Red Sweater!

A belated thanks to Gran (Andy's mom) for sending Maia this adorable red sweater. She gets lots of compliments every time she wears it!

Darkness Retreats / ABL Action Approaches

I just caught a glimpse of the sunrise/sunset and twilight times for today, and thought I'd share.

The sun "rose" today at 5:55am, and will set at 10:01pm. (It actually came up over our mountains sometime after that. I'm pretty sure this sunrise time doesn't take the mountains into account.) We're still picking up 5 minutes of light every day! (That'll slow down as we get closer to the solstice, in mid-late June.)

Civil Twilight dawned at 4:59am this morning, and "dusks" at 10:58pm tonight. Between these two times, you can still do normal outdoor tasks by the light of the sky. The example I always give is mowing the lawn. (Or, if you were in Anchorage this past Friday, shoveling 18 inches of snow!)

Nautical Twilight dawn today was at 3:28am, and dusk will be at 12:25am. This is when you can see a good number of stars in the sky, but you can still see a glow at the horizon. (This was when folks at sea could navigate with their sextants.)

Now, this is the weird part: There is already NO Astronomical Twilight dawn or dusk, and there hasn't been for about a week and a half. As Wikipedia puts it, "most casual observers would consider the entire sky already fully dark" as of 12:25am tonight, but the 6th-magnitude stars and the diffuse nebulae and galaxies wouldn't come out until the nonexistant astronomical dusk. This is the harbinger of things to come...

Next Wednesday (May 7th), we'll lose our Nautical dawn and dusk, so there'll always been a visible glow on the horizon. Another month after that (June 8th), we'll lose Civil dawn and dusk, so there'll never be an excuse not to mow the lawn. Then it's just a bit less than 2 weeks later that we hit the longest day of the year: Sunrise at 4:20am, and sunset at 11:42pm. Even though sunset is already crazy-late (10pm), I still can't believe it's gonna get so much later. I just hope Maia can learn to sleep at night with the sun still up!

The good news in all of this is that Alaska-League Baseball is right around the corner! The season seems to run from the second week in June to the first week in August. I've already found the easiest bus route to the stadium, although we may just drive. The question is, who to root for? Anchorage has two teams: the Bucs and the Glacier Pilots. Do you choose by roster? By logo? By mascot? By theme song? Or do you just go to a few games and see who you like?

(Scroll down... for some reason the table is WAAAAAAAAAAAY down there.)

	Glacier Pilots	Bucs
Roster	RHP Danny Sandbrink College: Stanford Hometown: St Louis, MO	OF Aaron Roberts College: SIU Hometown: Carbondale, IL
Logo
Mascot	Piper the Moose	Beekmin the Parrot
Theme Song	Unknown	Click Here
2007 Record	10-25	13-22
Spelled Backwards	Go Tilop Reicalgs!	Go Cubs!

I think I'm leaning towards the Bucs.

29K and counting

My shoulder is healing nicely. I'm in a sling for another week, then 4 weeks of PT and I'm home free. The bills are starting to come in, and once again we are thankful that we have insurance. So far, the medical bills total $29,000. Holy cow, who knew shoulders were so expensive?

According to the CDC 43.6 million Americans, almost 15% of the population, are uninsured. A friend of mine here in Anchorage is facing almost $100,000 in medical bills because her insurance company ruled her heart condition as pre-existing. I often think what would we do if we were in her situation. 29K right now would break us, 100K would take a lifetime to pay off. Other countries have successfully dealt with the healthcare situation, why can't we?

Here are the positions for the three candidates regarding healthcare. Take a minute and read through them, and keep this issue in mind when you vote this fall.

Obama
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/

Clinton
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/healthcare/

McCain
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/19ba2f1c-c03f-4ac2-8cd5-5cf2edb527cf.htm

100 Years: The Cubs & Iraq

Geography Lesson

This map appeared on the NBC Nightly News back on March 23, 2008.  The story was this one, about those poor souls who died on a sinking fishing boat in the Bering Sea. The problem, of course, is that's not the Bering Sea, it's the Gulf of Alaska. And that's not Dutch Harbor, this is Dutch Harbor:

View Larger Map

What I don't understand is how this mistake actually managed to get broadcast in Alaska. The NBC Nightly News had originally been broadcast 3 hours earlier, and this was the west coast rebroadcast. We routinely get updates during our NBCNN, when some talking head from California replaces Brian Williams to give us the latest breaking news. Did it really take an Alaskan to notice that they were 1300 miles off? Isn't anyone at NBC watching The Deadliest Catch?

