2010 in review

looking back, i am impressed with myself. i thought i only posted once last year, but there's 3 whole posts up! 2010 was similar to 2009 in many ways, which is why we have a huge round up post rather than shorter, more regular posts. so, the last year in review, if not in chronological order:

• in the spring, chuck changed jobs, then got fired, and now drives a school bus. that was a whole mixed bag. he was looking for less work stress, which he now has. he's also been wanting to get out of banking, which he has. the initial job switch let us use part of chuck's retirement to pay off a huge debt (with one tiny click. i savored that moment). we're now down to almost a third of the debt chuck had when we got married. not having that $900 monthly payment and several small miracles helped us through the 3 months of unemployment before the bus job and makes it easier to live on the lower income.

• archy work was very short this year, a measly 3 months. i worked in delta again, with all the fun side effects of living in two places that i noted last year. the work and crew were great though. site monitering is where it's at. you hike out to a known site, relocate surface artifacts, make sure the military hasn't blown a hole in anything, take some pictures and notes, then repeat. i loved it. still wish there was a good option for winter archaeological work up here........

• about the same time chuck started driving buses, i started working part time at a yarn store. work has tapered off, so i ought to look for something else, but it's been tons of fun helping people with their knitting and picking out yarn.

• i played more with homemade stuff. we haven't really bought bread since 09, and i've made my own tortillas and english muffins besides sandwich, french and flat breads. our garden gave us lots of potatoes that we're still eating, along with squash. everything else we ate as it ripened. i wish we could grow enough tomatoes to put up. we gathered blueberries, most of which we froze, and lingon (lowbush cranberries), that were turned into cranberry sauce. i also made spruce tip jelly, which has an interesting spicy sweet flavor. next year i want to try rose petal jelly from all the prickly rose in the yard. Homemade mustard and barbecue sauce are in the fridge, along with homegrown (homelaid?) eggs, some of them blue. chuck raised broiler chickens again, so we haven't bought chicken for 2 years. he also raised a turkey that grew to 25 pounds and barely fit in our tiny oven on thanksgiving, and we have 6 laying hens. they average 4-5 eggs daily, more than we can eat, so we trade them for moose and caribou meat. i even made laundry detergent too! seems we buy less and less at the store. mostly i try stuff out for fun, and because i like knowing how to make my food and what's in it and changing things to suit my taste. none of it took very much time (the jelly was a small batch) and costs very little. i made soft cheese, but for the cost of milk vs the lower cost of cheese and considering the ratio of milk to finished cheese......we will keep buying cheese.

• we bought season tickets for UAF hockey while we had money in the summer, and now the games are like free dates.

• i apparently knit a storm through the year, ending up with more large projects (shawls and sweaters) than before. i also experimented with some new things, knitting with wire and making small toys.
  that doesn't count anything started but not finished of course. i knit more for myself - it makes no sense for me to not have enough socks when i'm the one knitting them. out of 25 finished projects, 11 were for myself, almost half and a definite improvement. mostly i knit from stash, since yarn was not really in our budget this year. sweaters were probably the most satisfying projects while socks were not my friend all. year. long. fitting issues. hopefully to be fixed in 2011.

• the fairbanks knitting group just gets more awesome with time. they're a great mix of people with very different tastes and backgrounds and opinions, yet mostly we manage to encourage each other and have intriguing conversations. if we moved, they would be the people i missed.

• we got lots of yardwork done while we were unemployed together. the raised flower beds i built in 07 have been slowly but steadily eroding and we had started building boxes for them in the spring. we finished those and planted rhubarb, a red currant plant, daffodils, tulips and crocus. ever since living in sweden i've wanted crocus of my own to peep out from the melting snow. we even cleaned out the prickly rose from the raspberry bushes and raked leaves! not all of them, but more than normal. i almost like our yard now.

