Icewind's Ramblings

It’s getting to be that time again . . . Wacky Winter . . . when Chicken Little’s prediction finally comes true: “The sky is falling.”   Winter has long been here in Alaska , and the darkness with it.  As we once again approach summer and finally moved into “Springtime” in Anchorage we are gaining approximately 5 minutes and 44 seconds of daylight every day until Summer Solstice on June 20 th @ 9:04 PM Alaska time. For most people it may seem strange to hear “springtime” as barely having temperatures just above freezing still in the thirties or if we are lucky reaching the low 40’s for a few days.  Anything to help melting commence and get breakup out of the way is desired by everyone it seems. How one handles this time of year makes or breaks many people who live here.  It is a wondrous place to live . . . most of the time but it does wear on you in the late stages of winter when you want the snow gone, light to return, and the “heat” of summer to on...

I wanted to get my three daughters a little something for Christmas to put some positive thoughts to events over the last couple of years.   In Anchorage we had a nice large Barnes and Nobel bookstore that has a coffee shop and a nice sitting area to read.   It can be found with quite a few people hanging out and enjoying a good book or a cup of java.   I love coffee so decided I would stop for a cup while I was trying to do my Christmas shopping. I wanted to send my daughters a positive book that has always given me food for thought.   It is called "The Power of Positive Thinking" by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. My thoughts were everyone can always use that little lift from a positive attitude and sharing that feeling with others around you. Being the good father I wanted to boost these young women's spirit and help them get through the tough times away from family many miles away.   My thought process was I wanted to spout all this positive stuff how they...

Why do we press harder on a wireless mouse button when we know the batteries are getting weak? Ice

There was an incident at my work today that had me thinking about several things. Someone parked a car at the top of our parking lot and left to go inside to work in the building next to ours.   One of my co-workers, Faith came to work a little later than usual due to her son’s school activities.   She parked in a different spot than her ‘normal’ one as most of us are creatures of habit and leave for work at the same time, arrive at the same time and park in ‘our’ spot each day.   We do not change very much of our daily activities going home the same way, stopping for things from the store on the same day each week or weekend.   We all do it. Several hours after work started there was an email sent saying a vehicle had “rolled over in the parking lot”.   It did not say which side of the building this happened so I looked out my window and noticed a car had plowed into one or two other vehicles.   Later it was discovered that the vehicle that had parked...

Last week I booted my computer when I came home from a trip and started to do my normal things like check emails, a visit to Facebook, and to write something for this blog. I had been on maybe five minutes when I received a message from Microsoft that I needed to back up my data as my hard drive was near intimate failure.   I tried to remember the last time I had done a complete backup and figured it was during the last Christmas holidays.   Back then I had backed up on several discs so now I pulled out my trusty thumb drive and started to sort and back up some things. The word items went fast and smoothly but once I started the many photos from work and my travels it bogged down quickly.   Then things would start to freeze up and a reboot was necessary.   Over the next day or two it became apparent that I was spending more time with the freeze ups and reboots than I did actually backing things up. Then it happened . . . The Crash. It would be several days befo...

Last night I shoveled snow off the deck several times before dark and was down to an area of about 10’ x 10’ that was still packed with about 3 foot depth of snow. All of the front decks were cleared, the side deck that runs the full length of the house was finally clean and I made the turn in the back of the house all the way to the steps going down to the backyard.  I would get them today along with the last patch of snow. Or so I thought when I went to sleep last night. I awoke this morning to find it snowing large wet flakes and the glow of the streetlight out front showed me it was coming down like there was no stopping it soon.  Four inches had falling since about 2:30 AM and when I left for work just after six it was almost blizzard conditions on the Glenn Hwy. with the wind blowing vehicles and snow all over the place.   I had not checked the weather before heading to sleep so I was shocked and somewhat miffed that we cannot get through breakup and w...

December 26 is a downer for many people. The decorations are still up, but do you sometimes feel whats the point? Christmas is over. The children have done their thing with the presents which probably are unbroken and mostly appreciated, but their allure as surprises in brightly wrapped packages is gone.  The guilt-free indulgences that happened in the last several weeks leading up to Christmas with chocolates and Chex mix is now giving way to nagging worries about love handles. Call it the post-Christmas letdown, the result of spending a month immersed in the holiday, then having it end abruptly.  Although the holiday season doesn't end until New Year's Day, Christmas is the big holiday, the pinnacle of the season, the focus of planning and preparation.  The hours of decorating, cooking, and preparing for the big holiday gathering are shattered in the few short minutes of opening gifts, eating a great meal and if you are lucky . . . family or friends spending ...

