Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Springggg Timeeee

Sung in a cabaret voice of course. Finally, this place resembles real life. Sunshine (sometimes), more decent temperatures, and no snow (at the lower elevations at least)! We're up to about 16 hours or more of daylight. At midnight you can see a bit of twilight to the north, and by 4 in the morning it starts to every so slowly get light again.

It's a crazy thing...trying to go to bed when it's still light outside. I welcome it, though. I find myself missing meals and staying up too late, because I'm running around fishing or taking Maddy on walks. Speaking of fishing, H2O is slowly deciding to exist in a liquid form again. It's crazy. I saw some rain the other day...pretty much for the first time since September. Lakes are slowly melting, and the rivers are pretty much all broken up. Now we just need some leaves...maybe this week (fingers crossed).

So I don't have a ton of sweet pictures to show that I personally took, but I do have some that Andy took on a recent adventure. This past Saturday we drove down to the Kenai River for some fishing. It was cold, and the fishing was slow, but it was great to be out.

It was not super cold, but with the wind blowing and wet hands, I seriously had the coldest hands ever in my entire life. In fact, my fingers are still tingling (just kidding Mom). So without further ado, here's the good stuff.




looking down river. very beautiful



looking toward the outlet of kenai lake and the bridge at cooper landing.



great picture here. just pondering life and how Cameron has the ability to warm his hands simply through thought. No kidding, he can make his hands warm up by just thinking about it.



we saw a ton of eagles that day. here is an immature with a mature eagle. they chilled in the tree pretty much all morning. i would say I probably saw 2 dozen eagles that day. pretty neat.



this is how i looked yesterday. Andy and Lisa put on a fundraising lunch for babies. The food was stinking delicious. This is my round of seconds. I "slayed" some cookies too. The sugar crash at about 3 pm was tough, but I powered through.

Thankfully I took a razor to my boy beard last night. Also notice the crackhead-like dry area around my face. Dry skin up here is seriously ridiculous. I think I'm slowly shedding now that its sort of warm out.

Alright, more to come soon(ish).

Monday, April 6, 2009

Redoubt Continued

19 eruptions thus far. Thankfully things have started to get a bit quieter though...until Saturday morning at about 6 am. Redoubt had a pretty intense eruption...one of the most powerful yet. The ash went about 50,000 ft. up, but this eruption lasted for over an hour.

I've got more images to share, especially for those who like satellite images and other assorted weather weenie things.

First... here is a video a guy took of one of the eruptions. It's a time lapse of 26 minutes I think? Gives you a great idea for how ridiculously powerful a volcano is:

http://vimeo.com/3892358

The video is of previous eruptions, whereas the rest of this stuff is from recent eruptions.

This is a MODIS image (satellite), true color, taken today. You can really see the ash down on the southern Kenai Peninsula. I always like satellite images of this place, because it gives you such a good idea of how huge the state really is! For example, it takes about 5 hours to drive to Homer. Homer being the city/town most affected by this particular ashfall. I think it's funny that Homer is a big destination for people from Anchorage...but it's so far away. It's like driving to DC from Raleigh.



Moving on...here's some web cam images from Homer Saturday morning. Crazy stuff. The first image is around 630 am, right when it's starting to get light out these days. Next image is from 7:20 am. You can tell something's not quite right, because it looks sort of "orange-ish" outside. This is the approaching ash cloud. Next, at 7:40 am, essentially pitch black night outside. Mmmm ashfall. Good stuff!







I have been meaning to upload some pictures I took here around town when we had some ashfall. I also collected some ash samples (as requested), so those should be reaching the inquirees soon enough.

I'll stop here, so I can get back to work (yay for midnight shifts). Otherwise, things are going alright these days. We've had some beautiful days, with a whole lot of daylight. Up to about 14 hours a day now. When i drove in to work tonight, at 9:45, it was still twilight outside. Wierd stuff. Oh yea I forgot the bonus webcam sunrise image of redoubt the other morning. pretty spectacular if you ask me.