Taxes & snow

This morning was my annual visit to our family accountant. He's done our taxes for very many years now and it's always a pleasant meeting. What's great is that he recently moved from a midtown building to a new lower hillside office less than 2 miles from our house AND this place is above a yummy coffee shop. Score! Needless to say I enjoyed a coconut mocha after the appointment.

Overall everything looks good and I told Mr. Tax Man that D would be coming with me next February because by that time we'll be filing taxes together. Cuz we'll be married! Yay!

Here are a few random photos from the week. Since we're gaining daylight, I actually get to see the sun set after work. This photo was taken around 6 p.m...

Lots of snow fell upon us this week! Good news for skiing. But it has made the roads treacherous -- I slid through an intersection this morning. Full on SLID THROUGH, brakes screeching, white knuckles on the steering wheel, swearing through my teeth...the whole deal. Thank goodness no one was waiting at the other light. The people at the bus stop got a good show.

Snow fall - photos from the confines of our warm, dry dining room...

And one last one from my office window...notice the cloud cover obscuring the Chugach Range...

A coworker gifted me a flower bulb and it's taken about 6 weeks to get to this point, but I finally see flowers peeking through! I think it's a crocus?

Wedding update

For her wedding, a friend of mine recently looked into renting the grounds and lodge of a small local ski resort (Arctic Valley), located in the Chugach Mountains above Anchorage. For a 24-hour period, it costs $2,900 all-inclusive (grounds, lodge, equipment rental). I think my eyes bugged out a bit when she said that.

I am so thankful that our facility rental for the Tern Lake Inn is much less than that. We have the whole Inn reserved for 3 full days (not just 24-hours) and are able to use their tables/chairs/glassware as part of the rental. Plus the owners will set-up/take-down and clean up everything afterwards. Yes!

I'm happy to report that my wedding shoes have arrived! After tearing into the box and nervously trying them on, I was relieved to discover that they fit and are beautiful. I know green is an unconventional choice for wedding shoes, but I don't want to look back on our day and have it resemble all of the other cookie-cutter weddings out there. D and I are unique and our wedding should reflect that.

On the home front

A run of unusually warm weather started last week and managed to melt most of the snow off of the main roadways.We still have snow in the yard and a buildup of ice in the driveway, but it's totally gone from the back deck!

This is what I call "fake-out spring weather." With the balmy, 40 degree temperatures we get lulled into a false sense of spring, and them BAM! All of a sudden the weather turns cold and it's 20 degrees again. And on top of that we still have at least 2 months of winter left. At least it's sunny outside...

The sun is really rejuvenating. We're gaining more than 5 minutes per day, and it's still light outside when I leave my office, anywhere between 5:30 and 6 pm. I even wore my sunglasses yesterday when driving out to meet a friend for lunch.

At home D has begun demo on the basement laundry room!!! I'm super stoked to have a clean and finished area in which to do laundry. The room wasn't horrible to begin with, but it wasn't the most pleasant place to spend a lot of time in. As you can see, D has removed all of the drywall and last night he started re-insulating the walls. This room is very cold in the winter and I may very well have set the speed record for laundry folding last month due to a lack of consistent heat in this space.

Here it is right after we moved in. We plan on adding a toilet and new sink/base to increase our bathroom tally from 2 to 2.5 (and bump up our home's worth!) The washer and dryer on the right side.

If you click on the photo below to enlarge it, you'll see the Nutty Professor is keeping D company while he works. He says he found the photo stuck in the wall. :-)

This room is adjacent to our home's crawl space.

Will update with more photos as carpenter D makes additional progress!

Dinner, Symphony & Porcupine

This month is just kicking my butt -- I feel so behind on a number of things, one of them being this blog! I thought about blogging last night but then I ended up spending 3 hours in the kitchen, making garlic bread, caribou lasagna from scratch and a very yummy batch of chocolate tarts in coconut bowls. So dinner was tres' delicious, if I do say so myself. I just about passed out from the heat though, with two burners on the stove going strong and the oven working overtime.

The Symphony on Saturday evening was really great. I haven't been for quite a while now and forgot how much I enjoy listening to live music. It was a lovely evening. And my workplace got some great PR exposure! 

