even when I'll be 7 1/2 months pregnant at that point. I'm trying to remember that I feel extra tired right now both because it was a crazy week at work (which I don't want to go into, but I've never been so stressed out by work before) and because I'm getting over a cold. I blame Shane. He got sick first, then I got sick. I never got so ill that I felt the need to take time off work, but that was partly because I felt sickest over the weekend. Which, thankfully, gave me the time I needed to be super lazy and to recover. (I have a dr.'s appointment this week, anyway, so I'm sure I'll get checked out rather thoroughly then.) I made chicken noodle soup and we watched an entire season of a TV show online, and generally just took it easy.
The only thing we did over the weekend was to go to the Tanana Valley Fair on Sunday evening. We biked over to avoid paying for parking, then spent way too much money anyway on greasy, yummy fair food. We only go once a year, we figured (this was before the plans for the state fair), so it was worth it. And I discovered that my baby belly now sticks out far enough that drips and dribbles of food which would normally fall in front of me now land right on my abdomen. I had both gyro grease and blueberry stains from a crepe all over my shirt by the time we biked home. I regret nothing.
We saw "Goat Rodeo" in the list of activities and were super excited until a friend informed us that it was actually a one man band, not a rodeo. We were so hoping to see people roping goats. (Not raping goats, although that's not too far off the mark of what apparently did happen at the fair. Go Fairbanks.)
The next couple of months are going to be just as busy as the rest of the summer has been. Gearing up for birthday parties, the trip down to Palmer at the beginning of next month, and then the following weekend will be my baby shower, complete with a visit from my MIL. It will be fun, but I'm a bit tired just thinking about it all. I still have so many of my own projects that I've been wanting to get done that I have to work on. I did, finally, spend an evening cutting up an old flannel top sheet for reusable baby wipes, the draft dodgers I want to make for under the doors, and a rice heating pad for my aching back. However, when I tried to use my serger something went wrong. I must have threaded it wrong, but I'm not certain how. So I'll have to ask my MIL when she's here.
We're getting to the point in pregnancy where I think it's ok to start stocking up on some things. Our Fred Meyer rewards came in the mail (almost $10 off!) and some coupons, and a $150 gift card from a work program, so I'll stop there after my appointment later this week to grab some things off my list, like oats and dates and pasta and sticky hooks to hang curtains. I know I've mentioned this before but we're going to make and freeze as many meals and snacks as possible before Baby's arrival so that it's one less thing to worry about when we bring home our tiny new person. I still have all those craft and decorating projects I wanted to do as well, and organizing projects. Some deep cleaning of our apartment. (Heck, at the moment I'd settle for minimal cleaning of our apartment. With both of us being laid low for most of a week, and the traveling before that, our place looks like a bit of a dump.) I'm so behind. It will feel nice to make some progress on this stuff, finally. I've been putting it off for so long, not because I'm lazy but because I've prioritized other things. Now that I'm entering my third trimester, however, it feels just a bit more urgent to get things settled and ready for Baby.
Actually, I've got plenty of baby items on the list as well. A nasal syringe, thermometer, diaper cream, etc. Things that people say, "Oh, go ahead and register for that!" but I'd feel silly actually registering for. Seriously, a $1 bulb syringe? Baby nail clippers? They sell those in kits but all of the kits I saw looked cheap and had extra stuff that I didn't really see the point of. (And yes, that is after doing research about what kinds of health/safety items we really do need. I won't be leaving off my list things which will actually make a difference to my child's health and wellbeing.)
As strange as it seems, I'm a bit excited to buy these things. Not the purchasing itself, but the fact that we're getting so close to actually meeting her. I realized a few weeks ago that I'm not scared of labor, which I know a lot of women are. The knowledge is rather liberating.

Challenges

My eldest brother lives in L.A. He and I have a sort of game throughout the year where we text each other our respective temperatures, sometimes with a little personal update and sometimes not. During the winter, I get to call him a complete pansy, and during the summer he gets to mock me. When we got up to 80 degrees a few weeks ago I sent him a text that read, "80 degrees. Might be dying." He responded, "80? Sweater weather."
It reached 90 degrees here this weekend. My poor little Alaskan body is having a hard time handling it. For that matter, so is Shane's. And our pets only move to get water or find a shadier/draftier spot, it seems. (Once the cat figured out that the box fan wasn't going to eat him, he camped out in front of it and hasn't done more than adjust his position for hours now.) I was going to say that everyone is feeling the heat, but I remembered that when I took the dog for a walk earlier there was a woman wearing long pants and a sweatshirt. I can only assume that she's not from around here.
It was so hot that I actually looked forward to grocery shopping this afternoon, spending my time in the air conditioning. I'm looking forward to work tomorrow for pretty much the same reason. (I don't know if it's air conditioned, but it stays cool in there. I curse it during the winter, love it during the summer.)
Unfortunately, this weather is supposed to stick around all week. I'm trying to figure out what I can wear to work that will still be appropriate but which will keep me cool. In fact, nearly every decision right now is coming down to what won't overheat me. Everything I bought at the store today was with a view toward not heating up the kitchen. So, fruit and sandwich makings, milk and yogurt. Nothing which requires actually cooking. We've got some moose meat thawing in the fridge, so we'll most likely make burgers in the next day or two, but those will be grilled outside.
Even now, at 10:00 at night, the apartment is at 85 degrees and the sun, still fully up, is glaring into the living room through the blinds. We'll get no respite from the heat until about 2 a.m., and even then it will be short lived as the sun, which does no more than dip below the horizon at this time of year, will come back up almost immediately. By the time I head off to work tomorrow at 7:30, it will already be getting warm again. I didn't think it would happen after the long winter, but I'm already looking forward to autumn. (Well, for more than just the one reason, that is.) I'm excited for the cool, crisp air in September, the long sunrises and sunsets which we don't get at this time of year. (Of them all, I believe that September is my favorite month.)
For now, we're fighting the heat in the ways people always have. Lots of water to drink and to douse ourselves with. Shane and I took a cold shower earlier. (He was a baby and got out after only wetting himself down. I stayed in it long enough to actually shower, washing my hair and at least the important body parts.) It helps, although not for long enough.
We've mostly stayed close to home this weekend, only going out for a bit in the evenings. We got ice cream with friends at a nearby shop and went to beer league softball, them to play and me to cheer. We played frolf, which we walked to, I've walked the dog, and I biked to the farmer's market yesterday. It's just too hot to want to do much more, and we both get cranky when we're too hot. So I've been getting a bunch of reading done (lying in front of the fan) and enjoying the fact that I have time to read. Sedentary pursuits are the way to go.
In addition to the extreme heat, there are the mosquitoes. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that they're nearly the size of horseflies. They hurt when they bite, and I am one of those people who has particularly bad reactions to them. Pregnancy has only made that worse. And of course, this year they're worse than I've ever seen them before. People who've lived here all their lives are saying the same thing. I'm guessing that it has to do with the extra long winter, but I'm not certain. Usually the first hatching is really awful, and after that they become an annoyance but a bearable one. Not this year. We went frolfing with friends Saturday night and any time we stopped we were swarmed by the horrid little bloodsuckers. I killed dozens and missed so many more than that. Thankfully, though my bites swell up hugely at first, the itching tends to end fairly soon.
I sit here grumbling about this, but I have been trying to put it into perspective as well. We've started re-watching "The Human Planet", a BBC documentary series about how people have adapted to live in various places. It's one of those things that you watch and think, I live a pathetically easy life. I don't need to face down lions for my dinner, or navigate my way through the Sahara to the only well for many miles, or send my kids out to hunt tarantulas so that they can get a bit of protein. When I complain, I realize that these are first world problems. I can't control the weather, but I do have the luxury of lying naked in front of a box fan to cool off. We may have horrible mosquitoes, but at least they don't carry malaria. Even if they did, I live within five miles of a hospital. I have medicines and vaccines available to me. I need to quit whining.

