Bad Ideas

Well, I've been a little quiet lately. I'm laying low because I've been a wee bit indisposed.

It all started so innocently. I got this cold. A little tiny cold. The wimpiest cold ever. No big. But then, I made a mistake. A Very Bad Mistake.

See, I posted on FaceBook that I had the wimpiest cold ever. In effect, I laughed at it. I gave it a virtual raspberry. I might as well have waved my metaphorical private parts at its aunties (silly English ka-nnnigit... with apologies to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) Ultimately, it boils down to this: I taunted the virus.

Never taunt the virus.

Thing is, if you taunt the virus, it goes, "Oh, yeah?" and then it calls in reinforcements in the form of a secondary bacterial bronchopneumonia. And having pneumonia of any form, let me tell you, is a Bad Idea.

It's not my first round with pneumonia. I had it when I was an intern. I worked every day for a month with it. This also: Bad Idea. However, I was in a seven-intern program and we'd already lost two: One had broken her leg whilst cowboy dancing (no one could say she wasn't enthusiastic) and the other had wrecked her motorcycle. Five interns can (with great difficulty) do seven interns' work. Four interns can't. I knew if I went down the whole house of cards was going down with me. I wasn't going to do that to my intern mates. So, I lay on my side at night, feeling the secretions rolling down my airways, and then I coughed and coughed until I cleared them out. Then I rolled to my other side and did it again. I started on antibiotics and I got up in the mornings and I went to work. I also developed an interesting drug eruption as a result of an allergy to the antibiotic, but that's another story. But I got through it, my injured intern mates recovered and returned to work (one of them in a wheelchair at first), and I gradually got better. The intern program returned to full strength (for a while, anyway, until one of the interns left to give birth slightly prematurely - some people will do ANYthing to get out of their intern presentation! - and another had to leave the program for personal reasons.)

However, the entire experience left an indelible impression on me. Coughing your brains out for a month will do that to you. Go figure.

Which is how I knew, four days after the wimpy cold had started, that I was heading into Big Trouble. One day I was fine - mild sore throat, no cough, a little stuffy, a little blah. The next day I started coughing. Still no big, not much coughing. Par for the course. The next day, like a fool, I posted the wimpy cold status on FB.

Day after that, coughing a little heavier. By that night, it was kicking my ass. But I was off the next day; I figured I'd sleep it off. Still no big. Except that by the evening of the following day I Could. Not. Breathe.

If I concentrated hard I could draw a full breath, but I was drawing it against resistance, and it took effort to exhale. This - slow, deep respirations with effort - is an obstructive pattern, which indicates airway narrowing. A rapid, shallow pattern would indicate restriction, such as would occur with air or fluid inside the chest, anything compressing the lung tissue. But I couldn't tolerate any compression of my chest - not leaning back against the pillow, not laying down - and I had to concentrate on every breath. I didn't need a stethoscope to hear the crackles and rales in my chest. I could hear them just fine without (and feel them even better).

Okey-dokey. Time for a pulse-ox, and I may be heading to the people hospital to admit myself.

I struggled into clothes and tottered down to my truck. It was cold and the wind was absolutely howling - gusts into the 70 mph range. I warmed my truck up for 10 minutes - it took that length of time to recover from the trip down there, anyway - and I drove to work, concentrating on driving, concentrating on fighting the heavy winds as they snatched at my truck and bounced it around, concentrating on breathing. I made it to the clinic, went inside and leaned on a table for a while til I could breathe again. I put the pulse oximeter on my finger. I waited for it to pick up my heart rate - 120, too high - and my oxygenation - 90, too low. On room air I should be 98 to 100%, and standing at rest my heart rate ought to be in the high 80 to low 90 range.

This means that my lungs are impaired, but not as much as my bronchioles. My oxygenation is down about ten percent, but that's better than my respiratory effort, which is up by a factor of two or three above normal. I've never had this much effort breathing - ever in life - and that's for just standing there, doing nothing. Still, 90 isn't good - but it isn't dying, either.

Okay then. No hospitalization. On the other hand, big Yes to getting some meds (and yes, I do have a people doctor, why do you ask?)

So I started on antibiotics. I'm a proponent or reserving the use of antibiotics for those situations that merit them, which means I never take them for a cold. Especially not for a wimpy cold. But if said wimp-cold calls in a nice bacterial backup - okay, then. AB's it is.

