Fifty years ago today, fourth avenue in our quirky town, Anchorage. Note the creep factor provided by the overhead banner advertising for a showing of Our Town. More pictures of devastation here.
Just to the left of that powder blue Oldsmobile (?) is one of our favorite present-day date night hangouts.
Agreed snow writer, agreed:
Was pleased to see this wasn’t rendered in “Yellow.”
And of course, yes, we are Epic. Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the great Alaska earthquake. The most powerful earthquake in North American history. Local experts on the radio caution that present day Alaskans are woefully unprepared for the next big earthquake, and I suppose they are right. Happy Wife established us a survival kit in the garage — a few cans of tuna, some dog food, five gallons of water, some cash and possibly some fuel to get a fire going. I don’t know for sure, I haven’t looked in the bin lately. My preparation involved placing two wine glasses and a corkscrew in the crawl space, which functions as our wine cellar. Must be >75 bottles down there. I figure by the time rescuers find us we’ll smell like tuna and be totally snockered.
Went for a quiet lunch yesterday at Juno, a hotel restaurant. I don’t ordinarily eat much lunch, a smear or two of peanut butter on toast with a pickle (Clausen!) & chips ordinarily sustains me. And I don’t usually think of going to a hotel restaurant unless I’m staying at the hotel, and evidently others don’t either because there was nobody at the bar save one guy. He’d just finished his lunch when I heard him let rip a real stool burner. Or so I thought. Shot him a sideways glance to witness his embarrassment. Turns out it was his ringtone, which I think was supposed to be a duck call, but ringing inside his pants pocket it sounded more like a whoopee cushion.
Anyway, lunch was excellent and the Chardonnay pour generous:
My mom e-mailed me to praise a picture I’d sent her, and mentioned in passing how looooooong their winter has been. They live in the heart of Wisconsin. And I thought, you know, seeking sympathy from an Alaskan for how long and cold your winter has been is a bit like a prom queen seeking the same from a pole dancer because her date was pawing her all night long. Eeeew! What, you don’t care for that analogy? Whatever, you get my drift. Snow drift — get it! Haha.
Happy Wife’s birthday Saturday. Don’t tell her but my gift to her this year involves spoilage, i.e. I’m going to spoil her. Weird how spoilage — something that happens to food entombed in the back of the refrigerator — has come to be associated with the bestowing of extravagance. She knows something’s up, as I’ve already told her to free up her Saturday afternoon calendar, and that it will involve some shuttling from one place of spoilage to the next. She dislikes being the center of attention, and I know this, but you know what, tough. She’s getting spoiled, dammit, and that’s all there is to it.
Was at our Nest in Seward the past two nights. Happy Wife stayed home to succor Lucy, who’s been a mast cell cancer survivor for a whole year now this March, and she’s still trucking, albeit more slowly lately. She’s a tough one our girl is.
Me making Mt. Alice look surmountable.
Perspective is everything. In truth, even after most of the snow is gone Mt. Alice is difficult to summit according to our friend Meldyne, herself a former mountaineer. It’s a doable day hike to get to the base of the steepest part of the ascent, one Happy Wife and I would like to do on a long summer day, but beyond that reaching the true summit requires technical expertise.
My hoodie came. Captures the theme of my depravity shortcoming growth area quite well I thought. Harry appears to approve.
Ordered a hoodie online. Two weeks ago. Hasn’t arrived yet. Didn’t realize I’d checked the shipping option: “Dog Sled”. Amusingly, this morning I get a cheery e-mail inviting me to complete a survey about the product, and the company I ordered from. “$5 if you do!” the email teased.
Okay, this should be fun. First survey question asked me to rate the product on five separate features. Snicker. Checked N/A for all five and clicked “Next.” This must’ve puzzled the survey bot because the next screen entreated me to call customer service — anytime of day we’re here for you! — if by chance there was something wrong with my order.
Ring, ring… “Hi, this is Darcy (?), how may I help you today?”
I explained to Darcy I wasn’t able to complete the survey to evaluate the product because I hadn’t received it yet. Click click click I heard her type, and then suddenly she stops and says, trepidatiously: “Ohhh, you live in Alaska.” As if Alaska was equivalent to the moon. She went on to explain that when their company ships to Alaska it’s equivalent to international, whereby the package starts with FedEx, is eventually transferred to the post office and must go through customs along the way. “Customs?” I said, “it’s a hoodie.”
