It's very dark this morning. The clouds are thick, blocking out the sun completely. Despite this, construction on the convention center next door (outside my window) continues. I think the goal is to get that building enclosed before snow flies. It's already the last of August.... Fall has just about come and gone... I don't know how successful they'll be! And I don't envy them their jobs either!

Did I mention that we have new cell phones? We finally broke down and got Cellular One phones. So if you have our old cell numbers, they'll be non-functional as of Sept 2nd. We got 4 phones for the family. The kids were getting stranded at the school and in Eagle River too often, so we got them phones to avoid having them borrow someone else's. We were meaning to do this all along. So once Stephen gained employment, we went for it. The kids were psyched. They're cool flip phones with cameras. We've allotted them 200 minutes each per month plus their free nights and weekends. So we'll see how that works out. Of course any calls to us and other Cellular One users are free minutes as well. [If they go over, we'll limit their friends to those kids who either have Cellular One phones or are mute... :o) ]

PS Happy Birthday Mom!

It was about 42 degrees when I got ready for work this morning. It's mostly cloudy outdoors.

You may have heard that Barrow High School now has a football team. They played the first American HS football game above the Arctic Circle earlier this month. One major obstacle to their football program is that their nearest competitor is over 500 miles away near Fairbanks. They are only scheduled to play 4 games this season. I believe they either fly their competitors in to Barrow or they fly themselves to their opponent. Their most distant opponent is in Sitka, 1100 miles away... There are numerous articles about this on the web right now. Here's a link http://www.adn.com/sports/prep/football/story/8128351p-8020723c.html. Don't forget to click on "More Photos".

Anyway, turns out the Barrow cheerleaders don't know any football cheers. They've mostly cheered for basketball... a nice cozy indoor sport. So our cheerleaders might try to help them out by videotaping ourselves doing some cheer instruction and mailing it to Barrow. There is also talk of having a cheer clinic with them either here in Chugiak or there in Barrow. We'll keep you posted on that one.

We had a mini First Day Celebration yesterday, in honor of Stephen's first day at his new job and Alicia's first day at her new daycare. Both had good days...


Alicia's daycare is about a mile from our house. It's in a woman's home. Her name is Anita Gilmore. She has the downstairs in-law apartment converted into her daycare. What would have been the bedroom is a big playroom with a playhouse, two toddler slides, many bins of toys, a kiddy kitchen, and several baby doll strollers. She swaps out toys periodically. Alicia REALLY likes that room! :o) She made a bee line for it when Daddy dropped her off and didn't even notice him leaving... Yay!

It would appear that State Fairs are the same all over the country.


Lots of yummy, unhealthy foods, people trying to guess your weight, age, or whatever...



Rides that require you to purchase a sheet of tickets beforehand, because that way you might forget that the 4-5 tickets you handed over to ride an oversized swingset cost you the same amount as your last car payment.


Buildings full of crowing roosters and lumbering cattle.


More buildings full of quilts and canned zucchini. (How do you judge a jar of zucchini?)


I guess the thing that sets the Alaska State Fair off from all others is the fact that it's in Alaska! While you're meandering through crowds of folks dressed in layers of flannel and polar fleece, you can glance up and see tall peaks of snow-topped mountains. (That's Stephen there in the plaid.)


We had a great day at the fair. It didn't rain! We saw a lumberjack show, ate lots of good fair food, and walked until our feet ached.

Few folks have the opportunity to use the old "moose in road, held up school bus" excuse for why they were late to class.

This occurred on the very first day of school. I forgot to mention it here, but thought folks might find it amusing. :o)

We'll be heading to the Alaska State Fair tomorrow... rain or shine. The fair is in Palmer, less than 30 minutes drive north of our house in Peters Creek. It runs from Aug 24 - Sep 4 this year. [http://www.alaskastatefair.org/]

Tess is inviting a friend or two to accompany her. Donald has to work. Stephen, the baby and I will be viewing the gigantic produce (thanks to Alaska's long summer days), riding kiddie rides and eating lots of yummy fair food. I'll try to post photos on Monday.

Thanks for the good vibes... We are now FULLY EMPLOYED! YAY!

Stephen starts Monday as a Field Technician for EHS-Alaska in Eagle River. (That's Engineering, Health & Safety Consultants.) He will be "conducting fieldwork involving the survey of buildings for hazardous materials and industrial hygiene issues. " Basically, they inspect construction sites (both building and demolition) for hazardous materials and recommend methods of abatement. Some of his work will be in small communities in rural Alaska (school buildings, etc) where he will be flown in by small plane.

He's very excited about this job. They are going to provide him with all sorts of training to get his EPA HazMat inspector credentials. I think it's a great opportunity for him. And on top of that, he's just very pleased to be EMPLOYED after only a month's job hunt! Double yay!