• my wisdom teeth were pulled dug out in the spring. i was a bit worried, from the horror stories told to my body's high tolerance for medication to getting an IV and being put under for the first time ever. my mouth felt crowded though, and the new teeth were trying to push aside other teeth. so it had to be done, and in the end? not so bad. i almost wouldn't mind doing it again. the IV took a couple tries and hurt more than anything else. the dentist had to give me two hits of anesthesia to knock me out and as i came to, he clearly asked is she waking up already? that didn't make me feel too good, but they were almost done. there was a bit of swelling, and i got a cool ice pack band to wrap around my head. made me feel like i was in an old time war movie.
  i took the (huge) aspirin they gave me and nothing else and was back to work on monday without missing a day since the surgery was on friday, my day off. the pains from crowded teeth were gone and i was happy. although i'd've been happier if i could have kept the teeth for souvenirs..........

• we signed up for the rosetta stone online through the military. i'm reviewing spanish, and filling in some everyday words missing from my vocabulary, while chuck is learning swedish. i love hearing him learn, it's more exciting for me than him i think. he's improved in every lesson and i can't wait till his vocabulary is large enough to have conversations.

• i read lots too, although i have no idea where i fit it and the knitting in. according to goodreads, i read 45 books this year. that's almost one a week, not too bad. some really good ones were: Sorcery and Cecelia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot by patricia wrede and caroline stevermer, a lighthearted, funny fantasy with sequels to follow. stieg larsson's girl who.... series was a fascinating mix of mystery, journalism, crime solving, and political corruption set in sweden. they were gripping reads, and had fairly accurate descriptions of swedes. the only downside was the sexual crimes against women, but i suppose that was the point. the latest additions to the vlad taltos series, jhegaala and dzur, by steve brust added more depth to vlad's character. despite being quick reads, they kept me thinking long after reading. in defense of food by michael pollan made an interesting analysis of our current food culture and how traditional food culture has been manipulated for commerce. an extremely well-written and highly creepy fitcher's brides by gregory frost i would recommend for the writing and morals but won't re-read. i'd like to sleep at night, thank you very much. another non-fiction book i really enjoyed was the paradox of choice by barry schwartz. he delves into the unconscious and conscious factors that go into all our choices, big and small. the book was not as dry as i anticipated and points out a need for us to limit our own options to make effective choices. an interesting concept.
  
  annoyingly less good were: water for elephants by sara gruen, which a few of us in the knitting group read. the story just seemed to descend into melodrama and ended in an unlikely series of events. it started well, but i felt cheated at the end. name of the rose by umberto eco has sat on my shelves unread since high school. now it can sit on someone else's shelves. the long involved story of medieval religious heresies and dissidents is mixed with murders at an abbey. when revealed, the motive for the murders seems absurd and superficial. cheated again. wuthering heights by emily bronte confirms that british female romance writers are not for me. a bunch of whiny noble people make bad choices which have bad consequences and i think i'm supposed to feel sorry for them. um, nope. sorry. think i'll avoid the bronte's along with austen from now on.

• the week of thanksgiving it rained. this just doesn't happen in interior alaska. the warm weather made the foot or so of snow on the roof slide off, which normally happens in april. the fall compacted it all and made normal shoveling impossible. when it started coming off the deck in solid square chunks, what could i do but make a wall? crenelations and archer slits possibly to be added later.

• since summer, chuck has been working on painting the kitchen cupboards (the ones he took the doors off the summer before). the kitchen has slowly transformed from a dark green and gunky yellow 70s combo
  
  to a much brighter white (inside), blue, and yellow.
  
  the colors remind me of sweden and make the kitchen a thousand times brighter. i love it. the cupboard doors have been materializing the last couple weeks, and after a year and a half without doors, it feels odd being unable to just reach in and grab what i want.

• we watched more than a few movies in 2010, but not many made it to our favorites list. we really enjoyed blind side, ondine and the A team remake. oddly enough, tv on dvd was much more popular with us (we don't ever watch any tv shows on tv). a random series of events introduced us to the 2005 season of doctor who. september and october were a haze of the 5 recent seasons. it's a crazy, unpredictable, upbeat, funny british sci-fi space/time travel show and if you haven't seen it, do. you never know what will happen and yet only a few times is the story so outlandish that it seems impossible. we're waiting anxiously for next season to start, and have infected the grandkids with the addiction. we finished watching the dollhouse show, joss whedon is my hero for interesting tv. it's a bummer his shows have such short runs.

