Gosh, Is It Cold?

Here's the thing.  I'm Alaskan.  Cold?  That's part of winter.  If you let snow and low temperatures stop you from living your life in Alaska, you better stock up in September because you're going to be a hermit for half the year.  When it's cold and/or snowy up north, we just deal with it.  This is the attitude I was raised around, so when the Lower-48 has super cold temperatures and everyone I know wants to complain to me about how their world has come to a screeching halt because OH MY GOD WINTER IS COLD, WTFBBQ?!?!?!  Yeah, I'll admit I just hear white noise.  I try to smile and nod and be understanding, especially if you live south of the Mason Dixon, because you probably don't get winter weather every year - but if you live in New York where it snows every single year, people, then maybe white stuff falling from the sky isn't worthy of muppet-flail level of panic, hmm?

I think this is one way in which I will always be distinctly Alaskan.  You can keep your East Coast Weather Panic.  I'm just gonna buy some anti-freeze, put on an extra scarf and go on with my life.

**Update: 15 seconds after I posted this, I was told "Weather this cold should be illegal!"  I just stared.  It's all anyone can talk about.  White noise.  So much white noise.**

Close Encounters of the Alaskan Kind

I often post pics of my travels, but there today I'm sharing some of the deeply kickass things right in my own back yard.  Some weekends just seem to serve to remind me how awesome Alaska is and this was definitely one of them.  It started yesterday as we were headed up to the Denali National Park for a family getaway.  We hadn't even made it out of our neighborhood before we saw this fella:

Now there have been a ton of eagles this year and the usual crop of moose, but even though people had said this was a big year for bear (and we'd seen plenty of evidence of them), this was the first I'd seen this summer.  Right outside the car window.  Maybe ten feet away.  A nice beginning to the trip.

We headed up to the park, finding the only gorgeous weather in the state, and this morning we took a hike up Savage River inside the park.

We passed a family of dahl sheep up on a hill and kept walking, taking a jog off the main trail over some rocks until that off-shoot pretty much dead ended into the river.  And just as we were turning back toward the main path, we saw them.  That same family of dahl sheep.  Blocking our way.  And coming closer.  And closer.

(No zoom, boys and girls, they really were that close.  Maybe twenty feet away.  If that.)

Now, the sheep aren't aggressive, but they can do some damage if they thwack into you with those horns, so we gave them the right of way, backing up as much as we could until they decided to veer down to the river, where we got an up-close-and-personal view of them crossing (a rarity, according to a nature photographer we chatted with after the sheep had disappeared over the next hill).

(What you don't see in this picture is that the one behind just thwacked the jumper on the butt with his horns because he was taking too long.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  I'm a lucky brat.  Today was a good day. 

Cliches and Misdemeanors

I can't read books about Alaska. I know this about myself, but every once in a while, I get stupid. There's no other explanation for the fact that, about once a year, I find myself rationalizing my way into an Alaskan-set romance. It usually starts with "Oh, but I love this author! Her voice is so brilliant I won't even notice the annoying fake-Alaska crap." Or every so often, "I know her. She wouldn't screw it up. If she had any doubts about whether something was plausibly Alaskan, she could just ask me."

But it always ends the same way. With me plowing my way through the book like trying to shove a snow-blower through a four foot berm - with much cursing and sweating and occasional cries of "Why, God? Why do you hate me?"

Why do I do this to myself?

I love Vicki Lewis Thompson's Nerd books. I was in the mood for something light and playful, so I grabbed one I hadn't read yet (not recalling that the reason I hadn't read that one yet was because it was set in Alaska). This is NOT an indictment of the book. I'm sure if you aren't from here, you'll love it to pieces and back. But see, here's the thing? Alaska is one GIANT CLICHE in this book. Now, when the deserted island was a giant cliche in another Nerd book, I thought it was cute. When Vegas was a giant cliche in yet another, I loved it. But when it's my giant cliche... I'm having a harder time.

