Posts in the “alaska” category

“They say dreams are the windows of the soul. Take a peek and you can see the inner workings, the nuts and bolts.”

~ Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure

If you like signs, this signpost on the corner of 4th and F streets in Anchorage, Alaska shows the distance to many other cities in the U.S. and around the world.

This is a small version of a “painting” I’ve been working on. It’s from a photo I took when I was staying at the Jenny Lane Cottage(s) in Homer, Alaska. I started with the photo, and have been working on it in Gimp until I finally came up with this image, which hopefully looks a little bit like an oil painting. I’ll be including the full size “painting” in a new app that I’m working on.

While converting a photo to a painting in Gimp is usually fairly easy, it took a lot of work to make sure the bench in this photo/painting came out the way I wanted it to. Even just a few months ago I wouldn’t have been able to create this the way it is. (For that matter I couldn’t have made the mountains in the background look the way they look only two weeks ago.)

This is a photo of a sign at the Mat-Su Regional hospital in Alaska back in 2010. A nurse there told me that if I could read it, I was healthy enough to go home. :)

I’m not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but I do like to visit old churches when I travel. There are wonderful old churches throughout Alaska, and also in New Mexico.

I haven’t made it to Juneau, Alaska, yet, but when I do I want to visit the Shrine of Saint Therese. (I’m sorry, but I don’t know the origin of this photo.)

This tweet shows a terrific view of ice skating in Chickaloon, Alaska.

The image here shows two photos of the Pedersen Glacier in Alaska. The black and white image is from 1917, and the open green field is from 2005. I found those photos in this YouTube video after viewing a short video about how warm it is in the Arctic Circle this year, where glaciers are melting during the winter instead of forming new ice.

For more information, the USGS has this page which shows many more examples of disappearing glaciers in Alaska.

One thing I learned in Alaska is that when you see green water in it, that means there’s protein in the water, which means there will be fish, and also bears. I took this photo in the Kenai Peninsula in southern-ish Alaska (southwest-ish, not southeast).

If you’re interested, you can listen to one of my favorite songs, Temporal Dominoes, by Marian Call, at this bandcamp.com link. I first heard of Ms. Call when I lived in Alaska, and she performed at Vagabond Blues in Palmer, Alaska. This song and another one she created called Anchorage are two of my favorite songs that I first heard in 2014. (Temporal Dominoes is very upbeat, Anchorage is more mellow, but I like them both.)

Here’s a nice little story about the Permafrost Tunnel in Fairbanks, Alaska (and global warming, and a house sinking).

ADN.com has this nice list of things to do in Anchorage, Alaska on New Year’s Eve.

Back on December 31, 2010, I was trying to make my way to Seward, Alaska, but had a problem with icy roads, and couldn’t find chains to fit my tires, so after a few hours I finally gave up on the trek and stopped in a hotel in Anchorage. They started the fireworks at 5 or 6pm (because of the whole darkness thing), and various shows went on all night, which was pretty cool. Happy New Year’s Eve!

In Alaska people tend to paint things like garbage dumpsters and walls in alleys, so it was cool to see this pictorial of painted bus stops in Belarus.

A Wolf Called Romeo is “the true story of the exceptional black wolf who spent seven years interacting with the people and dogs of Juneau, Alaska, living on the edges of their community, engaging in an improbable, awe-inspiring interspecies dance, and bringing the wild into sharp focus.” You can check it out here on Amazon.com.

When I lived in Talkeetna, Alaska, I lived about two minutes walk from Talkeetna Air Taxi. Technically I think there were two houses closer to them than my cabin was, but personally, I enjoyed listening to the sounds of the airplanes at the little Talkeetna airport.

When I first moved to Alaska I took a really nice camera with me, and I took some fun photos I would have never thought to take with a regular camera. In this photo I was more or less laying down in a field of wildflowers (some weeds) at the Talkeetna Airport, bees and everything.

After some more medical tests tomorrow (Tuesday) I hope to be able to return to work as early as Wednesday. I don’t really have much energy yet, but hopefully I can get back to writing Scala code and blog posts for two to four hours a day initially.

My ideal job would be to work as a QA guy for the Talkeetna Roadhouse bakery but after getting my full energy back I’ll probably settle for some sort of programming gig instead. :)

494 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska. No services for 240 miles. 30 degree temps, fog, and very little visibility. That was a long, cold day in July. (August, actually.) Somehow I drove all the way from Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) to Talkeetna, about 770 miles.

This is a postcard I picked up one day from the Talkeetna Roadhouse in Talkeetna, Alaska.

Leaves here are already yellow, and the fireweed has died.

~ September 12, 2007, Denali National Park

Another cross-country move, another bean bag chair left with Goodwill.

~ September 1, 2011