Two hours later I felt markedly improved. Pulse ox had climbed to 92 (okay, not great, but I was getting it without the extreme effort.) I went home. I laid down. I slept. A miracle has occurred, and I can do both now. Or maybe it's not so much a miracle as the glory of antibiotics, appropriately applied, and thank God I live in a time and place where these things are available.

Meanwhile I got my truck stuck at the bottom of my driveway. The screaming winds have blown away the sand on my drive and polished the ice to something that even my Yak Trax are slipping on. It was a struggle to make it up the hill in the howling winds and the dark, but fortunately for Christmas (thanks, Dad) I got a headlamp that I believe might be visible in Russia. This means I could see even the slightest patch of traction, so I managed it in a under ten minutes, and only had to stop for breath every twenty feet or so. Easy-peasy. Fortunately I'd taken one Border collie along for moral support (I wanted two, but couldn't manage both), and he kept running back to check on me, facing into the knife-blade of the wind to watch me with quizzical gravity, moving up the drive when I did, as if concerned I'd forgotten the way. Every time I stopped, he'd run back down to me, watch, wait, lead me again.

Getting inside the house was lovely.

I slept and coughed the next day. I drank water and ate antibiotics and felt better. The following day I took a sick day and did it again. I called Rock Ridge and asked them if they had any miracle solutions for my driveway. They did, they assured me, and if I needed anything - food, medications, help of any description - I was to call them for rescue.

Gotta love Alaskans.

The next day I had challenges to face. Challenge number one was getting out of bed. That managed, I faced the Big One: making it down the drive to my truck, preferably without falling and breaking anything important. I put on my Yak Trax and crept out onto the icy drive, into the face of the howling winds. In the main, there are trees to grab onto - well, saplings, at least - and maybe a tiny rim of traction right at the very edge of the drive. Most of it I managed to do completely upright. Part of it I did literally on my hands and knees, where it was too slick and steep for the Yak Trax to grip the ice. The bank beside the driveway is devoid of both snow and ice, but the dirt is frozen so hard that there is no traction on it; my boots just slip off. I solved this by toeing in hard to the bank, bracing my knees against the steep slope of it, and using my frozen hands to find meager hand-holds of equally-frozen knobs of dirt knurling the surface. I crab-walked down that part sideways on my knees, but soon the bank's slope levels out and there is real footing again. Ah, success: My truck is there, the door is open, the dog and I are inside. My hands ache with cold and I can't feel my fingers, but steps one and two are complete.

Challenge number next: starting the truck, which has not had its block heater plugged in in three days. It is three degrees at my house - and, most unusually when it's that cold, the wind is still screaming by at vicious speed. The wind-chill is brutal. This might be a problem. But no, the truck fires right up.

Okay, now all I have to do is ease it out of the driveway without sliding into the lake, and then do my solo day at work. Piece of cake. Well, maybe not a piece of cake, but at least manageable. After getting down the hill, the rest of the challenges combined seem reasonably undaunting. My staff hunts around and finds me cough drops. They help me wrestle the tough dogs. They volunteer to slap me helpfully on the back if I need help coughing. We treat everything that comes in the door successfully.

Time to go home. Parked in the teeth of the wind for almost eight hours, the truck is dreadfully cold and won't start. It floods, straining to kick the engine over. Crap. I regroup, press the gas pedal to the floor, coax, pray. She tries, fails. Tires again, fails. Then a little gift: She turns over for me now, gargling and choking, but fighting through it to roar into life. Bless you, my little Canyon. I love this truck. I know Rock Ridge would come rescue me if need be - and so would any number of others - but I want to go home, crawl under the down comforter surrounded by dogs, watch Phantom of the Opera again (love that score), sleep. And that's what I do, because Rock Ridge has made my driveway navigable again, and the truck climbs right up.

Today I am better, and continuing on. It'll be a bit before I'm back to normal - once things settle into my chest, they stay a while - but I'm on the mend. But this is why I haven't posted the Bison story I promised Jenny - or anything else, for that matter. I'll get to it, eventually. I promise.

Meanwhile, on the plus side, I'm up to 94% oxygenation (heart rate mercifully 89 now). As a handy bonus, I think that all the coughing must be an excellent abdominal exercise, since my stomach muscles are sore, sore, sore. (Somehow, however, I doubt that the Bronchopneumonia Ab Workout will catch on and make me a million dollars.) I can think, I can breathe, and while I still have a lot of coughing in my future, I am now on the up-slope.

