Summer's over

Time really flies. I can't remember what I was talking about in April in my last posting so I'll just start fresh.
We had a really busy summer this year. First Mary's sister Pike (pronounced Pee-Kay) and her 2 adult children, 2 grand children and daughter inlaw came for a 3 week visit from Finland around the 4th of July. We spent a lot of time getting ready for them and it was all over way to fast. Their visit started out cool and drizzly to the point that we had to turn the furnace back on for them. Weather improved for the last 2 weeks so it actually ended up being a very nice trip. Mary and Pike didn't get to spend as much sister time as they wanted since they had to take care of the grand kids most of the time. I expect Pike will be coming back on her own so the 2 of them can spend more time together doing old lady stuff.
At the same time we were getting ready for our guests Mary and I were helping get Willow's first Farmer's Market organized. Actually I only prepared the web site, http://marketday.willowhealth.net, and then helped with the setup and tare down of the shelters. I also helped with the Info booth since I am a member of Willow Health Org. The market has been a huge success and looks like it will be held again next year although I think they are going to have to find a new manager because Dean really doesn't want to do it again.
I haven't done much around the place this year. After last summer's house painting and deck building I only cleaned up a few of the things I hadn't quite finished last year like putting a railing on the deck. We had an energy audit and got qualified for assistance in upgrading some of our stuff like getting a new furnace and replacing some of our windows. I haven't gotten much done though except researching a replacement for our wood stove.
Earlier this spring I had lunch with a couple guys I worked with at the FSDPS. Earl Shenneman came up for a cruise with his wife so he and Ross Flavel and I had lunch and got caught up on what has been happening since we retired. Ed Wilson was supposed to join us but he got called away on something to do with the new automation system for Alaska FSS. The plan has completely changed since I retired. Instead of the Alaska Region developing it's own system it looks like they will contract with someone who already has one developed. Makes sense to me. Why spend money re-inventing something someone else has already done? I had had coffee with Ed in May and he had told me a little about the new system.
So I am hoping to update this a little more often, but don't hold your breath. I really have to give credit to those real bloggers that post every day. It takes a lot of work to update something that often.

Redoubt

Well, we finally got some ash from the volcano that has been harassing South central Alaska since last Thanksgiving. Sunday night around 10PM a very light ash started falling. Looking out the window into the yard light I thought it was just snowing again but when I went to get the dog pads off the deck I realized it was ash and not snow. It fell for about a half hour to a depth of just less then a dime. When we lived in Eagle River we had ash fall a few times and it was much stinkier. I had a strong sulfur smell even when the ash wasn't actually hitting the ground. This ash fall had a slight sulfur smell but it smelled more like dust then anything. Hopefully this will be all over by this summer when Mary's family comes over from Finland. If Redoubt is still belching this summer it could limit our travel to the Kenai Peninsula because they tend to get hit the most. Ash fall is really hard on cars and having to wear dust masks makes breathing a real chore if you want to go hiking or anything like that.
The back room that I have been fixing up for my media room is almost done. I painted the walls and ceiling and fixed the base board and trim. Installed new light fixture and wall outlets so the only thing left to do is put the TV and sofa in there. Mary kind of teased me along by promising a new recliner chair and flat screen TV if I finished it by this summer so I got it done. I went out the other day and shopped for a recliner and found a really nice love seat size sofa that is a glider and a recliner and has a console in the middle for the remotes. I almost had a new TV too, but when I went to check out my debit card wouldn't work so I had to leave it at the store.
It is still winter in the land of the north. Overnight temps still get down to the single digits and it is snowing outside right now. I measured the snow on the ground this morning and it is down to 26 inches which is down from 39 inches about a month ago. With the coating of ash the snow does seem to be melting faster but I would be surprised if we have snow free ground by May 1.
I started a new website on willowhealth.net and have been working quite a bit on getting it up to speed. Interest in Willow Health Org seems to go up and down quite a bit depending on what is going on. We have our health fair coming this month and hopefully we will be starting a local market place next month.
Time to go. More later.

St.. Paddy's day....almost

Faith and begorra, the little people are about to have their day!
As a youngster St. Patrick's Day was a big day in the Rhode household. My mother was half Irish and half Scottish so Gaelic traditions were big for us. On March 17th we would wake up to a breakfast of green cereal with green milk and green sugar. We wore uniforms to school so we had to wear green underwear and use a shamrock tie clip to keep the tie in place. For dinner we would have corned beef and cabbage and if we were lucky and one of my great aunts was coming over we would have black pudding which is a kind of hard pudding made with Irish oatmeal and blood. Ma always made a big deal about her Irish ancestry and the Irish holiday traditions but barely mentioned anything of the German side of me so I didn't even know about Fasching, which is the German equivalent of Mardi Gras, until I lived in Germany for a year while in the Army. Boy! did we miss out on a lot. When I started my own family I tried to carry on some of the green theme of my youth but my kids were too smart. NO WAY would they eat or drink anything that wasn't supposed to be green.

