If loving Ray Troll is wrong, I don’t want to be right. The Ketchikan-based artist is best known (up here, anyway) for his fish T-shirts, prints, pins and such. But he’s branched out to sharks, fossils, dinosaurs and evolution, all of it imbued with unmistakeable graphics and some truly atrocious puns.
Three of those mini-masterpieces, in the form of fridge magnets, make up this week’s giveaway.
After a particularly aggravating shopping trip back in late March, I suggested that we buy as little as possible for the month of April. We’d live off what was stored in the cupboards, freezer and basement, filling in with vegetables, fruit and dairy as needed.
At the time I meant to report the findings here. That didn’t happen. In fact, I can’t find the envelope with our April receipts. However, I do remember that DF added them up and they came to about $91 – which shows that vegetables, fruit and dairy for two people can be pretty darned expensive up here. (Hint: We’re not buying organic or out-of-season stuff and we use milk for cooking, not for drinking.)
How’s our stockpile looking? Surprisingly unaffected, dammit.
I got home from the two-week East Coast trip at around 1:30 this morning, exhausted and suffering from Weird Pattern Sunburn. The back and front of my neck and about three inches of shoulders were scorched stop-sign red where the sunscreen washed away. I’d been wearing a T-shirt and shorts over my swimsuit for a trip to Ocean City, NJ.
It’s really starting to hurt – it may blister, dammit – and my shoulder and arm muscles are seriously wrenched from holding my younger great-nephew in deeper water so we could jump waves. The heavy backpack cutting into the ache/burn during our long day of travel certainly didn’t help matters.
Wish I could have a professional massage, but nobody’s touching that sunburn. When DF put aloe gel on it last night I shrieked like a smoke alarm.
Totally worth it to have gone to the shore again, after decades away. I’d forgotten how lovely it feels to be cradled by the ocean.
It’s high summer. The heat and humidity are racing each other to the century mark. Your shirt is sticking to your back like a sweaty decal. The air is so thick you could drink it.
Here’s one solution: Look at a cartoon that involves polar bears, snowmen or dog mushers. You’ll get a vicarious chill and the laughter-induced endorphins will distract you from the fact that you’ve got a few more months of this kind of weather.
Yep, it’s another “Tundra” giveaway. This will be the third time I’ve featured a collection of Chad Carpenter’s comics, and the reaction is always tremendous. Why? Because he’s freakin’ funny, that’s why.
Carpenter’s strip is syndicated all over the U.S. and also in other countries. If you’d like to know more, read this post from last year, which contains a link to a profile of the artist.
Or just take my word for it: Chad is a sick and twisted man, which makes for awesome (and occasionally wince-inducing) cartooning.
It’s high summer. The heat and humidity are racing each other to the century mark. Your shirt is sticking to your back like a sweaty decal. The air is so thick you could drink it.
Here’s one solution: Look at a cartoon that involves polar bears, snowmen or dog mushers. You’ll get a vicarious chill and the laughter-induced endorphins will distract you from the fact that you’ve got a few more months of this kind of weather.
Yep, it’s another “Tundra” giveaway. This will be the third time I’ve featured a collection of Chad Carpenter’s comics, and the reaction is always tremendous. Why? Because he’s freakin’ funny, that’s why.
Carpenter’s strip is syndicated all over the U.S. and also in other countries. If you’d like to know more, read this post from last year, which contains a link to a profile of the artist.
Or just take my word for it: Chad is a sick and twisted man, which makes for awesome (and occasionally wince-inducing) cartooning.
It’s high summer. The heat and humidity are racing each other to the century mark. Your shirt is sticking to your back like a sweaty decal. The air is so thick you could drink it.
Here’s one solution: Look at a cartoon that involves polar bears, snowmen or dog mushers. You’ll get a vicarious chill and the laughter-induced endorphins will distract you from the fact that you’ve got a few more months of this kind of weather.
Yep, it’s another “Tundra” giveaway. This will be the third time I’ve featured a collection of Chad Carpenter’s comics, and the reaction is always tremendous. Why? Because he’s freakin’ funny, that’s why.
Carpenter’s strip is syndicated all over the U.S. and also in other countries. If you’d like to know more, read this post from last year, which contains a link to a profile of the artist.
Or just take my word for it: Chad is a sick and twisted man, which makes for awesome (and occasionally wince-inducing) cartooning.
All around the country people recently celebrated the first day of summer (calendar-wise). The weather was gorgeous in Anchorage but I was a little sad. Up here, summer solstice means that in a day or so the light turns around.
If that sounds defeatist, it’s because it is. We’ll still have tons of light for quite some time, much more illumination than the Lower 48 gets. But I can’t shake the notion that it’s now going the other way.
I felt that way every solstice during my previous tenure in Alaska (1984-2001) and I feel that way now. May and June are the best months, in my opinion, even if the latter does turn on us each year on or around June 21.
Late last week I suggested we drive to the Turnagain Arm Pit BBQ for supper. It wasn’t that there wasn’t anything to eat at home. It’s that the weather was too nice to stay inside.
Sure, we could have had leftovers at a table in the back yard. In fact, DF suggested we do that rather than spending $30 or more on ribs. But I wanted to take advantage of the splendid drive along Turnagain Arm, and then sit on the patio eating fried pickles and basking in the nonstop Alaska sun.
Summer can do a number on a frugalist’s finances – especially if your friends don’t play fair. Whether it’s beer and chicken wings after a pickup softball game or al fresco lunches with pals on a sunny Saturday, the next few months could lead to all sorts of uncomfortable money situations.
The other night we went to hear a local jazz quartet. Or, rather, tried to hear them, being bracketed on either side by people who decided to talk during the music.
To my left were a couple of women who looked barely old enough to drink. They yammered for long, squealy stretches about jobs and friends, and the photos on their smartphones, and the Facebook updates they were posting.
To DF’s right were two women whose voices were audible but whose words I couldn’t quite make out. Thankfully, they left toward the end of the first set; at that point DF told me they’d spoken in detail about how best to avoid the locals during bike trips to other countries.
You go all the way to Guatemala or Sierra Leone and you want to AVOID the locals? I thought. Why did you even go? And why are you HERE when you obviously don’t care about the music?
Just spent a couple of days in Fairbanks with my friend Linda B. Today I came home to freshly waxed floors, freshly baked bread and freshly boiled whale. I am not making that up. Yes, DF really did wax the floors.
And yes, he really did boil a piece of Balaena mysticetus.