One step backward, two steps forward

It's still crazy cold outside. It's May 16th and there is snow in the forecast. I just...I don't even know what to do with that. Where normally it would be in the 60s or 70s during the days now we're lucky if it's in the 50s.
Last week was finals week. Naturally, it was crazy busy at our house. One of Shane's classes finished the week before, so he *only* had four finals. And to make it worse, he found out an hour before one of them (his physics final, no less) that work this summer is a no go. He'd talked to his boss just a couple of days before about possible start dates, so this was a huge shock. B later took Shane out to lunch to explain. It turns out that B had no idea himself that any of this was happening or he would have given Shane a heads-up. I guess the price of gold has dropped so much in the last few months that they can't find investors for the project anymore, so the camp isn't opening at all. I feel bad for B, too, who has spent all winter working on some contracts and then had to call the contractors to say, "Sorry, cancel all of that." And then there are the contractors themselves, who are now at a loss and scrambling. So, what sort of sucks on a personal level really sucks for everyone else.
We're both looking on the bright side, which isn't that hard. Shane gets to be home this summer, rather than gone 2/3 of the time! He'll take some classes, too, so that he can finish his degree that much faster. And I'm certain that he'll find something else, it just won't be quite as lucrative. So the only downside is the money. I'm sure that if I said how much money he would have made a lot of people would think, "Well that's not so much money." But for us, it would have been a huge boon. We'd already planned out how we were going to allocate the money (some people would see that as dangerous, "spending money you don't yet have", but we were planning what we would save and what we would throw at student loan debt).
I feel like a whiner. We'll be fine. We only have student loan debt, which is manageable, and we've got money in savings. We just won't be as comfortable as we would have been. And I really wouldn't care at all if it weren't for the baby. We've got medical bills which will need paying and my maternity leave to finance. And again, we'll be fine. It's just me, freaking out about all of the possible things which could go wrong. So I'm pushing those to the back of my head and concentrating on all of the things which are in my control, and all of the positives. Like Shane actually getting to be around this summer.
I coped in one of my usual ways, which is to clean. Our apartment looks better than it did all semester, and we got rid of tons of junk. We actually mostly filled the car and took that much stuff to Value Village. (Where I found two pairs of maternity pants for cheap, score!) We got rid of a couple of pots we don't use anymore (now that we have nicer ones), clothes, old sheets we never use, stuff which my brother-in-law and his old roommate left with us when they moved out of state last summer (thanks, guys), and so many other things which made me think, "Where on earth did we get this and why haven't we gotten rid of it before?"
We've got tons of boxes in our garage storage space which I've been hoarding "just in case we move" at some point. Well, there are clearly no moves in our near future now. So I offered some of the boxes around to people. My boss is retiring and moving to Oregon a week later to be nearer to her kids. She and her husband were super grateful to get both boxes and the packing material I've collected, which was lovely. Most of the rest of the boxes will most likely go to friends who are buying a house and moving in June. It's all part of a larger scheme so that we can clean up our half of the garage (until now, used as storage since we couldn't fit the truck in it) so that we can actually park our car in there during the winter.
Our second bedroom, which is almost exclusively used as storage at this point, is also slowly getting cleaned out. I discovered a few things which we can (and should) return to my in-laws this weekend when they're visiting. And hopefully, they will be taking the truck home with them as well.
My brother left a bunch of stuff with us when he went home at the end of fall semester, so I'm going to get my parents to take most of it home with them. Although, I'm hoping that I can convince the Boy to come up here again to both finish his degree and also be childcare for us. (We would work out some sort of payment system, most likely just giving him a break on rent and such if he watched Baby for us when we can't.) So maybe they won't take too much of it, but some of it really should go.
It's amazing how much better I feel when I get rid of stuff. I don't know if I'm "nesting" or what, but I'm looking at things with a very critical eye lately. In the interest of doing my fair share, I've even agreed to go through my books this summer and get rid of some. Most can be taken to Gulliver's to trade for credit on other used books and the rest can be donated to the literacy council. I've even already identified some which I know I won't miss at all, I just hung onto them because when is having books a bad thing?
The one big project I'm hoping I can talk Shane into is going through his old high school keepsakes. His mom brought up boxes of stuff last summer, all of which Shane had packed up right after high school and decided to keep. But, he hasn't looked in those boxes since high school for the most part. Now, ten years later, I'm wondering how much of it is still meaningful? Some things, such as his letterman jacket and yearbooks, will definitely be kept. Those sorts of things are important. But most of it? It's lost its meaning and is now junk. I'm sure that before the summer is over we'll take another trip to Value Village to drop off things.
I've also got a box of stuff that I want to take to the Really Free Market this weekend, stuff which I don't think I could sell or donate, but perhaps I could give away. And I have a bag of clothes which I want to take to the Fireweed Boutique and see if I can sell it there.
Of course, part of this great purge is because there are things which we will need to buy soon. I already mentioned my new maternity pants. I also bought a maternity shirt, also used, since I'm already growing out of some of my regular shirts. I found this shirt at Once Upon a Child, a used maternity/baby/kids stuff store in town. We were over there anyway (it's right next to the shop where Shane buys his beer-making supplies) so I stopped in to check it out. I can already tell that store is going to become my new favorite one in town. Used joggers/strollers, baby carriers (which I know from my nanny experience that I love), bouncy seats, clothes, shoes, cribs, bedding, maternity clothes, toys.... Perfect. And of course, it had so much stuff I don't know why anyone in town would ever want to buy new baby clothes. It also made me wonder how many people don't know about it and just throw out all of their used baby/kid items.
Other than what I need for maternity wear, we are of course going to hold off on buying anything. For one thing, we don't need it yet. For another, we're waiting to see what other people will gift to us. If this seems mercenary and calculating, it really isn't. You just don't know my MIL. One of the first things she said after we told her about the baby was a joyous, "I GET TO BUY BABY THINGS!" And then she sent us a baby gift which she already had waiting. She didn't even know we were thinking about having a kid, just bought it for when we did! (It was a book, thankfully.) The in-laws are visiting us this weekend (yay!) and she's assured us that she has baby things for us. I was only half joking when I told Shane, "Oh God, she went to Baby GAP and bought the store, didn't she?" So, we'll wait on buying anything for Baby to see what friends and family want to give us. (I understand that impulse--you want to do something nice for the new parents!) I'm hoping that I can get my mom to raid the boxes I know she has of mine and my brothers' old baby clothes and send some of them to us. That would be really fun.
Stuff and junk are not the only things on my mind, of course. I finally started my plants (and labeled them this year, I'm so proud of myself!) and I already have cabbage starts popping up. Hurray! I'm hoping the rest start coming up soon. I used last year's seeds so I'm a little nervous that not all of them will be viable. Cross your fingers for me.

