Friday seemed a long time in coming, this week.
Wildfire update: the Mat-Su fire (called the Sockeye fire, if you're trying to look it up) is still at about 7,000 acres in size, but fire crews seem to have a handle on it. There's still plenty of drama ... 26 homes destroyed, including a captain with the Willow Fire Department lost his home and everything he owned, while battling fire elsewhere. His neighbors we able to save his 28 sled dogs, though.
And then there's this:
Alaskans menaced by what is now the nation’s top wildfire remained cautious Thursday, though the heart of the Card Street blaze had raged miles into the unpopulated Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, driven by winds from the west that quadrupled its size to 12,000 acres in the past day. (Emphasis added - Ed.)
Meanwhile, here in Anchorage where all we've suffered is some smoke, weather guessers are predicting a temperature inversion tomorrow which could trap the smoke close to the ground. That would cause visibility and respiratory issues, so I hope they're wrong. It's certainly too warm to close the windows.
I've been interviewing vendors and soliciting bids for grounds-keeping, both summer and winter. This morning I went through the stack and narrowed it down to a single choice, and notified the losing bidders of that. But since it's early, and I don't have an e-mail address for the winner, I have to wait another half-hour before trying to call them.
We're only 2 days from the summer solstice, but the midnight sun has been with us for several weeks already (and will be around for several more). For example, we'll have 22 hours, 55 minutes of usable light today. This is the part of Alaskan summers that tourists flock here to see: it just doesn't get dark, this time of year.
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| Anchorage at midnight, in June |
2 comments:
I'm thinking that if you got every transplant hippie up there in Anchorage alone together by promising them a free Starbucks, and then handed them a shovel and told them that they had to get to work on the fire line or go back to Seattle that very day, the fire would be out by noon.
ML, that would work, from a purely numerical standpoint. But since we're talking about transplants from the Lower Left Coast, we'd have to teach them a) what a shovel is, b) how it's used & why, and c) which end goes in the dirt.
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