Also, I've learned an important lesson: Never taunt the virus.

The Weather Wild

Okay, I actually do know that this is Alaska and I should expect weather extremes. That doesn't keep me from remarking on it from time to time; even we (who are used to it) find it dramatic at times.

This is a la nina year, which I was cheerfully told by a client would mean a colder-than-usual winter. I immediately cursed him roundly and then threatened him with bodily harm if he was right, but strangely, that has not changed things for me. It HAS been colder than usual, and that's not the extent of it.

For one thing, the weather predictors seem to have taken la nina as licence to lie to us more than usual. Okay, I know they aren't really lying; they're guessing. But they'll blithely promise us a 10-degree jump in temperature, with clouds and snow, and what we get is crystal clear skies and a 5 degree DROP in temperature. It's hard not to be annoyed by that, especially if your starting point is subzero.

For another thing, we had some wicked strong winds this winter. It started when I was at work one day; the temperature had come up, according to the thermometer at the clinic. However, the wind came up along with it, dropping the effective temperature. By evening, when I was getting ready to leave work, it was a challenge to open the back door at the clinic, and should you be so foolish to be coming in that door, you had to watch carefully that the wind didn't slam the door on your ankle hard enough to break it.

Well. THAT'S fun.

Even more fun was the fact that we'd had a recent snow, and all of it was now blowing southwest at a high rate of speed. There is, of course, the bright side: just walking to the truck, I got free dermabrasion from tiny sand-like grains of ice and road grit.

Mmmm. That's refreshing.

Moreover, once you stagger blindly across the parking lot and find your truck (mainly by feel, since you can't really open your eyes wider than miserly slits), you get to try to open the truck door. Since the truck is parked nose-on into the wind, this will require at least three tries, since on the first two the wind will snatch the door out of your rapidly-numbing hands and slam it shut again. The windshield will be hazy with airborne grit, but the truck will start faithfully.

Now comes the entertaining drive home. There will be a ground blizzard of epic proportions. This is disorienting to drive in for several reasons: First, you can't see the road itself, nor any lane lines or other markings. This is in part because it's dark out, and in part because the curtain of blowing snow is inches thick and not punctuated by much in the way of lulls or gaps. Second, as you squint at the river of snow flowing across the road, your eye wants to follow the motion, which makes it challenging not to let your wheel go with it. This effect is enhanced by the fact that the snow isn't crossing the road perpendicularly, but at something of an angle, making it harder to sort out visually where you are supposed to be aiming your vehicle. And last but not least, you're fighting the buffeting of the gale the entire time, trying to steer a straight course against the blustering tug of the wind on your rig, and through the shifting veil of snow concealing the road from your eye.

Eventually, however, you will arrive home, only to discover that, while the winds are lower at home, the ambient temp is also lower, which makes your truck sad. On the plus side, there's little drifting to contend with, and the winds are forecast to die down overnight.

As it turns out, those weather people lied about that. AGAIN.

In the morning the winds have picked up. Luckily it's a day off, so I can wait til daylight to go out and fight my way back into town (which I might not do if not for the fact that I have to return our on-call cell phone to the clinic). I warm up the truck, back down my hill, sashay my truck forward through the lightly-drifted part of my lower driveway, and pause to check for traffic before I pull out.

Oh, goodie. There are huge drifts across the road now. Yay. Not.

Sighing, I check that the hubs are locked and I pull out, gunning it to ramming speed. I break through the first drift, fishtailing in the deeper snow. Ten feet farther on I hit the second, and largest, drift. The truck shudders, hesitates, bogging down in the snow. The tires are struggling for purchase on the road, but the snow is too deep to allow it. But she's a good little truck and she digs in, slewing and yawing, and powers her way through. After that the last drift is a piece of cake, and we are on our way.

The wind is still grabbing at the truck, bullying it toward the shoulder. I keep two hands on the wheel and fight back. Luckily, the majority of snow available to blow has already blown wherever it's going to, and the visibility is decent. Not as luckily, there's still plenty of road grit.

Overhead, ravens are flying, as if nothing unusual is happening. Crazy Alaskan ravens.

On the way to work, I see a pickup bed topper turtled up in the ditch. Hmm. That's interesting. The wind tore a topper right off a truck, it seems. Even more interesting, further on, there is an entire camper - the kind that fits in a truck bed, with a sleeping compartment that rests on top of the cab - is sitting next to an intersection. It is upright, as if Dorothy's tornado came and plucked it off a truck and set it down complete, right next to the light post. Maybe we're not in Kansas anymore.