I had a request to post some porcupine photos, so Mim, these are for you!

Last month I blogged about D and I having dinner with friends, with an unusual meat as the main course. D shot this porcupine out at the cabin and our friends cooked it up, using a cookbook we also have at home, Cooking Alaskan. What's funny is that I've looked through that book and don't recall ever seeing the section on porcupines!

Both Jay and Sara work for Fish & Game, so they are no strangers to cooking up Alaskan-type meals. However, porcupine was a first for them. Jay says he laid the animal on its back and then started to clean it by going in by the belly (no quills there). After butchering it, Sara let it cook overnight in a crockpot with lots of veggies and bacon. The four of us thought it was good, but really the meat didn't have a strong taste one way or another. The bacon helped to give it a good flavor.

Jay says he'll boil down the skull and use it for education purposes at work. The teeth really fascinate me, look at how yellow and long they are...yikes!

Long claws too...good for digging and climbing trees.

A closer look at the quills, nestled close to the skin.

D kept the frozen porcupine outside until I could take it over to Jay & Sara's for cleaning. As he brought it in, somehow a quill stuck him and you can see how tenacious the thing is.

A break

Sorry peeps, life is just too busy right now...will try to blog sometime next week!

Paper fetching

Our local paper has been steadily shrinking over the last few years. Weekday editions are no more than 2-3 sections and the Sunday paper is depressingly thin. This all means the Anch. Daily News is really pushing subscriptions via neighborhood solicitations.

We signed up last month for a 10-week stint and guess who LOVES going out to fetch the paper every morning? It may help that it is usually wrapped in an orange plastic sleeve and looks remarkably like Drift's orange retreiving dummies...

Back to blogging

February is always a busy month at work and I'm up to my eyeballs in Heart Month events. Three seminars and a health fair are out of the way, but we still have 4 remaining seminars plus a symphony concert sponsorship/marketing tie-in. So I'll be volunteering at the symphony this Saturday night, which is not so bad because we also get to enjoy the concert for free.

This week is also girls' craft night (Wednesday) and book club (Thursday). Sometime this week I will continue my search for the right shade of green tissue paper. I need to start on a wedding craft that will go along with the ceramic guest favors that my sister and her boyfriend have so generously begun creating for the big day.

D has found two of these dog booties out on the trails somewhere, so we drive Drift crazy by making him wear them around the house. The dog acts like we wrapped his feet in styrofoam! It's pretty entertaining for us to see him high-stepping around the house like a Lippezaner pony!

Bachelorette party

My friend Sandra's bachelorette party was a rocking good time: burlesque lessons (complete with feather boas and elbow-length gloves), an "exotic dancer" at Bernie's and a party bus that shuffled 18 of us from bar to bar on Saturday night for a scavenger hunt of sorts.

Our bachelorette - she weighs all of 115 pounds so I'm not surprised she got buzzed pretty fast.

There was another bachelorette party upstairs at Bernie's so we were able to see this "cop" put on a show for the other bride-to-be. I'm not going to post any of the other photos of him!

Our party bus was pretty great -- drove us all around town and there was no waiting in line outside at any bar or cover charge for us.

Me, Carrie and Cindy. This may have been at the Anchor downtown. Those feather boas gave us all pink necks -- the dye rubbed off on our skin!

Sadly, Sandra did not make it to the end of the night -- she imbibed one too many cocktails and went home at 1 a.m.! She was fine the next afternoon though, and has landed in Hawaii by now for her destination wedding. D and I had talked about attending but we have too many things going on right now and are trying to save for our own wedding. I'm trying not to think of sandy beaches and warm weather right now!

Ski for Women 2

More Ski for Women photos -- some of the ladies go ALL OUT with their costumes! There were tons of other dressed-up groups but I couldn't snap photos of them all and then once out on the trail I had other things to worry about, mainly avoiding crashes with the 100 other people in my skiing space. Good times.

Hippies

Skeeters - complete with peacock-feather antennae

Solar Bears (instead of polar bears, ha ha) -- they looked like pasty white ski bunnies to us

Tigers

Mr. Potato Heads

Crabs, along with a smattering of flamingos, hula girls and a couple members of the Wizard of Oz

Airplanes, plus sandwich fixin's on the bottom

Gnomes! Couldn't get a photo from the front, but trust me, they had beards and everything. Way cute.