Cold, cold weekend

All of the talk around here for a few days has been about the cold snap we're having, and the subsequent issues it's causing. Until now this has been a freakishly warm January. When people start to complain I remind them that this is January in Fairbanks, this is normal. Friday morning I walked to work in temps around -27 and it was just dropping from there. By the time I was going home it was more like -35 and still dropping. I think I frostbit my left ear a little bit because of my earrings. Usually I keep my hat low enough and my scarf high enough that it's never been a problem, but my poor ear was red and swollen when I got home. I didn't even feel it. If your ear gets that painfully cold you'd think you'd notice somehow. This morning, I remembered and put my earrings in my pocket before leaving for work.
Places hit -50 and colder over the weekend, or very close to it. The ice fog is incredible, and even places which are usually above the temperature inversion have ice fog and seriously cold temperatures. Worse, at those temperatures cars won't start, or have a lot of trouble doing so, and even if you do get it to start there are other problems. Locks ice up and you can't get doors open. Little parts become brittle and break easily. Tires, from resting on the ground, get flat on the bottom and it takes several bumpy miles before they round out again.
So as you can imagine, it was a rather quiet weekend. I got most of the reading done for my class and even managed to get the vacuuming done on Saturday. (A girl can only take so much and our carpets were gross so I'm glad I did that. When I think of how much I had to throw away and clean off the filter at the end I still make a yucky face.) I read a book for fun and we even spent lots of time playing board games with a few friends on two different nights. Many of our friends just stayed home all weekend in deference to the cold.
We didn't. Stay home, that is. Did I mention that Shane is taking five classes this semester? Four of them are difficult, including physics and calculus. Blech. I do not envy him. He found most of the textbooks online, and the physics book is being held at the main campus library for limited checkout times. We bundled ourselves and the dog up one afternoon and trekked up to the library so that he could scan and then email the necessary pages to himself. I put on so many layers that I stayed remarkably warm. (Thick longjohns, my flannel lined Carhartts, two pairs of thick and tall socks, including my sweater socks, boots, wool shirt, fleece jacket, down coat, hat, scarf long enough to wrap around my head twice, a pair of gloves, and a pair of mittens. Whew!) Even the dog got a double layer of coats put on her. I crocheted a pretty crappy jacket for her a while ago, and then because it was crappy I went ahead and bought one for her. However, the one I bought doesn't have any protection for her belly, which the one I made does. So she wore two coats and four booties and at the library we had a few minutes to warm up in the arctic entry while Shane was inside. (We checked her over when we got home and she was still warm, even her belly.) My favorite moment of the whole adventure was seeing my dog run into the glass, thinking that she could get into the library. She's a sweetheart, but she's not the brightest. She was anxious that Shane was where she couldn't see him so for the most part we walked around outside and waited for him, going back into the arctic entry to stay warm every few minutes.
On Saturday night, Shane made another batch of beer. A friend we haven't seen in a long time came over to play games and hang out so we were all in the cozy, warm kitchen area. Starting a new batch of beer requires a lot of cooking so the stove kept the room very toasty. In fact, it was so toasty that we could fully see just how bad the back door to our place is. There was steam being created inside the house from an air leak around the back door. We've known for a long time that that door is terrible (our landlord really got swindled, since it's supposed to be a great door, made by an Alaskan company, but it's been nothing but trouble) but I don't think we'd ever before seen just how bad it really is. Tired of the visible reminder of just how much heat we're throwing out into the cold I finally decided that it was time to tack some curtains over the door. I wanted, earlier in the winter, to get a dowel and some sort of cheap holding system so that we wouldn't have to put a bunch of holes in the walls but I never got around to it. Instead, we used some small nails and tacked two curtains over the doorway. It's not much, but I can tell that it is having some effect in blocking out the cold. Unfortunately, it's also just blocking out the light. Oh well. I'll probably end up taking them down again after the cold snap ends, and perhaps next time I'm at Fred's I'll remember to get the things I want to hold up the curtains. It doesn't have to be anything big, I'll probably just get a long dowel and some sticky hooks.
The worst thing about the cold, for me, is that it's so dry right now. And, of course, we decided to turn off our humidifier. Why? Because it's moldy. I don't know how it happened, but there's mold living in the bottom of our humidifier and we're guessing it's probably not good to toss that in the air and breathe it in. We're trying to figure out if it would be worth cleaning it out (it's from the 70s and we probably couldn't find the new filters and such that it would need) or just buying a new one. Probably, we will grab the Sears gift card someone gave us a while ago and just buy a new one, which will certainly be smaller and almost certainly more efficient anyway. (This thing is BEASTLY--but we got it for free from my in-laws so I'm not really complaining.) Without a humidifier for now, we're left with drier and drier skin. I'm starting to feel like a raisin. Every time I wash my hands I have to coat them with lotion. Every shower takes twice as long not because I'm spending any more time under the water, but because my skin needs a protective layer of lotion put on afterwards. Even my eyes feel drier. We're all noticeably more thirsty, even the pets, and the poor animals are itchy with their dry skin.
Today, even my office, on a hill, isn't immune from the cold and ice fog. Usually I can look forward to breathing slightly better air up here but not today. The thermometer, usually a bit warmer because it's right next to a window, is reading -30. The official temperature as of writing, with the sun up, is -47. Brr! Stay warm, Fairbanksters!

Inclement weather, brotherly love

Yesterday we got some freezing rain. Not as bad as the ice storm before Thanksgiving two years ago, but bad enough. I'm pretty sure that I heard a car accident as I was trying to go to sleep last night. (Either that or someone had something in the back of their truck which jumped around making a lot of noise as they skidded.) Even crazier, for the second time this school year the Borough closed the public schools. !!! Unfortunately, the U is still open so it was up and out the door for me. As the person who isn't dependent on a vehicle, and thus icy roads, I need to go to work, otherwise it will be a Big Deal and we'd have to close the office for the day. Since classes start in two days, that would be bad.
Honestly, I shouldn't complain. I'm tired, yes (still not quite recovered from our trip, I think), but I have a three day weekend coming up. It's even lengthened by at least an hour so far because I stayed late yesterday so that my coworker could go home early. She beat rush hour (such as it is here) but it sounds like the roads were already terrible by the time she made it out the door.
My supervisor is out sick, so it might just be me for today, with another 9 hour day.
Because of the crazy weather, because I was home late and needed to get dinner ready and all sorts of other excuses, I didn't call home like I meant to last night. Instead, home called me. The Boy was letting me know that he won't, in fact, be coming back to school this semester. He's had depression for several years and said that he'd been fighting it all last semester. I'd kind of seen that toward the end (kind of, because while I noticed it, I was really hoping that wasn't the problem) and was going to make sure he spoke to one of the counselors on campus this semester. (I don't know if this is common at most colleges, but because depression is so common around here, especially in the winter, there are free counseling services at the U.) Instead, the Boy decided that he'd be better of staying home and speaking with his old counselor, who he already trusts to open up to. I'm just proud that, this time around, he's self-aware enough to seek out the help he needs. This wasn't always the case and it shows that, no matter what, he's doing better than he was several years ago. I hope he knows what progress he's made and is proud of himself. He has a plan and he's working on getting better. And at home, he'll have more support and services than he does here.
I'm also pleased that he finally, finally, opened up to me. He can be so hard to get to know sometimes. He'll talk about surface things, about sports and the statistics he's working on. (For fun, he does sports statistics. In fact, there have been times when he's found problems with ESPN's statistics.) But he doesn't talk about what he goes through, he doesn't talk about things he wants. I know that part of that is being a guy, but it's so much more too. It's just him. But when we talked last night he explained that while I was pushing him to get a job this past semester, he'd start to apply for a job and then part of his brain would say, "Why are you doing that? You're not good enough for that, you don't deserve that. You won't get it anyway so why try? There are better people than you who will get that job." Yep, those are his exact words, and I'm tearing up just writing them. I wish I could make it all better. He's my baby brother. I remember when my mom told us she was pregnant, and the day he was born. I remember deciding not to run away from home because, after all, he was kinda cute, even if he was stealing all the attention I was used to getting. I want to protect him, but I can't keep him safe from what's in his head. What I could do, and did, was assure him that we love him and will miss him. Tell him that he absolutely should not apologize to us (he tried to, for giving us such late notice that he won't be coming back here--he didn't want to "ruin" the holidays by telling us before now), and to give him all the words of love and comfort I could over the phone. It's not a great substitute for being able to actually give him a hug, like I want to, but it'll do for now.

At least on the cold days, I walk faster.

