So, you think you want a nap?

Good luck with that. 

To Belle, it just looks like you're trying to make the couch softer for her.

Easter Break with James and Carl

The pre-Easter week is highly anticipated around here, not just because this is a holy time, but also because James comes home! This year, James' college roommate, Carl, spent Easter break in Alaska with us. While April is an awkward time to visit Alaska (not much snow, mostly slush, and the  tourist attractions aren't open yet), we were all happy the weather had warmed up nicely and we found interesting things to do...

Day 1 - Saturday
James and Carl left Pennsylvania at the same time, on the same flight, but due to scheduling difficulties with the airlines, they parted ways in Chicago. James arrived in Anchorage eight hours ahead of Carl, so we walked around the mall, ate at Harley's, and did some shopping while we waited for Carl's night flight. 

Day 2 - Sunday

James and Carl got some sleep after their long, late night of travel and then decided to explore the area. James took Carl for a ride to see Mt. Redoubt from Cook Inlet View, walk along the Kenai River, see Old Town Kenai (including the historic Russian Orthodox churches), and then to some of the little shops in Soldotna. Carl saw his first moose!

Day 3 - Monday

What a gorgeous day for me to drive the boys to Homer... We stopped for lunch at Rocky's Cafe in Kasilof and took some photos there of James rescuing poor Carl from being eaten by a giant mosquito: 

And both of them with a slightly-larger-than-life salmon:

On we went to Ninilchik where we visited the Russian Orthodox church overlooking the Inlet and Ninilchik Village. 

Once in Homer, we watched the eagles swooping over the bluff on the outskirts of town:

I think we saw five or six right there at the bluff. This one has the mountains and Homer Spit in the background. Homer Spit has a lot of adorable tourist trap shops, eateries, fishing charters and kayak tour shacks along it.

We walked out onto Homer Spit for a different view of the mountains across Kachemak Bay. Another eagle flew right over us and landed on the roof of The Time Bandit (of Deadliest Catch fame) shop on the Spit. He was so close to us, and seemed to be posing for the camera!

James went across the street to take a picture of the whole building:

And then, just because you sort of have to say you've done it, we took the boys' picture in front of the famous Salty Dawg Saloon, one of the few buildings to survive the Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 and the resultant tsunami:

 On the way out of town, we stopped for chocolates and souvenirs at Alaska Wild Berry. Sooooo yummy.

Day 4 - Tuesday

Early in the day, the boys worked on homework they'd brought with them, and in the afternoon Jim took them to the beach near our house at Captain Cook State Recreation Area.

Day 5 - Wednesday

I took James to town to shop for new jeans while Carl remained diligent to his homework here at home. Then they both helped me do prep for Smiling Otter Studio. They still had homework to do, though, with the boys often downstairs near the wood stove, working hard:

Day 6 - Thursday

The boys headed off on their own again, to finish shopping and to visit some attractions in Sterling, including the chainsaw carver:

They revisited the Russian Orthodox Church to see the interior, and visited the museum in the Kenai Visitors Center:

Day 7 - Friday

More homework for the boys! In the evening, though, Jim taught Carl to pan for gold. Jim's got an indoor setup for panning while he watches tv. Carl panned first while James put some hides on stretching boards for me, and then James took a turn.

Carl points out his first big "picker":

Day 8 - Saturday

James and Carl worked hard on research papers all day.....

Day 9 - Sunday

Resurrection Day! But also the day when we had to say goodbye to the boys and send them back to school. We ate a late lunch (early dinner?) of prime rib, grilled lamb, cheesy bread and apple pie before leaving for the Kenai airport. Rather than spend all day and half the night in the car, Jim decided the best way to get them back to Anchorage for their flight home was to fly them out via commuter plane.

We sure did enjoy having them here and were sad to see them go.  We hope Carl visits again and are looking forward to having James back home at the end of May!

Rondy '11 Part 4: The Running of the Reindeer Videos

As promised, here are the videos of the Fourth Annual Running of the Reindeer. I highly recommend that you click through to watch them on YouTube, where you might be able to see them better.

This is the video of my run with the reindeer. In all the Military, Mens and Groups herds, the reindeer are released at the same time as the runners. In the Women's herd, the runners are given a 10-second head start. You hear the emcee counting down the ten seconds at the beginning of the video. Two deer ran past me within arm's reach on my right, and another one brushed against my arm on my left. That was totally cool!

This is Jim's video of his run with the reindeer, which he filmed by holding the camera over his head as he ran. You can easily see how close he was to the reindeer!

