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)