I made it in to work about five minutes early this morning, even though I left the house at my usual time. Why? Because it's -45 outside. My legs were getting quite chilly so I walked faster. Numb thighs are quite the inducement to get moving.
Actually, I'm fairly impressed with myself. I'm tired (had a night where I just couldn't get my brain to shut up and let me sleep last night) and there's lots of snow on the ground so I should have been moving slower than usual. Last week we had what a friend jokingly dubbed Snowpocalypse, getting at least a foot and a half of snow in about 24-48 hours. It was so bad that, for the first time since sometime in the 1970s, the Borough closed the schools for a snow day. They simply couldn't plow the roads fast enough. Of course, the U stayed open (if for no other reason, it was finals week) so I had to go to work. It was like a ghost town for my walk.
Despite the lack of cars, that walk should have been miserable. Blizzard conditions aren't usually my favorite, what with the poor visibility and the tromping through ankle-deep snow uphill. (It's worse than walking through sand!) I might have been a little upset, also, because I started my morning with one major and one minor disappointment. (The minor disappointment was that Shane woke up when I did, and as I was in the bathroom doing my morning stuff I heard the sounds of breakfast being made. I thought, "So sweet! He's making me breakfast!" Wrong. He was making himself a BLT. He didn't even make an extra piece of bacon for me.) I'd also slept funny on my right shoulder and it hurt to move it. So I was in a bad mood before I ever saw the snow. I told myself that I was getting in an excellent cardio workout first thing in the morning and that helped my mood.
Anyway, that was Wednesday. By Thursday the snow had become knee-deep. We didn't shovel our driveway so just leaving my house, getting to the sidewalk, was a bit of a workout. I decided that instead of taking the back, woodsy path to work I would walk up one of the more-traveled hills which had a better chance of being plowed. It wasn't knee-deep, but it was still deep snow. When I was grumping to myself about the snow, I realized that I was less likely to meet a moose on that more-traveled path, and that if I had met a moose on the other path I would have been in serious trouble. (Yeah, snow would slow both of us down, but it would slow 5 foot me down more than it would slow an 8 foot tall moose.)
Of course, that didn't stop me from walking home through the woods. How could I resist the lure of fresh, deep snow? And what a workout that is! It had stopped snowing by that time and walking downhill through knee-deep snow seemed like the best idea ever. So. Much. Fun. I felt like a kid again and I was tempted to throw myself down in the powder but I didn't. Walking through it was enough. (And I didn't meet any moose.)
When I walked home through the woods on Monday of this week, I did see moose tracks on the path. They were fairly fresh, fresh enough to make me nervous and to call out, making sure there wasn't still a moose there. I still get nervous walking back there, after what happened (or nearly happened) last winter. When it started getting dark in the mornings I had one day where I literally jumped at my own shadow when I saw it moving.
In those two days we went from far less than average snowfall for this time of year to almost average. It was crazy. The snow is now deeper than my dog is tall. On Friday we took her out to run in the deep snow (and for us to go sledding!) and that was ridiculously fun. She avoided the truly deep snow, unless we ran into it and called her. Then she'd swim and jump her way out to us. My little old lady dog was exhausted that night. I loved it. We did get some video of her in the snow, just for fun and to show family.
And it was warm last week. It got up into the +20s. Not exactly tropical temps, but warm enough that I wore my fleece over a t-shirt one day and that was all. No need for the usual ridiculous number of layers. It was glorious.
And now we're back to normal winter in Fairbanks temperatures. It's supposed to get down to the -50s later this week. What a challenge this place is, in the best possible way. I love that it takes creativity to meet the challenges Fairbanks (and Alaska in general) throw at me. I'll never conquer this place, but I can rise up and be equal to the task of living here. I can face it head-on and thrive under difficult conditions. So while others are groaning at the thought of -50, I'm secretly smiling to myself because I know that Fairbanks is just forcing me to push myself and my limits. It's making me be a better me. If I'm at my best, I'll be able to find the joy and fun in -50 as well as I did in a foot and a half of fresh snow.
I don't say this because I think I'm, as one of my brothers put it, "tough as nails". Every environment has difficulties and the trick is to find which one suits you. Blizzards? Hurricanes? Extreme heat? While I wilt in anything over 80 degrees, my real kryptonite is rain. I hate having it rain day in and day out. As much as I love my friends and family in the Pacific Northwest, I don't think I'll ever live there again because I hate the rain so much.
My point, really, is that I'm trying to find the joy in little things. Daily things. Even when I should, by most standards, be miserable. -50 emphasizes how lucky I am to have a warm apartment, warm clothes (many of which were given to me by loved ones), enough food, all those good things. The difficulties we encounter are there to show us just how good we really have it. I know I have a lot to be thankful for.
This has seemed to be a particularly tough year in many ways. Especially the autumn and now into the end of the year, so many sad things have happened. The shooting at Sandy Hill Elementary, the one in the mall in Oregon. Even here, we had someone commit suicide at my work. A friend and coworker kept mentioning how it could have been worse, the things he could have done. I've been trying really, really hard not to think about the fact that things that day could have been so much worse. It's not helpful to me to think about what might have been, what could have gone wrong.
Yes, there are lots of bad things which happen. Most of them, I don't have any control over. I could be upset by it all, get depressed. I choose not to. I'm choosing to find life and joy in the little things, to be happy with what I have while I have it. I'm aware that life is precious and fleeting, so I'm holding my loved ones a little bit closer and appreciating the time we have together that much more. In the face of sorrow, that's really all we can do, isn't it?

The Jitterbug

Last week absolutely wiped me out and yet, I feel a little superhuman for all that I managed to accomplish.
I suppose I should start at the beginning. It was tech week for the show I've been doing ("The Wizard of Oz"), otherwise called Hell Week. Rehearsals every night for at least three hours, sometimes four. Plus the travel time/getting ready time which meant an extra half hour on each end. Most evenings I was gone from 6 or 6:30 until at least 10:30. On top of a normal 40-hour workweek it was crazy. And this is the first time I've done one of these shows without Shane's help taking care of dinner and the pets and such. My brother stepped up for some of it (at least, feeding the pets and doing all of the dishes) but with Shane gone I'm still the main household cook so dinner was still my responsibility. The CrockPot saved my butt. I made a giant pot of rice and beans in it on Thursday, knowing that I'd be home late from work that day.
The end of the rehearsals brought no respite. We had three performances over the weekend: one on Friday and two on Saturday. And yet, despite basically working two jobs for the week, I still managed to exercise a little bit, talk with Shane every night, do a load of laundry, and read two books. (I re-read the final two books in the "Hunger Games" trilogy. Now I'm nursing a serious book hangover. So good!) Yesterday, without a show or rehearsal, was dedicated to cleaning the apartment. I did a more thorough job in the bathroom than I have for months, and the Boy and I tackled the kitchen together. I even washed down the outside of the chest freezer, and I can't remember the last time we did that. I dusted the living room, although I couldn't vacuum because of the cat. But it's noticeably cleaner in our house now and it feels good.
The cat is still in the Recovery Palace for a week or so. We threw on a Pandora station while we cleaned, but the most prominent soundtrack to the day was my cat crying. Poor guy. He got let out for a few minutes while I cleaned out his cage and he does seem to be moving better but we don't want to push it. On the plus side, he doesn't seem to be angry with me for his circumstances. When he gets out he starts rubbing against my legs, and when I stick my fingers in his cage he starts rubbing his cheeks against me. It's almost as heartbreaking as how defeated he looks when no one's actively paying attention to him.
Yesterday evening was lovely, but a little sad. I couldn't figure it out for a few minutes because I was at a happy part in my book. But I realized that it was about the time Shane should have been coming home. We finally went a full two weeks without getting to see each other at all and he doesn't even get to come home until Wednesday. They're getting the camp ready for winter so it's all hands on deck. Additionally, they're doing their big monthly water sampling so they needed Shane there. He said last night that it was going to be more difficult this time because everything's frozen. These big water sampling times have meant extra overtime all summer because it's so much work, so I can only imagine how much harder it will be when they need to drill through the ice first.
Fairbanks finally got our first below-zero temperatures this morning at roughly 5:00. It's a bit earlier than the historical norm. The days are getting so short that soon I'll once again be walking both to and from work in total darkness. It's so beautiful, though, the way the light slants and makes the snow look so blue in the shadows, golden where the light hits it. The sky is an amazing azure and the moon at dusk is breathtaking, so white against the sky and so bright bouncing off the snow. No picture could ever quite capture just how gorgeous it all looks. So while the darkness and cold are creeping up, I'm still focusing on the beauty of it all.

