Right here in our Neighborhood!

Yes - we drove all over the city parks on multiple days looking for moose babies and all we had to do was walk into our next door neighbor's back yard. This little one was born Sunday morning and is only a few hours old at the time these were taken. He is right in front of momma in the second picture. Our neighbor said momma would move the calf to a denser woody area before the end of the day as the birth location would probably bring a bear into the neighborhood. Squirt and I were very careful this morning when going outside. :) Hopefully we will have more pictures to share before spring is over!

More importantly on this Memorial Day, I want to say thank you to all of the US soldiers who have defended our country and made this such a paradise to live in. I shutter to think what life would be like with out you and the sacrifices you and your families have made.

Living without windows...

Here we are in, what from all appearances so far, is paradise and we are without windows.

They are painting our house this week and instead of doing it with a brush it is being sprayed on. Right now, everything not wood is covered in plastic or removed from the house. It started Thursday with a power wash of the house. (John the painter said Squirt did not like that at all.) Friday and Saturday were taken with prep work (scraping and masking). Unfortunately, the paint store wasn't ready with our 40 gallons so they will be back on Monday to finish prep and then start actually painting Tuesday. Hopefully the weather will hold and thank goodness we did this early in the season before it got hot (you know - in the 70s). I really miss the views and this can't be done fast enough.

Robert and I have gone crazy with flower baskets and planting stuff in the flower beds. I'll take some spring pictures once the plastic is off of the house!

A Sad Moose Tale

As Spring arrives in full force here in Alaska so do the animal babies especially bear cubs and moose calves. Moose are so much fun to watch. How can you watch video like this baby moose attacking a septic vent or this teenager taking a Spring shower (pick the one titled Alaskan moose shower) and not want one for a pet or at least a neighborhood moose to feed the occasional carrot to. (btw - This is illegal in Anchorage.)

Of course, some of the freshly awakened bears are hungry (wait - probably all of them are) and there is the ever present natural order of things such as bear attacking moose - normally it isn't caught on video in your driveway. While this is a fact of nature, bears attacking people (although rare) is frowned on (by the people especially) and hence we have a new wildlife plan this year for problem bears on the Russian River. This is a very serious concern and danger, but I keep flashing on the Christmas Song when no other reindeer will play with Rudolph because he is different. The blue bear will be an outcast and none of the others will play with him...

Today's sad moose tale though is what happens as people move into the homes of these wild animals - after all, they were here first. Some kids were playing and accidently got too close to a momma moose and her two calves. Momma, wanting to protect her babies, attacked an 8 year old boy. Luckily, she wasn't out to kill him or she would have. He is bruised, very scared, sore but very much alive. Momma, however, isn't. Police had to shoot her and carry away the small, orphaned calves. It was the only way to get the child out of the yard safely.

Besides cars hitting 650 moose last year in the Anchorage Borough, this is the second time since moving here I have seen a story of police shooting a charging moose. The first time, tourists were bothering one downtown and wouldn't leave it alone until it was too late.

Of course, all of this publicity about moose babies caused us to go look for them last night. They must have been down for the evening as we didn't see a single one.

Dog biscuit report

Squirt says:

"Yum - Can I have another??

Can I have another??

Mommy! Daddy! Can I have another???"

I was mistaken....

Last fall, several asked what moose droppings look like. I described them as a pile of golf balls. (Of course, I had only seen them in the dark and I didn't really do a close inspection.) Since then, the snow has melted, the sun is out when I am and I have come across many many more nuggets. To set the record strait, they look more like a pile of pecans. In fact, a brand new Cheechako could easily wonder who left a pile of pecans on a trail...up until they kick them. I never fell for that.

And yes, I have been called cheechako by several over the winter. I don't know how long you have to be here to become a Sourdough but I personally think one winter should do it. :) Although, cheechako has a nicer ring to it than sourdough...

