Icewind's Ramblings

Alaska and the nation lost a great fighter for the American way of life especially in “The Last Frontier” yesterday when a floatplane he was in crashed in the mountains of western Alaska near Dillingham.                                      (origin of photo unknown) Of the nine people on board the aircraft, four people survived the crash. “Uncle Ted” as most Alaskans called him fought hard to bring Alaska from a Territory to statehood.  His legacy will be the 49 th star on the American flag as well as his tireless work to bring a better way of life for rural Alaskans, mostly natives who continue the subsistence lifestyle of many generations. As word spread last night and into this morning of his being on the downed aircraft the wave of concern and remembrances flowed from all sections of the...

Over the last few weeks it has been busy so it has been hard to write about all of the things happening so I’ll try to get back on track and hopefully return to some sort of normal schedule. The news has been filled lately with all of the gloom and doom with the financial crisis and the auto industry meltdown. Our new Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton recently returned home from her first trip abroad with stops in Japan , South Korea , Indonesia , and China but all this stuff is nothing compared with a news story that has somehow managed to fly beneath the radar. That might be a poor choice of words. Sorry, or maybe not. Russia is in talks with Cuba and Argentina to station bombers in those countries. The Russian president announced they were going to rebuild their nuclear stockpile in response to what they see as America gaining footholds in countries bordering Russia . All this only a week after Hilary Clinton visited. Don’t know what she did but perh...

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...