Does "layering" have to mean sweaters?

With the temperature in the 20s this morning, it's definitely time to be thinking about layering to keep warm. Living in Fairbanks, and either walking or biking year-round, has made me very aware of my layering. During the winter I can get an approximation of the temperature from the size of the steam cloud that forms when I open the door to let the dog out in the morning. Often this also means another trip to the bedroom to either grab another layer or put one back. Layering isn't just a good thing to do, it becomes an art form at that point. Knowing exactly how much to wear to keep yourself comfortable, and how to be comfortable in any situation, is very tricky. Who knows what the day might bring?
Let's face it, we don't always have control over what the temperature is. My office is always, always chilly. If I go other places, sometimes they're too hot. But even when we do have control, it can be good (environmentally and budgetarily) to keep the temperature down. Mothers everywhere tell their children to "put on a sweater" when they get cold. I'm sure most people are sick of hearing that advice and I know some would prefer to keep the heat up rather than wear a sweater. Honestly, wearing so many clothes around here can make the best of us a bit weary by the end of winter. When you're pulling on your longjohns yet again or deciding which of your sweaters to wear yet again it's easy to start daydreaming about swimsuit weather and shorts and tank tops. Spring is the time of year when you're ready to say, "Fuck it! I'm turning the heat up to 85!"
Layering doesn't always mean longjohns and sweaters or flannel shirts, however. (Although flannel shirts are amazingly comfortable.) Today I'm wearing two layers: a tank top and a light shirt. The tank isn't visible to anyone, but it's helping to keep me warm nonetheless. My office is perpetually cold and when I was getting dressed this morning I realized that, even with the sweater I planned to bring, I would probably be chilly. I forgot the sweater in my mad dash out of the house, but because I have 2 layers on already it's not such a big deal today. (If I got really cold I could always put my fleece jacket on.)
On Pinterest I keep seeing all these cute outfits which people (or magazines?) have put together and they often involve layers. A tank top and a sweater, or a long-sleeved shirt and a scarf. Layers not only add warmth but they can add something visually interesting to your outfit. One navy blue thermal shirt is much like the next, but add a pretty scarf and it looks instantly dressy and more interesting. Sure a scarf might not be the warmest thing in the world, but it could make the difference between being slightly uncomfortable and being comfortable.
As the temperature drops I'll start layering more and more. It won't be unusual for me to leave the house with 3-4 layers on top, at least 2 on my legs, and 3 on my feet. (Plus gloves and a scarf or cowl and a hat, possibly even putting up my hood for an extra layer on my head and neck. But that sort of goes without saying.) Most of these layers won't be visible to others but they'll be keeping me toasty warm.
When you layer your clothing, it's also much easier to turn the temperature of your house down and save a bit on heating. I say "clothing", but at home it doesn't even have to be that. There's a reason slippers were invented and it sure wasn't for their looks. We both have sheepskin slippers with rubber soles which my in-laws gave us. They're perfect, soft and warm and comfortable and durable. The rubber soles also mean that we're not ruining them if we have to step outside to grab the dog when she's being a pest, or something like that.
One of our favorite things in the winter is to wrap up in a big blanket. Shane will sit at his computer wrapped up in one and I'll frequently read in bed (with a pet or two snuggling in) to keep warm. If I'm up and about, I've got a robe or a blanket with me. The advice your mother gave you to put on a sweater doesn't actually have to be taken literally. Finding a comfortable way to keep warm is key. For me, that often means something loose. Having so many layers on during the winter is not only bulky but it can feel constricting. When I'm home, I wear loose, comfortable clothes and I'd rather throw a blanket around myself than put on a sweater. Again.
Finally, don't forget the power of a hot drink to warm you up. Tea, hot cocoa, warm cider, mulled wine, hot buttered rum, warm milk with honey, whatever. It's now chilly enough that I look forward to starting my pot of tea when I get to work each morning. Holding the hot mug heats my chilled fingers and feels comforting.
After writing all of this, I realized that I'm actually excited for the cold. Not just the snow, but the cold itself. It bothers me when I'm cold, but I guess I sort of like it when the temperature dips. I'm much more appreciative of all the things that help to keep me warm, such as a filling meal of pot roast (I have one in the slow cooker right now) or just waking up with the dog curled at my side. The little things in life become so much more meaningful when faced with such a formidable force of nature like extreme cold. It makes me proud of humanity's resiliency, that we can face it and (sort of) conquer it. And it makes me proud of my own resiliency. If I can do all of the things I do in this place, what can't I do?

The link between water and electricity

Here's a good reminder article about the link between electricity use and drought. It seems odd, but in drought conditions one of the things you can do to help the most and to conserve water is actually to use less electricity. Because power plants use massive amounts of water (especially nuclear and, of course, hydroelectric) they make drought conditions even worse and compete with, say, agricultural uses. So when food prices go up this coming year remember that using less electricity could help lower them some, not to mention lower your electric bills.
It sucks, I know, because during hot, dry times is just when more people want to use their air conditioners and fans and such, but unless the heat is dangerous it's best in the long run to do other things to cool off. A little bit of cool water on a washcloth on your pressure points or your forehead goes a long way to cool your whole body down quickly. It's a treatment I remember my aunt using on me as a kid, visiting Texas, when I was in danger of heat exhaustion.
If you need something a bit more intense, a short cold shower can do wonders too. I cooled off that way several times this summer when it was in the 80s and I'd go for a run. Instead of taking a hot shower I'd simply let it stay cool (not cold) and do a quick scrub-down. The rest of the afternoon/evening were then spent in comfort, rather than melting in the heat.

More homecoming

One of the first things I did when we got home, of course, was to check on my garden. It's very much autumn around here, so things are starting to die back. I need to dig up my potatoes, probably as soon as this weekend, since the stalks are starting to wither and fall over. Some of my peas are dying off, although a few are still going strong. Before we left I pulled up and pickled a bunch of my carrots, so what's left are the smaller ones and they have more room to grow. I'll leave them out until they absolutely need to be pulled. And the tomatoes are really ripening now. I have a couple of my Cassady's Folly just about ready to be picked, and I couldn't stop the cherry tomatoes from ripening if I tried.
My haul Sunday night, after we got home, was about three cups of peas (in their shells), one large zucchini, and a couple branches of cherry tomatoes. I have a couple more zucchinis growing out there, getting bigger, and my pumpkins are doing quite well. The biggest one is even starting to turn a lighter green. I'll leave them out as long as I can, though. They're New England pie pumpkins, so they should be hearty enough to withstand our autumn chill.
It's sad to see my garden dying off. I can't say that I worked *too* hard out there this summer (as evidenced by the weeds) but I did put a decent amount of hard work into it. This is also our last chance to get as much as possible put away for winter. Eek! Shane started munching on the peas I collected the other day and when I freaked out he said, "Wow, chill. The peas are better fresh anyway." Ok, I can agree to that. So I gave him about half of them to eat fresh and kept the other half to freeze. Any that I opened up which still had rather small peas were eaten fresh by me. And now I have about a pint of homegrown, shelled peas in my freezer.
On the food front, our trip down south wasn't a total loss. I never did get to go berry picking (if there are blueberries in those hills, my MIL doesn't know where) but I did get some rhubarb from a family friend when it would otherwise have gone to waste. Now I can start canning, since I should have a bunch of rhubarb.
There's another family friend there whose father plants an acre of peas every year, far more than they can eat, so my MIL gets to go pick buckets full. She talked to her friend to see if the peas were ready, but they weren't. Darn! That would have seriously added to our cache of frozen peas. Oh well. Maybe next year?
The biggest change from when we left to when we returned has simply been in the weather. Other places it might be strange to have such a rapid change of weather, but I expected this. It's now definitely autumn here, with the days staying chilly rather than getting hot and merely having cool nights. I've still got a couple of windows cracked at home, for the air flow, but I'm also thinking about pulling out our big down comforter.
The trees are becoming yellow, more than just a splash of color here and there. The birds are flying south quickly. This morning when I let the dog out I heard a gaggle of cranes overhead, in classic V-formation, heading out of town. And so we head into winter once again.