JUST TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT:

1) All the men up here do not look like lumberjacks and I can't remember the last time I saw a man wearing plaid flannel. (Actually, I can remember. I was in Montana. Last time in Alaska? Might have been the nineties. Plaid was very in then, thanks to the Seattle Grunge trend.)

2) We have access to both dentists and shaving kits. So that guy in your imagination with a bushy beard down to his navel and five missing teeth? Um... we're not all like that. (In fact, I don't know anyone like that.) Nor are we all "quirky characters". Normal people live here too. Normal people with hair dressers and working toothbrushes.

3) We don't live on diet of moose-meat pie and caribou steak. Surprisingly, even the more locally flavored restaurants will have such daring menu items as Cheeseburgers and the always exotic Grilled Chicken. I know it's hard to think of me eating anything other than smoked salmon and reindeer sausage, but today, I have big plans to go for a chicken burrito at Qdoba. I know - doesn't that just sound soooo Alaskan?

See, here's the problem with cliches - they take away the REALITY of the setting. If you had a guy who was big enough to be a lumberjack, with a nicely trimmed beard he'd grown out to protect his face and neck during the cold months, who wore Nordic Fleece and Henleys and was self-conscious about a tooth he'd chipped playing hockey which he hadn't been able to pay to get capped - that's a real person. The lumberjack with the beard to his waist and five missing teeth isn't. Do you see what I mean? About the cliche just serving to make things feel fake?

It's the fantasy-land Alaska thing that drives me nuts. Especially when so few people writing romances about our state have ever even visited, let alone stayed long enough to get a sense of what it's really like.

And then there's the little things. The fact wobbles. They aren't totally wrong, but they don't feel right - so they throw someone with legitimate local knowledge out of the story. For example, Anchorage & Fairbanks are on different weather patterns - so a snow storm in one has nothing to do with the weather in the other. Or how, if you want to photograph wildlife, you should really try Denali, not Fairbanks. And if you are staying at a lodge near Fairbanks that doesn't have an arctic entry (two sets of doors with a little room in between to keep the cold from coming in with you when you enter from the outside), you might want to consider moving to a different hotel because that one is going to be drafty as hell. Oh - and even in "blizzard" conditions (which is not a word we throw around lightly) life goes on. The plows will be running and folks will be shoveling out so they can go to work. You can't let snow stop you when you live up here or you would never leave the house.

So, yeah, those are all the complaints I have so far... but I've only managed to make it through the first 70 pages. In spite of the fact that VLT is holding up her usual end of being witty and charming and fun to read, I'm still having the devil's own time getting through the cliches. If only I didn't find it so damn imperative to finish every book I start... It's a perverse but inescapable need. Wish me luck.

Winter Wonderland - Writer's Edition

Winter in Alaska means we have an abundance of two things - cold and dark. (And this year we also have an abundance of snow. Woot!) But the great thing about Alaskan winters is that it's the perfect time to hunker down, batten down the hatches, curl up under a pile of blankets with a giant mug of hot cocoa and write until spring. Which is why the Winter Writing Festival is so perfectly timed for me.

That's right, boys and girls of the writerly persuasion, it's time for the Ruby blog's version of NaNo: The Winter Writing Festival - a seven week writing frenzy where you set your goals and we whip encourage you to meet them with sprints and check-ins and prizes, oh my! (Yeah, the initials are WWF and that's because we're putting the SMACKDOWN on winter laziness, beeyotches!)

Wanna play? Head on over to the WWF site HERE and register to participate (totally free). Then check back tomorrow when the chat room opens for sprints and the Ruby blog is open for Goals, Goals, Goals! (I'm mildly obsessed with goals. As evidenced by my copious quantities of To Do lists and the fact that I've been fantasizing lately about buying a new day planner. Organization is my crack.)

And speaking of crack... you know what else gets me giddier than kids on Christmas? SNOW! We have so freaking much this year. It's brilliant (and makes my shoveling muscles ache just thinking about it). A few weeks back I posted about a multi-day power outage we had, accompanied by a mega-snowstorm - including some pictures. Well... we've had a smidge more snow. Observe:

BEFORE:	AFTER:

So in celebration of all things Winter and Snow, I'm giving away another signed print copy of SERENGETI SINS (which includes Serengeti Storm, which includes a freak blizzard!). Just comment here for a chance to win.