I started work on a new website last week. I volunteered to maintain the Willow Health Organization web page but some of the stuff the President, Nina, and Treasurer, Mary, wanted were not available to us on that site. First I created a new site on my web server at home which was OK for some things but the way it is done hides it from search engines so it was not a perfect solution. I then looked into registering our own domain and starting a whole new website. This actually works out much better and really isn't that expensive. We now even have our own email domain so that makes it kind of neat. It also has a wizard for web creation so the new site looks much more professional then what I was doing on either of the old sites.

The new car I helped Scott with a few weeks ago ended up being one that had been in an accident at some point in it's life. I noticed when I drove it home for Scott that the airbag light didn't go out. He finally had a chance to have a mechanic check it out and found the airbag had been replaced with one from the junk yard and really didn't work. The wiring harness for the heater was also shredded so his heater didn't work right. Otherwise, the car seems to be great. He even appologized on his blog for driving the Civic for the last few years without studs and holding everyone up during the winter.

Mary is getting ready to give a class on making a quilted backpack to women in the Willow area. It is a back pack she made from plans that her sister Pike sent her. She completed her's around Christmas and has had many compliments on it.

Today is animal food day. I have to go into Wasilla to pick up animal supplies which is kind of a big deal since I almost never go even that far anymore. I've got a whole list of stuff that I have to do so I had better get a move on it.

Holy Crap Bat Man! It's been over a month

I can hardly believe it has been over a month since my last posting. I think about making an entry quite often, I just never seem to get around to doing it.
Winter has become more normal now. Low temps just below zero F and high temps around 10. We seem to get measurable snow about once a week so we now have about 36 inches on the ground. Last Saturday we got a dump of over 13 inches and it could not have come at a worse time. I had agreed to help Scott pick up a new car in Wasilla so I had to drive all the way to Anchorage in a really bad snow storm. Good thing was that since the weather was so bad Scott thought it best if he drove his old car back to Anchorage which ment I got to drive the new car. The new car is a 2004 Pontiac Vibe with all wheel drive. Scott had mentioned once when he was having trouble with the old Civic that that was what he would like to replace the Civic with. I kept an eye out and found one for sale and let him know so now he's got a new car. After helping Scott with the car I had to start cleaning up the snow around our place. It's getting hard to find room to push the snow into. The burms around our parking area are over 6 feet high so I have to use our snow blower for a lot of the snow removal. In the next 24 hours we are supposed to get another 15 or so inches and it is going to be the heavy wet kind since it is suppose to warm up and maybe even rain a little. I hope it gets over in time for this weekend because this is Iditarod weekend and Mary and I are going to an Iditarod party on Crystal Lake. I'm suppose to help drag wood down for a bonfire so I hope the snow isn't too deep. The weekend before last I helped the Willow Dog mushers build a mushers cabin about 25 miles up the Yentna River. We got to stay in a nice cabin and got the mushers cabin to usable state. My little Skandic snowmobile ended up hauling the heaviest load because one of the other snowmobiles broke down. It made for a long trip because we had to keep the speed down plus the guys I was with are dog mushers and don't really like riding snowmobiles that much.
I've started maintaining the web pages for Willow Health Organization at www.waco-ak.org. Our friend Nina is President of WHO and wanted some new features added to the web site. The main website is run by WACO and they control what can be done quite closely, for good reason. We wanted to have emailable forms and be able to keep track of how many people visit the site and WACO didn't have the capabilities to do that. I offered some space on the server that I maintain for Bleatinghearts.homelinux.com and registered a new site with dyndns.org so we can have our own server that runs scripts that I can write. We also have capabilities to maintain an online database using MYSQL so as long as I am able to the health organization will have a pretty nice site.
That's it for this entry. I'll try to update more often. (Were have I heard that before)

This winter SUCKS!

First off this winter started a little early. Fall events around Willow had to be canceled because of snow. Then we have a really snowy December followed by one of the longest sub-zero cold spells on record in January. Now we are setting record high temperatures during our normal January thaw. Anchorage has been flooding because of their rapid melt down. All of the schools that were able to stay open during 2 weeks of -20 to -30 temperatures had to close when the temperatures hit the mid to high 40s and even 50s in some areas. The snow run-off mixed with the rain that was falling coated the super cooled ground with solid ice. I put the studded tires from the Golf on the Prius and was able to get to Willow a couple times but the area between our house and the shop where we keep our cars is just like a skating rink. I tried replenishing our wood pile yesterday by cutting down a few trees that I knew were dead but after slipping and falling on the ice with the chainsaw I decided to go inside were I would be a little safer.
I finally got to drive the Prius when the temperature was above zero and it does make quite a difference in gas milage. Even with studded tires on I get 10mpg better on the short trip to the postoffice and Nina and Dean's house. The Prius with traction control really handles the ice pretty good. It is a little disconcerting when the computer kills the engine when the wheels spin as you try and pull out onto the highway. Normally both the gas and electric engine are used when accelerating on the highway. If the wheels spin the computer takes over the throttle and applies just enough power to get you going without spinning the wheels. I have learned to bet patient when pulling out and make sure there is no traffic coming.
Time to go out and try to collect some of the trees I cut down yesterday. A little snow mixed with rain fell last night so the parking lot isn't quite as slippery.

