It's Time To Catch Up Here - From No-Snow, Yes-Snow, Trees, Basketball, DEI etc.

There are lots of reasons I haven't blogged for a while.  There's so much nonsense flooding social media, I'd like to not add to it.  But there are also terrible things happening that are begging for push back.  But if I blog about them, I want to offer a different perspective than what everyone else is saying, and I haven't been very confident I could.  

But also, we've returned to Anchorage.  Aside from finding Anchorage strangely snow free in early/mid March, there was also a spruce leaning on another tree in the back yard.  (There had been strong winds while we were gone.) I did get a couple of bike rides in on snow free sidewalks/biketrails.  

We've got a tree cutting proposal, but they said the current priority is getting down Christmas lights that are still up.  I think the tree is firmly lodged into the other tree.  Someone - the phone people?  electric people? - cut off the top of the tree which must have looked threatening to the wires along the alley in back.  

But then, finally, the snow came.  

We've been sorting through mail, and just catching up.  I brought the rose bushes in from the garage.   They've already started leafing out.                                                                                      Brought the begonia basket in too.  They began to poke out of the soil in a few days.  

Our internet has been on and off, more off than on.  This morning it was off again but while I was calling Alaska Communications (ACS), I noticed there was a truck up in the alley and a guy on a cherry picker working near the pole.  The ACS tech guy on the phone said they had decided there was a short and the guy at the pole was splicing something.  It still didn't work when he left.  

I went off to school.  The particular kid I'm focused on was out for the third day this week.  He was there Tuesday and it was nice to see each other after our long break.  Our regular routine is:

Steve:  "Good morning, A... how are you today?"

He's supposed to, and generally does, answer, "I'm fine thank you.  And you?"  The daily repetition is intended to get him comfortable speaking in English and it's been working.  But Tuesday he had trouble answering.  I finally figured it out.  It wasn't that he'd forgotten while I was gone.  It was just that he wasn't 'fine, thank you' and he didn't know how to say, 'I'm not feeling well.'

And he hasn't been there since Tuesday.  But that gives me a chance to help out other kids in the class.  I discovered today that two kids couldn't tell me what 2X8 equals off the top of their heads.  Working on ways to help them learn the multiplication of basic numbers from one to ten.  

And while the Trump administration is trying to erase all pictures and mentions of non-white males in US history (see War heroes and military firsts are among 26,000 images flagged for removal in Pentagon’s DEI purge)  the elementary school I'm volunteering in has very recently put up four large murals that feature men and women of note, representing various ethnicities.  

Part of me doesn't really want to bring any unwanted attention to this addition.  This had to have been arranged before Trump's White Nationalist staffers began their crusade to erase non-white, non-males from our history.  The fact that they are taking images of, and stories about, people like these down at the national level shows that the rhetoric about efficiency and cutting the budget are just smokescreen for getting rid of anything that challenges their white male image of the United States.  It costs more to find and delete these images than to leave them up.  And what kind of person feels compelled to erase images of people who aren't white or aren't male?  In my eyes it shows how scared they are to allow anything that suggests anyone else has played a role in making this nation great.  But it's clear that it is white males who are trying to destroy the greatness of the United States.  (Wow.  I'm just writing this to explain the pictures, but what a good segue into the next picture.) 

Went with a friend to GCI (the other phone/internet company in town) the other day where there was a protest against Rep. Nick Begich for speaking to a private group, closed to the public, because he won't speak to his constituents at a public meeting.  Even though the original sponsoring organizations pulled out - the reasons weren't made clear - there were still about 40 folks out with signs about various issues they'd like to discuss - from Ukraine, to fired federal workers, vets,  and the looming wipe outs at Social Security, Medicaid, and the Department of Education.  

I'd note that former US Senator Ted Stevens died in "a DeHavilland DHC-3T . . . registered to Anchorage-based General Communications Inc., a phone and Internet company" on the way to their private remote lodge near Dillingham.

We also got to watch the state high school championship game between the girls' teams from Fort Yukon and Shaktoovik last Saturday at the sports center at UAA.  (It disturbs me that the state underfunds the university and other state organizations so that they have to beg private companies to pay for such things and then plaster the name of the company on the buildings.  I realize most USians probably don't remember when stadiums were not covered with corporate advertising and companies didn't buy naming rights to buildings all over campus, but I do.  Until the 1970s or so, we weren't confronted with corporate branding everywhere we went.  They did name buildings for individual donors* back then, but not for corporate donors.  But then that gets back to issues like cutting taxes continuously for the wealthy and for corporations since the 1950s so that governments have less money and the public has to go to wealthy individuals and corporations to beg for money for public facilities.  So that's why I'm only calling the building 'sports center.')

