Merry Christmas, ya filthy animals.

It's that time of year again.  Glittery cards and lovely, thoughtful letters on festive paper chronicling the last 12 months.  Well, ain't nobody in this house got time for that.  The best you're all getting is a blog.

After 12 years in the legion, Rick finally commissioned as a Physician's Assistant--excuse me, I was just corrected, PHYSICIAN Assistant, not possessive--and dragged us all up to Fairbanks.  He works long hours treating the booboos and rashes of the common soldier, and takes frequent work-mandated vacations often with little warning.  In his spare time he indulges in internet-politics and lock-picking.

I (Carla) somehow maintain my tenuous hold on sanity.  Homeschooling four kids, toilet training a toddler, and heimliching an adventurous baby are all really starting to cut into my Netflix time.  As if there weren't enough children in my life, I was also called to be the 1st counselor in the Primary Presidency.  (For those of you who aren't LDS, that means that I spend my Sundays yelling at other people's children in addition to my own.)

 Our Christmas moose

Brenna is in 7th grade.  She is sarcastic, pun-loving, helpful, brilliant, kind, responsible, and very proud of her new status as a legal babysitter.  Her latest adventures involve crochet, candy-making, and controlling her annoyance at her mother's bad jokes.  She's getting a little froggy now that we're almost eye-to-eye, but is generally a good sergeant.  This Christmas morning finds her alternating between her new illustrated Fantastical Beasts guide and Great British Bake Off cookbook.  I suspect pastry in our future.

Leah is barreling through 4th grade, a bit of a wild thing and a whole lot of clown.  She has a natural ear for music and is learning piano; as of this moment she is wandering around with the kids' new ipod, singing showtunes very, very loudly.  She has read all of the Percy Jackson and Hiccup series, and is the kid to invite to any impromptu dance party.  She does not love the cold, and even after a year here likes to remind us that she would have preferred to move to Puerto Rico.

Aeryn is almost eight and wading through 3rd grade.  She's incredibly helpful and the nurturer of the group; she's also the lawyer, perpetually concerned about the fairness--or rather, the unfairness--of all of her parents' decisions. She loves to make things pretty, and is looking forward to being baptized in the spring.  She is reveling in her new make-up kit, bought against my better judgment.

Jane is a freaking adorable kindergartener.  She is grudgingly learning to read, but loves math, possibly because numbers don't go changing their pronunciation on a whim.  She also loves Tae Kwon Do with Leah, even though she's the smallest kid in the class.  She is Leah's little shadow, and they rampage after each other all day long.

Echo is 3 and...well, how to describe her... Echo is like some cute wild animal that will let you pet its ears before chewing its way through a window screen and trying to eat your face.  Skull surgery to remove a dermoid in November didn't have any personality-altering side effects.  She loves to help, and also loves to draw on the walls with soap and markers.  She also loves ocean animals, so we think she might grow up to be a marine biologist or veterinarian...or fight sharks.  Whatever.

Claudia joined the madness on an icy day in March.  From the beginning she's been good tempered.  This may just be her temperament, but I suspect it's out of self-preservation.  She's crawling now, and incredibly non-discriminating about what she puts in her mouth.  Cheerios and dice are firm favorites.

Having other people do your bidding is exhausting.

The cats are as fat as ever.  They split their time between the girls' bedroom and a nest of plastic bags in the pantry.  They're pretty protective of their private lives, so there's very little I can divulge since signing a non-disclosure agreement.

All in all, Alaska's been good to us.  The year was bumpy in places, but we've had great adventures and look forward to those to come.  There are so many people we miss, but so many more we've gotten to know and serve and love.

2017 is just about done, and 2018 is on its way whether you're ready or not. We're going to make the best of it and hope that you all will too.  Bloom where you are planted.  Wait until spring if necessary.

Turn and turn again...

I never really thought a lot about the solstice before moving up here.  It just doesn't mean that much in Arizona.  Oh, shortest day of the year?  How can you even tell?