This is the Groups herd. This is where the best costumes are. Enjoy!

(In spite of the emcee suggesting there might have been an injury, there wasn't. There hasn't been an injury in all four years of RotR.)

Rondy '11 Part 3: The Running of the Reindeer

I suppose The Running of the Reindeer needs some explaining.

Probably, it needs a lot of explaining.

Think of The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.  Now remove the bulls and substitute reindeer. Remove the certainty of injury by goring and replace it with a faint chance of injury by falling in the snow and being stepped on by another runner. Remove every shred of seriousness and replace it with the-sillier-the-better. Remove Pamplona altogether and replace it with the downtown Anchorage business district. In fact, remove all similarities except that people run in a street with hoofed animals.

Got it? Okay. Now we can begin.

Runners race down two blocks of Fourth Avenue with about a dozen male reindeer released behind them. At the other end of Fourth Avenue is a trailer containing a doe in heat, which keeps the males not only running, but running in a predictable, relatively straight line towards her. There are no prizes for winning or anything like that, it's just fun and wacky, which is honestly a point unto itself.

Last year, Jim and I were spectators. This year, we were runners.

Anyone can participate in The Running, and there are people who come for Rondy from all over the world, and some of them join in the race right along with the crazy fun-loving locals. The reindeer, by the way, are local, too. (I forgot where the ranch is located, though.) It costs $25 per person with proceeds benefiting Toys For Tots. There are four "herds" - the Military, the Men, the Women, and Groups. Here, the male reindeer are walked to the starting line after the first group of runners are already in place:

The race organizers decided to try something new this year - Antlercam! It did not go as planned......

He scraped the Antlercam off in the street.

This is my favorite photo of the reindeer this year. A young buck posing for my camera, wearing his purple RotR cowbell. Um, deerbell. Sorry. 

The Military herd wasn't too exciting, because they were all dressed in fatigues and probably all sober. So I don't have any interesting photos of that. But up next, the Men's herd! The emcee asked all the men who were mostly bare to come to the front, where they proceeded to dance about in Rondy-spirit abandon, and were only too happy to oblige when the emcee told them to give him some pushups in the street. While they were doing their pushups, the crowd threw snow at them. Ah, good times. I should probably mention that although costumes are not required, they ARE encouraged, and you can (I highly suggest it, in fact) click on these photos to enlarge them and see some of the costumes better.

 The men's herd runs past shortly before the reindeer catch up to them:

Yes, that's a banana. And a tooth with a giant toothbrush. The big plywood carrot (probably to lure in the reindeer? I dunno) is coming, and in front of him is the hairyman from my previous post.

When you watch the videos in my next post, you'll see Jim's point of view as he runs. You'll see the easy landmark of the plywood carrot go by, and that's about when this photo of Jim was taken. He's wearing his beaver trapper hat, khaki pants and a dark jacket and is holding the camera over his head, right in front of the guy wearing bib number 121.

The snow was very loose and slippery from having been spread out after the Iditarod ceremonial start, which was only a few hours before this. Lots of people fell in the snow, but other runners good-naturedly helped them up and retrieved lost bits of costumes, and the race continued with no harm done. This is the closest I saw to an actual mishap - when a reindeer ran between me (on the sidelines) and a cameraman, and the cameraman jumped back to avoid the deer and fell on his bohunkus. He got back up when the deer passed, though, and kept filming.

We don't have any still photos of me running with the Women's herd, because I was busy running and Jim was operating the video camera. We also managed not to get any stills of the Groups herd. I can't believe we did that. You'll just have to wait for the video. 

As we were leaving the downtown area that evening, we passed a group of Rondy pin collectors, and asked to take their photo outside of the official Rondy store. Rondy pins are quite collectible if you're into that sort of thing, as these people evidently were!

In my next post, I'll have the videos of the races for you to see, and you'll especially want to see the Groups herd. That's where the best costumes are. See you then!

Rondy '11 Part 2: The Ceremonial Start Video

Thank you, Jim, for this awesome video montage from the Iditarod Ceremonial Start!

Rondy '11 Part 1: The ceremonial start of the Iditarod

I love Fur Rendezvous weekend. I truly do. I start looking forward to next year's Rondy on the ride home from the Rondy that just finished. Is it February again yet?

At last year's Rondy, we were fortunate that the two events we wanted most to see - the Outhouse Races and The Running of the Reindeer - were on the same weekend. This year, we weren't so lucky. Forced to choose between the two events, we opted to go on the last weekend of Rondy to see the Reindeer and the ceremonial start of the Iditarod dog sled race, and then go to Willow, Alaska to see the official restart of the race. Turns out to have been a very good choice.

