Category: Life in Alaska

Living on the south side of the inlet means we live on the north side of a mountain. And in the winter, at this latitude, that means direct sunlight doesn’t reach us for about 3 1/2 months each year, as the sun is too low in the south to reach over the top of the mountain – we are in its shadow all day.

So I have always meant to try to record the days when the sun reaches over the mountain for the first time, in spring (and likewise, when it disappears in the fall). The problem is that we also live in a very, very overcast part of the world. So we never know quite what day it is. But it’s close to today: today, we had quite chilly but clear weather, for a change of pace.

So the sun peeked between two trees on the mountain’s ridge, and struck through my south-facing window next to my desk. For about 5 minutes.

“Oh,” I said to myself. “A sunbeam. What’s this?” I took a picture.

Meanwhile, we are still waiting to hear back from the electricians about having them come visit to diagnose our weird electrical problem (I think I blogged this before, but if not, the TLDR is: we experience “brown outs” when we pull high levels of current, e.g. the heating system).

I checked in with them this morning, but they are quite busy, as is to be expected, being the only licensed electrical contractors based on the island, as far as I’ve been able to figure out. “Maybe later this week,” the woman reassured me, quite pleasant but clearly clueless as to what their actual schedule might be. Island Time.

I finished my fraught disassembly of my storage tent today. The morning was actually slightly sunny and nice, but by 1 PM it was quite windy and starting to rain.

I got the storage tent canvas parts spread out and weighted by rocks, and draped a simple 20′ x 40′ tarp over the “stuff” that had been inside the storage tent. This includes firewood, recyclables (because recycling isn’t currently done on the island, but I daydream it might one day be done again, as it used to be), some construction materials (boards and plywood and plastic pipe), some unused collapsed boxes and other various containers.

With the wind whipping into a frenzy, I threw a bunch of rocks and stuff on top of the tarp and hoped for the best.

The storage tent has consumed a lot of my labor over the past 3 years. I think it will be retired, now – too many of its structural pieces are bent or broken by the giant load of snow in December.

The rain came. Two inches so far today, in our rain-counter. And it’s not dark yet.

But on top of 6-inch-thick layers of ice on the roads, and 2-3 feet of snow piled on everything, it’s not enough, even there, to clear anything. It just creates lakes on the road, on top of the ice, and it turns my carefully-hewn network of snow-shoveled paths into slush-swamps, ankle-deep and devoid of friction.

My network of paths also created a bit of a problem: they channeled the rain and melting snow down our stairs toward the house, which would, of course, make a mess under the house under the upper front door. So I built a “dam” of ice and snow across the stairs and dug a channel off to the side to divert the waters.

For future reference, I should try to make sure to dig out “drains” when putting in snow-paths.

Good thing I don’t have to go to work tomorrow.

I went out this morning to discover that my storage tent (sometimes called the “studio”) had collapsed under the load of ice and snow. I suspect it got bombed by chunks of ice or snow falling off nearby trees, which didn’t help.

This is not the first time my storage tent has suffered the inclemencies of the weather. Last year it got blown down off its foundations and ended up caught up in a tree – which was impressive for a structure that is 20 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 8 feet tall.

Anyway, I am dismayed, but not overly so. It has provided approximately the value I paid for it, which wasn’t really that much – a couple hundred dollars. I think in the spring I will build some other type of structure, which might weather the weather better, so to speak.

Meanwhile, I went and took the neighbor dog for a walk.

Art and I had a busy day today. We had lots to do in town. But first, I walked the neighbors’ dog.

The dog always runs down to our dock when we get to our house. I think she likes the smells of sea-creatures and such. We saw the morning sun touch Sunnahae mountain.

Maya likes to climb over the big snow embankments generated by Pat’s road-grader-as-snowplow. Of course, she sometimes gets stuck.

Eventually, she liberates herself, and then takes a moment to slow down and reflect. Maybe.

Art and I drove to town and first we went to the doctor, at SEARHC. After that, I dropped Art at the library and I took the Blueberry (Chevy Tahoe) to the mechanic shop. The Blueberry got brand-new snow-tires with studs. This does wonders for my peace-of-mind and confidence driving our road-as-bobsled-track back and forth to town.

You can’t really see the snow studs in the picture – but they’re there. You can see the tire’s brand name, though: “Snow Claw.” A reassuring name.

While the car was in the shop, I did walking errands in town. I went to the sporting-goods store and bought some new gloves of the sort I like to wear when working. I went to the bank. I went to the post-office. And I even stopped by work and helped a random customer looking at some of the factory-made picture frames.

Then I fetched the car, fetched Art from the library, and he and I did the Thursday grocery shopping and got a pre-made, bake-at-home pizza from the local pizza establishment. This last was our “normal” Thursday in-town routine.

Then we got home as the sun was setting, and had our pizza.

In my neverending quest to enumerate all of life’s sundry banalities, I will share some pictures from a second dogwalk, this morning, after having written up the first dogwalk yesterday. The world is being exceptionally photogenic lately, anyway.

After spending most of the summer unwrapped, I decided to re-wrap the GDC (RV camper). First I had to start it. I think its battery has permanently died, so I borrowed Arthur’s spare marine battery. It’s the same voltage, but it doesn’t fit very well under the hood – so it was just a temporary solution.

The vehicle started fine with that battery. I ran it for a while, but as I rolled down the driver’s side window to let it air out some, I think some peripheral fuse blew out – the main electrical stuff still was working fine (headlights, motor, etc), but the extras (fan, cabin light, electric windows) stopped working. Instead of putting time into trying to solve that, I taped a garbage bag over the driver’s side window and Arthur helped me pull the giant white tarp over the vehicle.

Here is a picture of it all wrapped up. Note that this was at noon, and the sun was no longer successfully clearing the treeline to the south (the direction I’m facing to take this picture). Midday, no sun. Welcome to winter.