.

Fort Yukon won in a great game.  Lots of passing and setting up shots.  Though the three point rule tempts people to shoot when they probably shouldn't.  

State Infectious Virus Reports

While my regular posts have been slow in coming lately, I have been posting updates based on the (now) weekly updates to the State's Infections Virus Snapshots.  Those don't show up here among the regular posts, but can be found at the tab up top (under the orange header) titled: Respiratory Virus Cases October 2023    Below the introduction are weekly updates (well, not quite. . . there was a period when they were updating them monthly) with new charts and the numbers for each type of virus.  The State's chart is interactive, but each new chart has updated numbers, the original numbers disappear.  So I capture the the originals and the updates so you can see if and how much the numbers changed from when first put up to a week or two later.  When they were doing it monthly, I could only compare the original and updated numbers for the last week of the month because it was the only weekly set of numbers shown twice.  This is getting way too complicated.  If you have questions leave a comment.  

The charts look like the one below and I add some commentary each week.  

You can also go to the state site to see the interactivity of this chart.  

When I got back from the school today, the internet still wasn't working, and again I called ACS, and again, as I was talking I saw an ACS truck in front of the house.  And 20 minutes after the truck left, I could get email and start writing this post.  

*Individual donors.  Even then, there were tremendous protests that UCLA named the new basketball arena after a wealthy oilman and donor, Edwin Pauley, and not for Coach Johnny Wooden who put UCLA basketball on the map with a string of undefeated seasons and national championships.  Before that, UCLA was scrambling for a court for the basketball team.  They played in the Sports Arena near the Coliseum (next door to the campus of rival USC) when they could get it.  Sometimes at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and even the Venice High School gym.  

A Ride Down The Road

 Gave the car a spin this afternoon.  It's good to get out of town a bit.  

Looking across Turnagain Arm from the Seward Highway.  Can you see the tracks where rocks have slid down over the snow?

Same mountain, a little closer view.

McHugh Creek

Looking across Turnagain Arm from McHugh Creek

A muskrat at Potter Marsh

Biking In Anchorage In Full Swing

 First off, I should say that for the fat tire and studded tire bikers, Anchorage is a year round biking town.  For folks like me, biking doesn't really start until most of the snow is off the bike paths.  The paths along the main roads have been clear since April 1 at least.  Here's Dowling on one of my early April rides.  

But as of the past weekend, the trails I've tried - and from reports of others - the bike trails along the greenbelts are now snow and ice free.  This was the trail from Goose Lake along Northern Lights and then over the the Alaska Native Medical Center last Friday.  The shiny stuff on the trail is melt water from the snow on the edge of the trail.  

Goose Lake, last Friday was still covered with ice as have been other small lakes I've been by.  

I still can't imagine the folks that designed these bike paths on the roads that bulge into the street at the corners.  The biker has to move left into traffic.  What were they thinking?  OK, you can have space marked off from the cars, but only most of the way.  Then we push you into the roadway.  I'm guessing this wasn't a biker.  Or even worse, an engineer who hates being forced to add bike lines, so he (a she wouldn't have done this) does the trail part way and then gets revenge at the corners.  (Any engineers reading this - I'm just being playful, like the person who designed this.)

On Bainbridge Island, where they have a similar design, they have curb cuts so bikes go on the sidewalk instead of the street.  

But this is a fairly recent improvement for the bike lanes on Bainbridge Island.  

Saturday I explored the Campbell Creek trail going south.  It was mostly clear, but there were still a few stretches with ice/snow.  So coming back I decided to explore along Old Seward Highway.  I didn't realize how grimy some of the streets between Old and New Seward are.  This was 66th I believe.  There was a fire in the old barrel in the middle.  

And not all the paths along main streets are great. This is one of the worst.  36th Avenue west of the Old Seward Highway on the south side of the street.  The big gravel lot north of New Sagaya feeds rocks and gravel onto the sidewalk.  There are big holes in the sidewalk.  This is just east of the little mall that has ACS and the Pita Pit.  The sidewalk has disappeared under rock and broken asphalt.  

And here's a picture in Spenard.  I can't quite believe this was the first moose I've seen since we got back into Anchorage early March.  It paid no attention to me.  I was biking back from the Providence branch in the old REI space.  No one had bothered to tell me that my doctor had recently moved from their to Building S over on the main Providence campus.  But, I got to see the moose.

My Bike Season Has Begun

This is no April Fool's post.  While the bike trails through the greenbelts still have a decent amount of snow and ice, the sidewalks/bike trails along the major roads in Anchorage are pretty much clear. 

