Once Upon a Time (with photos)

Once upon a time, the homeschool program in our town offered virtually free passes to head up the Mt Roberts tram. Being the cheapskates we are, we signed up quickly.

After arriving up top, we thought to take a "quick" hike to Father Brown's Cross, a local landmark that we'd never been to.

What's this? Another trail? Can we go all the way to the top of the mountain, Mommy? Sure! Let's give it a try!

Wow, this alpine vegetation is sure neat!

Let me get your picture on the trail, ladies!

 Aw, you guys are so cute. But why are all these pictures so foggy?

Thanks for the cameraness, Gwen!

Is it getting dark already?

Hey, is that Mountain Goat poop?

How far up are we, anyway? Let's head back down, girls who are wearing shorts....

Oh, a sign! We must have missed this on the way up.What's it say?

 Yikes.

 Wow, look at those teeny tiny cruise ships!

Let's go, girlies!

The end.

Girlies!

I'm at the library right now with our laptop, posting as much as I can. We got rid of the internet at home so will only be posting here sporadically, and checking email rarely.

Some people are really getting caught up with and highly proficient with this techno age. Not us.

Burying their feet in the sand, aka, "Making boots."



"Oh that sun is so bright!"



"Okay, maybe we can unshade our eyes for just a second!"



"Yikes, that was really bright, huh?'
"Yeah, so bright. Ouch."



Busy girls making bridges and tunnels for the stream to better reach the sea. Maybe they will be engineers like Daddy.



Shorts over leggings. Quite the Alaskan fashion plate, no? Hey, our main goal is modesty, not trendiness.




Thinking hard about math.




"We're done with school already? Yay!"

We have had several really nice days since we started school. The girls and I have moved lessons to the beach on some of those days. We love homeschooling.

More Bears and some pictures

...but not of the bears.

Last Sunday morning as I took a load of mixed paper down to the garage for recycling, I stopped on our first set of steps, before I got to the landing. Even without my glasses, I saw some movement in the bushes near our neighbor's house, about 20 yards away. Actually, it looked like there was something under their house. My first thought was, "I didn't know they had chickens! Do they have chickens? Black chickens? They must only have laying hens since I've never heard any cock-a-doodle-dooing. I should ask them about eggs. And chickens." (I think really fast...)

Then I realized that the "chicken" was much larger than a chicken. I thought, "What is Dale doing under his house this early in the morning? Was there some wind last night? Did a tree fall? I wonder if there was flooding? Wait, Dale doesn't get up this early."

That's when a very large, very fluffy, very sleekly black, shiny bear came out of the brush and stood in Dale's driveway, broadside to me, paused in silouette in the sun, with his breath puffing out into crisp morning air. It was a beautiful sight to behold. He was magnificent.

When I slowly eased backward up the stairs through the door and said softly, "Bear.", Greg came bounding out with his slingshot and a fist-full of lead balls, with wild-eyed excitement.

My Kodak moment was over.

These are shots of a bear from a few months ago. We saw him several times in the same spot eating lots of grass and greens, while on the way home from fishing. He was usually right by the road and never seemed too leery of strangers.

But wait!

There's more!

This morning, we were up early to take Greg to the airport for his hunting trip (Elk. Wyoming. Yum.), we encountered THIS:

PS: This is the neighbor's trash in our garage, so don't jump to any conclusions about those beer bottles, thank you very much. Go ahead and razz me about all the miscellaneous junk those - that's all mine!

wishes

Happy Birthday, Dad!

I wonder if you know how much I miss you. How much I wish you could have met Greg and the girls. They have started asking for stories about "Papa". That's what we call you. I tell them about funny, silly things like your monster face; you teaching me how to make gravy - patiently; you making green eggs and ham for us which we were grossed out by and didn't eat; you trying to poison me with green milk; that your favorite color was yellow.

I also try to explain to them why you died before you could know them and why you smoked. I try to help them learn from your life the things that they should and shouldn't do, just as I do with my own life.

