When you live in Alaska, spring is a special time of year.  Not as dripping with awesomesauce as summer with its 18-hours of daylight, but leaving winter behind is always worth celebrating.

We mark the beginning of spring with the Vernal Equinox on March 21 (interestingly, Russians mark it less scientifically with an arbitrary calendar date, March 1), but I take great joy in noticing the more visual milestones.  For instance, when:

Sunny days in winter are welcome, but the lack of any insulating cloud cover means the sun has no real warmth.  For me, spring ends — and summer begins — on that magical, arbitrary day when “sunny and clear” actually means that the air will be warmer than on overcast days.

That hasn’t happened yet, but I think it’ll be any day now.

Global warming, huh? A couple summers ago, I thought that might be the case, but Juneau has been cold this winter. And piled high with snow.

For the second time this season, my Jeep is buried beyond the point of easy extraction. When the weather gets like this, it’s just easier to dig out and scrape one car; Oksana drops me off at work in the morning now.

Last month, our local ski resort, Eaglecrest, recorded the world’s highest snow-pack at 180 inches. And that was well before last week’s blizzard. Up until then, we’d had our fair share of “Winter Storm Warnings.” Those aren’t too bad. Snow comes down, the roads get slick, maybe the schools shut down for the day. Unfortunately, besides having evening classes cancelled, the university plugged right along. I expect more from my blizzards!

10 to 17 inches of snow was called for, but it was the wind that had people worried. It was a dry snow and 65mpg gusts were kicking it all back up in the air, reducing visibility. When the actual blizzard warning hit on Thursday — “A BLIZZARD WARNING MEANS A SERIOUS THREAT TO LIFE AND PROPERTY IS ALREADY OCCURRING OR IMMINENT. TRAVEL IS DISCOURAGED UNLESS IT IS AN ABSOLUTE EMERGENCY.” — I expected that, on Friday, the university would finally have a snow day. Nope.

Let me tell you, it’s quite disappointing to go to work when you were fully expecting to climb back into bed after a quick radio check. It’s inversely proportional to joy you feel the following Monday when you discover that even more snow piled up the night before and you’re going to get a three-day weekend after all!

Yeah, Juneau was essentially shut down on Monday. All federal employees and school workers (including the university, yay!) exchanged slippery roads with sightline-blocking snow banks for warm comforters and bad daytime television shows. If not for the World of Warcraft, I probably wouldn’t even have realized it until I got to work. The possibility of a snow day hadn’t occurred to me; the TV and radio aren’t usually on in the mornings at Casa Midgett. But when I logged on to WoW (“checkin ‘ my auctions,” you know), two friends immediately sent me the same message: “SNOW DAY!” It was a wonderful surprise… even if I did have to shovel and scrape Oksana’s car for her. She still had to go to work.

Now, a couple days later, the temperature is finally climbing above freezing for the first time in weeks. The snow on the ground has turned from fine and powdery to clumpy and wet. Most of downtown is situated at the bottom of steep mountain slopes and is under threat of high avalanche warnings. It’s not over yet… We may get more snow before the rain really comes, but tons of miserable slush is definitely in our future. I’m not looking forward to the spring thaws — can’t the snow just sublimate? — I’m ready to feel the sun’s warmth again.

I’ve been working on that book idea — taking the 175,000+ words and pictures in this blog and archiving them in a dead tree format.  I didn’t think a crash course in publishing would be this time consuming. 

First, I grabbed a hardcover book template from Lulu.com.  It’s a Word document and the page numbering, margins, and the like were already set.  Next, I needed to figure out how to get the content off my blog and into the blank document.  I found the easiest way to preserve the formatting was to copy and paste directly from my html pages.  Took quite awhile, but all the italics, bolds, hyperlinks, and pictures pasted into the document essentially intact.

While doing that, I managed to do something smart.  I set up a number of styles and applied them to specific sections of each entry.  Photos are centered, captions are italicized, dates are right justified, titles are big and bold, comments are formatted differently than the body text, stuff like that.  I learned some neat things about styles in the process, but I haven’t actually used them yet.  When I’m ready, however, I’ll be able to make global formatting changes with just a couple clicks.  New font for every titles?  Center justify every date?  Perfect.

