Heading into a New Year

The rear of our cozy little cabin at around 9am.Light is slowly creeping back into our world.

Quite a load of snow up on the rooftop, at least 8 inches deep with another heavy snow heading in this evening.

Our 12/30 snowfall total for overnight and the day,bring us up to 30 inches so far this winter.

Its so nice to be a kid! 8 new inches of snowfall make for terrific snow angels.

Also makes for a very snowy little girl!
Currently the snow is falling as "Storm 2" makes its way thru our area. The forecast shows snow for the next 7 or so days. I'm just a snow addict! I think we're going to spend our first year here in Alaska quietly at home, keeping our traditions of the torching of the years Christmas tree and just simply being together as our family has always done, and thinking of the family we have in the South that won't be with us for New Years for the first time ever. Eric doesn't return to work until Tuesday, the same day the girls head back to school. It's been an awesome time for us to be together, just relaxing and meshing again as a family unit. I, personally, have been on a bit of a soul and heart searching "quest", for lack of a better word. Everything has been so busy busy busy with a pile of stress mixed in that I let slip the peace I should feel and the heart for home that is so important for a helpmeet to have. I have a bad habit of borrowing trouble and worrying about things far more than I should. I tend to forget that my whole life is in His hands and keep thinking I have to handle all this myself. Time to fix that....

Almost Christmas and Life in General

Well, the tree is up and a few gifts are wrapped. We still need to make a grocery run to get the rest of the fixings for our little Christmas dinner. Today is the start of Christmas vacation for the girls. Our youngest is enjoying it by sleeping in late, then getting up to watch movies and playing Wii the entire day (apparently). Our eldest is out helping out with the Alaska Excursion 120 dog sledding race with friends of ours, so I imagine she will take tomorrow to sleep in late and watch movies all day.

Life is...cold. We have folks we know all over this beautiful state, some with far worse temps than we have, but this poor southern gal is cold, hehe. Thankfully not the "I can't hack this and I want to go home" cold, just more the general observational type that notices the fact that nose hairs freeze the minute you walk outside and the toes are feeling pretty icy and if I have to get up at 2am to crank cars so they don't freeze one more time I going to lose it kind of cold. I will admit to having those "what were we thinking" moments, but in general I'm still thrilled we are here. There is truely no place like this on earth. Even in the frigid negative temperatures there is no place I would rather be.

So, we spend our time making plans for our future here. We've narrowed down the area we want to live in, scan the real estate ads often and think about settling into our own little place here on the last frontier. It will be the end of summer before we buy, since we have a years lease on our little log cabin in Willow here, but that gives us plenty of time to look around and find the perfect fit for us at the right price. Life here in the one room dry cabin is refining for us what we can and cannot live without, the things we see that need to be done better and the things that work.

Still here!

Wow, life got so busy and yet it was hard to form thoughts to put together in any kind of form that would make sense. We had my Sister in law and Niece come for a visit Thanksgiving week, which kept any homesickness we might have felt for the first time away from family for the holidays at bay. I think they were very grateful to return to the land of warmth and running water after 5 days here LOL

The girls and thier cousin at Talkeetna.

We had a strange weather front come thru while they were here. Warming temps that dumped rain on us, promptly turning to solid ice as it hit the ground, leaving it highly unadvisable to try to get out on roads. As they left the day after Thanksgiving the colder temps started creeping in. Clear skies came out exposing all the beautiful mountains that they didn't get to see the whole time they were here. We awoke this morning to 15 below, the coldest we had experienced so far...until this evening. Eric went out to crank cars and let them run so hopefully they won't freeze overnight and crack the blocks and it is already 20 below out in our yard, meaning we'll need to get up several times tonight to crank cars and let them run about 15 minutes to get warmed up. So far that is really the only thing I'm not liking about living here in Alaska. We'll definately have to fix that before next winter by getting the cars winterized so we can plug them in on timers and save ourselves the worry of destroying motors.

Now it's time to prepare for Christmas...I'm so not ready!