I'm tired, I'm cranky, but I'm better off than the duck I ate for Thanksgiving Dinner

Well, while the rest of the country has tucked another Thanksgiving into bed, we're still holding on here in the Alaskan Suburbs. So I'll post a few pictures.

We had our first School Performance the other day, and despite the fact that I complained about racism rearing it's nasty head on several fronts, the dotter got to be an American Indian for the day...

A damn cute one at that.

In preparing for the project, the kids were asked to do an artsy project and put together a little story about what they would have done if they were the pilgrams...

All the boys made Pilgram men and all the girls made Pilgram Women. (In addition to racism, sexism is one of the many isms that are alive and well in our public schools.)

As a response to what she would have done if she were a Pilgram coming to America, the dotter wrote:

Which I find interesting largely because the kiddo assumed that if the Pilgrams had any sense they would have come to America via California... like she did at an age just shy of eleven months. I am also rather pleased to see that she would have cleaned up the house a bit in the process.

In other news, we have our first loose tooth...

And we got the kid her first pair of 'grown-up' skis, which she took to like a pro.

After I had told her that a lot of the fun in skiing involved falling down, she took to falling down a lot. It was fun.

That's it for now. I have 26 minutes left before Thanksgiving Day leaves Alaska, and I need sleep.

One last thing... I had promised my brother I'd post a link to a map showing Alaska superimposed upon the Lower 48. Here it is... ftp://ftp-fc.sc.egov.usda.gov/AK/pdfmaps/akvslower.pdf.

There you go. We're bigger. We win.

Don't expect much... this is my first blog and I have to work tomorrow

My brother who's lived in the same Oklahoma town since long before Al Gore invented the internet asked me to share some photos of our new digs. My wife, daughter and I just moved from Arizona to Alaska, and I'm sure that my brother, like the rest of my family, wonders just what in the hell that's all about.

So that's what this first blog is all about... sharing pictures as a way of explaining what this is all about.

Everyone seems to think that moving from AZ to AK is a huge change, and perhaps it is.

For instance, this is a picture of my daughter playing near our old home in Arizona...

And this is a picture of my daughter playing near our new home in Alaska....

No, I didn't get the pictures in the wrong order. The first one's from Arizona; the second is from Alaska. Watch those preconceptions... they'll sink you every time.

I drove from Arizona to Alaska on the infamous Alcan. Everyone who has never driven the Alcan waxes mystical about the adventure of it all. I have driven the Alcan, and to be honest, it's not the adventure of a lifetime. It's like this...

Honestly people, if you want to have the adventure of a lifetime, have kids. Forget about the Alcan. It's rain and road construction, potholes and pea gravel in the windshield. Sure, there's some great scenery along the way, but good gawd you're coming to Alaska. The best stuff is here, so save yourself some road ravels and buy a plane ticket. x

Upon arrival in our new community, wife, kiddo and I set up temporary housekeeping in a small apartment tucked into this splendid old house...

What you see is more than what we got. It was thirty something days of cramped claustrophobia, but I have to admit that the view from the back porch was kinda neat...

Eventually, we moved into our new home, which on move-in-day looked like this...

Just like home, huh?

Over the past few months, we have soaked in as much scenery as possible. The daughter and the dog have romped in fields of flowers...

We've been blueberry picking in the mountains...

We've walked on rocks...

And rocked around on rivers.

So yeah... Alaska is okie-dokie.

It's got mountains...

And oceans...

And I finally have an office with a window (with a view)....

None of this really explains how we came to be here, but that's another story that I'll save for another night.