We enjoy talking about you backing the Blazer over the trailer; demonstrating "One Grecian Urn" for us in your trickle, trickle, trickle way; your insane love of all things baseball; your disdain for cats, except when they are snuggling on your belly and purring in your beard; you scaring off the solicitors at our front door wearing just your undies while you were working nights for so long; and your devotion to their Granny.

You would have been 68 years old today and you would have just hated being an old man. It's been just over 12 years now since you died, but I keep you with us every day.

This time of year is reflective for our whole country, and for me too. But for a different melancholy reason.

Marauders and Guns

How on earth did this story skip my mind? I should have started off with this last time, but I guess I'm just so used to living in Alaska that it didn't hit my radar has hard as it would have 15 years ago...

Several nights ago, Greg and I were sound asleep when, at 3:24AM, we heard two very loud, very close gunshots following a shout of "You git outta here!". We ran to the window and watched two very large black bears come into our yard, meander around our truck and boat and then move quickly away when Greg opened a window to yell at them.

Now, Greg's truck is an older model Ford. It is just a regular old pick-up, right? Not a huge monster truck, but not one of those little half-trucks either. The back of each bear (their heads were down; they must've been sniffing something) came up well past the back bumper, almost over the top end of the taillights. So that's about 3 1/2 feet from the ground up. Big, fluffy guys.

Turns out these are most likely two male brothers who are about two years old. With our cold weather and rainy days, they're getting a little daring in their food searches and they've been vandalizing the whole neighborhood like clockwork for about a week now.

The neighbor who shot at them (just birdshot) had caught them up on his front porch eating the birdseed and squirrel treats he left out right in front of his big picture window so he and the missus could get a good, close look at nature.

So let me take just a quick moment here and say, "DUH!"

Even if the bears break in through the window to snack on their cat, we won't have any sympathy for that guy, the birds, squirrels, or the missus. We will however have something to say to him if he wounds a bear in the middle of the night and my girls get mauled the next day while they're out playing forts in the woods. Not cool.

The other big news related to this posting is this cute, special-interest story from our local paper last week.

Wrapping Up Week 2

We are really having an amazing time at school this year! The girls are doing GREAT, and that must mean I'm doing okay too. Lots of smiles in the house this year - so far.

Swimming lessons start next week. Gwen will be in Youth Level 3 and Amelia is in PreSchool Level 2. Both girls are excited to become better swimmers since we are going to Hawaii in February for Uncle Steve's wedding. We are hoping to do some family snorkeling, so we'll need the girls to get used to masks and snorkels.

I remember the first time I went - with my friend Jill on Oahu... I started breathing in the tube and very quickly snorted water into my own mask! When I heard myself breathing, I sounded just like Darth Vader and even now, over 13 years later, I still giggle when I think of it. So yeah, there's some acclimation to do with snorkeling. Luckily the girls have never seen Space Balls, the movie. Or Star Wars.

Nothing much else new under the Alaskan sun except that the sun is getting more scarce these days. We actually had to turn the heat on this morning. It was 58 in the school room and that was a little too chilly for school. No, we didn't cancel; we just moved out to the kitchen table where it was a more luxurious 62.

Speaking of school I'm hoping to have some pictures of our school room, nature hikes, and the like very soon, but am having a very hard time with our OLD computer not wanting to do anything I ask.

This is how non-technological we are: when we ordered this here new-fangled computer from Dell in the spring of 2005, I made sure to get a 3.5" floppy drive so I could get to my old college papers and stuff. Ummm hmmm. I had no idea that the software we used back in the day (1995!) would ever be obsolete.

Plus, on our top-o-the-line model we don't have a, um, what-d'ya-call-it, little slot thingy for the little card that comes out of the camera either. And I think the cord for camera-to-computer downloading is lost forever. Instead, I now put the little picture card in Gwen's homeschool laptop and burn a CD to then bring over to our archaic old grandfather computer, so I can try to get those pictures to upload to Blogger.

Blogger is having none of it.

In other news, we have stopped buying supermarket meat due to the hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, plastics, and general uncertainty of the quality and/or safety of the meat. Greg leaves for a moose hunt to an undisclosed location in a week, so the pressure's on! Get a moose or we starve. I suppose we would just eat halibut and salmon all winter, which may be the same thing as starving in my book.