A møøse once bit my sister...

We've seen our fair share of moose since we moved to Anchorage. (No bears, though.) We usually see them when we're driving, which can be a bit scary, since a number of people die every year from hitting moose on the road. I think I've seen at least 2 each on Tudor near Elmore, on Baxter near Tudor, and on Northern Lights near Goose Lake. But one morning in late February, I got to see one while I was on foot. I was standing at my bus stop (at De Barr and Edward), listening to my iPod for a good minute or two, until I realized that there was a moose directly across the road from me!  Fortunately, I've been carrying our old camera around to work with me, just in case something particularly "Alaskan" happens.   I didn't point the moose out to the other folks at the bus stop, as far as I know they never noticed. The sky also happened to be quite beautiful. It was pink well away from the direction the Sun would be rising.



A moose's silhouette in the dark.




Experimenting with longer exposure times.



Looking south-southwest.



Looking southwest.



Looking nearly west.  The Sun will be rising over in the east!



Looking nearly east.








A clearer shot (it's getting brighter out).

Miscellaneous Cuteness

Looking prim and proper while naked, somehow.





She always takes the slide belly-down, either feet-first or face-first.  It's hard to sit down and slide!







Maia is good at asking, "Please?"










She loves Valentine's Day!  Believe it or not, this balloon is still flying.  I think they last longer in Alaska.




She got into this basket herself.  I think she likes it in there.



She likes to be up high!



Getting ready for some sledding.  Like her snow bib?

Democracy in Action

We caucused up here in Anchorage on Super Tuesday, Feb 5th.  It was crazy!  There was a single Democratic caucus for the entire city, and it was held at a middle school.  They say they were expecting more of a crowd than last time, but they weren't even close to prepared for the number who showed up.  We were somewhat less than an hour early, and we had to park across the street at the grocery store.  Maia was in her stroller, and we had to cocoon her in her blanket because it was so cold outside.  People were parking in places they shouldn't have, and more than once there were announcements over the school P.A. to move cars so that ambulances could get through!

They had district registration booths set up in the hallways, which became horribly overcrowded.  There was a short "Yay Democrats!" rally in the multipurpose room, and when they dismissed us to the classrooms for our per-district caucuses, movement in the hallways went at a glacial pace.  When we got to our room, it was nowhere big enough for our numbers, so we expanded also into the room next door.  This meant we never really got to have any sort of discussion about the candidates.  When they would normally say "go to your candidate's corner," we were told to pick a room:  Clinton or Obama.  There was also the choice of Undesignated, whose supporters went out into the hallway.  (There were other options, but no takers.)

There were long stretches of time when we didn't have any guidance, and there was a brief flash where one young woman said "I've caucused once or twice, here's how we do it."  She mentioned that we could present our cases about the candidates if we wanted to, etc.  I don't know if it was because of the overcrowding, and the fact that it was taking much longer than everyone expected, but no one was having it.  Folks just wanted to know which corner to stand in, stick around long enough to have their vote counted, and get out of there.  And I don't blame them.  I was proud to have caucused and glad to have made a difference in a primary election for once, but I was ready to run for the doors once I'd been counted.



Registration tables in a narrowish hallway?  What were they thinking?


Babies for Obama.



Mayor Begich must live in our district, because he stepped in to help organize the Clintonites-in-one-room, Obamians-in-the-other-room swap.


Democracy in action!

Jan 6th - 23rd

Finally, we're catching up to the end of January!  We came home to find lots of snow, but that didn't stop us from grilling on our deck.  Then Maia had her third 1st birthday party, on her actual birthday.  We also went up to Alyeska, so we've got a movie for you from up there.  Enjoy!




This is what happens to Maia's hair when she plays on the couch!

She loves to read, of course.



Our snowy mountains, and Becca's snowy birdhouse.


Winter grilling keeps the cold away!  Especially when it's tandoori chicken.


Maia in Daddy's hat, while visiting his office.





More birthday fun.  Would she be a Ramsay if her birthday celebrations didn't last at least a month?


I don't know what was going on here, but she looks like she's lost in some concerto.

The Beatles serenade the birthday girl while at the mountaintop at Alyeska.