Over the course of the next few minutes she repeatedly begged my forgiveness so often I wondered if she was paid by the apology. She refunded the shipping charge and said I should expect to see the refund in 5-6 business days. “In other words before the hoodie arrives,” I quipped. If Darcy thought this remark was witty there was no indication. More penance ensued, until eventually I got sucked into the pity party and started feeling sorry for her. This, in spite of my irritation arising from her over- and mis-use of the adverb: “actually.” My latest pet peeve. That deserves a post all its own.
Latest shipping track says the hoodie is in Kent, WA, where it arrived a week ago and has been languishing since, evidently now in the hands of the U.S. post office. By the time I get it it’ll be too warm to wear hoodies. If it doesn’t fit or for any reason I am dissatisfied with the hoodie I was assured I may return it for a full refund. Ha ha ha, that’s the ticket, yeah, if I do I’ll return it via bike messenger, call Darcy and tell her to expect it in 6-8 business months, actually. Cue satisfying laughter….
Snow. We’d nearly forgotten. The weatherlady said expect 2″, maybe. Instead, 6-8″ fell. Ah, the folly of Man’s hubris, one minute we’re predicting the Higgs boson and the next we’re knee deep in unexpected snow.
Some viewed this as a setback; we accepted it as opportunity. We loaded the twelve year olds into the Subaru and up into the mountains we all went to enjoy a positively serene plod through the snow.
Happy Wife broke trail:
Back at the trail head we met a man visiting from Tahiti. He was holding a camera and gazing at the white mountains set against the bluebird sky. Speechless. I love that.
Despite this latest snowfall we’re well below our annual average, and north of us, closer to Fairbanks, the day-to-day temperatures this winter have been well above average, and so, like others, I think this may mean the ice on the Tanana River could break up earlier than usual, that is if you call this usual:
With the possible exception of 1963, last year was the latest breakup in almost one hundred years — over 60 days after the vernal equinox (VE). There’s a celebration held every year in Alaska called the Nenana Ice Classic, which involves a contest to see who can guess the time when the tripod will fall on the Tanana River. $2.50 per guess, enter as often as you’d like. I’ve not participated in years past but this year I’m going to. The payout last year was $318,000.
You might think that a higher than average day-to-day winter temperature in Nenana would cause a breakup much earlier than “normal,” and that’s true, but low snow cover means the cold penetrates deeper into the ground which has the effect of delaying ice breakup. A multi-factorial problem for sure. There’s something about April 29th at 3:42 pm that’s speaking to me right now (39 days after VE).
Or I suppose I could ask the weatherlady when the ice will go out. 
Starts out cliche, gets more witty and amusing further in. I thought so anyway.
Every team into Nome so far said this year’s race was unusually challenging on a number of fronts, injuries, snow-less trail conditions, and storms. The mushers are impressive, for sure, but you can’t say enough about their dogs.
Moving right along…
There was a report in the news recently around a paper published in Nature Medicine regarding a blood test that could predict whether or not an elderly person would develop Alzheimer’s related dementia (ALZ)*. Setting aside the obvious question of why anyone would want to know in advance if they were likely to get ALZ, the publication had other problems. Most notably, the authors claim that the blood test is 90% accurate. Meaning, given a blood draw from 10 elderly people (70 or older), all of whom let’s say would in fact go on to develop ALZ, the blood test would correctly identify 9 of them, and incorrectly conclude one of them would not go on to develop ALZ. In statistical lingo, the former are known as “true positives”, and the latter one a “false negative.” The test is based on the level in the blood of ten independent lipid molecules (fats) as measured by sensitive mass spectrometry, which, having considerable experience with it, appeared to me to be expertly done. In addition, how they arrived at those specific ten lipids was I think sound, but in any case unimportant to the following criticism.
Which was nicely and clearly explained here. If you follow it, you’ll see that even under the most generous estimate using the paper’s author’s own numbers, the best accuracy the test could hope to achieve is 62%, not 90%. Using more realistic calculations, the accuracy falls to only 32%.
