Month: December 2016

Forty degrees, gray, and raining. Not the Christmas in Seward we’d hoped for. Between here and Anchorage it’s another story, biblical inches of snow with howling wind, not expected to clear until tomorrow, so we’re staying put down here, even though a simple walk down the beach this morning was thwarted by ice. Even The Dog was doing The Penguin walk.

Inside, we enjoyed a more traditional Christmas, a tree with a modest apron of modest gifts and a not-too-spicy Alaskan shrimp cocktail

I got a super comfy acrylic knit hat, cycling accouterments, a gift card to spin classes (have I mentioned I’m leading another bike tour in Alaska in ’17?), a coffee mug to remind me I’m the youngest of three children, a bottle of my favorite wine from Chateau St. Jean, Cinq Cepages (thank you Sistah!), and a box of Queen Anne cherries, these last two ostensibly to share with Happy Wife. Emphasis on ostensibly. She got slippers, a dress (one she likes!), a pastry piping bag with an assortment of tips, a recipe hook, and shoes (she needs).

Almost forgot, I also got a bottle of wicked good gin. We arrived at Our Nest Friday night to find the gin bottle nearly empty. Sensing my lament, and to lift my spirits (ha ha) HW said, “You want one of your gifts early?”

“Under the circumstances I’m hardly feeling cheery right now, Dear.”

Voila – Lament Crusher!

 

No difficulty seeing him in the snow. We finally got some. After two almost snowless winters it’s good to see it back. If for no other reason than it brightens up the landscape, but of course skiers love it too. Which is fine, so long as they don’t go off on me when they spot me and The Dog on their groomed trails. A freshly combed trail is to a skier what a glass pool is to a high diver. I get it. I try to stay on the multi-use trails most of the time. But in the few instances when I don’t, for instance when we’re forced off a side trail onto the groomed corduroy by an angry moose, or circumstances of the day require I shortcut back to the car, I don’t want to be berated by an apoplectic skier who thinks just because there’s snow on the trails they are suddenly — and legally — for skiers only. They aren’t. I steer clear of groomed trails as a courtesy to skiers. As a protest sign I once saw posted at the trailhead correctly noted: 12 months of taxes, 12 months of access.

The opinions of this blogger are his and his alone, especially as his Happy Wife is an avid skate skier. (Thankfully, a reasonably minded one, sympathetic to the plights of Dog Walkers).

Lot’s going on lately, not all of which I care to share with you, and not because it’s not good, it is, but I don’t want to jinx the outcome I want by talking about it. And no, I’m not opening a Pot store.

Adding to our seasonal woes of dark and cold, the State is now officially in a recession

“I about cried when I first saw the data — it was shocking,” said Caroline Schultz, an economist with the Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development who worked on the report. She described Alaska’s current economic state as a “recession.”

How touching, an economist in tears. In my experience the best ones are coldly logical and stoic. If a grim analysis is all it takes to make you cry, maybe seek other work? In any case, no matter. I first moved here in ’89 when the State was in the trough of a pretty bad recession. For largely the same reason, too — a very low price for a barrel of oil. It rose again briefly in ’90, dipped and stayed low the following ten years, then began climbing again pretty steadily, until it was all Wine & Chocolates again (and free Halibut Charters 🙂 ) for a pretty long time. Until now

Hard to predict what that graph will look like ten years out.

So we (HW & I) have had to cut back. To wit: while traveling recently I had to stoop to ordering an anonymous bottle of Barolo for dinner.

Nothing pains me more than a look of shame on HW’s face