Alaska

Celebrate the Iditarod start: Win a hat!

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thThe Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage on the first Saturday in March. People line the streets, which have been prepared by having snow put on them and which are aflame with barking, leaping, howling dogs.

If you happen to speak Canine, you’ll be able to hear what they’re saying: Let’s GO! Let’s GO! Let’s GO!

Come to think of it, you don’t need to know what a dog’s saying — just check his body language (See “barking, leaping, howling,” above.)

I hope to be there myself, although it will be a late night on Friday — I’m reviewing the touring company of “The Addams Family” for The Anchorage Daily News (my former long-time employer), and I’m expected to put the review up on the Arts Snob blog that same evening. The show probably won’t let out until about 10:30 p.m., which means I won’t even start to write until 11 p.m. Who knows what time I’ll get to bed?

I’ll be there in spirit if nothing else, having attended Iditarod starts in the past and enjoyed them hugely. I’ll also check out photos on the Daily News website of both the ceremonial start and then the next day’s re-start in Willow, Alaska. You should, too: The ADN shooters are masters of the art.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about a hat.*

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A midwinter’s tale. (Okay, a digest.)

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thThe snow is clean and new, the temperature is 18 degrees, daylight is increasing (we get 9 hours, 43 minutes today) and the annual winter carnival known as “Rondy” (short for the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous) is underway. When I lived here before, February was always the month when winter turned around. Still is, even though it’ll be months before we can garden.

The carnival includes a three-day dogsled race that starts and ends downtown. As I’ve noted before, Anchorage is the only city I know of that puts snow on the streets. And they’ll do it again on March 1, when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start downtown.

Yep, it’s a weird place.

I haven’t posted anything particularly deep lately due to having first a virus and then a head cold (still got it, yay), and also having accepted a magazine assignment and been in negotiations with another magazine editor. The latter involved a long phone conversation and then sending a fairly lengthy outline on a very personal subject, only to be told this wasn’t specific enough: What did it feel like?

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Will I go round in circles?

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thRecent sustained pain in my right shoulder has made it hard to work, and also to do some of my exercises. Walking’s been tough, too: The freeze-thaw cycle glaciated our side street, and the footpath is as polished as a politician’s promise. Even with ice-grippers on my feet I’m unsteady and fearful of falling.

Between my frozen shoulder and the frozen ground I’ve been frustrated and sluggish. Last week I decided that if I couldn’t walk outdoors, I’d walk inside.

That’s when I started doing laps around the living area.

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Still in Phoenix, and staying for a while.

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thIf things had gone according to plan I’d be getting on a plane this evening and returning to Anchorage. But one thing I’ve learned in all my years is that plans are really just God’s laugh track.

Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or my daughter’s website know that she’s had three miscarriages in a row. In the middle of the night Saturday she started to spot and cramp. She and Tim went to the emergency room and I stayed here: sniffling, setting up the Roomba, doing dishes and then mopping most of the living area. If I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, I figured I might as well do something useful.

The ER doctor said it wasn’t clear whether she was miscarrying again. “Too soon to tell” wasn’t of much use, but it allowed for hope.

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Coupons.com wants to give you a $100 Amazon card.

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XMAS_BLOGGIFT_MOM_FINA couple of dozen bloggers were given the chance to participate in the Coupons.com Holiday Sweepstakes. I’m happy to be among them because of the possibility that one of my readers will be chosen as the winner of a $100 gift card to Amazon.com.

The contest is designed to call attention to the site’s holiday gift guides, which offer ideas for presents for moms, dads, teens and younger kids. This being Coupons.com, online coupon codes are included with each gift idea.

Among the four Coupons.com holiday gift guides, my favorite is – naturally – the mom page. That’s because it includes a class of gifts I hope to see under the tree: skin-care items.

It’s cold and dry here in southcentral Alaska, which is hard on the skin. Looking at the moms’ gift guide I see a three-pack of fragranced body butters from Sephora. The  accompanying coupon codes bring free shipping and a gratis “deluxe sample” item. (Hint: Those small sample items are obviously good for travel but they also make very nice last-minute stocking stuffers.)

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Money that would otherwise have been lost.

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thAfter our Thanksgiving dinner one of my great-nephews counted up my found money. In the past year I found $13.81, considerably less than in 2012.