Right now I’m staring down 12 Megabytes of text and photos, spread across 462 pages.  It’s so very tempting to simply fire this off to the press and call it good.  Instead, I’m hoping to persevere long enough to make this something I’ll be proud to show off.  That’s not going to be easy.  I’m learning that the web is a very different medium than a book.  I’ve got more questions than answers at this point.

(more…)

Yesterday we received a letter from the INS.

Wait a minute, back up.

Back in November, after four years of marriage, the INS finally allowed Oksana to apply for U.S. citizenship.  She spent a number of hours filling out applications, gathering supporting documents, and writing checks for something like $400 in form filing fees.  Then we packaged it all up in a manilla envelope and mailed it off to Nebraska.  A month or so later, we received a nice form letter in the mail.  “Thank you for applying for ___U.S. Citizenship___.  You can expect to hear from us within __365___ days.  Don’t call us, we’ll call you.”  The wording was different, but that was the exact message, honest.  We resolved ourselves to a long wait.

So yesterday, when an official envelope arrived, I thought it was going to be time for Oksana to start reading up on the Civil War.  After scanning the letter (which, by the way, curiously uses design elements cribbed from our currency), however, I realized that it was just notifying us that she had to get fingerprinted.  Again.

I don’t know how many times she’s been fingerprinted for this naturalization process.  This might be the third time.  I have a question:  Isn’t one of the reasons we use fingerprints as a form of identification because THEY DON’T CHANGE?  What are they hoping to accomplish here?

Also, isn’t it just like a government agency to notify you that they’ve scheduled your appointment without consulting you?  “You are hearby commanded to appear at the official INS office at 3pm on March 6th.”  Fine, but what if we’d been on vacation or something?  I’m just glad she doesn’t have to fly to Anchorage again as a part of the process.  (Something tells me they don’t actually offer the citizenship test here in Juneau, so it looks like the cost of another trip to Anchorage or Seattle will be added to her citizenship’s bottom line.)

But, hey.  Someday it’ll be cool.  Oksana will be able to vote for the president, get a federal job, or whatever.  I’m just looking forward to the day when we can both travel under the same passport.

Anyone that knows me well, knows that if I’m awake, I probably have an open can of Diet Coke nearby.  It’s a vice I’ve had since high school, when my step-dad, a diabetic, kept nothing else in the ‘fridge.  When people express wonder that I drink it so early in the morning (and so often in the hours thereafter), I compare it to your typical coffee addiction.  It’s simply a caffeine carrier, one without calories.

My family knows this.  Whenever I visit, my mom grabs a case from the store before I arrive.  My friends know it, too.  They can always count on Diet Coke being stocked in our ‘fridge.  Yesterday, I reaped the first benefit of having a semi-public habit.  One friend, a friend who shall remain unnamed (just in case this could get him in trouble), stopped by my office with two bottles of Coca-Cola’s newest product, Diet Coke Plus.

I hadn’t even heard the rumors, yet, so it was a complete surprise to me.  Diet Coke Plus is “Diet Coke with Vitamins & Minerals.”  10-15% of your recommended daily allowance for Niacin, Vitamin B6 and B12, Magnesium and Zinc. 

My first taste wasn’t very revealing; I’d been chomping on Valentine’s Day Cinnamon Altoids.  A few minutes later, though, I took another swig.  To me, it tasted like Diet Coke… with just a little indefinable difference.  Kind of like drinking Coke Zero or Diet Coke with Splenda.  They’re all trying for the same taste, but they just can’t quite get there.  Later that evening, Oksana said that it “tastes like the Diet Coke in Russia.”

Anyway, I thought it was quite cool to be one of the first people (at least in Juneau) to taste Diet Coke Plus; not even my secret friend had sampled it.  The local Coca-Cola distributor hasn’t decided if they’ll carry the product or not.  They’ve got only one batch, and as far as I know, it may not even reach the shelves.  Our market is so small, they just can’t afford to carry every one of the umpteen billion varieties Coca-Cola pushes on us.  Which is sad.  I could be Niacin deficient.

I had a fun wake up call this morning.  After falling asleep at about 4:45am — what can I say; I’m on vacation — Oksana ran in at 6:49am and said, “Arlo, wake up!  It’s an earthquake!”