• we got a couple camping trips in. we took the bratlings camping in denali in the spring and hiked with them all day with no complaints from grownups or kids.
  
  chuck kidnapped me to paxson lake for a relaxing weekend in the summer, complete with canoeing and a beautiful sunset.
  
  we also finally hiked angel rocks together. we've been saying we'd do that for years. the trail starts out on the valley floor and climbs to the ridge top
  
  where granite tors are eroding into cool formations and caves.
  which of course we had to explore a bit, crawling into that hole behind us that opens into some small caves, then out the other side.

• on the winter solstice, we saw the total lunar eclipse. apparently the last time one happened on the solstice was in the 1600s. the moon wasn't totally blacked out but looked shadowed, like seeing it through a black curtain. very cool phenomenon, but we couldn't get a photo that didn't look like a black sky.

• after the very long break i've had in blogging, i have a clearer idea how i want to blog, a way to balance my content. several blogs i read manage to have good, varied content in short posts and i think i have learned from their good example. i suppose this next year will be the test. my iphone was no replacement for the internet and so there are still podcasts and blogs being caught up on.

all in all, 2010 was a good year. i never got tired of being home with my husband. i'm grateful for my friends, talking to family over holidays, and all the little miracles that keep me going every day. i'm thankful i can do so many things that i enjoy and are meaningful to me, which luckily tend not to be very expensive. reading my summing up post on 2009, i must have got something right in the balance department this year. the year was equally disruptive, busy, and i still worked out of town yet i feel as if i did more in most areas of life and feel more peaceful and happy looking back. i have to keep doing that.

livengood to point hope...and back again

livengood is an old mining town just a couple hours north of fairbanks (and not pronounced "livin' good" but liven like "enliven"). i went there in may for almost a week. people still mine there, and we were doing a little survey. the little we found was historic (technically anything over 50 years old is considered historic archaeology) and mining-related: rusted out cans, a metal box rigged up as a stove or refrigerator (it's covered by sod and goes back a couple feet),and a rotting log cabin,but mostly mining ditches that diverted water. some of them still held water.but the very coolest thing we found (people are always asking what THE coolest artifact i've found is - such a difficult question to answer, but easy this time) was a shovel some miner hung up on a birch branch and never came back for.another thing i discovered was a new term - niggerheads. alaska has lots of bogs, and in these boggy areas grow tussocks. basically clumps of grass growing in a kind of mushroom shape above the rest of the ground level. makes for very difficult walking at times, because you don't want to actually walk on them, but between them (where water is usually lurking too). anyway, apparently a common name for them back in the day (and i'm not sure how far back we're talking) was niggerheads. a coworker told me about it while we were hiking through some muskeg, and although i never thought of it before, they could look like dreads. it was funny and appalling at the same time. the term was accepted enough that offical names on US geologic surveys included it, like niggerhead ridge.

this was bad enough to my way of thinking (niggerhead's not exactly a compliment, right?), but after the coworker explains that some politically correct black guy (in the 70s?) got the names changed (and only to blackhead ridge instead, not much of an improvement, i'd rather call it dreadridge), both he and my other coworker express their opinions that they should have stuck to the original niggerhead. um, hello? they said "nigger" wasn't an insult, and referred to mark twain calling huck's slave friend "nigger jim." uh, yeah. i think mark twain was recording southern culture and mocking it, not saying that black people weren't offended by the term. this time i was appalled and not amused. i'd like to see them go shout nigger in the middle of a ghetto and see how many people take kindly to it. there wasn't much i could do but shake my head and let it go.

after a couple projects closer to town, i had a fun adventure 2 weeks ago. i went up to point hope, which is way up north (farthest i've been so far in alaska) and almost in tomorrow.