Happy Solstice!

Happy Solstice, everyone! Tonight is officially the longest night of the year - a fact which is probably only noteworthy in Alaska where we start talking about how many seconds of daylight we're gaining every day as soon as solstice passes. It's eleven-thirty a.m. as I write this and I can just now see the edge of the sun breaking out over the mountains across the valley. How am I celebrating? With a slice of solstice pizza from the Moose's Tooth and a vow to wrap packages until the sun sets or I finish them all. (Which is kind of a wussy vow since the sun won't stay up long, but that's how I roll.)

Enjoy the holiday! And remember, it's only T-minus 365 days until the end of the world, Mayan-style! Make this year count, boys and girls.

Snow Day!

I think there are days you probably have to be a little nuts to love living in a place like Alaska. Luckily, sanity has never been a handicap for me. Man, do I love it here.

I've completed my latest round of travels and I'm back in the frozen north (woohoo!) for Christmas with the folks. This weekend Winter welcomed me home right. It started on Sunday morning, right as we were returning home from picking up the Christmas trees (yes, two!). Just snow at first and a few power flickers (which we've been getting all week, including a couple 4 hr outages), so we went about life as usual. We headed over to my sister's place (through near white-out conditions) to celebrate my brother-in-law's birthday with presents and sledding.



My brother-in-law (a lower-48 transplant) laughed at our hapless Alaskan weathermen, who'd predicted up to an inch and we already had two or three, with more falling fast. With night already closing in (it was 3:30pm, after all) we headed home through the snow. Back at Casa Andrews, my dad and I settled down for some football as the wind kicked up outside, but the power began flickering again and then gave up for good. We pulled out some candles and played cards by their light as we listened to the chinook howl through. The spruce trees in the yard bent over at sixty degree angles, but luckily no more of them came down in our yard (we already had one mega-wind-storm this year take out almost a dozen trees in the neighborhood).

The wind died down enough to stop being a danger to the electric company crews around ten and, confident the power would be back on soon, I grabbed some extra blankets and burrowed under them to read a historical romance by candlelight - because what could be more fitting than reading about folks who read by candlelight?

But in the morning we still had no power. What we did have was eighteen-plus new inches of heavy, wet (gorgeous, white, perfect for snowmen!) snow.

Behold! The barbecue grill - tipped over by the wind and ever so lightly snowed upon:


We started a fire in the fire place and lit the burners on the gas stove to keep the house from cooling down too fast. The contents of the refrigerator migrated outside in coolers to stay chilled (though, alas we were too late to save the ice cream).



We melted and boiled snow on the stove to make coffee and cocoa (Ice Coffee & Snow-coa!) and then took turns wrestling the snowblower through the heavy masses of snow piled in the driveway.



By midday the driveway was clear and the house was getting COLD. Our road still hadn't been grated (and still hasn't as I'm writing this) but we'd seen our neighbors push through in a Suburban so we all piled into the truck and went back to my sister's (where they had power and everyone was home for a snow day).

One of my nephews showed me his pirate fleet (composed of drawings of ships, many of which have laser-shooting mermaids as hood-ornaments). Another showed me Mesopotamia (the actual Mesopotamia on his world map). And I watched Cinderella with my niece - who is going to be Rapunzel when she grows up and therefore has stopped cutting her hair. (She's convinced that someday it will glow when she sings.)

After the bliss of hot showers and the marvel of fully charged cell phones & laptops, we eventually headed back to the Ice House where temperatures were now in the fifties. We pulled out even more blankets, preparing for a very cold night, when what to our wondering eyes should appear, but ELECTRICITY!

The roads are still clogged with snow, but we're nice and warm with our delicious luxuries of heat and running water. The wind has calmed, the sun is up (as much as the sun comes up in the winter), and it's a true winter wonderland out there.