Float planes and other small puddle jumper planes fly overhead all the time. I'm sure I'll stop noticing them soon. But for now, it's neat to watch them and wonder where they're headed. Anchorage has the largest float plane airport in the world. It's at Lake Hood and sits very close to the main Anchorage airport for international flights...

There's also a small plane airport called Merrill Field just east of downtown. I drive by it on my way to work. This use to be the main Anchorage airport back in the old days. But I don't think the space is big enough to handle jetliners so they built a new airport at some point. Most flightseeing tours originate from Merrill Field, and most fly-in fishing trips originate from the float plane airport at Lake Hood.

In addition to Lake Hood, any lake large enough to land a plane which has residences on its shores has float plane hangars or docks as well. There's Fire Lake in Eagle River and Mirror Lake near our house in Peters Creek. We'll have to hang around these places and drum up some friends!

Well, according to Tess, "High school is great!" She seems to really like it. So that's a relief. Not that I really suspected she wouldn't. But with teen girl mood swings, I wasn't sure she'd admit how much she liked it.

And Donald claimed yesterday that everything seems to be working out all right. He's loving his new job at the grocery store. He rode the bus from school there yesterday afternoon. He says he never thought having a job would be this much fun. [I told him he must be doing something wrong... ;o) ] At any rate, he's still in that euphoric state of "wow, they're PAYING me to do this!"...


First day of school duds...


2nd day of school duds for Tess... (She's all into the "gotta wear what everyone else is wearing" stage.)

Stephen’s interview last Friday went well, by the way. They told him they’d be finishing up the interviews within a week and then good candidates would be scheduled to interview with an external hiring company. If this interview was successful, the candidate would be brought back in to the original office for a 3rd and final interview.

Later that same day, they called to schedule him for the 2nd interview on Monday (yesterday). He apparently did well in this, according to the interviewer. We’re now waiting to hear back from the company to schedule a final interview. We’re pretty optimistic about this position. It sounds like a good fit for him. I’ll fill you in more on it later if things progress.

On another note, I got a call yesterday from a woman I’d spoken to previously who offers day care in her home. She lives just around the corner from us and sounds like she has a nice set up for children. But when I spoke to her twice previously, she was full. She called today to say she had a spot open up for Alicia’s age bracket if we were still looking. We’ll be visiting her home this Friday evening. Another yay!

Well, by the time I post this, the kids will be Back In School! Yay! We went out for our traditional annual back-to-school dinner last night. Every year we go out to eat the night before school starts as a special treat. I’ve been doing this since Tess entered kindergarten. And here she is… all grown up… heading off to high school! In honor of such a monumental event in her educational career, we went some place EXTRA special. Any guesses?

Living in Alaska is like living in a foreign country where they speak perfect (American) English, accept the dollar, and allow us to work without a permit or passport. It's great!

This feeling stems from the fact that we are so divided from the rest of the US by distance, time, and mindset, we basically function as a completely separate entity. If you watch your morning news (Good Morning, America, etc.), they're not talking about or even thinking about Alaska. We won't be on the national weather report. If our senators are involved in DUI or whatever, no one down there will hear about it. [Not that they have been, I'm just using that as an example.] The only time we seem to make the news is when it affects your oiling-buying wallets. And to be honest, I'm good with that. As I think most folks here are.

So if you get the urge to travel abroad and visit family members or friends... come to Alaska! We'll leave the light on for you. [wouldn't want you tripping over a grizzly]

The girls had their first football game last night. They did pretty well. I'm the co-team mom and the booster club historian. I'm doing the scrapbook basically. So I'm allowed to hang around practices and games and take pictures without getting eye rolls from Tess. :o) It's all in the title I guess.

The weather here is still rainy and cold. It's in the 50's during the day. The days are getting shorter by about 6 minutes each day. We're down to 15.5 hours of daylight a day. Sunrise this morning was at 6:17 and it'll set at 9:50pm.

Stephen has a job interview this morning at 10:30am. It's with a private Environmental Health and Safety firm in Eagle River. Hope it works out!

Tess did some back-to-school shopping yesterday at the 5th Avenue Mall near my work. She got a couple of mix-n-match outfits at American Eagle Outfitters (the new IN store) and a store called Wet Seal. The good thing is, no one here has ever seen any of her other clothes... so everything that still fits is fair game for this year's wardrobe!

None of that pick-your-own berry farm business for us. You know, those places where you drive up, park your car, walk 50 feet to a field of bushes and start filling buckets with berries. Not us!

We hike 3 miles up a mountainside trail with a vague hope that we’ll be able to find some blueberry bushes before we find a bear.

We dropped Tess off early at cheerleading practice as they were making “break through” signs for the football team to run through to start the game. This gave us 3.5 hours to find the trailhead, hike “several miles”, locate the blueberries, pick some, get back to the van and then back to the school to pick up Tess by 8:30pm.