We saw serious sun yesterday - it was warm enough to sit out side without a jacket for hours and luckily because of the garage sale, we had an excuse to do just that. I finally have a little color back on my face and arms. Today looks to be exactly the same. A good day to plant flowers. I hope it is warm enough for shorts and a tank top!

The mountains are beautiful in the winter with the snow on them but, in the summer, the valley is going to be incredible. It has been a long time since I lived in a location that actually had a winter where all of the green left and a spring when it all comes back. I look forward to discovering what flowers we have in our gardens!

BTW - we didn't sell everything yesterday but we got rid of a lot. After we tally what is left, it will get boxed up and go to charity.

Today is "Garage Sale Day"

As we were unpacking our stuff in October, there were several things I came across where I made at least two executive decisions: 1. I'm not packing this in another move (my stuff); 2. Asking the question, do you really want this and if so, why (his stuff). (Hey - at least he got a say in the matter!!!) If the answer was toss it, the item went into something marked 'garage sale'. I didn't know if we would have a garage sale but at least it wasn't in the house and put away.

It turns out our housing addition has a neighborhood garage sale twice a year and today is the spring garage sale. The day dawned bright and sunny (about 4:30 this morning) and looks like it will be a great day to hike, bike ride, walk and I guess sit outside trying to sell stuff. We have been culling, moving and marking for the last two weeks. Pricing has been tough. This is some priceless crap here....or at least expensive. Do we put 50 cents or a 1.00 on that shirt??? After all, I don't want to haul it back in to the crawl space!

I have participated in one other garage sale since moving out of my parents house. In that neighborhood, it seemed a common occurance to have people show up an hour before you were going to open, wait in the drive and give the appearance of stop, drop and roll as the garage door was going up. Now to find out if that is a Lower 48 habit or it it happens here too.

I am actually looking forward to dumping some invaluable goodies and meeting some more locals. We will be bone tired tonight as we (including Squirt) normally don't have to be captivating for 6-7 hours in one day. :)

Maybe it it will all be sold in an hour and we can go bike, hike and walk...

Happy Mother's Day

Dear Mom

Thanks for everything! I hope you and Rascal have a good day.

Love Janet, Robert and Squirt

Baking Dog Biscuits

I can't believe it has been over a week since I last posted something. The days fly by when the sun is out so much!!

Today is my day off and I had planned on getting ready for the addition garage sale next week. However, I have been fighting what I think is a dislocated shoulder since mid February (no I don’t know how I did it) and yesterday I think the chiropractor may have finally gotten it back into place. Anyway, I am doing non-lifting things today in an attempt to let it heal.

One of those non-lifting things is baking dog cookies. As I mentioned before, Squirt is supposed to be on a really strict diet of no dog treats. While Robert and I decided he could have some dog treats, we are going to minimize what he gets and substitute a dog biscuit made out of Science Diet. Today’s recipe is as follows:

Preheat oven to 250
Open can of soft U/D dog food
Cut into rounds about ¼” thick
Cut each round into fourths
Spray cookie sheet
Place dog food pieces onto cookie sheet
Bake for 4-6 hours turning once after 3 hours

Squirt and I are into hour 4 of the baking and all of the windows are open because this stuff stinks. I was going to be creative and make actual biscuit shapes but the food was too disgusting to mess with for very long.

Needless to say – the house is cold.

The Nenana Ice Classic is over. There were 22 winners splitting over $302,000. Neither Robert nor I were one of the winners. Luckily, there is next year as I am sure the river will freeze again.

I happened to be up this morning at 12:15am taking aspirin (see shoulder comment) and was amazed at how light it still was in the north. Looking out the south windows, it was dark but looking out the north windows, it was still light enough to read by. I haven’t checked lately but I would guess we are getting about 17 hours of sunlight now. I am getting better at sleeping when the sun is up.

Last Saturday and Sunday were labeled "Flower Bed Clean up Days". It took both days and 9 garbage bags to cut out all of the dead stuff. Multiple people stopped by and expressed how beautiful our flower beds had alwasy been in the past. They will proabaly be disappointed this year. Besides the raspberry thicket, we found 4 black currant berry bushes. We have decided the previous owners wanted the bears to stop by for snacks as we have lots of things to draw them to our yard.

