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.

a moose a canoe and some very small rocks

well, our ideas of garden invincibility came crashing down last week when a moose discovered our garden and stomped on my zucchini, ate half the lettuce and stripped our pepper plants they had so many small peppers starting, and tons of blooms. now we're down to two peppers the moose missed somehow, and a few straggly leaves. *sigh* so yesterday we bought a fence and guess what we're doing for FHE tomorrow? other than that the garden's doing fine, still getting cherry tomatoes. those yellow ones are sweet, we really like them.

i got called in to work on wednesday, and while grateful for the hours, was bored out of my skull. i'm not sure if it beats out factory work or not. i typed up some photo logs, copied a book for their library (and isn't that like a violation of copyright or something? whatever, i just work here), and now i'm analyzing some lithics. all of a sudden i'm very very grateful i didn't pick lithics at field school, cuz they are so boring. 8 hours in a small hot room, looking at little flakes (although they're not microscopic thank goodness). i'd much rather be in the field. but i'd rather get paid to look at those small flakes than sit at home getting antsy and bored.

chuck hooked us up with a fishing trip wednesday night, rather unexpectedly. he meets all kinds of people at the bank, and of course they all like him cuz he has the gift of gab. they always promise him fishing trips and stuff, but this guy just wanted an excuse to take his boat out. so we went out on the chena river, looking for king salmon. we saw some heads on the shore, so someone caught a couple, but we didn't see anything but grayling the whole night. it was gorgeous though, sun shining, beautiful clear water (lots of rivers here can be silty and yucky kakas) and Bill was a nice guy too. so that was fun.

then last night our ward had a canoe trip down a slough (pronounced slew, and i still haven't figured out if it's man made or natual and why you'd call it a slough instead of a creek cuz that's really all it is). it was awesome. nice weather again, beautiful water, lots of fishys, and underwater flowers blooming. we even came across a moose feeding in the slough, a couple canoes got past her before she spooked and decided to run for it. that was cool to come so close. moose are so awkward looking but man can they move fast! so now chuck and i are wanting to get our own canoe but i'm sure the checkbook won't let us do that either. it's so bossy sometimes. at least i sneaked that yarn for chuck's sweater by it ;) oh, and it was lots of fun to get to know people and chill with them. being in outer darkness, i mean primary, i don't get to interact much with anyone at church and it's fun when i get to.

i started the silk cami too. added an extra inch and figured out the lace so it only shifted by one stitch. i actually did a swatch of the 1 vs 2 stitch shift, and the 1 stitch shift looks way better. so that's started. the irish moss yarn hasn't come yet *sigh* and what's up with the usps having tracking numbers and never updating them? it's like teasing, come see where your package is, but we'll still show it in ohio until after you've already got it. augh. but it's ok. less knitting time now that i'm working again, but it's not as hopeless as the 12 hour days.

and this week i have some herb/garden books to read. since i'm starting to harvest some of the herbs i want to decide which i'm making vinegars and oils with. it's exciting and fun to try new stuff like that. i've been converted to deadheading by the way. it really works. our jacob's ladder is blooming again, and the salvia. yay!!

we took my bike in to the bike shop, and they siad the pedal coming off is a common problem in lower end bikes. ouch. did he just say we bought a cheap bike? cuz i could swear we padi over $300 for them on sale. apparently it's the kind of crank they use, and over $500 they just don't have that problem. they'll warranty fix it, so it's free but only once. if we tighten it every month it should be ok. too bad they didn't tell us that when we bought them eh? the guy said all it really meant was i had been riding it. ha ha, chuck's isn't coming off yet. what's that tell you about how often he rides?

i've got garden pics to post, and maybe some of kennecott. you'll have to look and see what i've got, cuz i sure don't remember. but for those of you who complained, there are some with us in them this time ;)

helicopters, sweat, envy and cold feet

how's that for a start? it's been raining 2 days now, and that means no sun which = COLD. 55-65. flashbacks of winter with hot tea and wool socks, my nice new knit sweater (which unfortunately is just a bit too baggy in the sleeves for comfortable knitting ).

this a.m. i was checking out some knitting blogs and got technical envy. some of them have these supercool bars showing knitting progress on projects. of course the one site that had a link to get your own DIDN'T WORK. not that that bothered me of course. and this blog isn't very flexible (or i don't know how to use it very well, which could be the case since i don't spend much time on it) so i can't seem to make seperate photo lists of finished projects.