It's a lot more noticeable up here.  Wednesday was the turning point of the year--3 hours and 42 minutes of actual daylight, the sun just skimming the horizon.  The world has started turning back towards the sun.  It's almost upstaging Christmas.  Fairbanks is throwing down this weekend with the Celebration of Lights, complete with fireworks at 6 pm.  The darkness definitely has its perks.

I celebrated by eating tamales.  Like the light, these are in shorter supply than in Arizona.

A lot of people have problems with the darkness up here.  The days can be interminable when you are up hours before the sun rises and hours after it sets.  It doesn't get very bright, either--it's like a constant sunrise that blurs into sunset.  I can see why so many people want to celebrate the turning point of the darkness.

To me, it underscores how much everything can change, especially up here.  We go from four hours of daylight now to 21 hours of daylight six months from now.  Temperatures can have a 30-degree difference between high and low temps, and have a 140 degree difference between the coldest day of winter and the hottest day of summer.  It is flipping amazing.

If you're focusing on the darkness, or the cold, or the snow, or the distance, then you miss so much.  That's my challenge to you as the days shift toward summer. Find the wonder in the little things--they'll change soon enough.

For those who want to get a better idea of the darkest "day" up here, take a look at UAF's timelapse video.

UAF Solstice Timelapse 2017

Hello Darkness my old friend...

Fall didn't last long, but it was gorgeous.  It started out all fire and gold, the birches flaming against the more reserved spruce, then faded into weeks of grey drizzle and sleet. Last year life was a little hectic but this year we got to watch the transition.  It was awesome.

If I'm honest, though, it's always a pretty crazy season for us.  We have four birthdays, Halloween, and Thanksgiving all crammed into about 8 weeks.  We managed to survive another year, but if I never see another cake it will be too soon.

Trick or Treat on Halloween, the beginning of the real snow.

After a long, soggy brown October, snow finally started to stick on November 1st, and in the last month or so we've gotten roughly 20 inches of snow.  My snow-mountains on the side of my driveway grew steadily until the snowplows came and removed all my hard work.  I'm a little grumpy about that, but Rick reminds me that it's only December--we literally have months of snow to come.  My shovel and gloves will find their purpose again.

Off to shovel.  Again.

But seriously.  Look at those tiny, perfect flakes.  It is incredible to reflect that the five feet of snow lumped on my lawn, my fledgling Caradhras, is nothing more than millions of delicate Lilliputian crystals.

We watched the river freeze over.  It's more solid now than in the pictures, but I'm not going to take a chance on the ice until we've had a good solid few weeks of single digits.  For the desert dwellers reading this, the first step of rivers (and oceans) freezing over is called pancake ice--chunks of ice that freeze and slap up against each other, growing larger and larger until they are all frozen together into a solid sheet.  It's pretty cool to see.

The native Fairbanksans have been out and about.  The moose have made an occasional cameo; we have a mother and baby that have set up shop again in woods behind us. 

The veloci-ravens are back, gigantic black birds that clearly remember being dinosaurs and are just waiting for their chance to put the boot in to us monkey-folk again. In all fairness the ravens probably never left, they just stand out more against the snow.  All the same, they're the most obvious, brazen--and obnoxious--of the local fauna.

We found a vole-hole on our back porch a few weeks ago.  For those of you not in the know, voles are adorably round rodents, about 2 inches long, with short hairy tails.  They do not hibernate, but make tunnels in the subnivean zone--in other words, they run around in their own little world under the snow all winter long.

This is a vole. Cute little bugger (Picture courtesy of Pennsylvania State University)

The little buggers tunneled up on my porch through four inches of snow and ran around my porch for a bit taunting the cats.

A vole hole.

We had another visitor dressed for winter.  I found the tracks while I was once again clearing the driveway.  I followed them and found a little guest huddled under our neighbor's long disused car.