I looked to see if there were ruby slippers poking out from underneath, but I didn't see any.

I did, however, see a large piece of panelling flapping heavily against the storefront from which it has been half-torn free, and two street signs whose poles have been bent far enough over that the sign is swaying at knee-height in the verge of the road.

Last but not least, I see an entire 18-wheeler on its side in the ditch. It looks like this happened some hours ago - the site is abandoned, no Troopers or rescue personnel nearby - and the trailer is twisted at an awkward angle to the cab. I hope nobody was hurt.

Eventually I make the clinic, where the wind snatches my door open and tries (but fails) to rip it off its hinges. I stagger across wind-polished ice to the clinic, make it inside without having my ankle bear-trapped in the door, return the cell and catch my breath for a few minutes before braving the wind again.

Repeat for two more days.

Oh, well. It made a break from the cold, anyway. Unfortunately the cold returned thereafter, defying all predictions from the weather guessers that it was going to warm up tomorrow, warm up TOMORROW, I say, HEY! WARM UP!

No? Okay then. Who can I bribe?

I can't complain today. It came up 16 degrees overnight (to a balmy 12 degrees), and it is snowing: Big, light, fluffy crystalline flakes, beautiful to behold. On the road, not as beautiful, because it's snowing to white-out conditions and accumulating fast enough to glaze the roads. Luckily the snow plows are out plowing and sanding, and closer in to town, away from the influence of the Cook Inlet, the snow is lighter and not sticking. And now, drinking tea at the coffee shop and blogging, the sun is shining slantwise below the cloud cover and turning the thinning flakes to diamonds floating on the air. Rifts of blue are showing through the clouds - which is pretty, but probably means the temp will drop again.

Still and all, the light is coming back, which up here is the harbinger of winter's end. The brain defect I have - which calls the end of winter earlier and earlier every year - is fully operational, asserting to me that winter is practically over, all we have to do is January and then it's done, it's only a month more to go, and it could be worse: it could be raining.

Oh. Um... I didn't just curse myself, did I...?

Slow Fall Into Winter

Author's note: Writing time is being consumed a little by editing time. Sorry about that. Things may be a bit slower on the "posting" aspect for a while, as I work on editing for the book. I hope you can all bear with me for a bit....

It's been a beautiful fall here.

We deserve it, after last year. Last year we came out of winter into a late, chill spring, and endured a cold summer, a raw overcast fall and an early, bitterly frigid winter. By the time we got to this spring, we were getting a bit cranky - well, I was anyway - and it didn't help that this spring was late and unseasonably cold as well. It was quite a pain lambing in it, not least of the reasons being the incessant worry - til things warmed up - that the lambs would be suffering or at risk.

This summer, though - glorious. It was hot. I mean ACTUAL hot, not just Alaska hot. We had temps over 90 this summer in the valley - the first time that's happened since I moved here. We had a whole week where it was in the upper 80's when I went home at night, every evening, consecutively. I actually used the air conditioning in my truck. I know! Amazing!

Normally, I am not especially heat-tolerant, most particularly when it's combined with humidity; that heavy, muggy weather blankets me in oppression and saps my energy and my will to do anything. (I realise the irony of this, given that I used to make my living grooming racehorses on the east coast - in the summer. I think it was the horses that made that tolerable... they make everything more enjoyable, don't they?) But this summer - wonder of wonders - I actually revelled in hot, humid weather. Revelled. Just a little, mind you, but actual revelling occurred. I kid you not.

Maybe because we'd just recovered, by dint of our beautiful hot summer, from what seemed like 19 months of winter - winter-winter, spring-winter, summer-winter and then winter-winter again - most of us were a little reluctant, maybe even a little apprehensive, to see fall coming this year. Because warm and glorious and restorative as this summer was, maybe we weren't quiiiiite ready for winter to come back again. I admit I was disquieted when I had yellow leaves falling in my driveway - just a few, mind , you but there they were- in July. Could that mean an early, cold winter coming? No, I told myself. That's just heat stress. La la la la la, I can't hear you!

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Still, you face what you have to face. So I braced myself for a cold, hard fall and a colder, harder winter. After all, I did it last year, I can do it again, right?

As it turns out, so far I haven't had to.

