Fire Goddess Confession

On the evening of January 4th our dear friend Emily came up to me at Aimie's birthday party. Putting her arm around my shoulders, she said, "You know I hate to say this but it's a bit too cold for skiing. Do you think you could warm things up a bit?"

Now everyone knows I am the Fire Goddess, Bane to Skiiers and their precious snow. Thankfully in past years we have come to an agreement. They give me cheesecake and they can keep their cold snow. I had never had a Skiier ask me to make things warmers but I assumed it would require the same payment.

"You have cheesecake?"

Emily shook her head. "No, but we are eating pretty good ice cream cake. That should be enough."

"Ok, I'll see what I can do."

What Emily and I failed to take note of was that we were eating sacred ice cream cake of the mint chip variety. Two days after I got back from Nome the temperature started to rise and as most of you know the rest of the story is history. Ski races, school, and a lot of other things were canceled because of too much warmth. 

The moral of this story: Don't ask the Fire Goddess to make it warm until spring and don't underestimate the power of the sacred ice cream.

  

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.

My Melancholy Mood at wanting to be back at college yet at the same time not...

Why can't we get all the people together in the world that we really like and then just stay together? I guess that wouldn't work. Someone would leave. Someone always leaves. Then we would have to say good-bye. I hate good-byes. I know what I need. I need more hellos. ~Charles M. Schulz

Dinking around on html with little success

I am trying to get a slideshow to work properly...I would get it to display the first picture but nothing after that. Also I tried to make the blog have three columns so that we can have slideshows for different people etc...and so I was looking up tutorials online...trying to edit the html and having little success.

If anyone wants to try to make it work, I can make you guys have admin powers if you need them to edit the format, just save a backup copy of the format before you do too much. I throw out a challenge to you all, I don't know what the reward is quite yet, but you can suggest appropriate prizes...

Is anyone else amused by this?

Say what??

In honor of the holidays, I'm going to post something completely unrelated to any winter celebration whatsoever...just something that I deal with every day that it occured to me might be sort of funny to read--the literal transliteration between English and Norwegian. Since the two languages share a great deal still and more or less came from the same languages, most things can be translated literally and directly between the two and still make sense, as long as you go back and rearrange the grammar. Usage, however, is a different story. Here's some very commonly used phrases in Norwegian, their literal translation, and the most common English phrase to say the same thing:

Hva skjer a? - What cuts? - How's it going/what's happening?

Hvis du vil - If you will- If you'd like to (in certain situations this sounds quite strange)

Hvis du har lyst til - if you have lust to - If you want (it was literally months before I could bring myself to say this)

Fy faen oss - oh damn us - general obscenity exclamation, (not especially mild but very common nonetheless) but when Norwegians are speaking english, they often translate it as 'fuck us', which i invariably find hilarious

messing naken - brass naked - norwegians translate this one as 'really naked' or 'very naked'...just an expression but rather entertaining to hear them try to explain to the american the difference between 'naked' and 'really naked'

i det pratsomme hjørnet - in the talkative corner (prate = chat) - in a talkative mood

anyway, you get the point.

No More Finals!

This madness that is
Core is done, my brain now free
To think of snow again

Falling Rain

The rain in endless
Sheets pours down, flooding courtyards
Dampening brown leaves

It came last night, sudden
Downpour in the gutter out-
Side of my window

Never stopping, the
Rain fell though the night, taking
Dust and smog from air

Parts of dining hall
Closed off, filled with water now
Drains clogged with dead leaves

Heat is gone, now cold
Seeps in to buildings with single
Pane glass in windows

From above, the ground
Sprouts brightly colored mushrooms,
Umbrellas with feet.

Do trees shed tears? Let's cut them down and find out

Back in Alaska
Back to the snowy blackness
Eugene is like gold

Adventures with google translate

Loni's heroic couplet

tocino buen cocido, mucho de 

la gente que nos pasan dicen ¡mmm!

our translation

bacon cooked well, many of

the people who pass us say Yum!

google translate's translation

bacon cooked a lot of good people who pass us say mmm

....well that changes the meaning a bit doesn't it?