Coming Along

The last few days, looking at my shelves and peering into my freezers, has shown me that I've done a lot so far. 1 gallon of local broccoli for winter, over 3 gallons of pitted and frozen cherries, plus five cans of cherry preserves. 8 jars of cucumber pickles, 9 small jars of fireweed jelly (sort of), a gallon and a third of blueberries, 1 quart of raspberries, a pint-ish of cranberries, half a pint of my own peas, 2 cups of zucchini, some grapes and peaches.... All this, of course, it just "so far". I haven't even started preserving carrots, celery, or anything like that. I do still want to can more things. I haven't started preserving tomatoes at all. Or the rhubarb. I've been freezing it just until the weather turned a bit cooler and was more favorable for standing over a hot pot of boiling water. That time is rapidly approaching.
It's still quite hot in the evenings and everyone's been talking about how inverted the summer was. Usually July is our hottest month and August starts off rainy and ends chilly. Well, this year it was July that was cold and wet but August is turning out the be gorgeous. Chilly at night and in the mornings (I left the windows in my bedroom open last night and that was a mistake--I didn't want to get out of bed this morning because it was so chilly!) but the days and evenings have been pleasantly hot. I hope that this last bit of summer really pushes my garden into overdrive. My cherry tomatoes have started ripening (I have a recipe in mind for some of them!) and I've got another couple of zucchinis growing. My pumpkins are getting bigger, and I've been collecting some nice fat peas every couple of days. I'm still holding off on digging up my potatoes, giving them as long in the ground as possible to grow big. The herbs need to come inside, though, and I've been trying to remember to cloche the celery at night.
This week is turning out to be crazy, though. Softball ended last night and I only went to one of the two games because I had to get other things done. (Glad I went, though, because it was fun!) Trying to organize berry picking trips, and taking care of the cat (his antibiotics finished last night, but he's still limping from his injury), normal household chores (I had to water all of my garden buckets last night and as the watering can was filling up I was frantically running around to put the clean dishes away then load up the empty dishwasher again, rushing outside to water and fertilize in between--I sat down for a grand total of ten minutes, to eat dinner, from just after lunchtime until 10:00 at night) and trying to get everything organized for our trip on Sunday. As if all this wasn't enough, two good friends are having birthdays this week so two evenings will be spent celebrating them, and I need to get gifts. (My best friend's birthday was two weeks ago and, as we both always do, I still haven't ordered her present. It's ok. Last year I got my birthday gift from her when she came up for my wedding...six months after my birthday. It's how we roll.) Don't worry, any gifts I get will totally fit with my principles. ;) And these are happy things. Busy, but I wouldn't miss out on them for the world.
You'd think I'd be more organized, with so much going on, but no. I keep thinking, "And on this night, I'll get such and such chore done!" but either it doesn't get done, or I realize I have something else going on that night.
Not that this is a complaint, mind you. I love being this busy. I love getting to see my friends this much, and knowing that I'm going on vacation next week gives me that little push to fight against my natural lazy tendencies.
Even if I wanted to complain, Shane worked a 17 hour day yesterday, and will probably be working about the same today. With that comparison, I feel decadently lazy. Poor guy! All this on top of being sick, too. But water samples wait for no man, I take it. He called me at about 10:30 last night from his office phone, and he still wasn't done with work. When I said how much it sucks he shrugged it off and said, "At least I get paid for all this time." And for him, too, having the trip to look forward to, and knowing that he gets to come home in time to celebrate our friend's birthday on Saturday (a friend who has been out of town all summer) helps immeasurably.
It seems like I've done so much, but there's much, much more I need/want to do. As impossible as it seemed last year, I need more canning jars. I have plenty pint size jars (I think--there should be more out in the garage) but I could use more half-pints and quarts. I knew I had more quart jars but couldn't find more than a couple. Well, last night I got out a bunch of stuff to make scones (I tried a new flavor--walnut & chocolate chip, AMAZING!) and realized that I've been using them to store things in. Like my chocolate chips. When I looked in the cupboard I found one more holding some dried fruit way in the back, and one more holding some pasta. Ah-ha! I've transferred those dry goods to other, non-canning jars. (On the rare occasions I buy juice, I buy the organic stuff in glass jars and save the jars. They're super handy for holding dry goods from the bulk section and with the labels ripped off it's easy to see when I'm running low on something.) I figure the quart ones will be best for most of the rhubarb, since what I tend to make rhubarb into is either pie or crisp, and that requires a lot of rhubarb. For just the two of us, I use pint jars for tomato sauce. I'm hoping to can at least 15 jars of tomato sauce this year. Six last year got us halfway through winter, and that far only because we rationed them. If I do get 15, I'll probably end up wishing I'd put up more like 20-25!
I did discover something forehead-slappingly simple, though. I thought I needed to get a food mill for ease of making tomato sauce when I saw online someone mentioned using a blender, then straining the tomatoes to get out the seeds and skins. Wow! Why didn't I think of that before? I know, I know, blenders use electricity and food mills don't. I'm sure I'll get a food mill at some point, but I was dreading trying to find someplace to put it in our tiny and already overstuffed kitchen. Besides which, I'll be canning tomato sauce with a friend so it will be efficient in that way. We're going to wait until after the hunting trip, hoping and praying that my tomatoes ripen before then so that we can use them as much as possible and supplement with the (expensive) farmer's market tomatoes.
Finally, I want to organize the freezers better. I'm hoping that I can make the fridge-freezer for produce, and have the other one mostly open for meat and fish. This depends on whether or not we get a moose, of course. It might end up being a moot point. But even if we come back empty-handed, we still need to figure out what exactly we have in the depths of our freezers, and eat it. I found some caribou jerky the other night that I didn't realize we have. (I'll probably dig it out to bring on the road trip.) What else might we find back there? So that is one of my projects, most likely for after we get home.

Friday Independence Days - Breakup!

Breakup is here! After over a week of positive temperatures during the day, and a lot of snow melt, I think we can officially declare it. It did get down to -7 the other morning (which explained why I was a bit chilly in just my fleece :) but the days have been getting up around +40. Ah, t-shirt weather!
The animals are coming out again, too. I love watching the tiny red squirrels with their frenetic energy. They're starting to skitter around again. The chickadees, which stay here all winter but which I never really see much of, are once again out in force. Singing, winging, dancing through the woods. Even the ravens are getting into the act. I know a lot of people despise the ravens, but I love them. They're absolutely enormous. As in, nearly twice the size of the crows I grew up with in Seattle. Heck, they're almost as big as my dog. And they're smart. They're around all winter too, but right now they're making more noise and flying around more than they did during the cold months. When I saw a couple diving the other day I had to wonder, was it a joyful sort of playing? Were they territorial males fighting over a good spot? Or was it some sort of mating dance? In any case, it was wonderful to see. All of the animal activity puts me in mind of the quote from Emerson, that "the appropriate response to the world is applause."

So, I wanted to do a little Independence Days update. For myself more than anyone else.