We got to Anchorage on Friday night so we could be up early Saturday morning and have a good spot staked out along Fourth Avenue to watch the Iditarod teams line up for the ceremonial start. The weather was pretty good, bright and warm in the upper 20's. Exxon and Wells Fargo had a hospitality tent set up, serving free hot cider, coffee and cookies, and handing out blinkie pins and posters. The reindeer sausage vendors were doing a brisk business selling hot dogs for breakfast. Speaking of reindeer dogs, I have to stop and show you this:

Aren't they precious??? Elaborate fur costumes are the norm at Rondy (well, except for when elaborate costumes of any other sort are called for, but we'll get to that when we talk about The Running of  the Reindeer). Seeing small children decked out in extremely wonderful furs, however, is unusual. I asked these little girls' grandmother if I could take their picture, and she stepped aside. As soon as she did, they moved their dogs away from their faces and posed, probably having been asked repeatedly for their photos over the weekend. My only regret is that I didn't get a picture of  the backs of their parkas as well.

But, I digress.

The weather had been so warm and nice that there wasn't enough snow in the area to provide a snowy chute for the sleds to run on, so truckloads of snow were brought in the day before to make a chute from. The first sled to leave the start line was a ceremonial vintage freight sled. See how the sled driver is on a small ski platform in front of the sled? 

Months before Iditarod, there is an auction whereby you can purchase the privilege of being an IditaRider. IditaRiders can bid on seats in their favorite musher's sled for the first 10 miles of the run, before the dogs are loaded up into trucks and driven to the official start in Willow. I can't find anywhere how much the auctions ended up at, but I found out that being in a *rookie* musher's sled can run into the thousands of dollars. I can't imagine what someone would have paid to ride with favorites like Lance Mackey or Martin Buser. Here you can see an IditaRider in the basket of Jamaican musher (nope, not kidding) Newton Marshall's sled.

We took a gazillion photos of the dogs and mushers. We took a gazillion more photos of more dogs. And then more of the mushers. We photographed the interpreter for the hearing impaired, the handlers that helped hold back every single dog in the entire lineup, and interesting people on the sidelines. But I won't make you sit through all of those pics... just a couple more. There will be others to look through when I take you with us to the official start. In the meantime, however, here's a dog that seems to sum up the feelings of every dog in the race:

Slobbering, jumping, barking, crazy for racing and ready to GO!

We heart Lance Mackey. He won four Iditarods *in a row*, people. In. A. Row. While dealing with the after-effects of throat cancer and the special problems that brings him, both on the trail and off. Want an interesting read? Check out his book and read a little more about him here.

We watched the first 17 teams go through the chute, including other favorites DeeDee Jonrowe and Martin Buser. Rather than wait three hours for all 62 teams to go through (they leave every two to three minutes), we left after seeing Lance start off. Although we were a bit sorry we left early when someone told us musher Wattie McDonald (bib #38) of Scotland wore his kilt, his dogs wore tartan coats, and bagpipers played as he entered the chute. Someone posted a video of his start here.

Here's Jim outside the official Fur Rondy store:

Me, with the statue of Balto:

 

Much of the fun of Rondy is seeing the costumes and furs, and I love it bunches. This guy was dressed as a "hairy man" or "bushman", the Alaskan version of Sasquatch, and for a donation to Alaska's Healing Hearts, you could have your photo taken with him.  Without making a spectacle of myself by inspecting the costume, I think it was bear and wolverine fur.

After we left the race, we had only a few hours before we had to be back for The Running of the Reindeer. We needed to take a shipment of slippers to Alaska Fur Exchange and pick up materials for the rest of the spring orders. Then we ate at a new place, Harley's Old Thyme Cafe, which is awesome, and shopped at Black Elk for suede and beads. 

Check back next time to see how the rest of our day unfolded!

The Six Sillies

James the Storyteller performs "The Six Sillies" at Winterfeast 2011 at Grove City College.

The first few seconds of the story were cut off by the camera, and go as follows:

"Once upon a time, there was a young girl who reached the age of thirty-seven without getting married, for she was so foolish that no man would take her. 

But one day, a traveler arrived to court her, and her mother sent her down to the cellar to fetch him a jug of beer. So the traveler and the girl's parents sat down upstairs and began planning and preparing...  "

Turn up the volume and enjoy!