An even bigger concern if you ask me is what the author at that link pointed out, that even assuming a 90% accuracy rate, if you performed the test on 1000 random patients only 50 of whom would actually go on to develop ALZ (ALZ is estimated to have a 5% prevalence in the population), then 0.9*50 = 45, and 0.1*950 = 95, meaning the test would correctly identify 45 of the 50 (true positives) people who would in fact develop ALZ, but incorrectly identify 95 people predicted to develop ALZ (false positives). Even being generous and using the more likely accuracy of 62%, true positives = 31 and false positives = 361. Which would mean 361 people left to believe they’re destined to get ALZ.
I am beginning to understand and appreciate the public’s skepticism around many of the du jour medical claims being made lately. How this study got published in Nature Medicine is truly puzzling to me.
* Hat tip Derek Lowe @ In the Pipeline
Live helmet cam footage of the Last Great Race, courtesy of Jeff King ‘n team.
Told you we hardly have any snow (wait for 45 sec mark). And here you probably thought there’s nothing to this, getting pulled on a sled behind some happy Huskies for a thousand miles. Ha!
Happy Wife treated her friend on her birthday to a viewing of the Addams Family. Broadway musical directed by a four time award winner. Guessing this production won’t make it five. Both said it was awful, so bad I got a call at intermission to come get them. Humor was spare and uninspired, Morticia was not dressed pencil thin, which always made her appear to glide rather than walk, Cousin It was absent entirely (although if It appeared after intermission we’ll never know), and Gomez looked more like the villain in Bullwinkle, never stood on his head or flirtingly kissed Morticia’s arm. How could you leave that stuff out? That’s what Gomez did.
We drove directly home and watched the next episode of Breaking Bad together. Two more left to go and things are not looking good for Walter White ‘n Co..
Discovered an empty plastic bag on the kitchen floor that had been torn open: contents had been 8-10 milk bones. Got the “Who, me?” look from Harry.
Uploaded a few of my phone videos to Utube. This one, captured inside the Monterey Bay Aquarium on Cannery Row, reminds us that bodies in nature are much overrated. Who knew that merely attaching fins to a mouth would get the job done:
Later we met a gregarious seal on Fisherman’s wharf. He and friends smelled like golgotha, although otherwise appeared quite content. Here, nature chose to place a head on a mondo tube of fat, add some flaps for locomotion and call it good. Happy Wife heard cooing near the end:
On hearing that Obama’s reaction to this Ukraine thing will be measured and firm, someone opined somewhere that what this really means is he (Obama) is seriously considering de-friending Putin on facebook. That would probably work about as well as sanctions would in delivering a butt slap to Russia, possibly more effective. And yes, the president’s posture on international matters of certain gravity like the present one has left him open to the criticism: pantywaist. But surely the white house has to say something, right? Putin is violating international law and Ukrainian sovereignty, no? Well maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. But being told this by supposedly straight-faced American diplomats must have caused unprecedented belly laughter over vodkas at the Kremlin.
However…
If you ask me, and I realize you didn’t, one of the features of this President I quite like, contra McCain, is that he’s not recklessly shooting at anything that moves, as might an overeager child demonstrating the power of her first rifle [1], merely because he views himself as the world’s Great and Powerful Oz who must wield American force whenever and wherever he feels compelled to.
…
We’re back in Alaska!
The snow is all but gone again owing to sunny days and above freezing temperatures. Sorry Midwest, it was just your turn this winter is all.
So many pictures on the phone to prompt a sharing of experience I don’t know where to begin. I did hear a few ooh lah lahs on Happy Wife’s photo of defiance, so thank you for those, and I’ll add that I quite like that photo too, although surprisingly she (HW) cares a little less for it than I do, complaining that her hair at that moment didn’t look quite as nice as she would’ve liked it to look. “Seriously?” This is like saying the Great China Wall isn’t that awesome because look, over there, see that, a couple bricks are missing. Then again I accept I’m deeply biased in matters of devotion to my wife, possibly even to the point of pathology, of being uxorious.
Btw, she did eventually get over to the court house and receive her permit (#1208) for The Wearing Of Shoes With Heels In Excess Of Certain Limitations. Signed and dated by the city clerk! It never expires but so far as I can tell it is not transferable.
More later. Much to tend to this morning…
1. My brother in-law’s two girls, 9 & 7, received for Christmas last year a CZ .22 caliber rifle and a .410 shotgun, respectively. Although owing to their Father’s guidance neither is irresponsible around guns.
