Sunday Morning

It warmed up to 9 degrees overnight, and that's where the mercury now sits. Like most Alaskans, we keep extra water, soft drinks, juice, etc in the garage. Unlike most, ours is unheated. There's a single furnace vent out there, but it allows backflow of cold air from the garage to the adjoining bedroom, so we long since closed the vent & have things sitting in front of it.

In spite of the lack of heat, we've had only rare & minor issues with liquids stored there. I hung a thermometer yesterday, which reads 27 this morning. That's not bad. I'm interested to see how that holds up when we have our almost-inevitable really cold spell in another couple of weeks ... that's when it typically hovers at -22 or so for a week or two, around the end of January.

There are benefits to living in the "banana belt" of Alaska, and that's one of them. Not too far from here, it gets much colder, much snowier, and for a longer spell.

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The sky is brightening nicely now, but it's mostly overcast. The picture above was taken at 9:45 this morning. A half-hour later, it's full daylight, and the sun will be rising above the mountains in another minute or two.

The girls are going shopping again today, which is a popular sport in mid-winter. I've been cleaning out all of the e-mails my wife receives from various on-line shopping sites, all offering sales on swimwear and spring sandals. We just laugh at those, since we won't have anything resembling spring weather for another four months.

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There's an op-ed piece in today's paper wherein the author whines that Alaska isn't politically progressive enough. This from a person who's been here for years. It does make one wonder what this person has been doing, while living here; it certainly wasn't spent watching the local news. In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, "What a maroon!"