That doesn’t surprise me, since I spent a fair amount of 2012 traveling and moved to Alaska for the last three months of the year. I walk a lot less up here than I did in Seattle. That’s due in part to scary-icy conditions and also to the fact that I no longer live within strolling distance of shopping, banking and the like. While living down south I took a long walk most days, for health reasons but also to buy a bunch of bananas or take advantage of great deals on toiletries.

These days if I need to hit the library, the post office, the drugstore or the supermarket I either go with DF, borrow his car or take the bus. That means considerably fewer chances to find coins on sidewalks and in shopping centers.

Even so, I wound up with:

  • Four $1 bills
  • 16 quarters
  • 38 dimes
  • Seven nickels
  • 166 pennies

In 2012 I found $21.31, which I rounded up to $50 as a donation for a local food bank. Due to the late unpleasantness at Microsoft I can’t afford to be quite that generous in my math this year. Thus the $13.81 will become a $20 donation. But since I have an automatic monthly donation to the food bank I don’t feel too bad about the pinch.

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Giveaway: Wearable art from Alaska.

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photo 1(1)My friend Linda B. has a sideline making beaded items, mostly jewelry. She doesn’t just string beads in straight rows, however.

Linda has been known to bead-weave around seashells, interesting rocks, copper plumbing parts and  aluminum flashing she picked up for a song at the Habitat ReStore.

She also likes to pound metal. Boy, does she. I was her roommate when I returned to Alaska, and sometimes I’d go to sleep hearing the tink-tink-tink of one of her hammers pressing shapes out of flat metal and then, sometimes, texturizing their surfaces.

It was like “The Shoemaker and the Elves,” if the shoemaker had made boots out of aluminum or copper.

Recently I helped her set up for a crafts show and decided to be the “lucky money,” i.e., the first sale of the day. Rather than get one of the bigger beaded pieces I opted for two lovely pairs of earrings, which I figured would have more mass appeal — and would also make good last-minute holiday gifts.

Thus I’m giving away two prizes this week.

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What I’ve been doing.

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thMade it back from the annual Talkeetna fling late Sunday afternoon, in one piece but very tired. Either I’m getting older or the late hours, odd eating habits and weirdly crappy weather (freezing rain despite ground temps in the 20s) took more out of me than I thought.

Before I recap that bacchanal, allow me to share a few recent happenings. 

Despite my previously stated position on why you shouldn’t write for free, I recently did just that. But donating “Want to cut costs? Get yourself a frugal filter (or two)” to the Wise Bread blog was a professional courtesy, which is one of the few reasons to give it away. Will Chen and Greg Go have both been helpful and supportive to me and I wanted to return the favor.

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Lighting the tree on Alaska time.

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SnowyChristmas_EN-AU2022031457It was zero degrees when I left the house at 4:30 p.m. yesterday, but I was determined to get my nephews to the city tree-lighting ceremony downtown. Make sure they wear snowpants and wool socks and hats and that they have both mittens in their pockets, I pleaded with their mom.

That’s because at a long-ago tree-lighting I neglected to put on a hat or, apparently, to pull my coat hood up far enough. Or maybe it was just so cold that year (below zero, can’t remember how far) and my coat was so insufficient that my body had to make an executive decision: The torso is essential; the ears we can live without.

The burning throb of frostbitten earlobes kept me tossing and turning all night. Since then I’ve been more careful (usually) about dressing when I know I’ll be standing around in the cold. I also bought a better coat, essentially a small building made of goose down, for really cold trips like the Talkeetna Bachelors Auction and Wilderness Woman Competition.

I needn’t have worried about the boys, though. The first thing they did at Town Square Park was head straight for a snow pile.

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Slip-slidin’ away.

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thThe smart money would have been on skipping the movie. Instead, I found myself in the car with DF, creeping toward the Century 16 on roads as glazed as a fresh Krispy Kreme. Freezing rain had been falling for about an hour – maddening, really, since the temperature at our house was 22 degrees. Shouldn’t that have been snow?

Blame the “blast of mid-winter moisture (that) blew north from the tropics,” according to The Anchorage Daily News. My friend Linda B. and I were determined to see “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” on Friday morning and that’s what we did.

It helped that DF is the calmest driver I know, and that Linda B. shrugs off all crappy weather with, “Hey, it’s Alaska.”

He dropped me off on his way to work and she and I enjoyed the film (even though I hadn’t seen the first one I was able to follow along). When we left the theater it was snowing sideways, so we crept carefully over to the Table 6 restaurant and had lunch.

Then came the slippery part.

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