It's the 28th of October today. The leaves finally all came down about 2 weeks ago; there were actual green leaves - GREEN, I'm telling you - still on some of the last hold-out trees until about 3 weeks ago. So far, my lake has yet to freeze. We've had one day where there was a thin scrim of ice on the surface, but it melted off by afternoon. There have been four days when the neighboring marsh - shallower and faster to freeze - has had that same thin, clear crust of ice on it, just for the day. The swans only left my lake 10 days ago. There are still ducks flying around my house, swift and sturdy as they launch themselves through the air on fast-beating wings. Last night it rained. I'll grant you there was about an hour during the middle of the day when there was a sleety look to it, when there was a faint scurf of white on the grass in the lees of the hedges, but that didn't last. By nightfall it was gone, melted by rain. In late October. In Alaska.

This morning there is the faintest ice-fractal on the surface of the water dish on my deck, but none on the lake or the marsh. No frost slicks my deck or clings to the trees. It's cool out, certainly - 33 degrees on my thermometer - but that's nothing. Nothing at all.

We had a winter, a few years back, where it never went below zero at my house all winter. To zero, yes, twice - but never below. It snowed, and the snow stayed, but it was mainly in the teens and twenties all winter. None of this 40-below-zero crap for THAT winter.... and certainly none of that never-gets-warmer-than-twenty-below-zero-for-three-weeks-strait nonsense. My lake didn't ice til the tenth of December. Given that I have some congenital abnormality that has me convinced that winter is over as of about February tenth, for me winter was only three months long that year. I enjoyed every minute of it - but springtime in Alaska is so full of vigor and life and burgeoning light that you can't regret the fade of winter, no matter how much you like it.

Hmmmm.... I think I could live with a reprise of that, this year.

This won't last forever, this long, gorgeous slide toward dark and cold. Sooner or later we'll be in short days and snow and ice. But for now... it's been a long, slow fall into winter.

Springtime In Alaska

We might actually get one. Who can believe that?

Up to now I've been skeptical. It has been SO cold this spring - following an unusually cold winter and an unusually cold summer the year before (which was in fact so freakishly cold that I didn't even attempt to garden... not even sweet basil, which grows for me as if nuclear-powered, and for which I have many uses and much demand). The weather was just so chilly and unpleasant that I couldn't bring myself to make the slightest attempt; I love my sweet basil plants and I would've felt like I was torturing them, trying to get them to grow in that weather. Even arugula - which grows like a weed - would have been faint and timid in the chill. And attempting tomato plants would have been cruel and unusual punishment. At any rate, as a result of all this, I feel like I've had winter for about the last 19 months.

Mind you, I love my winters. But even I don't love them 12 months a year. I don't tolerate hot muggy weather very well (despite the fact that I used to make my living grooming racehorses on the east coast, where hot and muggy are de rigeur. Somehow I managed not just to tolerate that, but to tolerate it whilst doing a manual labor job 50 hours a week. Don't even ask me.) I spent most of my youth in Colorado, where the summers are often quite hot, although very rarely are they muggy even for a short period of time. I'm no longer accustomed even to that, however.... since moving to Alaska I've grown used to cooler summers. Nowadays, I (and many of my cohorts up here) have been known to whine and complain if the temperature approaches 80 degrees. My friends still in Colorado (when coaxing me to visit) are inclined to try to tempt me down by saying, "But it's a dry heat." To which I usually reply, "So's the inside of my oven, but you don't catch me wanting to spend the summer in there, either."

At any rate, you know it's bad when I, of all people, am craving some hot weather. But here I am, wishing it would pop up 30 degrees over night and stay there until fall. I assure you I never have such thoughts - but this year, I catch myself thinking this all the time. It's very strange.

However, this week there has been a wee glimmer of hope. All last week - and early this week - I had temps 20 to 25 degrees colder than normal at night (and only slightly less unseasonable in the daytime). But in the last few days - and I hesitate to mention this, lest I jinx it - the night time temps have been nearly normal. All afternoon I've been hearing loud thuds as the ice accumulated on my roof is finally starting to slide and fall. Yesterday afternoon, coming home from work, I drove with my window rolled down. The air had a round, fresh, balmy feel, tender and sweet as a ripe peach, as if we might in fact experience spring this year after all. In addition to which - and here I know you'll think I'm being rash - I am starting to hope that my lambs won't instantly flash-freeze as they are being born.