Plant something: Today, I'm planting two more bean plants and one more cherry tomato at work. After these, I might be done with the work plants. Everything else will just have to wait for my garden. The count for my work vegetables will be: Four peas, three beans, two cherry tomatoes, and one regular tomato.
Harvest something: Nothing yet. One of my beans is turning purple, though, which means that it's getting ripe! In a week or two I'll be able to eat the first bean I've ever grown.
Preserve something: Just the chicken stock I made. I froze it.
Waste not: Actually, in the last few weeks we've dropped the ball on this one a bit. We had a miscommunication about some leftovers and they ended up going bad before either of us got around to eating them. However, some of those "bad" leftovers went to the dog, who loved them.
Want not: I'd say that the biggest thing I've been doing toward this is to read the book "Affluenza". It's excellent, really eye-opening. It was written for Australia, but the authors could just as easily be describing most of America, too. In general, it's making me realize what's most important to me (not money--that is a means to an end) and how I really want to shape my life. It and a few other things have sparked some really good conversations between me and Shane recently.
Eat the food: Actually, we've done a bit less in this category, too. Mostly because I think we were both getting so sick of fish and moose. In the past few weeks we've had more chicken than we had in the two months previous (which means we bought most of our meat), only two meals of fish in March, and we even bought some pork chops. (They were delicious!) We'll go back to eating more fish now, but it was nice to get a break from it.
Build food systems: Well, I did write to someone who does an ongoing article about farming in Alaska for the local paper. I asked him about some local food resources and got a response. So, now hopefully I'll be able to find the local flour (named--of course--Alaska Flour Company) and buy from them. I was worried about plastic packaging, but their bulk (20 or 40 lb) bags are paper.
Skill up: Nothing.
Health: Lots of fruits and veggies, and I've been adding more nuts like walnuts and pecans to my diet. I've also been exercising a ton, but I'll talk about that in a different post.

Salvaging the compost

The title of this is a little misleading. By "salvaging" I don't mean getting the useful stuff out of your compost, I mean saving it from you. Or rather, in this instance, me. Back in January I noticed that my compost was no longer compressing down. Usually I take my old coffee tin full of compost out to the bin in the garage about once per week, or even a little less depending on what we've cooked. And usually, the pile has mooshed down from the level it was at before. That's a a good thing, it's what compost is supposed to do. Well, mine had stopped doing that. I assumed that it was because the compost froze, since it's near the doors and there was ice on the rim. But then, something happened which I hadn't though possible: I filled up the compost bin in February. This might not seem worrisome, but I could tell that something was wrong. It just didn't look right. The compost wasn't, er, composting. Sure, the food scraps were moldy and rotting. And it smelled like rot, which is not actually what a good compost pile is supposed to do. Further, I keep a plastic lid from a different bin under it so that any liquid doesn't run out all over the garage. Well, this lid was completely full of liquid that I couldn't seem to make go away. At this point, it definitely wasn't because the compost was frozen, so I needed to figure out the real problem.
So I did what I always do in these situations: I checked the tubes (internet) to see what I was doing wrong. Well, I feel silly. I was completely forgetting to add "brown" or "woody" material to the compost. Good compost should have at least a 50-50 ratio of "green" material to "brown" material. Some people even say it should be more like 40-60, with more brown material than green. Since I couldn't exactly add wood chips or dead leaves at this point in the winter, I shredded up a bunch of newspaper (from work--we recycle our papers after two weeks and anyone who wants the old ones is free to take them) and added that on top. Then I let it go for three weeks without adding any more compost. (I have two coffee tins in the kitchen to hold scraps and they got full.) But it worked! The next time I went out to check on it, it was immediately obvious that the compost was once again composting. It had compressed down to almost half of what it had been, the smell was gone, and so was the standing liquid. So now each time I add my food scraps, I also add a layer of newspaper on top. This is the new way I've been handling compost for about a month now and it's working brilliantly.
I have no way of turning over my compost, so no way of seeing what the bottom layer is like. I'm excited, though, because I'm sure there's some quality dirt at the bottom. This summer I'll have to figure out a way to get down there and get at the usable stuff.
I'm also thinking that I might add one light layer of compost-able material to my bins full of dirt before I plant in them. That way as it composts in place this summer, it will release nutrients for whatever I plant in them. And since composting is a heat-generating process, it will help to keep the roots warm, at least in the beginning, and protect them from cold-ish nights. I've heard of other people doing this with great results, so it's worth a try.
And btw, Breakup has started. In less than a week we went from me grumbling about our still cold temperatures to t-shirt weather. Of course, this also means that everything is covered in a layer of slush and muck. I'm back to wearing boots for my walk to and from work so that my pants don't get (too) filthy. Now I just need to convince myself that I really should hold off on planting my seeds until next week or the week after....

Darn it

Keep bragging about your abnormally warm temperatures, Lower 48ers. Meanwhile I'll be up here, debating about what thickness of long underwear to put on for a run with the dog (medium) and whether or not I should put the arm warmers on (not). My (fully charged) iPod shut off halfway through the run because it was too cold. I should knit or crochet a little iPod cozy for myself.
On the plus side, I didn't have to take a flashlight, despite leaving the house at 8:20 and knowing we wouldn't be back until about 9:00. We're getting over 12 hours of daylight! Everything is so bright, with the sunlight bouncing off the snow. In the mornings it's light enough on my walk to work that I get to see the streetlights shut off. Despite the temperatures, summer is on its way.
At work, my two pea plants have almost reached the tops of their cages already. I'm hoping that this means they're going to start bushing out soon. The bean plant is putting out more true leaves every couple of days, although it's still only about half as tall as the peas (which is as it should be). One of my tomatoes is starting to put out its first true leaves and I'm excited for the progress it's making. My other little tomato, which I started after the other one (the first seed I tried didn't germinate) is looking a bit too leggy, but I don't think that can really be helped unless I buy grow lights. (They're expensive, even on Craigslist!) I think the reason it didn't grow quite as well as the other is simply because it started over a weekend, when I wasn't here to take the plastic off the top and give it room to grow up.
If you're confused by "true leaves", I say that because the first leaf-looking things a plant puts out aren't actually leaves. They're called cotyledons, and they don't do any photosynthesizing. I don't know what their purpose is, either, but I'm sure Wikipedia knows.
If you're confused by my description of my "leggy" plant, it's when the stem of a plant grows faster than the leaves do. This is fine for vine plants (like peas), which are supposed to grow up really fast. But it's not so good with things like tomatoes, because it means that they're not getting the proper conditions for best growth. It also often means that the roots are under-developed. I might try moving this particular plant to a window I've scoped out on the south side of the building for a few days so that it can get some direct sunlight.
And if you're surprised that I used plastic in my seed starting, don't worry. I'm not abandoning my principles. A lot of the journals the library gets come in clear plastic bags. (I wrote to one of the major publishers to say that I thought it was silly for environmental and biology-related journals to waste so much plastic and they basically answered, "It's not our fault, people have asked for the journals to be wrapped. They're recyclable." I do recycle it, but I'd much rather they don't send it in the first place! It seemed like the biggest cop-out of an answer.) So I cut one of those bags open to lay over my seed starts. The warmth helps them to germinate faster and better, and the clearness is just as important because light helps many seeds germinate. (You'll know if it's important because when it is, the seed packet will tell you not to totally cover the seed with dirt.) So I'm simply reusing something before it gets recycled.
We're making progress. I just need to remind myself of that every day. It seems like such minute progress, and it can easily be lost under the metaphorical pile. We're making progress. We're making progress. We're making.....

A Cautionary Tale

Just a little lesson we learned the other night: you can't substitute cayenne pepper for chili powder on a 1-1 ratio. Shane made our enchiladas almost inedibly spicy (at least for me, my little brother--who loves spicy foods--thought they were great) and I had to smother mine in my homemade sour cream (amazing, by the way) to choke it down.
And if you do eat something that burns your mouth and tummy for hours afterward, don't compound the problem by doing vigorous exercise afterwards. That was not a good choice.


P.S. What's with the wind?? I had to walk facing the wind for only a short time this morning and my face went instantly numb from the cold. Was it this bad last year at this time?