The trail was pleasant. Not too steep. Just enough to remind us exactly how out-of-shape we are. We hiked for almost 1.5 hours without spotting any berries (or bears). We were just about to turn around when we came out into an open field area surrounded by higher mountain peaks with a steep drop off down to a river. This looked promising.

Upon further investigation, and a lot of loud whistling (to ward off bears), we located an area of low growing blueberry bushes. Yay! We picked for a half hour and high-tailed it the 3 mile hike back to the van.

Baby rode in her back pack much of the time, or Dad carried her. The woods were very damp as it’s been raining for two weeks. It rained a little as we hiked. My feet felt like they were in a pond, my sneakers were so saturated. A cold pond.

Blueberry season lasts well into September. So we’ll certainly try to go again. Maybe we’ll find another patch.

Here's the tally so far of damages:

The main TV (27") is broken. Cracked in the front and the remote control receiver is smashed.

The (previously brand new) gun safe is banged up. The movers dropped it off the truck ramp right in front of Stephen. Still functional, but mightily scuffed. :o(

Stephen's turkey tail feather mount is mangled. The VA packers shoved it in a box and piled kitchen goods on top of it.

Several plastic tubs and boxes are mutilated or crushed. The packers in VA did a HORRIBLE job of packing our things. They did not follow company policies. They hardly wrapped anything in paper or packing. We'll find a whole box of loose (some broken) glassware, completely unwrapped. And then you'll see this giant, fully encased "something" that'll turn out to be a plastic laundry basket or something. They fully wrapped trash they found in the basement of the Virginia house, but they just tossed antique beer steins into a box with a bunch of other stuff. Unbelievable.

They had a giant stack of packing paper to wrap things with in VA, most went unused. But they used two of Donald's posters to wrap a framed painting. Hmmmm.

Given the opportunity to use Premier Movers out of Salem, VA... don't!

THE GOOD NEWS:

• The guns arrived intact (despite having been removed from the gun safe and packed into a wardrobe box with clothing piled on top to "conceal" them). Totally against all policies and I believe the law!
• The scrapbooks all arrived intact. Yay!

Our stuff has arrived!

The movers are at our house right this very moment unloading two trucks full of our stuff. I'm leaving work early today to assist Stephen with the Unloading Direction Process.

We're praying that most (if not all) of our things have arrived intact....

Donald started his new job yesterday. He's the latest Courtesy Clerk at the Carrs Grocery Store. Minimum wage here is $7.15/hr. So that's what he's making. Yay!


Here he is practicing his career skills at home with the World's Cutest Shopper.

The return from San Diego was relatively uneventful. I arrived at the airport 3 hours early just in case things got hairy with the new terrorist threats... However, I discovered that the level of security efficiency had been underestimated. Turns out, the security folks at the San Diego airport were already diligently checking passengers at a rapid rate. So the earlier arrival time on my part was not used up waiting in line at the checkpoint. Rather it was used up lying on the floor behind the Gate Desk reading a magazine and munching on Jack in the Box chicken strips...

I'd have sat in a seat, but everyone else apparently also heeded the "get there early" warning and the place was more crowded than JFK International during a blizzard.... Ah well. Moods were festive, so it wasn't so bad. Nothing like near tragedy to lighten the mood.

My goodness. I leave town for 1 week and the world goes crazy! The oil pipeline shutdown in Alaska has forced a hiring freeze by the state! Talk about bad timing... Now this raised terrorist threat affecting air travel... and me with a flight tomorrow afternoon. Ahhh... adventure.

On another note, I went to see World Trade Center last night. I thought it was very well done. And I think that story needs to be told and retold the sooner the better. If you wait too long, the people hearing the story or watching it on screen will have forgotten just how they felt that day or they will be too young to have been there at all. At any rate, I highly recommend it and I hope other film portrayals are released soon as well.

I've been in continuous contact with the Alaska contingency. They're a little bored right now because things have yet to begin for the most part. School starts the 22nd. Of course Tess has cheer practice every day. But that's about the only thing that breaks up their days.

There's no money for exploring. Now that they've shutdown that oil pipeline, gas prices are expected to skyrocket. Gas was around $2.89/gallon when I left. It's $3.45/gallon here in San Diego. Stephen said they need to replace 12 miles of pipeline for some reason and that's why it's been shutdown. Hmmmm.

Stephen has been taking the kids to a nearby park. There are soccer fields for Donald & Tess to use and a playground suitable for Alicia. So that's something close to home and free!

We've been having issues with our cell phones. We are currently with Cingular, but they don't have service in Alaska. So we're waiting for them to kick us off before we sign up with an Alaska plan. Cell service is much more expensive in AK. Then again, what isn't??

Day 2 of the San Diego conference. I overslept a little... belatedly discovered that the pants I'd packed are the ones the button came off last week... finally found a paperclip to improvise.... Ahhh, adventure...