There's still snow on the ground, of course, but Sunday we rotated the ewes to their lambing pen, in which there is a nice barn for them to birth in. By "we" I really mean S&R, since I spent the wee hours of Sunday morning in the ER having a kidney stone, and S&R were pretty certain that I didn't need to be trying to help. Apparently the combination of exhaustion and a dilaudid hangover combined to make me sound truly alarming on the phone, so by the time I got over to Wildwood (after a nap), S&R had taken matters into their own hands and had already moved the ewes. It was rather dear, actually; I had brought over a large cooler to be modified for use as an insulated stock tank, which had necessitated me moving a dog crate from the bed to the cab of my truck temporarily. I would start to move the cooler or the dog crate and suddenly I'd be staring at my empty hands, thinking: "Wow, it just evaporated! How did THAT happen?" since S or R would have stepped in and quickly plucked the offending item from my grip, tsk-ing and telling me I didn't need to be doing THAT right now. They do take good care of me, I must say.... and at any rate, I was still too bemused by sleep deprivation and a faint narcotic echo to protest; by the time I could formulate any sort of demur, it was already too late: The job had been done.

So now I am looking forward with cautious optimism to the possibility of lambing in reasonable temperatures. The first calculated due date would be this coming Saturday, although normally you allow a fudge-factor of five days either direction, so it could be as early as NOW, or as late as next Thursday.

I used to feel like spring was here when I saw robins, or when the lilacs started to bloom. But any more, I feel like it's spring when the first lambs are on the ground, peering from behind their mothers' woolly flanks, gamboling about on their long cunning legs, shaking their little floppy ears, pronking about with the other lambs - of which, I sincerely hope, there will be many. The goats are due about the same time, so Wildwood will, if all goes well, be inundated with little four-legged babies starting in less than a week.

I love spring.

White New Year's

To no one's surprise, I'm sure, we had a white Christmas up here. Not only was there good snow on the ground, snow was actually falling on Christmas day. SO pretty.

The snow kept up til Boxing Day, when I went back to work; fortunately my plow guy had been and gone; I'd have been surfing my truck backwards in snow up to the bumper otherwise. The truck on the left has not been shovelled out and is sitting on bare ground under all the snow (this is my "extra" truck, which I should probably find a home for, although it is almost old enough to order its own drinks if I took it to a bar.) The truck on the right is the one I drive; it's not really higher clearance than the other one, it's just sitting up on the snow pack.


Sunday the wind started; it knocked all the pretty snow off the branches and dropped the chill factor into the below-zero range. I tried to take pictures of the pine grosbeaks; it's tough to get a clear focus when the branches are swaying in the breeze. It's also tough with the wind numbing your fingers to the stiff-and-clumsy level and making you shiver so hard your whole body is shaking hard enough to clack your teeth together (hence the imperfect focus, sorry about that.)

Monday driving to work was interesting: all that beautiful snow on the ground, now being driven across the roads. Some places it becomes a low, fast-flowing river across the road, swift and opaque, obliterating all signs of the road itself. There you have to guess where the lanes are, where the shoulders are, where the pavement edges break off into the ditches. Some places it eddies in whirling snow-devil funnels, glittering and brilliant in the headlights. Some places it is flung thick and hard into the air, giant billowing sails of it, now hiding the oncoming traffic from view, now drawing aside its curtain of sparkling white to reveal the headlights in the other lane. Some places your best hope of avoiding a crash is to follow the red glow of the tail lights on the vehicle ahead of you. Some places you can't see beyond your own hood, let alone to the tail lights ahead of you.

For fun, in the places where the wind hits hard, driving the snow up to hiss and scour like sand against your windows, it also grabs your truck and bounces it around, tugging it fitfully toward the ditches and rocking it on its suspension.

Kind of makes you happy to get to work, you know?

The wind is gone now, but it's a good 25 degrees colder than normal for the time of year. One of my clients reported - as I was standing on tip-toes in the icy parking lot, trying to reach high enough up into his dog boxes to vaccinate his sled dogs - that he had 39 degrees (F) below zero at his house this morning. I feel like a piker: I had a balmy six degrees. (I even plugged my truck in last night. What a wimp.)

It looks like it will be cold and clear at the turn of the year; all the better to view the planetary conjunction that I hear will be occurring that afternoon (or night, I presume, for people in the lower 48). I'm on call New Year's Day, so I plan to have a quiet New Year's Eve at home, stuffing diazepam in to my dogs; two of them, plus the BFs' dog, have fireworks phobias, and we always have a lot of those on New Year's Eve. We kinda get screwed on the July 4th fireworks, as it isn't really dark enough to enjoy them, so people go nuts at New Year's. I live on a lake, so every last echo rolls across the ice to the waiting ears of my pooches. On the plus side, I get a great show (for free), and the one dog who isn't troubled by the noise runs from window to window looking for the best display.

