Hello wife, hello grandson, goodbye wife, goodbye grandson, hi frozen over pond: rally for "Hunt, Fish, Share"

By the time we reached Anchorage, Kalib and

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Weather station, in fog - where's the snow?

Hmmmmm.... I am scheduled to fly to Point Lay early Friday morning. I wonder if I will go? If you read these words, then I did go. I am preparing this post on a foggy Thursday night. Before I go to bed, I will set it to post at 10:00 AM - about the time I am scheduled to arrive in Point Lay. So, if I fly, it will appear just as it is now.

If I don't fly, then I will change this post before the scheduled post time of 10:00 AM.

Make sense?

This, by the way, is the Barrow weather station. 

It can snow during any month of the year and in fact, it has snowed, before I came. Even Wednesday morning, there were a few flakes on the ground but they didn't last long. When I first started coming to Barrow, the snow always set in for good by this date and so did freezeup.

I remember elders at the time saying that when they were growing up, snow and freezup came before August ended. Today, Fannie Akpik told me that when she was a girl, freezeup generally came during the first week of September.

Now, sometimes, it doesn't come until October.

We will see what it does this year. Maybe it will snow and freezeup will settle in before the day ends. I kind of doubt it, but maybe.

The Mormon missionary entry is done - but I've got to read through it one more time before I post, so here is the Sports Authority on a windy afternoon

I think I went way overboard this time. Maybe I was a trying to write a book instead of a blog, but a blog is not a book and should not be treated as one. Oh well. I have done what I have done and I am not going to undo it, yet I must read through it one more time. I will strive to better restrain myself in the future.

Many of you have probably noticed my tendency to make typos, misspell common words, drop others altogether. Trouble is, when I proofread, my mind tends to see these errors not as they are but as they are supposed to be. There is a good fellow back east by the name of Albert Lewis who tries to find time each day to read through my blog and then send me the corrections that he finds, but the blog can sometimes be up awhile before he can get to it.

Plus, this one is extra long, Albert has a life to live and may not have time to do a good proofread.

I am certain this entry that I must reread has more words in it than any other that I have ever posted, so there will be many typos and such and although I just read through the whole thing, two or three times, I am very tired. I know I missed dozens of errors. I could read through them again right now and I would still miss them.

Maybe I will do a little better if I wait until morning, get some sleep and then go have breakfast at Abby's.

I think the majority of my potential readers will skip most of it, because it is just too long. But a few will read it, so I want to catch as many typos, misspellings and such as I can.

I will miss many of them, though. I can promise you that.

After I severely overwrite my next Loft entry, I must pull back to do repairs, so, here is the daily moose, the daily dog, and the daily shovel load of snow

I didn't mean to get so carried away. I placed my photos for my next Loft Workshop entry and then set out to write the text, intending to keep it short and simple. When I write these blogs, I tend to write whatever comes to mind when I look at the pictures. When I looked at the pictures of the temple, the taxi-cabs, the broken computer, and the missionaries, I tried to think of just a few words to say, but a flood poured through my fingers, onto the keyboard and into the draft entry of this blog.

It was as if I was not writing a blog at all, but a book - a long and book, possibly brilliant, possibly just tedious and a tad insane. The process got completely out of hand. Most readers would have ran away screaming and of those that stayed to read to the end, a certain number would have run screaming toward me, pitchfork and boiling tar in hand.

So I decided that I had better pull back and see if I can repair the damage tomorrow. It won't be easy, because I have to drive Margie into Anchorage early in the morning so that she can spend the week babysitting the grandchildren.

Even if I do manage to somehow keep my trips to Anchorage brief, they never take less than four hours and theys always disrupt my plans bigtime. It is going to take some real time to repair the chaos I created today and I might not get started until Monday evening. Even so, I will try my best to get it repaired and posted before I go to bed Monday night or, more likely, Tuesday morning.

In the meantimes, above is today's daily moose, spotted on the corner of Brockton and Seldon.

And here is today's daily dog, spotted just off Ward's Street. This dog really wanted to come home with me, but I said, "No, pup! No, pup! Stay here, pup!"

So the dog stayed, but with regrets.

And here is today's shovel-load of snow. The shoveler is a stranger, who I just happened to pass by on the road, the name of which I know, but it escapes me at the moment.

My poor friends down in Cordova - they have really been dumped on. Doors are completely blocked by snow piled above the eaves. Worse yet, Cordova sits right smack on the ocean shore and it rained, the snow got impossibly heavy and roofs collapsed all over town.

Take care, all of my friends in Cordova.

Valdez got dumped on, too, deep enough to bury houses, but I don't think it rained afterwards, so it wasn't as bad. Plus, Valdez always gets dumped on to ridiculous depths.