Icewind's Ramblings

Is it just me or do you hate those stupid commercials that seems to come out during the holidays? One that drives me nuts is the Jared’s Jewelry Commercial. One of the actresses in it used to be in the “What Ever Happens in Vegas” commercial and her crooked smile (mouth) makes me nuts to watch her. Now she plays one of the ‘friends’ asking if Mr. Wrong has a brother. I was hoping the holiday jewelry commercial would drop off but it has continued so I will please ask, can we stop with the "He went to Jared!" Ads? Is anyone going to be that impressed that you scraped together a few bucks to blow at a mall store only because the pressure and her pregnancy got to you? A better commercial to demonstrate true love might be, "He went to planed parenthood." Or maybe just say no until after you were married. The most misnamed business ever by the way. No one goes there because they had a plan. They go there because they didn't...

Two for Tuesday Observations . . . The hardness of the butter is proportional to the softness of the bread. My wife has been sick since Christmas Day with the flu with some really nasty respiratory congestion. She sounds like she is coughing up a lung and you can tell it hurts. She headed to work yesterday and I received a phone call alerting me she was at the hospital being treated and had been there most of the day. She was hooked up to two bags of IV fluid, one bag of IV antibiotics, and given an inhaler to help her breathe. There were several prescriptions which needed to be filled so hopefully she can start to feel better. All of this has made the dog Gus crazy with him not getting the attention so he has decided to eat every Christmas ornament from the floor to half way up the tree. Gus has shredded newspaper, paper towels, and even pulled toilet paper off the roll in the hall bathroom and made it all the way across the living room in one...

I have worked for the Hughes Service Center for the last four years The cold has crept into Alaska over the last couple of days making things interesting again. The interior is even colder with their temperatures around the minus 40˚ to - 60˚F below zero. On top of that some areas are getting high winds for the next two days. Texas and Louisiana has their hurricanes but for most people I think they could not even fathom hurricane winds at 40 below. That probably puts the wind chill factor below minus 100+ below zero. That’s Alaska tonight and I do not see the Weather Channel or Today Show doing any live broadcasts from here. They’re wussies I guess as I talked to one of my contacts in Fairbanks earlier today who said several people came into his store wearing shorts. Yeah, we are slightly off kilter here. I had several who made comments to me today about wearing my Hawaiian shirts at minus 20 below. I told them “it’s a dry cold” but really it was colder than...

I saw in today’s paper that there were over 50 vehicles in the ditches around Anchorage yesterday. It doesn’t surprise me as it seems people making the drive out to the valley do crazy things while making that commute back and forth every day. It warmed up on Christmas Eve then snowed all night and day. It lingered into the evening hours but late last night things were getting back to normal when temps started falling again and yes, it finally HAPPENED!!!!. I was shocked to see things had gone crazy here. While out running errands on my day off yesterday this dick in a truck pulled out in front of me on the way home as it has been snowing all day and everything was slick and people were upside down in the ditches. I was able to miss this nut but couldn't quite catch up to him to get a license plate number. Luckily I do keep a camera with me for job pictures so I was able to get a quick picture to help me find him again...

Today is a bit of odds and ends that I wanted to post but had not gotten around to it. We had a moose that wandered around downtown Anchorage the last couple of years that seemed to be a fixture in Town Park and other locations who was named Buzzwinkle. He became ‘Almost Famous’ due to one adventure of ambling down the street and squeezed into the courtyard at Bernie's Bungalow Tavern where he settled in for a feast of crab apples and eventually assumed a disoriented stance, staring into space and snorting steam. I first wrote about him here: 11-28-07 and later upon his death here: 4-06-07 . His personality and the care free lifestyle are sorely missed this year and I meant to post his picture once again wishing everyone a Merry Christmoose so without further ado . . . *Pictures by Eric Hill, Anchorage Daily News We received about eight inches of snow on Christmas Day and w...