All things considered, it's unlikley to be a restful night, even with a diazepam assist for the dogs; people are likely to go even crazier than usual, since it's the 50th anniversary of Alaska's Statehood. We're unlikely to get to sleep before one in the morning, if we're lucky. The next morning, we'll be trying to sleep in (calls permitting); it's likely to be a bit cold for skiing, and besides, I have to stay within striking distance of my truck for the on-call duties. We usually get to sleep in at least a little on New Year's; the people who stay in have been watching their dogs and keeping them home, for the most part and don't need me; the people who went out and partied, on the other hand, are all hung-over or tired and hence sleeping in. If all goes well - and no one needs my help - we'll be cozying up in our little house, tying to stay warm and wishing everyone all good blessings in 2009.

In The Deep Freeze

It's been cold here. [Yes, I KNOW, it's December in Alaska, what did I expect, ha ha, very amusing.] I don't mean regular seasonable cold. I mean, colder than usual for the time of year. Those lying meteorologists keep promising us normal daytime temps (low to mid 20's) and standard nighttime temps (mid teens.) But what do we get? Some days our high temp doesn't break zero (although yesterday morning it was a balmy 3 degrees). This is more like January weather: clear, cold, very dry. I wouldn't mind so much if they didn't keep lying to us about it.

Mind you, when it's clear, it's sunny, so the cold does have its compensations. But the dogs don't want to be out in it for any length of time. Can't say I blame them, especially my lurcher, Ali Babba, who is the next thing to bald (having unfortunately inherited his fence-jumping whippet father's nearly-absent coat, rather than his imported Scottish BC mother's weather-resistant rough coat). I have bought Ali several dog coats in different designs. This is not easy, mind you, since Ali has a mighty deep keel and a wasp-waist that would be the envy of any corseted Victorian miss. Finding something that will accommodate his deep chest but not hang down so low that he would be walking up the inside of the hem as it droops to the ground is quite a challenge - but I managed it, more than once, and have purchased several nice examples, some fleece, some knit, one like a tiny horse blanket with a weather-resistant canvas outside and an imitation shearling inside. Unfortunately, I have discovered that all of them induce instantaneous paralysis.

It goes like this:

1. Pick up coat

2. Call Ali over

3. Chase Ali up the stairs and under the bed, where he is hiding because you have A COAT!

4. Hide coat under comforter

5. Coax Ali out

6. Get a death grip on his collar

7. Apply coat gently and with much praise

8. Release collar

9. Observe look of stark terror in eyes

10. Attempt to coax dog to move

11. Fail completely

12. Remove coat

13. Observe miraculous recovery.

Sigh.

All right, then, you have no one to blame but yourself if you freeze to death in the 0.9 seconds it takes you to run out, pee, and run back in (all at top whippet speed).

Another thing that's nice about the very cold weather is that every available molecule of water precipitates out onto some object. This makes for some pretty trees. It also means that should you be so foolish as to inhale while you are outside, your nostrils will immediately stick together, effectively gluing your nose shut (at least until it starts to run, at which time you will again be able to breathe through your nose. Although you may not want to.)

(All the above shots were conveniently taken from my balcony, so I don't have to put on shoes or bundle up to get them.)

I will admit we did have snow a few days ago. This was the sunrise (taken about 9:45 from the back step of the clinic):


By noon, we had this:


The dogs, of course, love when it's snowing, because it means it's considerably warmer and they can romp around and play. Or else stare quizzically at me, wondering if I am ever going to THROW something for them to chase.

Finn:

Kenzie (in her winter "do", cosmetically inferior but thermally superior to the trimmed-up and jaunty look of summer), with Ali Babba head in the foreground:

Of course Ali has bigger concerns... because is that a fabric Frisbee in my hand, or could it perhaps be a cleverly disguised COAT?!?

Oh, okay. It's a Frisbee after all. The world is safe once more. All's well that ends well. Still, it pays to be alert, especially when one lives with a coat-wielding maniac. Because you never know when you'll have to go streaking off into the sunset to avoid her evil plans to keep you from flash-freezing yourself into a little black and white dog-sicle.

You can't trust her an inch.