Winter adventures

The kids haven't been particularly interesting lately, so I guess I'll have to talk about Alaskan winters, the gift that keeps on giving.

To sum up: it snows.  A lot.

Don't believe me?  This is a picture of our driveway shortly after we moved in, roughly in mid-November, the first time we shoveled the driveway.  Please note the height of the snow, and the fact that you can still see the plants by the house.

This is about three months later, after the 4' snow brims have already been removed once.  Frankly, as happy as the snow makes me, keeping the driveway clean is positively Sisyphean.

So what do we do to keep from going insane?  Well, besides being a natural at ignoring the snow I should be shoveling, I happen to be a champion Putterer.  I can amuse myself all day with a glue-gun, a box of stuff to file, Netflix, and a toddler to throw popcorn on the floor behind me. Rick says that I'm a vole at heart, content to run through my warm burrow and eat my way through the winter.  He's really not far off except that voles don't have to make their own popcorn.  On the other hand, I don't worry about getting eaten by foxes.  It all works out.

This is Brenna, getting ready to learn all about physics and how cold a face-full of snow really is.

The kids have to divert themselves in other ways.  Their favorite outdoor activity so far consists of trying to build a snow fort.  This is harder than you expect, because the snow up here is so dry that it doesn't stick together.  The forts (or "nest-holes," depending on how recently I made them watch a nature documentary) may hold up for a while, but ultimately always crumble.  There are few snowpeople up here for the same reason--inevitably they are snow-piles with carrots stuck half-heartedly in the middle of the pile, made by transplants from the southern 48 who don't know better yet.  The one successful snowman we've seen was about 8" tall, made by some bored gate guards.  I complimented them on it, and they admitted they'd had to melt the snow a little bit in front of their giant heaters to make it hold its shape.  Yes, you read that right.  It is so cold and dry up here that snow has to be heated up to make a snowball.

What about homeschool science experiments, you say?  Well, to be quite honest, there's only so many things you can freeze.  We did do the colored water-balloons, and I look forward to the bizarre Easter egg hunt we'll have in April when the snow starts melting; right now the remaining "eggs" (the ones that weren't smashed by hooligan kids traipsing across my yard on the way to school) are buried under around 18 inches of snow.  The bubbles tend to crack and wither, not freeze solid, and we'll be trying the boiling water "cloud" experiment in the next few days when we can expect lows of -30 again. If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. 

The wildlife occasionally suffices for entertainment.  I have seen a grand total of five and a half moose since my arrival--one and a half of them in Canada--but though they have so far proven elusive, it's always really awesome to see one.  Now, I'm from rural Arizona, so I'm no stranger to horse or cow-sized critters wandering through my yard, but let's be honest--moose are much cooler than cows.

This is Momma moose.

Her "baby" is around 5 feet at the shoulder.

Driving is always an adventure. A friend also new to Alaska shared a meme a few weeks ago.

...aaaaaand that pretty much covers it.  Seriously.  The picture below is of an actual 4 lane road on post. 

The roads are intermittently scraped off, but I've been driving on an average of 2 inches of ice since late November.  You generally guess where the spaces are in the parking lots, and people are driving half-way on the shoulder as often as they are between the lines on the highway. People expect you to drive through the red lights because it's safer than braking. I'm not ashamed to say I kinda dig it and will be sad to have law and order return when the snow melts.

Another way to fill the time is to cruelly amuse myself at the expense of the kids.  While those who know me and my physical prowess might question the decision to strap razors to my kids' feet, I recently put the oldest three in ice-skating lessons.  It's probably the funniest and meanest thing I've done to them in a long time.  Leah spent the first ten minutes flailing on the ice; all I could see was the occasional hand, struggling to grab the side of the rink, or a pony tail flipping backwards.  Aeryn kept trying to walk in her skates, high-stepping across the ice, while Bren kept inching forward, stiff-legged, arms out stiff like airplane wings.  Whenever one would fall, at least one of the others would fall too, apparently in sympathy as they weren't close enough to knock each other over.  Every week they stay up longer and get fewer bruises, for which I am both glad and disappointed. *Aside--I have a new appreciation for the difficulty of skating, and have at least temporarily repented of my laughing.  More on that at a later date.*

Three guesses as to which kid is mine.

The Northern Lights are one of my favorite things.  They don't usually start until after 10 pm or so, but between Rick being gone and me being eight months preggo, I have champion-level insomnia, and I get to see them often.  I wish I had a decent enough camera to get a picture. It's really pretty amazing to see what you're pretty sure is smoke from some poor sod's fireplace suddenly flare lime-turquoise green and zag across the sky.  I've watched it for hours a couple of nights, and it just doesn't get old.  To me, anyway.  Rick seems pretty unimpressed, but he has to get up in the morning, so I guess that's fair. The girls were rather put out about missing it when I told them about it, but the next night when I woke them up to see it, they just grumbled and rolled over with a sleepy "I see it,  Ver' nice." Ingrates.

Well, that's about it fo this week.  Nothing profound, but life doesn't always come with a pithy lesson; sometimes all you get is popcorn and a documentary, and that isn't too shabby, is it?