The overachieving butterfly group

More airplanes

Crayola crayons

Ski for Women

It's hard to believe that this was my first year participating in the Ski for Women, but I never really thought about it before and then last year I bruised my ribs in Mexico and couldn't take part. Just four of us girls were able to do it this year, but for 2011 we plan on getting a big group together and donning costumes! We already have an idea picked out and everything.

The Ski for Women always takes place early on Superbowl Sunday and is a fundraiser for awareness of domestic abuse against women and children. There are different race categories, plus a "party wave" that is untimed and open for skiers of all levels. Since our little group didn't do costumes this year we were able to get to Kincaid a little later and then watch the start of the costume contest.

The butterfly costumes were all handmade. The fabric was stretched onto frames and then hand-painted. Somewhow they attached the frames to sturdy backpacks. After seeing the wings up close I'm not sure how they were able to ski in those heavy things! This group wins the overall costume contest every year -- this year was no exception.

I heard that over 1500 women turned out for the event. After trying to avoid collisions on hills and ski around people, I believe it! The trails at Kincaid are pretty wide but certainly were never meant to accomodate hundreds of skiers at one time. This was the starting area and it was about 10 times wider than the trails.

 

Us girls. Karen, Sara, me and Cindy. Sara just got engaged on Christmas and is getting married in October, so we've been able to talk weddings. We have the same sort of ideas and design aesthetic when it comes to our upcoming nuptuals, and it's been nice to bounce ideas off each other. She and Jay cooked the porcupine for us last Thursday -- it was surprisingly good.

More photos of the costumes tomorrow!

TV spot

This post talked about how I helped a friend out by appearing in a tv commercial. Well, that spot has started to run on local stations and can be viewed on the Anchorage Animal Control website!

Look under "Related Links" on the right side of the page and then click on "Dog Licensing Video." Or you can check it out via this direct Facebook link.


After watching it last night, I kinda wish I had pulled my hair back or something...

Weekend roundup

We are waaaay busy at work, and then I come home and have stuff to do there too -- so I need to take a few days off from blogging.

We're having dinner with some friends on Thursday (they're cooking up a porcupine that D shot out at the cabin this past weekend!), then Friday I need to cook up some treats for my friend Karen's birthday party on Saturday, and Sunday is the Ski for Women, which I am participating in (couldn't do it last year because of the bruised ribs - remember those?). I'll take photos of everything and post next week for all of you faithful blog readers.

I did have a good weekend though...we celebrated my friend Cindy's birthday with dinner at a hole-in-the-wall pizza place and a Muldoon pub crawl! (Muldoon being the name of the road on which the aforementioned pubs are located.) And D had a fun snowmachining weekend -- shot a couple fox and finally nabbed that pesky porcupine that had taken up residence underneath the cabin. They tend to gnaw on wood and that is always bad for a wood cabin!

Have a great week everybody.

Pet roundup

A few photos of our furry dependents...

Hello!

Pets aren't allowed on the furniture, but once in a while Drift gets to hang out with us on the couch or bed. He's usually pretty happy about that...

This is the hallway leading to all of the upstairs bedrooms and Drift sleeps next to our bedroom door every night. He does this weird curl-up thing with his paws when laying down.

His kennel is right outside our sliding door on the back deck. Doesn't stay out there for long periods of time in the winter though.

I bought him a new softy toy for the new year. Drift's old favorite was "Birdie," but "Ducky" goes everywhere with him now. The squeaker is already broken! He knows the names of all of his toys and likes to fetch them for us.

Little Dude is a norwegian forest cat and has the breed's typical stocky body and very thick coat, which is prone to matting. I get him shaved 1-2 times per year.

His most recent haircut! We just laugh and laugh at him right after he comes home -- it's such a weird look on a cat. I call him my big sausage casing, but he seems to really like how it feels.

A rare treat -- soft cat food. The third cat is very old now and only comes down about once a day.

The vet finally called me back after receiving Pepper's bloodwork from the lab. Turns out she has a very hyper thyroid and we're going to start her on medication asap. Poor kitty.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Still alive

Hi all, I've been really busy lately but will try to post some things tomorrow!