It took me 5 minutes to reach the convention center and about 30 minutes to get into the parking garage. Tomorrow I'll play dirty and cut folks off instead of obeying traffic laws as posted. I was cut off by lots of sly conference goers this morning and felt the tinge of envy... Darn them! Why didn't I think of that?!

Then I waited in line at the Starbucks vendor inside the CC for another 30 minutes to buy a coffee and a pastry, even though I'm not a coffee drinker. The line at Mrs. Fields was much shorter, but I couldn't bear to part with that extra $.75 to get a cookie and an apple juice. $2.50 for a normal sized cookie?? What's up with that? Can't do it. Not for breakfast anyway. For $2.25 I got a yummy chocolate croissant instead!

I'm in San Diego right now. I flew in yesterday morning (Sunday) and spent the day with Aunt Dorothy just east of LA. She took me to dinner in Palm Springs. Let me tell you, it is some kind of HOT in Palm Springs! And I don't think it just happens to be more noticeable to me because I'm coming from Alaska... We're talking "fry eggs on your forehead" sort of hot! Holy cow... But the food was great and filling, and thankfully we chose not to eat outdoors on the terrace. We had Mexican at the Blue Coyote. Yum.

I finally arrived at my hotel here in San Diego at midnight last night and crashed until 8am this morning. The over-zealous sunshine in AK makes it difficult to sleep well in the summertime. So it was nice to get a good night's sleep in the dark. But I'm not complaining about the sunlight in AK. It'll be dark soon enough!

My hotel is great. Tess would love it. It's like a polynesian resort... lots of tiki decor, waterfalls, and palm trees. She's decided to do her Alaska bedroom in a beach motif... Maybe I'll swipe a tiki statue for her. :o) Okay, not really. But it's the thought that counts!

The conference is gigantic. It's cool to think that this throng of humanity is interested in geography and maps the same way I am. Gives me that nice feeling of belonging. It also gives me that feeling of being jostled around and elbow-wrestling for the best seat. But that's okay. It's all in the spirit of Geographic Brother(Sister)hood. Hail to the Map! :o)

Home Sweet Cubicle. :o)
This is where I spend my days. The view outside the window is generally a little brighter. At least in the summer, I guess. It's unusually dark today. Just below my window they're building a new Convention Center. It's only supposed to be about 4 stories tall, so it won't obscure my view. I'm on the 6th floor of our building.


This is the seal on the front of the security guard's stand at our building's entrance.


There are murals on the sides of buildings all over the city. This is the one I can see from my window. You can see those 2 tall buildings depicted just right of center. The silver building is my building. The gold one is the Conoco Phillips building I can see out my office window....

Well, it's official. Tess is a high school cheerleader. She made the JV squad. Yay! Or I should say: Rah rah rah! Sis boom bah! She's pleased. [You can send your congratulations to her at bugoff319@yahoo.com.] Some of the other girls live in our neighborhood it turns out. So maybe we can work out some carpools....

We're thinking of popping up to Talkeetna on Saturday to play tourist and show the kids around. I fly out to San Diego at like 1am Sunday morning. Talkeetna is about a 1.5-2 hour drive from our house.

We registered the kids for school last night. They're both going to be in Advanced English classes which unfortunately had summer reading lists of which they have only just been made aware. Now the challenge is to locate those titles at the library in time for them to read them within the next 3 weeks.... Hmmmm.

This is a photo I took when we crossed the Columbia River in central Washington state. There was a little pull out from the highway. Great vistas... Gets those "wouldn't it have been great to be an early explorer" juices flowing...

Anyway... back to Alaska.

Tess has a "playdate" today with one of the other freshmen trying out for the cheer squad. Then we've got to register the kids for high school this afternoon and then the final tryout tonight. She should find out which squad she's on by tonight. There are 3, varsity, JV, and the C Team which is all freshman.... She's hoping for JV. Any way you look at it, we have to cough up at least another $125 to buy cheer gear for her (sneakers, socks, a fleece, etc...). Ouch! This is on top of the $130 we paid so she could just sign up! Double Ouch!

Oh well. Stephen does have a job interview on Friday with a private sector environmental services firm. Plus he has a couple applications in to the state (DEC) and with another private sector firm. So keep your fingers crossed that he is offered a good position soon!

This is the mountain that rises up behind the house. It's called Bear Mountain. The odd thing is, we lived at the base of a considerably smaller Bear Mountain in Virginia.


In the winter when the leaves are off, supposedly we catch an occasional glimpse of Mt. McKinley through this break in the trees.


We have many large rocks and patches of lovely fireweed in the yard.


Here's the dog pen and you can see one of the neighbor's houses through the trees in the background.


This neighbor is directly across the street. Nice log cabin.


Here's Alicia May in her new yard sale snow boots! We're all set now!