and those knitting blogs have HUGE lists of blogs they read, and i don't know how they have time for it. and time to blog and describe their projects, and take and post pics of them. *sigh* i'm so jealous. and they seem to knit loads of things. right now i'm struggling with sweater envy, because i'm soooooooo bored knitting small things and want to knit sweaters galore. but do you know how much yarn you need for a whole sweater? the checkbook is just not cooperating with me on this one. chuck tells me to go ahead, but those black numbers in the checkbook won't let me.

and i just can't seem find any local knitters to hang out with for friendly crafting conversation. it would be nice to have some idea exchange going on.

but on the other hand, i am forcing myself to finish some projects. i hate finishing projects. not finishing the knitting but seaming and weaving in ends and making any adjustments i discovered after the knitting was done. augh. and i've gotten an early start on some christmas presents - please don't stone me. small things using up yarn. and there's several ideas i've had rolling around my head for a while, so i'm going to set myself down and figure out the math and plan out the designs. that's another thing i'm not very fond of in this knitting business. who knew it involved so much math? i still feel jipped on that. but planning/designing everything ought to take me a while - and then i'll have to find me something else to distract the checkbook so i can sneak past it and buy enough yarn for a sweater.

so now we're to the helicopters and sweat. the last entry i was still suffering through the last days of school. that was done in mid-may, and i got hired by NLUR, the local CRM company, in june. so i've been working crazy hours, 12 6's was the norm. (which didn't leave much time for knitting or blogging or anything). i worked on 4 projects so far, and the most interesting part (outside of meeting cool new people) was the logistics. for the main survey we were dropped in by helicopter every day. that was fun, especially the tight turns perpendicular to the ground, and flying with the doors open. how'd you like to try that mom? check out this video-that's the same helicopter we used, but we didn't do any fun tricks like that. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGu45s1_QPU
another site on the river was boat accessed, not as exciting as the helicopter, but fun. the last project was a railroad side extension that we got to ride a highrail on. that's the cool trucks with dropdown rail wheels. it sounded cooler than it was though, just like riding in a truck at 30 mph. but i can say i did it!

which brings us to this moment, heather in between projects, at home feeling like it's winter. i'm dying to go ride my bike but that wouldn't be much fun in the rain. so here i am, finishing small christmas projects and putting off redoing the button band on my fjörgyn viking sweater. i should have picked up more stitches for it cuz of my selvedge stitches . oh well.

last week chuck and i went on a "fishing trip" that ended up not having much to do with fishing. we went down to valdez. everyone talks about it lie it's cool so i was expecting maybe a real town or something. don't know what i was thinking. it's a small village with not much besides fishing. we went to their dinky museums, where i got going about the poor displays and the info not being accessible. luckily chuck was very understanding about my archaeologist quirk. and the pinks were running so we fished for a couple hours, but they weren't biting. some people were snagging them, but i don't think that's fair, plus it's against the regs. we got some cool pics of them swarming the mouth of this one creek with a weir. that's why they snag, there's so many of them the hooks get caught on fins and bodies since they're not biting. too focused on reproducing. hmmm.........know any people like that? hehehe.

valdez took about a day, then we drove up to chitina, our main destination. the reds were running there. for some reason these different salmon species get called bycolor names here, not their real names, so i forget what they really are. sorry. but anyway, the reds don't bite either so you dipnet. that's all anyone goes to chitina for, and it's even smaller than valdez. (i did forget to mention valdez has some glaciers and hiking, but we didn't have time for it.) but there's 2 places to fish in chitina: off the shore under the bridge, or downstream by climbing down cliffs or getting dropped off by boat and tying yourself to rocks. we of course were going for the free, less dangerous route of fishing off the bridge. alas, the river wasreally high, chuck said about 3 times its normal size, and there was no dry ground to stand on. the ghetto campgrounds (just clearings with gravel on the side of the road) were packed because one of them was flooded out. crazy. and the boat charters cost 90 bucks a person, which we were not prepared to pay. not to mention we didn't bring rope or thermals for staying out all night to catch our limit. that was the other thing, the fish weren't coming in very fast cuz the river was high. so we're hoping to go back in a week or so and try again.