As the temps have been dropping, we've naturally been lurking inside a bit more.  The older girls are adjusting pretty well to having no more friends until spring.  Claudia has mastered rolling, and is focusing her attention on crawling and eating every piece of trash her sisters leave on the floor.  Echo is still her delightful, irrepressible, diabolical self; despite the negative temps, she's come out firmly against wearing pants.

The best part?  The dark is back.  Right now we average about 4.5 hours of actual sunlight, with just over a week to go until the solstice.  The sun only gets about 5 degrees above the horizon during the middle of our day.

The premise of scarcity increasing value holds true--you definitely appreciate the light more when there is so little of it.  It's pink and gold and gray depending on the time and weather.  Every day I see things that just take my breath away.

Life is pretty good.

Officially Winter

Well, it's official.  The critters and colors and the smartest tourists are gone.  Snow is falling and the roads aren't so much roads as wide unmarked slides of snowpack and ice.  Coats and boots have been dug out of wherever they were stuffed for the summer.   Mostly, it's cold.

Have you ever been cold?  I don't mean delightfully nippy, or that it's finally time to break out your favorite sweater.  I mean Alaska cold.

Alaska cold is when 15 degrees above zero still feels like sweater weather.  It's feeling your nose hair freeze at -20, and coughing with the first breath you take as your lungs ice over.  It's stepping into the store and still being able to see your breath, your fingers and face starting to ache during the frantic penguin-shuffle from the car to the door, and ice on the inside of your car window.  It's a ninety-degree difference between your living room and your back porch.  All the water in the air freezes into fine crystals that, in rare bouts of humidity, technically form something called an ice fog but was cheerfully nicknamed "the white death" by early Alaskan settlers.  The snow is so dry it drifts like sand.  Even the birds are like, "Damn, I should've flown south when I had the chance."

There are usually around twenty birds huddled on this

particular spot by somebody's laundry exhaust pipe.  Evolution at its laziest.

You might say it's kind of serious.  People have died from the cold.  Power outages take on a certain urgency once the temperature starts dipping.  Drivers often carry extra winter gear. The cold plays merry hell with electronics--cellphones and other devices can get so cold even in pockets that they will shut down in a couple of minutes.  Cars up here more often than not have a power cord hanging out the front so they can be plugged in to stay warm.  The cold's so invasive that even after coming inside your feet can be cold for hours; it seeps through windows and under doors.  It is incredibly easy to find an open window, though--just take off your socks and follow the cold.

So how do people survive up here?  Well, the first--and best--way is to go outside as little as possible. If you must leave, however, then you make like an onion and layer up.

You start with the socks--wool for preference since it's thicker and can keep your feet warm even when snow inevitably melts in your boots.  Next comes a long sleeve tee, a sweater, and fleece-lined stockings under jeans or snow pants.  (Those fleece-lined stockings are the bomb.  Seriously, I don't know how I lived without them before.)  Then there are two types of gloves--thin knit and thick snow-gloves; mittens are even better--a scarf, a hat, and a balaclava if you have it.  Boots are a must, and they are not all created equal.  The general rule is the prettier the boot, the more useless it is.  Then you top it all off with a parka.  By the end, we all feel like that kid in A Christmas Story.

Babies are not exempt from the fun.  The starfish suit is a must.

Except when it's not cold.  After an appropriately cold November, we have had an unseasonably warm December with multiple days above freezing thanks to La Nina and a chinook.  While the slowly melting snow does kind of fun things, all I want for Christmas are sub-freezing temperatures.

I will admit, though, that Christmas in Ice was much more comfortable this year as it was roughly 60 degrees warmer than last year.  It's quickly becoming one of my favorite winter experiences.  Professionals, amateurs, and local politicians all sharpen their chainsaws and snow-knives and make incredible ice sculptures that are then illuminated for your viewing pleasure.

Rick got in on the carving with some of the scraps and his trusty pocket knife.

Us in the igloo.

And the savages.  Naturally.  Because what else would you do with a glowing red altar?

There are igloos and winter houses, slides, mazes, carved benches and hot chocolate. Personally, my favorite part was dragging Claudia around on a sled.  She wasn't impressed.