Icewind's Ramblings

It has been hard to find time to post lately as many things are happening right now so finding time to sit and let the writing flow has been hard for me.   Not writers block by any means but I just haven’t felt like putting words to paper or in the digital age we live in type or text to some machine. I traveled to a couple of villages last week and seeing them in an unfrozen state with children playing and jumping off the bridges into the water (freezing cold to many of us) and swimming in the river enjoying life in a much simpler way than many in the modern cities. I enjoy my time in the villages and talking with the people and children who always seem to come out to see me when I am there.   I do not know if it is because a ‘stranger’ is in town or they are curious to this dude with Hawaiian shirts and baseball cap riding around on a 4 wheeler.   They come out and want to ride or see if I have anything for them, like kids all over the world have done in my travels. ...

The Exxon Valdez oil spill was one of the largest oil spills in history. It took place in Alaska in March 1989, when the oil tanker ran aground, causing 10.8 million gallons of crude oil to spill into the pristine waters of Prince William Sound . While this was indeed a huge spill, it was actually only a small fraction of what the United States uses in oil in any one day. The United States uses about 700 million gallons of oil every day. That is a lot of oil. When an oil spill occurs, everyone works to help clean it up. Have you ever noticed a rainbow puddle on the street or parking lot after a rain? That rainbow sheen that you see on top of the water is actually oil from cars that has leaked onto the ground. For Steve Smith, the 20-year anniversary of the nation's worst oil spill is like a reminder that he lost a loved one. "It's like a death in the family," the 70-year-old fisherman said of the Exxon Valdez disaster. "With time...

I have been following this story in the news as it has all of the ingredients of a good crime drama or even a modern day ‘western’. It has a bad guy, greed, the trophy wife, a horse (the airplane & motorcycle), the good guys (Marshals), and a moral to the story. There are so many funny little things that come to mind and how this could easily be on television. Let’s see, bailout, golden parachute, ‘Financial Crisis: The Movie’, trophy wife for an affair, flashy “red” motorcycle, and most of all . . . poor planning. The financial crisis has led to same very interesting stories that seem ready made for television movies. There is the Madoff mess that continues to bring things to light as each day passes and now for example the case of Marcus Schrenker, an Indianapolis financial manager, who appears to have tried to fake his own death by crashing his Piper PA-46 into a Florida swamp. I’m sure the idea was for the plane to go down into the Gulf of Mexico ...

It was a long drawn out campaign for both sides and to be honest I’m kinda tired of all of this now. But I know I will keep watching, reading all I can to learn and stay informed of the issues. Because I know, that despite the divides that politics can create, despite the unrest from all sides, the strained tensions that develop . . . politics ultimately DO bring out the good in people if we let it. Politics allows everyone to put our heart on our sleeve, to illustrate what we believe matters. It allows us to talk of subjects we have views on but may not know how to bring up . . . topics of abortion, of gun control, government size, wars and the environment. It provides the perfect opportunity to believe with every ounce of you in something outside yourself. Politics sometimes brings out great people . . . it’s given us Churchill and Trudeau, FDR, Mandela and the Kennedy’s. Politics has provided a platform to address social injustices . . . to highlight inequaliti...

It has been a long grueling week here in Alaska . It ran the gamut from being pretty cold for this time of year with it in single digits or just below zero in the mornings while I looked at the weather map on the Today Show showing that Alaska was “Above Normal” so I have no idea where they were getting their information. Driving to work in the darkness was somewhat deceiving with the ‘black ice’ covering the ground several mornings that we had ice fog around the city. The clear nights with the cold temperatures, no wind, and the inlet close-by made for some tough driving conditions for many people. We had a couple small snow flurries which most hoped that it would warm up a bit and have the heavens cut loose with a nice fresh snowfall before the Holiday . Fresh snow cleans everything up for a bit and makes things have that ‘wintry’ look. Work tried to beat me down this week as I tried to keep up with everything going on. Multiple projects, several ...

Today has been a mixed bag of things going on here in the northland. Anchorage finally dropped the price of gasoline to below $ 3.50 a gallon today while word on the news is saying the Lower 48 is seeing gas prices about a dollar a gallon less than here and a few areas that the price has dropped lower than $ 2.00. That’s great for those areas and hopefully we will see something around two fifty before long. There was the rumor of traffic here today as the traffic engineers were working on the traffic lights by the Dimond Mall. They turned them off at 9 AM this morning for maintenance and other work and should have them operational around midnight. It did not make for a fun day for anyone who had to drive around the area as there were vehicles backed up in all directions while the flaggers directed traffic in the below freezing temperatures. It was only 9 degrees this morning and rose only to about 25 when I left the office at 6 PM tonight. I could see th...