New Car

Well, we did it! After the last problem we had with the Golf Mary and I talked about replacing our 2 cars with 1 reliable vehicle. The Subaru Forester and the Golf were both in the 150k mile range and both were starting to have problems. The Golf being a diesel had additional problems because of the extreme cold we have been having this winter. (we haven't seen the plus side of zero now for over 2 weeks) We thought this would be a good time to replace cars because of all the talk about the car dealers having trouble moving vehicles because of the screwed-up economy. The Forester is in a little rougher shape and so we decided to clean up the Golf and use it as a trade then clean the Forester and sell it ourselves later this year. We wanted a hybrid vehicle that got at least as good gas mileage as the Golf which averaged around 45mpg. Of all the new hybrids out there only the Honda Civic and the Toyota Prius have that kind of mileage. So we went out and test drove those 2 vehicles. They are both roughly the same size although because the Prius is a hatchback design that allows you to fold the rear seats down flat it is a more useful vehicle in my opinion. I honestly liked the way the Civic Hybrid drove better then the Prius on the first test drive but it did feel like a small car and the Prius just felt bigger and more substantial. Honda also seemed more eager to sell us a car and gave us a much better deal on the initial price and trade in for the Golf. Mary really wanted leather trim and the Honda that we drove came with leather for around $20k. The Prius with leather was going to cost us around $29k. I left the dickering up to Mary and I think she did one heck of a job. She got Toyota to increase the offer on the Golf a couple thousand dollars and she also got them to increase the dealer discount by almost a thousand dollars. We ended up getting pretty much the top of the line Prius with leather and all the extras at almost seven thousand dollars below the sticker price. This was done by Mary being stubborn and the 2 of us working on the dealer over the phone. I was at the dealership and Mary was giving me instructions over the phone. The dealer couldn't talk to her direct so when she said no to something they couldn't talk her out of it. All they could do was talk me into talking her into it. Contrary to popular belief the dealers are not just giving away vehicles. We had to work at this but I give Mary the credit for getting us almost exactly what we wanted for what I think is a fair price. Edmunds.com, Kelly Blue Book and Yahoo Auto all show Prius cars selling for 1200 to 1500 above MSRP so getting our car at our price is quite a thing. It is funny though, to think that now driving a hybrid I am more conventional then when I was driving the diesel. I still think diesels are great cars but they do have their draw backs in cold climates. The day I took the Golf in to be evaluated by Toyota it was -32F at our house and reports along the road had the temperature ranging from -25F to -36F. The Golf temperature gauge never showed normal operating range for the 70 miles to Toyota. Then after we agreed on a price for the new car and the Golf was theirs the salesman went to start it to move it to the used car lot and even after I had told him how to do it he couldn't get it going. I was a little afraid he would go back on the deal so I went out and told him if he could let it sit for about 5 minutes I would come out and give it a try. It started right up for me and I felt like a traitor giving him the keys. I really did like the Golf but I couldn't drive it in sub-zero temperatures reliably so it had to go. The Prius is warm in a few minutes and since it has auto everything we just set the temperature to 73F and it takes care of us.

This cold spell that we have been enduring up here is really getting old. It has been 2 weeks now since we have been above zero for the over day high so nothing is getting done outside. We used up all the wood I had split a week ago so I have to go cut a few more trees down but I wont work in twenty below temps unless it is really necessary because not only is it hard on the tools it is dangerous because so much feeling is lost to the cold. I have 2 nice big spruce and 1 big birch tree that are dead but still standing that I can get at once it gets above zero but it looks like it will be at least one more day before that happens. The goats seem to sense a long cold spell this year. The last couple years, even when they lived in the little shed, by this time of the year they would be showing signs of blowing their wool. I checked this morning and not a loose fiber yet. The cold is not all that bad as long as you don't have to go out in in. But you never know. The day that I was dickering on the car Mary drove herself into the ditch on a little back road between our friends house and the highway. I have and emergency pack in the car for just such an emergency and luckily our friend is a dog musher and came dressed to help. I'm looking forward to those balmy 10F days.

Enough for now. I have to check some upgrades to this computer and go check the mail.