Wednesday, September 07,
2011
It rained through the
morning and into the afternoon, but not heavy.
Last night, it cleared up in the evening, and we saw the moon rise over
the mountains across the inlet. It was
beautiful, and reminded us how few times it’s been clear enough to see this
since we got here.
The goal today was to get
AK driver’s licenses and license plates.
The bad news, AK DMV here is only open four hours and only twice a week,
on Wednesdays and Fridays; good news, there was only three people in front of
me when I got there, even though only one person works the office! Ha, there’s a huge positive for living in a
very small town!
So, first is the driver’s
license. Not so fast: they want my current license, my passport,
and my social security card! What?! If I have that, it’s still packed away, for
another month. Who does Alaska think they
are? California, with 33 million people and the
eighth largest economy in the world, doesn’t require a Social Security card,
for pete’s sake! Oh well, can’t get that
today. Let’s try the license plates. Keep in mind this is a small office in the
corner of the first floor of the two-story Craig Police Department
building. All I need, luckily, is my
current registration and $100, and I’ve got both. She looks over my application, and then pulls
a set of license plates out from under the counter! I’m going to walk away with a set of plates, cool! No waiting for them to be mailed from Juneau. They are the old style, plane yellow, but
they’ll do the job, and make us more officially Alaskans! GFY 153:
I see Goofy’s batting average in the cartoon where he played for the
Yankees for ten games. (As Cookie
‘Chainsaw’ Randolph
would say, “Are you just MAKING that up?!”
YES! J) They do
have some really cool license plates, but those have to be ordered over the
Internet, after one already has plates, so we’ll think about that next.
Next, the dogs have been
very, very patient while I ran errands and hoped the rain would stop or slow
down, so it’s time to go take them for a walk.
I head to Cemetery
Island, our favorite
place to walk them. It’s always
deserted, which means the dogs can go off-leash, which they love. (They always stick to the trails and stick
close, so don’t molest the wildlife.)
The rain has slowed somewhat, but continues. Driving in, all we see are the 15 or so
Canada Geese grazing on one of the ballfields.
I continue past them and drive to the spot where the long trail
starts. They deserve a nice long walk,
and the red alders provide fair protection from the rain, so we walk the entire
trail, find it is a deadend, strangely, and turn around. Lakota is lagging behind, so I know we’ve had
a good walk.
Back at the car, and it’s
time to put the new plates on. Away go
the paper plates from the dealer, and I don’t like their frames either, so I
take them off. The new plates look a
little bare, but still better, and so cool, we are Alaskans! I’ll find some nice frames from a local or
regional nonprofit organization I’d rather help promote.
It has been a pretty good
day for birds, relatively speaking.
Sittting at the DMV parking lot waiting for them to open, a nearby tree
was visited by not one, but three Stellar’s Blue Jays. I’ve seen a couple of these, and heard a
couple, but this is my first sustained look at them. They mean mountains and forests and camping
to me. They were almost pests on Palomar Mountain, our family’s favorite local
place to camp for decades and generations.
I pick up Kathy for lunch,
and we open an account at our local credit union, Tongass Federal.
Okay, we are in Alaska, right, land of
the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, pumping billions of gallons of oil south to a
port. Alaska residents get a check each year from
the oil they sell. So, why am I paying a
constant $4.519 a gallon, with no movement at all since we got here? Hmm, must be that darned island syndrome
factor. Luckily we don’t have to drive
far for the most part.
Here is a little
information on the impact of the pipeline to Alaskans, taken from Wikipedia:
Since the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System in
1977, the government of the state of Alaska
has been reliant on taxes paid by oil producers and shippers. Prior to 1976, Alaska's personal income tax rate was 14.5 percent—the
highest in the United States.
The gross state product was $8 billion, and Alaskans earned $5 billion in
personal income. Thirty years after the pipeline began operating, the state had
no personal income tax, the gross state product was $39 billion, and
Alaskans earned $25 billion in personal income. Alaska moved from the most heavily taxed
state to the most tax-free state.
It now delivers about
700,000 barrels of oil a day. Each
barrel produces about 25 gallons of gas!
Again, why am I paying even more than San Diego is paying?! I suppose I shouldn’t complain, since I won’t
be paying any state income tax, and may get a check from the state after we’ve
been here a year.
The thermometer has been a
very short one, too, which is nice. It
has varied little outside of between 51 degrees and 58 degrees. This works for us: one habit we’ve been able to maintain is
sleeping with at least one window open, enjoying the fresh and cool air.
All of Alaska
has the same area code, 907; all Alaska,
except the extreme western islands of the Aleutian chain, is in the same time zone,
which seems like a stretch for a state that is 2,261 miles wide (it’s also
1,420 miles long).
Another factoid: half of the 710,231 residents of Alaska live within the Anchorage Metropolitan Area,
making the most sparsely populated state in the Union,
on average, actually even more sparsely populated.
By the way, I did find a
national franchise on the island, when I thought there was none. I’d ask people for their guesses, but I don’t
think anyone would get it without lots of clues: it’s NAPA Auto Parts.
No comments:
Post a Comment