Nothing beats an Alaskan winter.

The Alaskan Mystique

This is one of those weeks when I feel like I am inundated by romances set in the Alaskan wilderness. Everywhere I look, I seem to be tripping across books about bush pilots and mountain men looking for love (with a delicate city girl from the lower-48, of course).

Maybe I'm a pessimist, maybe I'm over-protective or too possessive of my state, but as a life-long resident of Seward's Folly, I avoid those books like the plague, convinced they will get everything wrong. The books could be awesome, the research flawless, but I can't take that chance because if they aren't, the mistakes would drive me nuts.

I hate it when lower-48 authors try to capitalize on the selling point that is the Alaskan mystique. Because, let's face it, the Alaskan mystique has nothing to do with the real Alaska. And that drives me straight up the wall.

This is how cowboys in Montana feel about cowboy romance, isn't it? If you know too much about the reality of anything, you can't read the fantasy of it without cringing, can you? I guess my crankiness stems from the sudden popularity of my reality.

And the fact that if I wrote about what living up here is really like, I have a sneaking suspicion it wouldn't sell.

Though maybe the crankiness has something to do with the fact that I banged my knee up something fierce while picking salmonberries in the mountains today. Time to switch my heat pack back to an ice pack if I want to be able to walk tomorrow.

Rant complete.

Can you read about the fantasization (yeah, I just made that a word) of your reality? Do you have any settings/themes that you avoid because you know too much about them?

Extremely Belated Olympic Wrap Up

I know the Olympics ended over a week ago (which is about three gazillion years in internet time), but I still want to talk about them. And this is my blog. Where I am dictator and get to talk about whatever I want. Mwah-ha-ha.

I like the Winter Olympics so much better than the Summer Games. This probably has something to do with the fact that I grew up with the winter sports. Downhill skiing was my personal favorite, & my high school had State Champ hockey & cross-country ski teams. There are usually a handful of Alaskan Olympians in the Winter Games (not something you can often say about the Summer counterpart), and this year was no exception.

I love the Olympics... but I'm usually not such a big fan of the coverage. I get so annoyed when we see thirty minutes of "human interest" on someone and then we get to see only five of the downhill skiers actually take their runs. American with a chance of medaling... American with a chance of medaling... Bronze... Silver... Gold.

I know they think the montage of some random athlete's hometown is going to make me care about them and root for them more, but it just annoys me. Can't the commentator verbally give me some anecdote or do a 15-second explanation of why this race is so important to this racer without the slow-motion, weepy-music-playing montage?

And a fifteen minute interview in the studio with that chick who everyone thought would win but just crashed on the semi-final run? Yeah, that's just cruel. She knows her Olympic dreams just went up in a puff of snow! Don't make her relive it in front of seven million viewers!

Those things drive me nuts about Olympic coverage... so this year, I had a strategy. The DVR.

Normally, I could not employ the DVR strategy, since I do not, in fact, own a DVR. However, my parents do. And I just so happened to be house-sitting for my parents during the Olympics. Fortune smiled on me.

I set it to record all the Olympic coverage and quickly discovered I could watch six hours of coverage in slightly less than three hours - and still see all the actual sports! No human interest (I am not human, apparently, because I have no interest). No agonizing interviews (unless I wanted to watch them). No watching the skaters warm up for five minutes only to go to commercial and then come back to watch another skater warm up. And no commercials (unless I wanted to watch them - and I will admit, I actually did watch a couple Visa & P&G commercials about the Olympians, cuz awwwww).

And the best part? I could watch whenever I felt like it! It's all tape-delayed four hours by the time they air it in Alaska anyway. Might as well enjoy at my leisure. Prime-time skating over my cereal at breakfast. Snowboard cross at two am.

It was the best Olympics ever. I feel like I actually saw more of it than I've ever seen before, because I wasn't walking away from the television in frustration whenever some long non-sports segment forced me to leave or hurl something at the telly.

And do you know what I discovered in the awesomeness of my complete, accelerated Olympic viewing?