Our bicycles are now tuned and ready to go. I opted to have treaded tires put on mine instead of slicks. I don't plan to do any road racing while here. :) The first ride in several years was Tuesday night. We went up hill number one and I was averaging 2 pants per tire rotation in granny gear. After reaching the top Robert wanted to know if I wanted to go home or go to the next hill. Always up for a challenge, of course I said “I can go!” At the top of the second hill I said “I’m ready to go home.” Coming down the hills was GREAT. I don’t know how fast we were going but I was really enjoying it until Robert said “Watch out for moose.” I am sure the moose would win if I should ever hit one on a bike path! I think I heard him say he is going to get a GPS for our bikes – that will make 4 for our family. You can never have too many!

Bears and Trash

We received a letter from the Alaska Waste Department yesterday letting us know: “Your neighborhood has been identified as an area with high probability of bear/trash encounters.” Oh good. Now that the ravens have gone back to where ravens spend the summer and they won’t be bothering the trash, we have to watch for bears. We can’t put our trash out the night before pick up. It must be the morning of. The city may ticket/fine something like $300 if a bear is caught rooting around in your trash. I wish someone would explain to the bears they can be expensive and if they are going to root in trash and cost residents, they need to provide a floor show to an audience.

This last weekend we were pretty busy. We spent Friday and Saturday in Seward. Friday we went on a whale watching tour and saw harbor seals, stellar sea lions, eagles, sea otters but someone forgot to notify the whales we were in town. Didn’t see a single one of the 22,000 migrating gray whales. Maybe we will see some on one of the other whale tours we are going on later in the summer. Then Saturday on the way home, we stopped off at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center and checked out the animals. Since it was so pretty, we also headed to the Portage Glacier area. I am pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a moose baby but by the time we got turned around it was gone.

Sunday was ‘test the bear gun’ day. A group of us took several pistols, rifles and shotguns to a local range and had a blast (har har har). It was beautiful, sunny weather – a perfect day to be outside shooting targets. Btw – the bear gun has quite a kick to it – however not as much as a .50 caliber pistol.

Monday was the official start of Anchorage City Wide Clean Up (getting ready for tourist season). All week long, there will be people by the highways and streets picking up literally tons of trash tossed out over the winter. There are thousands of orange bags filled with trash on the roadsides now. I was amazed at what we found in approximately ¾ of a mile yesterday on one side of one of the main roads. There were the typical fast food wrappers, newspapers, soda cups and 5 gabillion cigarette butts but we also found a ring (assume costume jewelry due to the greenish tint on the silver), CDs, game boy cartridges and a passport. Others found wallets complete with $$, credit cards and driver’s licenses. Of course, one compatriot said at the end of the day she was really glad she didn’t find a body under the really tall grass she was walking in. Of course next year this will be the only thing I think about the entire time I’m out there. The team was a grimy mess but our 2 miles or so looked very nice when finished.

Bad News from the Dog Treat Front

We just returned from the vet for stitch removal and Squirt received terrible news....no more treats. No more steak bones, biscuits (regular or chocolate covered), chips, snausges or rawhide. He feels so bad he came right in, nested in his dog bed and went to sleep (right after I gave him a guilt biscuit because he can't have them any more and he hadn't had one for two weeks).

Of course this is harder on Robert and myself than it is Squirt. We are pretty sure he has been asking all the other dogs he sees if they still get treats. The vet suggested I try buying the soft food (he normally eats dry) and baking "cookies" out of it. They say it smells the house up but dogs think it is a treat due to the texture difference. Squirt is pretty smart though so I only bought 2 cans. We'll see if he takes one bite and spits it out.

One of these weekends, we will have a ceremonial last biscuit event and explain to him it's tough getting older. Then we will bake some of the new ones and sneak the other ones out of the house to a good home.