All together now: "Snow, snow, snow, snow, SNOW!"

[missroserose]

It's snowed more in the last few days than I've ever seen it snow here, including the giant snowstorm we had in January a couple years ago. I literally could not get my car out of our neighborhood this morning - the snow was piled up so high that poor Kitty kept high-centering. (She's a very good car, but not designed for environmental extremes.) Fortunately a kindly neighbor helped me get back into my driveway and gave Brian and I a ride to work in her giant Ford F-250. Made for an interesting morning, let me tell you.

A somewhat amusing side effect of all this is that I keep having to postpone my music lesson for last week - on Friday the weather was pretty seriously bad and I didn't want to drive down to Douglas in it, and today I don't have a car with me. Hopefully this Friday will work a bit better - it's supposed to warm up later today, so at least I'll be able to get unstuck (though if it continues to be warm then the roads are going to be a slushy mess. Yay).

The kitties have their very first vet visit tomorrow, only about a year late. I finally convinced Brian that they needed to go see the kitty-doctor (helped in part by the fact that Mr. Jerry Brown is getting to be a very distinguished middle-aged cat - he turned 9 this year), and we eventually got around to investing in a couple of carriers. So tomorrow afternoon we'll head home, stuff them in the carriers, stick them in the car and take them to the veterinarian. I'm hoping it'll be a relatively painless experience, but at the very least we'll probably get to listen to a very pitiful chorus of miaous on the drive there and back. Poor kitties.

My copy of Oblivion hasn't shown up yet, likely due to the fact that mail's been a bit backed up thanks to the snow (when it all comes in by plane and the planes can't get through, well, there you have it). It's still kind of frustrating, though - I've been reading the strategy guide and I really want to play it. I'm halfway tempted to go over to Fred Meyer, buy a copy, keep the receipt, play it until mine gets here, and then return it. But that wouldn't be very nice of me, now, would it?

All right, enough procrastinating. Time to do the incredibly tedious and boring long distance billing...again...

Comments

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I know this is an old post, but what the hey.

Y'know it's colder, on average, where I live than where you do? Coastal Alaska is a lot more temperate than northwest Minnesota. We're like Siberia here, but without the borscht!

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Hey, it's new to you, right?

If you read some of my older posts, however, you'll see that I've lived in both Fairbanks (central Alaska) and Barrow (look at a map of Alaska, find the absolute northernmost tip, and stick a pin right next to the coast. That's where my house was). Brian's reaction to visiting there in midwinter was "Wow, I've never seen a place where the weather has a lethality index. 'How dead will you be if you go outside today?'"

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Yikes! Those are very very cold places!

Who is Brian?

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

My more-than-boyfriend-not-quite-fianceé, or significant other, or whatever the politically correct term is these days. The other half of the "we" that I tend to use (when I'm not using the imperial "we", anyway ;).

When we first started dating I was up in Barrow over winter break between semesters, and he came up to keep me company for the week after Christmas. I don't think I'll ever forget his reaction when I opened the curtains in our room overlooking the (frozen) Arctic Ocean and went "Oh, look, we have a lovely ocean view." "That's the ocean?" "Yes." "That's the ocean?" "Yes." "That's the ocean? The Arctic Ocean?" "Yes. It's the middle of winter, what did you expect?"

Apparently his previous experiences with the concept "ocean" had been in Oregon, Washington and Hawai'i - not exactly the sorts of places one associates the concept of "ocean" with the idea of "frozen". =)

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

A more-than-boyfriend-not-quite-fiancee, eh? I didn't know you had one of those! (Lucky guy, I might add.)

So, I have to ask...why did you live north of the Arctic Circle? And what was it like up there? Did you have "midnight sun"? Did you have to time your trips outside so that you minimized exposure? I imagine you had lots of warm clothing...

[roseneko.livejournal.com]

Aw, thanks. I feel lucky to have him, too...we deserve each other in so many ways. In both senses. =)

So far as Barrow went, the "why" consisted of my mother being offered a six-figure income for a job that she liked about ten times better than what she was doing at the time, complete with moving expenses and a very real chance to get out of debt (long story). So I spent my senior year of high school up there, as well as what would've been my second semester of college (another long story) and a few summers in between other years. She's now back to living in Anchorage, though, and is still working for the same folks (and quite happy to be doing so). I'm happy for her.

As for what it was like...actually, not as bad as you might think, especially in the summer. The midnight sun is really something to see - right around 2:00 AM it gets as close to the horizon as it's going to, at which point the sky looks amazing. Like sunset and sunrise at the same time. Likewise, in the winter, the sun doesn't actually come up but roundabout noon to 2 PM the sky goes through several lovely shades of indigo blue. (Not that you really want to go outside to look at it, but it's pretty from the window.)

In the summer being outside wasn't too bad, but the temperature rarely went up above the mid-40s, especially when you factored in the near-constant wind coming off the ice. Usually we'd have one or two days a year where it was sunny and the wind was still and the temperature got up to 60 or so - those were pretty awesome, let me tell you. (The last summer I was there, we had a whole week of those in a row, and the temperature was in the mid-60s - it was the only time I'd ever looked at the ocean and been tempted to jump in.)

In the winter, it mostly amounted to not going outside much, and wearing a lot of clothes when you did (I have an awesome custom-made parka with a wolf-fur ruff around the hood and hem - you need those to keep out the wind!). The school bus picked you up right at the door, and the cabs would go anywhere in town for $5 (the cabdrivers were awesome, they were almost all Filipino or Thai immigrants with great senses of humor). Not that there were really that many places to go. So it worked out okay.

Altogether, it was a good experience, but definitely not someplace I'd want to live forever. But then, I don't want to be here in Juneau forever either, so hey.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

As someone who likes to "cocoon" in the wintertime, that actually sounds kind of nice.

I'm not sure I'd want to stay that far north forever, of course. On the other hand, what with global warming, that far north might become rather temperate in another decade or so!