Psycho Weather

All this fall, people in Tempe asked me how I stood Alaska in the winter, why I didn't simply freeze into one big popsicle...and so on. I tended to reply with my various tour guide-y facts about Anchorage being more temperate than one might think, and actually in most cases having a milder winter than the Midwest. I would also mention that you can always put on more clothing but can only take so much clothing off... Had this been a more normal winter that is the case, and granted it is the case, but 10 below is absolutely freezing no matter what excuses one offers up.

I was home during a cold snap...yuck...and it was long too! I personally blame it on Justin, cause the day after he left the temp went within the average range again. I recognize there isn't NECESSARILY a causal relationship, but I still maintain that the cold snap was his fault...

I was looking at the weather page, which has a graph of the past week or so of high and low temperatures, along with lines that delineate the average highs and lows for this time of the year. Anchorage went from days of having the high be near or below the average low temperature, to Monday when the temp range was within the averages to Tuesday and Wednesday highs being WAY above normal highs.

The last two days ASD has canceled school because the warm temps put a lovely layer of water on top of the existing ice, I think Alaska may be the only place where school gets canceled because it is too warm :) It has also been gusting wind, hard enough that the house sounds like it is about to lift up like something from the Wizard of Oz and my mom is afraid the wind will take out one of the trees around our property which would probably NOT be a good thing because many of them are tall enough that they would most likely hit the house. Also, in the typical classy Novak style, when my dad and brother replaced our old fridge with another (not a new one, but more functional) they decided for some reason to leave the old fridge on the back deck. I'm not sure if it was dangerous to get it down the stairs, if they were defrosting it, or they just got lazy. Anyway, the fridge has been a lovely deck ornament since sometime this fall, and got frozen to the deck with all of the snow and ice, however in the warmup that all melted, and the fridge was freestanding. This morning, we woke up to all of our trashcans blown away, and the slightly scary fact that the winds had been strong enough to move the refrigerator about five to ten feet across the deck. I guess it is good to keep things interesting :)

I guess this all just fits the Alaska maxim of: Don't like the weather? Wait ten minutes, it'll change.