The innocence of our children or grandchildren makes us remember what Life is truly about . . . They force us to open up to those things long buried And beaten down by life. Ice

2008 has been one of those years that you just wish was over and can look forward to the coming New Year. Last nights post ended with a kind of somber note that I felt there would be no saving grace at the end of this year. After I posted I sat there and felt bad that over the course of the whole year I was left with a ‘downer mood’ which goes against all of my positive being. I went to sleep late after watching my granddaughter fall asleep on the couch waiting to see Santa come down the chimney. She made sure that the fire that had been raging earlier was out and the chimney had cooled so Santa would make his appearance. I wandered off to sleep just as a light snowfall was coming down outside and the light played off the crystallized snowflakes as it passed by the street light out front. I finally fell asleep around four in the morning and ‘slept’ in as that is my usual time for waking up and getting ready for work. I was in a deep sleep when around...

It’s been 40 years tonight that an estimated one billion people either watched or listened to the live broadcast from lunar orbit by the crew of Apollo 8. In retrospect of that flight it fascinates me that all of the engineers and astronauts thought about almost everything on how to blast off from Cape Kennedy Florida , travel across the vastness of space to the far side of the moon but the one thing man had not considered or planned for was something that almost didn’t happen . . . an attempt for the crew to glimpse and record the most moving of sights, as their jewel of a home planet, suspended in the blackness of space, rose from behind the barren lunar horizon. No one had thought about what our world would look like from behind the moon that first time so no scheduled ‘picture taking’ was in the mission plan but by some luck and quick thinking by the astronauts . . . one picture changed how we view ourselves in the world. What I’m talking about is the ‘Earthrise...

Yes, the bizarre story lines keep spilling from our 49th and largest state. When I first reported on this Alaska happening in December 2005 I said: “He’s been in all the papers and on TV all last week. From Florida , to Europe , in web blogs all over the internet, and brought up on weather forecast’s on television he’s becoming a star. He’s the cool dude here in Anchorage that has the neighborhood buzzing and people from all over stopping by. Snowzilla , the 16 foot tall snowman built when there was not a lot of snow on the ground. The kids in the neighborhood brought sleds full of snow from their own yards to help bring this character to life.” Last year Snowzilla grew in both size and popularity again bringing some protests from the neighbors. Funny thing that seems to happen is the spread of his story and again the world took notice. This year the MOA ( Municipality of Anchorage ) decided that enough was enough. Municipal c...

We had our company Christmas Party tonight so I’m getting in late with not much time to write. It’s snowing tonight with some strong winds blowing snow all over the roadway making driving home a slower process than usual. I made my first visit to the new Target which opened in October here in Anchorage as it is less than a mile from my house. Easy access and a new Kohl’s and Lowe’s are both almost finished so we seem to be coming out of the dark ages here in the Arctic with the ‘big box’ stores. All we need now is the Red Lobster and Olive Garden that has been talked about for years now but never built. Speaking of Red Lobster . . . I still wonder why they spend the thousands of dollars on television commercials here in Anchorage when it’s about 1,500 miles to the closest location. I was in Target in search of a cable I needed for my iPod and was wandering aimlessly around the store (get it? Target? Aimlessly? Ha! Ha!) looking for the part I needed. I...

Today is Midwinter for us here in Alaska , perhaps better known as the Winter Solstice. For people like me, however, it also represents a hopeful, optimistic time, as it kicks off the official countdown to spring and the joyful long days of summer. Sure we still have the bulk of the cold weather is still ahead of us, but if we can just make it through tonight, we'll have survived the longest night of the year. Longer days and more sunshine are on the way. In the northern hemisphere, today is the shortest day of the year. The sun makes its shortest arc through the sky that we will see this year. Time-lapse photograph of the sun's arc through the sky during the winter solstice (photo credit: Danilo Pivato) To correspond with this celestial event, celebrations and holidays will be observed by cultures from every continent in the northern hemisphere. The solstice is one of the only events observed by virtually every cu...