We’ve made it to Christmas week and with it watching the traditional holiday movies we sit through every year.  My brother loves “It’s a Wonderful Life” while my sister likes “Miracle on 34 th Street ”.  My favorite is “National Lampoon Christmas Vacation”.  I find it hard to believe that it has been out 20 years now and it still brings us laughter year after year. This is the classic tale of a man trying to have a ‘good old’ family Christmas with his "good old" family.  The quiet dream of every man, I think, is to have that perfect holiday.  Too bad like the movie it never quite turns out that way. There's a reason the "Cousin Eddie" character in Christmas Vacation resonates with so many.  We've all got a Cousin Eddie, or two, in our extended families.  Some of us . . . are Cousin Eddie. Probably many of our families weren't designed for a televised Christmas special as our dysfunction would be awkward on TV.  Who knows with the curre...

As we approach the holiday season and prepare for the small gathering tomorrow of family and maybe a few friends it is nice to think back on summers end.  It started snowing this afternoon giving us a fresh blanket of the white stuff.  Anchorage is known as the “City of Lights ” during the winter months so I, like many people put up lights for the winter which remain on until the last musher of the Iditarod arrives in Nome completing the race in mid March. With a little extra time on my hands I can think back on summers past where I close my eyes as the memories come back like a wild river, colorful like Northern Lights in the clear cold night, which I saw for the first time this season a few nights ago.  THE reason I came to Alaska , THE thing I wanted to see since I was a little boy in Atlanta .  There they were, dancing above the hillside, misty green, slick and wavy.  Nothing could screw this day anymore as I watched in amazement at the night sky. ...

Happy Halloween everyone! As most of you know I have been working on a couple of projects here at the house leaving me little time to write so I wanted to post a couple of pictures of the first bathroom makeover.  I just finished for another night at 10:30 pm so I sat down with a glass of Beringer’s, a couple of Advil and that good tired feeling of accomplishment after progress today working on the master bathroom. But today I wanted to share some of the pictures from the previous work over two weekends.  This bathroom is the main full bath for the upstairs part of the house and is the one everyone uses all the time.  There was nothing about this room that really stood out but was painted when we moved in several years ago and my wife did a great job of decorating it, but it always seemed to lack something.  Here is a before picture which almost shows the bland flooring of linoleum which I hated.  The walls are a very pale yellow color and the light bar...

These past couple of weeks has had me tearing out bathrooms, with the remodeling ongoing leaving me little time to write or have any thoughts to put on paper. I can report the first bathroom is finished except for a towel bar so it went smoothly with the demolition of the flooring, cabinet, sink, and closet being redone.  The hardest part of the demo was getting the several layers of flooring out and the prep for the tile. Once everything was taken out the first thing was a fresh coat of paint, Lowe’s Baguette color.  It is a nice color that in the low night light conditions gives off a nice easy tone.  In full light it blends nicely with the tile shades.  What started this makeover was my wife looking on Craig’s list and finding Italian marble tile for a low price.  She found 18”x18” squares (40) of beautiful tile for fifty bucks.  It was enough for the bathroom and closet floor.  The cabinet was painted and new base trim was installed. We ...

I read a lot of blogs when I get the chance on all kinds of subjects and one that seems to get a ton of verbiage is about people who work in offices.  Some are complaints about people who have co-workers who steal their lunch or co-workers who wear too much perfume.  A few about those people who haven’t mastered email etiquette at work.  I read blogs where people rant about their bosses, complain about their work schedule, moan about their cubicle size. Which makes me feel somewhat guilty. Because usually . . . I don’t have anything to complain about.  Sure, I might have a backlog of work from submittals or O&M manuals waiting for my attention or a list of calls to return but is that really something to complain about?  Not really.  The work hectic but I think I thrive on it if truth be told but this is just . . . It’s sort of a gross story, but I did it as a child too . . . so I can understand the appeal. (Get it . . . A PEEL?  I’m here all ...

This weekend I have been feeling under the weather so other than my Saturday breakfast meeting I have stayed around the house resting and trying to get rid of a nasty bout of sneezing, wheezing, and coughing.  They call it the nighttime sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy head, fever, so you can rest medicine and oddly it’s true.  Feel like crap, take some Nyquil and hopefully feel better.  It may take two days but at least it seems to work. During this down time I haven’t felt like working on a couple of upcoming bids but I did get in a few hours here and there.  I did feed the birds a bit and hung out watching movies.  Today the house has been mostly quiet as my wife and father in law headed down to Seward to go fishing.  Gus and I have enjoyed a couple of brief naps between my sneezing attacks making for some funny moments as he is trying to figure out what is going on with me and all of the noise. One of the movies seen this weekend was S...

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...

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...