View Larger Map
(that point farthest south is fairbanks, with livengood just above it. point hope is way out on the edge there, if you zoom in you can see it's just this little spit going off into the ocean.)

i was hoping to somehow (magically) see russia, but the point was fogged in the few days i was there. the point is just a gravel beach built up by the sea over time, and the village moves every 20 years or so.there's not really any soil there. and yet these tiny tundra flowers find niches to grow in, making small clusters barely rising above the ground. i was fascinated by the variety and maxed out the macro function on my camera. most of those came out pretty well. the pebbles in the background of those flowers are maybe half-dollar sized. it's great how nature fits prettiness in wherever it can.

despite being the middle of june, the temps were only in the upper 30s F (2-4 C) and everyone still had their winter coats on. my first glimpse of the arctic ocean (from the ground anyway) looked like this:ice floes that apparently came to town a couple days before i did. they even moved like in the movies, chunks drifting silently in opposite directions on the current swirls. it was mesmerizing, and a bit eerie with only a creak or an occasional drip of the melting ice to break the stillness.

last week we were back in livengood for a dull, and very dusty, survey along one of the wonders of alaska: a gravel highway. the best thing about that trip was being able to stay at the same company camp from before (even though we weren't working for them this time). all the people there are extremely pleasant, and the atmosphere is very positive. plus the cooks are great. the most adventure we had was when we were almost home. we'd just turned off the highway onto farmer's loop in fairbanks, when we heard an odd sound from a rear tire. a sort of rubbing sound - but it couldn't be flat because the truck was still level. that lasted maybe two minutes before the truck suddenly wasn't level anymore. because of this

at least we were back in town. changing a flat on the dalton would not have been fun, what with the gravel and dust and tractor trailers zooming by. well, if you can call an exploded tire a flat. that's what happens when your boss puts an unbalanced camper on the work truck. the tires obviously didn't appreciate it at all.

i worked on a pair of diagonal rib socks for chuck in point hope and the last trip to livengood. the first one was cast on in JFK airport on our way to MA in may. my gauge was a bit tighter than the pattern called for though, and the ribbing was standing out more than the diagonal mock cables, which was not the effect i was going for. so i ended up frogging half a foot, and adding a couple extra stitches to the fake cables. i was much happier with the results. i was working on the heel while waiting for the flight out of point hope, and talking with a couple guys who'd been working there. finally one of them asked if i was making socks for myself (i was impressed he knew what it was, so many people have to ask). after i told him they were for my husband, he said,

"i wish my wife would knit me some socks"

that gave me a nice warm glow. the first sock was finished sunday, and as soon as i cast off and chuck tried it on, he said "i need another one."

sigh. there is no rest for the weary. but rather than leaving (again) this week, i have a reprieve and can actually go to knit night! and do some laundry, and buy some groceries maybe. but probably (still) not bother with the cobwebs.

time is relative

right now we're in this transitional period where light equals daytime and dark equals night. it's kind of a weird sensation really. i'm so ready for spring, even though i have no idea how march is already over. since the new year i've been in this time blur, where one day feels like forever, but then the endless days blur into one and seem to have gone by fast. terry pratchett said something like that once.......i may have to look it up.

but anyway. somehow march has whizzed by and i still have pictures from the beginning of february that i haven't posted yet. ajajaj.

there was the ice park, which was held a couple weeks early. the temps were in the 40s for a whole week, so they panicked and moved the contest up. a bunch of sculptures ended up classical styledue to bits and pieces melting off. we went with our 3 stepbrats (and a dad but he's not in any pics)

the 18month old decided halfway through that it was way past his bedtime, he was bored, and maybe if he screamed *nonstop* he would get to bed faster. he did. so we didn't really get to see the multiple block sculptures, and only got a few pictures.

a chameleon and a very odd abstract couple.

and my favorites: a different kind of seafood dinner, and a teardrop. i love how the carvers can make such realistic drops of water.

the two older stepbrats stayed the night. i read them a grimm's faery tale for bed, which they repeated almost verbatim to their dad when he picked them up the next day *raised eyebrows*. since it was warm out, we went outside for a bit. their dad was literally throwing them around.