we moved on to kennicott mine then. so we made it to all 3 places we planned on, but without any salmon kennicott was the coolest place though. they had almost normal campgrounds, and it was very peaceful. kennicott is a historic copper mine from the early 1900s. so we checked it out, it was cool. the nat'l park service bought it a few years back and they're slowly restoring the buildings around it. there was actually a survey crew there on one of them, and we learned more from them. they won't be restoring all the buildings, but stabilizing them so people can still wander around them. they're on a steep mountainside, and already leaning something awful, so that's probably a good thing. but it'll be cool to have a few restored with machinery etc. there was one semi-restored cottage but it was totally empty so we didn't learn much from that. there's also a glacier there (it's part of the wrangell-st. elias nat'l park) with some trails up to the old mines too. plus there's a tour that actually goes through the main refinment building. we thought it was a rip-off at first (why pay for something if you don't have to?) at $20/pers but found out it takes 2 1/2 hours. so we were all for taking it, but still had to drive home that night. so we reserved the tour and the glacier hikes for another trip. we figured if we had only gone to kennicott we would have been happy. there's a good variety of things to do there, and the people are friendly. some places you go treat you like dumb tourists even if you tell them you're from AK. so we liked it there.

so i'm going to see about getting some pics posted. promises, promises. and maybe i'll start blogging more often.

we can dream, can't we?

the only one more bored than the students

i'm a computer lab teacher today, hence the post. yay for jobs that let you do what you want (sometimes). i finally got over my cold, which was more of a cough. and, typically, yesterday chuck got a sore throat and started coughing today. so i guess he's going to be coughing for a week now like i was. :( bummer for him.

dance class was fun yesterday. we started east coast swing, and learned a turn in the foxtrot. i don't think we did anything with the waltz. we did get a practice CD with music for all 3 dances, so we can practice at home. hoo-ra. practice would help. we don't do too bad, surprisingly. those folk dance classes must have helped my coordination and gracefulness more than i thought because it's been easy to pick up steps. i almost feel like a good dancer. but most of all it's fun. we're lucky to have a big deck we can dance on, otherwise we wouldn't have enough space inside to dance.

i finished the mystery yarn socks. . . well except for grafting the toes. what can i say, it's not the funnest thing in the world, and i don't have to do it yet. i'm starting the foot on the second hedera sock. in the process of doing the heel, i realized why the heel on the first sock looked so short. because it was. i did half the number of heel rows i should have. duh. but of course the sock is done now, so the internal dilemma is whether or not to take out the whole beautifully finished foot (including grafted toes) to lengthen the heel, or to just leave it becuase, hey who's going to see the heel but me? the perfectionist side might win out, but then again the lazy side might. we'll have to see.

the sides and back for the fjörgyn sweater are all done, so i just have to bind off the shoulders together and i'll be ready for the hood. i'm so almost done with that sweater that it's killing me. if only it were smaller, i'd take it to school and be done with it already.

the snow is finally all gone from our backyard. it did leave a small, mosquito breeding pool in its place though. the first mosquitos are so big, it's like i forget from year to year how big they are. luckily they're also very slow, which means i can kill more of them. the smaller ones are faster. but back to the yard, obviously dwayne never raked leaves. we've got our rakes and we're working on plans for gardens and flowers and things. we bought crocus bulbs, a wonderful mass of them, that i had hoped to plant before spring so i could see them peeping out of the snow. that's one of my favorite memories from sweden, crocuses in spring. but alas, not only did dwayne never rake, he never put real grass or topsoil in. he scraped off the moss to (sort of) level out the yard but there's just loess open for weeds and rosehips, the nastiest spiny thorny plant around. i like the rosehips and the flowers, but not so much the spikes. i still have some in my work clothes from last year. so we're going to have to do a real make over before we get to our garden or flowers or herbs. *sigh* i found this fascinating book in anchorage last week called, lasagna gardening, where you layer natural materials and end up with good topsoil. sounds way better than the traditional way, and more like nature's way. i'm thinking of trying it, but besides waiting for the mosquito swamp to dry out, dwayne still has a huge truck he has to drive out through the back yard. it just wouldn't do to go through all the effort of fixing a garden spot to have it run over by dwayne later. so we're still waiting on that.

tonight the most important improvement to our house is finally being made. we're putting in our new hot water tank. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i can finally wash my hair in hot water and maybe have enough warm water to shave my legs! i'm excited. nothing can be better than a hot shower.