The simplest coffee ever

I have to give kudos to my brother-in-law's girlfriend for this one. Shane loves coffee, but he also tends to suffer from acid reflux and heartburn. Coffee has always made this worse, but he never wanted to give it up. Then, Megan mentioned that she'd heard cold-pressed coffee has little to no acid in it, unlike regular brewed coffee, and that it might be easier on his stomach.
It is. And it's ridiculously simple, so Shane has switched to only making coffee this way. And since it's brewed in the fridge, it's very low-resource. (After all, we'd have the fridge running anyway.) The ratio is half a pound of ground coffee for every gallon of water. Put those in a jug (we have some big glass jugs, which are only 2/3 of a gallon so Shane changes the proportions to match) and place in the fridge. They stay there anywhere from 3 days to a week to "brew". Then Shane filters out the coffee grounds. He uses a regular coffee filter, which we already had from our old coffeemaker (I'll probably get him to use our cheesecloth instead when those run out) inside a fine wire strainer, and it drips the coffee into a juice container before transferring it back to a clean glass jar for storage in the fridge. That's it.
It's a coffee concentrate, so it needs to be watered down. Depending on how strong you like your coffee, 1/4-1/3 of the cup should be the cold pressed coffee and the rest should be water. Iced coffee is easy enough because all you need is tap (or filtered, if that's your preference) water and some ice. For hot coffee, just heat up some water before adding it to the coffee concentrate. It's easy enough that the non-coffee drinker in our household (me) will often make the coffee on weekends when I hear him waking up.
The best part is that, since he started using this method, Shane's stomach problems have nearly gone away. Isn't it funny how one simple change can affect everything else?

Also, after my post yesterday about how much I love my walk, I woke up this morning to at least 6 inches of fresh snow, and plenty more falling. (The storm advisory yesterday said 2-4 inches. Ha!) When I let the dog out, all she could see was a wall of white and she looked back at me like, "Where do you expect me to go?" It was miserable to walk in. Not the falling snow so much (although, having that blow into my face wasn't fun) but the deep snow. Even most of the roads weren't plowed yet, let alone the sidewalks. I could have easily twisted an ankle because I could never see where the curbs ended. I got to work 15 minutes late. At least I have an understanding boss!

One heck of a crazy week

Well, our truck still won't start. Shane thinks the battery died so we have it on "life support"--battery charger hooked up and plugged in, as well as the engine block heater. It's still in the -30s, though, so we'll see.
Our good friend and next door neighbor came over to "rescue" us last night. We were cheeseless and wanting needing to make noodles and cheese sauce. (We used shells rather than macaroni so I can't call it macaroni and cheese, but that's really what it was.) I'll have to share that recipe sometimes. It's Shane's, and it's divine. I know he starts off with a roux, heated milk, and adds cheese plus a dash or two of nutmeg, but I'm not sure what else or in what quantities. I just know that it's fabulous. Dinner ended up being around 10:00 because we were still hoping that we'd get the truck running. Oh well. We do have food, but to make it all into meals we'll need to go to the store soon. Our neighbor offered to give us a ride if our truck won't start. I love having her live so close! I think I'll bake some bread as a thank you.
In addition to the weather and vehicle insanity, Shane starting classes, and the Fairbanks Symphony starting tonight, I'm having to work crazy hours because my coworker is out until further notice with family health issues. My boss is teaching a class Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we don't have a student worker, and the library is supposed to be open until 7:00 each night. At least I got to sleep in a bit this morning, to make up for working late. (I'm on my 15 minute lunch break.)
On my walk up the hill, I got something in my eye. I rubbed it, and my contact fell out into the snow. Now, I have awful vision. As in, if it gets much worse I will be legally blind. There's no way I can operate with only one contact, and I don't normally carry my one pair of glasses with me wherever I go. This could have been disastrous, involving a headache inducing walk back home (with only half vision) to get a new contact and then trudging back to work with all of my stuff. (My normal work bag packed with two meals' worth of food and my violin in its huge padded case since I'm heading straight to Symphony rehearsal tonight. The case protects it from the cold.) Somehow, miraculously, I managed to find my contact in the snow. My next worry was that it would break or in some other way be weird because it was frozen. But I ducked into the nearest building, found a bathroom to wet down my contact, and somehow everything was fine. Disaster averted! I might have horrible luck in some things, but I'm counting this morning an overall win, even if I was at work 15 minutes later than I planned.
All of this is really just to illustrate the fact that I'm so thankful I planned ahead. I banked some meals in the fall by freezing some soups that can easily be reheated at work. (Butternut squash soup freezes and then reheats really well.) Because I baked a ton of bread over the weekend it was easy enough to grab a couple of rolls in addition and an apple as filling sides. Healthy, quick meals on the go for the win! I won't get home until after 10:00 tonight, and it will be a marathon day, but at least I'll have fortified myself well with nutritious, yummy food to keep me going strong right to the end.
Finally, I decided to shake things up around here a little bit with regard to the view. I wanted to make things simpler and easier to view. I'm trying to figure out how to tag things to get an archive by category going, but I'm still not sure how to do that yet. If anyone knows Blogger better than I do and wants to let me in on the secret, please do!

Ice fog

It's all -50 and ice fog outside today. Tomorrow we're escaping to the hills (where it can be 20-30 degrees warmer) to help cut wood for J's parents. For today, though, I'm mostly stuck inside, reading and cleaning. On my one very brief venture outside, I took a couple of pictures:

If I was on a hill, there might be sun dogs or ice rainbows. Down here, though, it just looks dim.

Usually this way we'd see the University up on the hill. Now we can't even see the busy intersection less than two blocks away.

This is why I'm scared of moose

There are usually several stories like this every winter. To sum up, this poor man (82 years old) was attacked by a moose, which his 85 year old wife chased off by beating it with a shovel until it stopped attacking her husband. He's lucky to have gotten away, and with *only* seven broken ribs.
Also, we're entering yet another cold snap. *Sigh* I'm dreaming of beaches and Fairbanks is giving me -40 and -50. Or, rather hilariously, snowfall on a sunny day as it was doing yesterday. I'm not sure how that worked since there was nothing more than wispy clouds above, but it was definitely snowing. We got a lovely snow rainbow out of it, too.

And then there was light

It's getting noticeably lighter from one day to the next. We're gaining about 6 minutes of daylight right now, so it's quite obvious every day that the sun rises a little earlier, sets a little later. It's making me excited for the summer, and it's giving me a restlessness that I always feel at this time of year. There's an underlying anxiety that I've been feeling--not of bad things to come, but of good things that I'm anxious to hurry along. The daylight whispers that Spring is right around the corner, that soon I won't have to bundle myself in layer upon layer to step outside, that I'll be able to ditch the boots in favor of sandals, that I'll feel truly (as opposed to artificially) warm once again. It's a sweet siren song and I'm responding to it.
The first afternoon that I could still see the sunset during my walk home from work, I stood on the snowy hill for a moment, silently rejoicing. It was breathtakingly beautiful, with the deep red over the mountains in the distance, the nearly full moon on my other side, and the deep blue sky which the snow responded to by appearing as a lighter blue. It was one of those snapshots in time that makes me think, yes. I want to hold this in my heart forever, the joy and the beauty of now. One perfect, gorgeous moment in life.
As I get older, the days pass faster and faster. I know that really, Spring won't come until sometime in May, five long months away. But my heart doesn't listen, instead reminding me that it's already been almost six months since my wedding, which seems like it was yesterday. Spring, with Summer quick on her heels, will be here soon enough. And then the marathon that is Winter will become the sprint of Summer. I'll be running and rushing with hardly a moment to catch my breath or to stop and reflect. It's an entirely different kind of joy than winter brings.
I think that this anxiousness is necessary. It helps me to prepare for the short summer, to remind me of all the tasks I need to get completed before then. The dark season ends, and with it the slowness and lethargy of early winter. I want to be out and doing, not sitting around.
But sitting indoors is what I've been forced to do. The extreme cold of these past weeks have kept us housebound for the most part. I haven't even gotten to take the dog for more than two short walks because of worries that it's too cold for her. (It is--she loves walks but during the last two we took, the most excitement from her was when she realized that we were headed home.) So we fill our days with tasks that will be put off during the summer. I've already read 6 books this month, we've been visiting with friends and cooking and playing indoor games with the animals. I've even been watching TV shows. I'm trying to savor the slow season even as I prepare for the fast one. And to remind myself that patience is a virtue. The light returns in its own time. Spring and Summer will come in their time, on their own terms. All I can do is wait, prepare, and anticipate. It's such a sweet longing.