they crunched into the snow and disappeared from view. they seemed to like it thoughafter (finally) finishing the snowflake headband, i jumped right on another quick fix, the army helmet hat. that went so fast it didn't even make it up on the sidebar. the fit is a bit snug, right on the line between just right and a little too short. the pattern picture only shows the side view, but i noticed on ravelry that the hat looked a bit small on almost everyone, so i wasn't that surprised. the applied i-cord in front was kind of fun and really topped off the helmet look. i love the yarn, but noticed it has very little twist, so it might pill. that's the sort of thing i've been noticing more about yarn, how it's spun, but alas not until after i've got it home. so far no problems though. i may frog the top and add a couple rows before the decreases, just for a little more height. some day. right now i'm just happy it's done and cozy to wear.

and speaking of being done, i even picked up the FFF shawl this week. knit night at my house, and i figured the pleasure of company would dull the irritation of the shawl. and i finished it this weekend. off the needles. whoo-hoo!!! technically i still have to weave in the ends, but as far as i'm concerned it's done. thank goodness.

limited knitting time has forced me to focus on one thing at a time, which inwardly makes me horribly twitchy, but does get results. i also finished a sleeve for chuck's sweater he says it looks like a sting ray. i could see that i guess. i even cast on the second sleeve yesterday.

a couple weeks ago now, i gave a presentation at chuck's rotary group about alaskan archaeology. it went pretty well despite my swedish computer refusing to play nice with the projector (after a week or so getting it all together *sigh*). the group was small enough that they could still kind of see the powerpoint slides on my laptop. i think the problem may have been the screen resolution, so i'll have to figure out how to change that.

still, everything seemed to flow really well, and nobody got the glazed-over look of too much detail. archaeology is very fun, just in very short bursts. i was glad i could explain what field work really is like yet still keep everyone's interest. they even said i could come back in the summer and do it again! so it was fun, and i was flattered.

another compliment i got recently was at the doctor's office. i was waiting for chuck and knitting (on the snowflake headband i think) and some guy walking by thanked me for keeping a tradition alive. he said it's lots of work and most people don't bother anymore. so even though it was totally random, it was kind of cool to get a sincere compliment for doing something i love.

traveling tuesday

today i finally remembered to take pictures of the landscape. i admired it all week, i guess we have to be grateful i remembered pictures at all.arkansas is one of those states i always thought of as being in the middle and flat. where chuck's parents live, it's actually very hilly. rolling hills with steep declines into those famous hollers. and they have winding roads that would make western mass proud.today i learned why: the ozarks. duh. that i should have figured out for myself. but they're only in northern arkansas, and everything flattens out towards little rock.


(these obviously overlap a bit - guess i only got the stitch function to work halfway on the camera) we were down in the middle of those hilly folds there. that would be awful territory for a survey. and while i'm thinking of archaeology, in those boxes of pictures and stuff chuck went through were 2 ziplocs chock-full of rocks. most of them were water eroded and smooth (you know i had to look at them just cuz). but one of them was guess what? an artifact. it was a utilized flake, with a clear bulb of percussion, a bit of cortex on the edge, and use wear on the one edge. *sigh* the worst part was, they hadn't picked it up on purpose, his parents had just collected rocks on a cross country trip from arkansas to alaska. so it could have come from anywhere. do you know how hard i look for those things? and they didn't even know they found one. *sigh*

today was a hot day again. day 1 was hot, and day 7 is hot, with cool, perfect days in between. at least from our point of view. today was like 65. i haven't seen that for months. we didn't bring our coats, but if we had we wouldn't have worn them anyway. we went into a restaurant, and the temps were easing down but it still felt nice out, and we both had short sleeves on. the restaurant chick asks us "where are y'alls coats at?" and while i rarely play on the alaska thing (chuck does it all the time, especially now that we live in north pole) all i could think of to say was "back home in alaska"

did she ever stare at us. she must have thought i was joking, and once she realized i wasn't, didn't know what to do about that. specially after i told her it was nice out. it's all a matter of perspective i guess.

we did drive past chuck's old swimming hole where he cliff dived. this is the practice jumpthis is the real thingnice huh? you couldn't get me up there for a million dollars. the scenery was beautiful, but it still can't compare to what we found a bit further down the road .

my very very favorite place we drove through today wasthey had signs to let you know it was coming over 15 miles out. not sure why cuz there wasn't much there. but i did wonder if andy would want to move there once i told him about it.