1) Luge, bobsled, & skeleton must be watched on mute. The commentator guy is WAY TOO EXCITED ALL THE TIME AND DRIVES ME TOTALLY CRAZY WITH HIS CONSTANT SHOUTS OF EXCITEMENT!!! Someone needs to tell him that being constantly at the emotional equivalent of Def-Con One is exhausting for the audience.

2) The Nordic Skiing commentators were awesome. I watched a freakish amount of biathlon, cross-country & nordic combined, cuz they just rocked that hard. I got intensely into the whole Norway-Sweden rivalry. I saw a chick win bronze with three broken ribs. I saw lots of people chasing one another around on skis with guns on their backs and discovered that the biathlon "pursuit" is by far my favorite event. It's so stalkerish! (And in case you're wondering when all this was happening - it was the afternoon coverage that I never would have known about if my DVR hadn't automatically recorded it too).

I was so in love with the Nordic events, I'm now longing for World Cup coverage on ESPN 8 (the ocho!). I guess I will just have to settle for the Last Great Race on Earth. Yep, folks, the Iditarod started on Saturday! Anchorage to Nome. 1150 miles in a dog-sled over about nine days. Can Lance Mackey make it four years in a row? We'll know next week!

Mush, boys and girls!

Vibration: Occupational Hazard

I'm talking today about the giant vibrating machine I spent most of yesterday with.

My snow blower. The machine that throws the snow around in my driveway. (You people all have filthy minds, you know that?) Ahem.

Yesterday I woke up to a lovely blanket of freshly fallen snow. *Cue the sleigh bells.* After an appropriate amount of time spent gazing at the picturesque vista, I decided that I did, in fact, want to be able to leave the house at some point before April, and therefore would have to break out the snow-blower to clear the driveway.

I dragged that big monster out of the garage. Throttle, choke, and away we go. With my iPod cranked up to top volume to compete with the engine noise, I bopped up and down the driveway, snow flying merrily in all directions (and then I figured out how to work the thingy that turns the chute the snow flies out of - the first big snowfall of the year is always a re-learning experience).

Hours later, after I'd reached the point of cursing the fact that the driveway is so darn big (do we really need that circle cleared? What about the spot where my sister always parks? Does she really need a parking space?), I shut off the blower. Pleased with a job well done, I rolled that puppy back into the garage.

That's when I noticed it. My hands weren't working properly.

Apparently, clinging to a giant vibrating machine for extended periods of time can really mess with your fine motor skills. My hands were numb, achy and stiff. Which, usually, wouldn't be a problem. But, see, I had this great plan for yesterday. Step One: Snowblow the driveway. Step Two: Complete Edits and return them to my editor.

Step Two became a lot harder to accomplish when I couldn't type. Even my mouse-clicking ability was distinctly sub-par.

It's funny the things you take for granted. I don't often think about how much I love my hands, and being able to use them. It hadn't even occurred to me that snow-blowing the driveway was something I should probably do after completing my necessary computer tasks for the day.

My usual light-speed typing was a fond memory. I stumbled clumsily along making typo after typo, where normally my fingers would fly lightly across the keys, easily keeping pace with my thoughts. (As an experiment, I then sat down at the piano for a bit - it wasn't pretty, folks.)

Thankfully, my hands are back to normal. It only took an hour or so before I was back to my usual fleet-fingered self. But it was a fun lesson to remember: don't overlook the little stuff. Manual dexterity is something to be grateful for. And stay away from giant vibrating machines.

Things I Learned from 30 Days of Night:

Research is important.

