Six Months In Alaska!

Happy February everyone!  We have now been on the island six months, amazingly.  Due to our housing challenge, we’ve only been in our cabin about four months.  The weather, of course, has been different, pretty wild for the last three months, much better the first three.  That's when it was almost a constant 55 degrees or thereabouts.  Then came November, it got colder, and we ended up with a White Thanksgiving, something the locals said was very unusual, and portended a snowier than normal winter.


I walked home again yesterday.  It was raining lightly, not bad.  It took me twenty minutes at a brisk pace.  I'm so lucky to have a job, this job, and in this location.  It makes our single-car family project work great.  

I've got nice family pictures on my desk at work now.  I have of Kathy in her graduation gown, with me and Kelli and, of course, Henry, on the day she walked for her Masters in Family Therapy.  That was only May of last year!  Who could have predicted what that day would lead us to?!


We moved Kathy into her new office on Wednesday evening, after work.  She now has a little bigger office, with a window, nice!  She also has a new co-therapist coming into the department, starting Monday, so that should help with her workload.  Steve will be moving from Florida, so will have similar issues with weather as we do.  

Brady is flying, or has flown, home from two days in Toronto.  Next, he's in Halifax for 12 days on the 20^th of February.  He sure gets around!  He was in Chicago for one or two nights last week.  Faith was at the Sundance Film Festival this past weekend with a girlfriend.   How cool is that?

They are getting a replacement cat for Animal, from the breeder where they got both Animal and Pixie.  The breeder feels responsible for the heart ailment that took Animal down.  Pixie greets them at the door each night hoarse from mewing, so she definitely needs a partner.

January 31, 2012, Tuesday

I got to work early today, finally.  We had a mixup on the car, though:  I thought I was taking Kathy to work and she wasn’t ready to leave, so was just dropping me off.  I had to walk, then, to the POW Watershed Association meeting at the Klawock City Hall, about eight blocks from work.  The weather was okay, but I thought I saw a shortcut on the map.  It turned out to have a long bank of snow and bushes, but I managed it.  The rest of the way was uphill on a paved street, so that was good, but I was out of breathe from scrambling up the bank of snow.  Anyway, I made it, just as they got started.  I couldn’t stay to the end, unfortunately, but that was okay, there for most of it.  I'm still hoping I can get myself on the board of directors.  This is a brand new group, working on getting off the ground.  The four island tribes are now apparently interested, which is good.  We did get the bylaws accepted today, which is a huge step forward.  We did not get a board seated though, which would have been nice.  Next up is the logo, which, since it’s art and will represent the association, is likely to be highly controversial:  people have way different tastes with art.  Maybe we will get lucky and a majority won’t really be concerned with it. 

I decided to take another route back to work, sticking to the streets, then found another path that I thought would do it, but it took me right back to the snowy bank.  Good thing, too, because that is where I found my missing gloves!  And, I only fell once on the icy path:  had the wrong shoes, for one.  

Our grandson is growing up seeing us on a computer screen, waving and saying hi and giving kisses to it.  What kind of grandparents are we?!  There are only two things worse  than absentee grandparents.  What are we doing up here?!

Boy, the cold water coming out of our faucets is cold!  This morning it was icy, a wonder it was flowing at all.  When it’s been really cold for a few days, people start leaving the faucets running, can you San Diegans imagine?  We just let it run, all night long!

Kathy told me yesterday that a LICENSED Marriage and Family Therapist had been hired by SEARHC in Juneau!  This means she will finally have a supervisor for her hours, and she can get HER license!  This is great!  Finally!  

Kathy went to the dentist last week and found she only has one tooth with issues.  She thought she had three.  She will need a crown, but that’s better than three.  She also found out she grinds her teeth, which was news to both of us.  I’ve never heard nor suspected she did this.  We expect it’s the result of the stress she is under at work.

This story is over a year old, but new to me.  It's the craziest set of pictures of nature I've seen in a long time.  Check out this story and set of pictures:  grizzly chases bison.