Here I am on Providence headed toward Elmore (formerly known as Bragaw).  No snow, but lots of post-snow debris.  And riding along the streets still means watching out for cars hitting puddles and splashing anyone on the sidewalk at that point.  

Here's were the Elmore bike trail dips down to let folks use the tunnel to get over the the UAA dorms.  Still clear, but the retreating snow leaves a much narrower path.  

And here I'm up from the dip looking back at the snow my tires couldn't get a grip on.  But it was all clear except for this stretch.

I've now completed the first 5.6 km of my Anchorage summer biking expedition.  

In previous summers I've imagined routes in other places as I plied the Anchorage bike trails.  I've gone from Santiago, Chile south to  Conception; Chiangmai to Bangkok;  and from Istanbul to Cappadocia.  Last  summer I didn't pick a foreign route.  But this year I've decided I'm going from Kyiv to Mariupol.  

That's 868.9 km according to Bikemap.com.  That's not quite as far as I hope to go.  Last summer I did about 1200 kms total.  Sorry the map isn't quite clear enough to read the details, but you get the point.

I'm hoping this will give me a better sense of the geography of Ukraine.  I was thinking I could go another 300 or 400 kilometers past Mariupol.  But maybe I should start in Mariupol and after Kyiv I can head west toward Poland or south toward Moldova.  .  

My Body Knows I've Been Shoveling Snow and Peace Corps Recruiter

So, this is what it looked like Tuesday after the clouds cleared after Anchorage's first snow of the year.  A bit late, but it's here.  I'd gotten the driveway and the deck cleared of snow.

Then it started snowing again Wednesday and by Thursday there was over a foot of new snow in the driveway.  Wet, heavy snow.  In this picture I've got some of the driveway shoveled.  

I was going to leave the rest for the next day, but I remembered I'd said I'd go to a Returned Peace Corps Dinner to meet with Alan Yuen, a South African national who works in the Peace Corps office in Pretoria.  The Peace Corps has contracted him and about 15 other foreign nationals to come to the US to recruit Peace Corps volunteers.  The idea, as I understand it, is to let people from countries that have volunteers give their perspective on how their countries benefit.  

So I kept on shoveling.  Got to talk to a couple of neighbors doing the same.  

And the sun even pinked the sky as I was shoveling.  

While I got the driveway cleared, the roads were something else again.  Lake Otis was awful.  Parts of Northern Lights were ok, but parts were a mess.  From Mike Garvey's Twitter account

Garages gonna be repairing a lot of broken axles pic.twitter.com/SS3mZsCVe2

— Mike Garvey (@mpg167) November 11, 2023

 But we made it safely, if bumpily, to the gathering.  

Here's Alan listening to a couple of the RPCVs talking about their experiences and asking how they can help Alan out.  

Then this morning I looked outside and the snow was coming down just as heavily as it did yesterday.  

But it didn't last as long, but it dressed the trees in back in a dreamy white.  

Here's what the deck looked like this morning.  But first I took care of the few more inches that had accumulated overnight on the driveway.

I did part of the deck in the afternoon.  The weather app says there will be some partial sun tomorrow, so I'll finish it then.  

My daughter and a good friend constantly remind me that shoveling snow is one of the best ways to get a heart attack.  Normally I don't pay them much attention.  But we had lots of wet, heavy snow, so I scooped the first six inches or so first and then the other 10 to 12 inches below.  And I took lots of breaks.  And I'm doing fine, though my body is pleasantly tired, no real aches or pains.  

A Satruday Hike In Alaskan Fall. Then Sunday Winter Came

I drive my van even less during the winter than the summer.  Partly because I avoid driving as much as a I can.  But also because we spend more time during winter with grandkids to the south.  We have it parked out of the street so it doesn't block the snowplows while we're gone.  And since we've been gone a while, I felt I should take advantage of the lack of snow, to go for a ride to charge up the battery.  Which is why we got to McHugh Creek.  

The sun made itself known through the clouds.

The total lack of snow or ice in the beginning of November feels weird, but no one was complaining.

Blends of yellows and oranges, with the green of the spruces.  The clouds hanging low, well below the ridge.  A little up the trail, we could see the faint outline of what I suppose is McHugh Peak through the clouds.  

Rocks have various kinds of lichen.   

.                           

And there's still green plant life showing.

"

The cottonwoods are skeletons now, the trunks are ridged, which I've always assumed is a sign they've been around a while.  The cottonwoods in our yard have much smoother trunks.  

We passed Potter Marsh on the way out and saw folks skating.  On the way back we stopped, but the skaters were gone.  These two guys were venturing out in their tennies.  

And then today we woke up to winter.  Nature pays no attention to humans turning their clocks back.