Suppose you're making a movie about a real city in a real state. Let's say you're making a movie called 30 Days of Night and you're setting it in Barrow, Alaska. Let's ignore, for a moment, the fact that the "days of night" in Barrow number more than thirty each year, because thirty is such a nice fun number. Round. Not like, oh, sixty-three. We will suspend our disbelief about the exitence of vampires, cuz it's a vampire movie and that's what you do when you watch a vampire movie. Oddly, I have no trouble suspending that disbelief. It's these other things that bug me... so I give you Things I Learned From 30 Days of Night: **Spoilers Galore!**

• Thing One: Planes cannot fly in the dark. For all those days of darkness, the people of Barrow will be secluded from the world. Isolated. Helpless. Totally cut off and without resources until the sun should rise again. Ripe pickings for those thirsty vamps. Wanna test this theory? Try Expedia. See if you can fly to Barrow on winter solstice, December 22nd. You know what? You can! So that whole isolated for a month in the dark thing? Um... bullshit. You wanna remake From Dusk Til Dawn in Alaska? Neat. Go for it. But I recommend you pick a fictional city. By having it be a real place, with real flights (several every day!) you lost me. The movie makers went to a lot of trouble to cut those folks off - destroying all the cell phones (then promptly showing cell phones in use in the very next scene!), disabling the internet, and cutting the power - but does anyone actually think that darkness means there will be no more flights? Really? Dude, what century are we in?
• Thing Two: Too many writers is a baaaaad thing. In Hollywood, a screenplay will often find its way through several screenwriters before making it to the big screen. The guy with the idea. The guy paid to fix the idea guy's idea. And the guy brought in by the producers to make the film "commercial" so it will make as much money as humanly possible. I'm guessing that with 30 Days the original idea guy was the only one who had ever given any thought to the realities of living in Barrow, Alaska. There were just enough things done right that it almost seemed like someone somewhere knew what the hell they were talking about. But those right things were grossly outweight by all the jawdroppingly dumb things. Like no one's breath being visible in the -10 degree air. Like Barrow being isolated in "80 miles of roadless wilderness". Um... y'all? That's one helluva lot more than 80 miles. I think you missed a zero. The only thing within even 80 nautical miles of Barrow is Wainwright - and that ain't exactly civilization. Or - and this one is a personal favorite - the oil pipeline running right through Barrow. Yep. Only off by a couple hundred miles of "roadless wilderness". I could totally walk that - like the cute dark-haired chick does after her friend gets munched by vamps.
• Thing Three: Vampires are sloppy eaters. There are a limited number of people in Barrow, i.e. a limited amount of blood. So the frenzied ripping and splashing is just downright wasteful! Make that blood last, boys and girls! Be grateful for the stupid humans who stumble into your feeding frenzy. There are vampires starving in Africa!
• Thing Four: Dental hygiene = morality. Two cute little eye-teeth fangs = Good Vampire. A mouthful of jaggedy fanged teeth with a nasty underbite = Bad Vampire. A mouthful of blackened nubs like you've been chugging battery acid = Bad Human. Straight, over-whitened pearlies = Good Human.
• Thing Five: Stupidity in the cold is still stupidity. The vampires appear to be impervious to the cold. This adds a special layer of juicy idiocy to Our Hero's moving speech in which he proclaims that they live in Barrow for a reason. Cuz no one else can. They know the town. They know the cold. They are gonna prevail, bitches! Unfortunately, their little undead buddies are impervious to the freaking cold, you freaking moron. So the fact that you are not? Not an advantage. Oh! And then there's this one part (God, I love this movie. It is sooooo bad.) when the Rebel Badass guy is running into certain death with his big ass combine-looking piece of construction machinery - only what's this? He seems to be a-slicin' and a-dicin' those nasty vamps! He's winning! Eating their fricking lunch, baby! Then he intentionally runs his combine-thingy into a building so he can blow it up, but does not in fact succeed in blowing up the vamps. Just himself. Yep. Stupidity. Not any less stupid just cuz it's cold.

This movie? Beyond awesome. I can't stop laughing. It's the gift that keeps on giving. If only it were trying to be funny.

So do your research, boys and girls. Cuz if you don't, someone may just be blogging about how ridicu-awesome your mistakes are.

On a realistic Alaska note: Snow in the mountains behind my house today and a moose eating the neighbor's flowers before they're all killed by the frost. Winter's coming. And you thought it was Autumn. Ha ha.