“Holy crap!” I replied.  I bounced out of bed and stood in the doorway just as the trembling faded away.

Wait, that doesn’t do my reaction justice.

“Holy crap!” I said, not understanding what she said, but reacting only to her tone of voice.  I stumbled out of bed, clad only in my undies, and stood in the bedroom doorway desperately trying to keep my eyelids open.  I may have only imagined the last of the rumbling, or perhaps my conscious mind was pulling up memories of the sensation from the previous 10 seconds of being fully asleep.  Oksana left me there and went to the front door.  It was already over.

I suspect that after most earthquakes, people take a few seconds to wonder “Was that really an earthquake?  Might have been thunder, or maybe an explosion.”  We live in an apartment above the post office, so our first reaction was “Did the freight truck run into building?  Again?”

Oksana was sure it’d been an earthquake, though.  She was in the bathroom when everything on the shelves started rattling around.  Her first thought, of course, was the post office truck, but then our notoriously precarious entertainment center started to wobble in the living room.  She heard all the knickknacks on it rocking madly back and forth.  By the time she woke me up, it was pretty much over.  Fortunately, nothing in our house fell over, down, or off anything.

I wanted to check to see if it had been a earthquake, and the first thing I could think of was to get online.  I knew about the USGS earthquake site and I called it up.  Unfortunately, they update in “near real time” and an update 30 seconds after the shaking ended was an unreasonable expectation.  I thought that the Juneau Empire or Google News might eventually verify it for me, but not for awhile yet.

I was still struggling to keep my eyes open when Oksana went back to getting ready for work.  I began to feel nauseated.  All of a sudden my mouth started watering and I was on the verge of throwing up.  I laid down on the couch, pulled a blanket over me, and promptly fell back asleep.  I have no idea why I felt so sick.  Maybe it was the shaking, or more likely the extremely rapid onset of stress (“Holy crap!”)  Or maybe it was just, you know, morning sickness.

At a more reasonable hour, I got up off the couch and checked again online for some news.  Yep, all three sources confirmed it.  5.6 on the Richter scale, roughly 160 miles northwest of Juneau, and 5.9 miles underground (+ or – 5.5 miles, heh).  Bet Haines and Skagway were bumpy this morning.

I thought about calling Oksana to let her know, but then she listens to the radio at work and they were sure to have had that on the news.  Duh.  The radio.  And the TV.  That’s how I could have quickly confirmed it earlier.  No doubt the morning radio hosts would have been fielding calls right away.

Funny how I defaulted into thinking that the internet would be the best way to get information on an earthquake.

I got a call the other day that, frankly, surprised the hell out of me.  It was ACS, calling to tell me that they’d read my blog.

The call came in while I was asleep.  I woke up enough to grab the handset and check the caller ID.  “ACS PRODUCT MAN,” it said.  It occurred to my sleep-addled brain that it might have something to do with what I’d written, but it also occurred to me that they might be trying to sell me something.  Either way, I didn’t want to talk to THE MAN.  I settled back down, keeping an ear out for the answering machine.  It didn’t pick up when it was supposed to, but then my cell phone started to ring.  “How the hell did they get my cell number?” I thought.  Then I remembered they were the phone company.  (And later Oksana reminded me that we left our cell numbers on our answering machine’s outgoing message.)  I was tired.

When I finally checked my voice mail, there was a message from an ACS employee who said that she’d come across my blog over the weekend.  (Whoa.)  She sounded apologetic and wanted to offer Oksana and I a “special offer” to make things right.  I had a brainstorm and checked Google.  Sure enough, my blog was already on the first page of results for “Alaska Communications Systems.”  Could that be how they found it?

Listening to her message again, I noticed that she sounded most concerned about the treatment we’d received at the Juneau office.  It’s true, much of our frustration came out at the counter, but I’d hoped my writing conveyed that the letters from their marketing / retail sales department was the heart of the issue.   

I never expected to get anything out of ACS by writing in my blog.  Maybe in the back of my mind I thought that something might come of it, but honestly I was just venting my frustration.  I worried over the impression they must have had of me.  I didn’t want to be “that guy” on the other end of an unpleasant phone call.  I returned her call.

(more…)