Christmas, New Years, and January

. . . . all vanished without any documentation.  Oh, I did get a few pictures of the kids at Christmas, New Years, cabin building, but the blog has been severely neglected.  All the kids (Bryant's and mine) were here at the house for a couple of days around Christmas.  Our neighbors and Bryant each had a skate ski track groomed in our backyard that I was able to take advantage of over break.  New Year's Weekend, our warmest ever at 30 degrees, was spent at the cabin near Big Lake.  January . . well I'm still not sure where January disappeared.  I'm not feeling really too bad that it is over, because it has been one of those winters.

The boys and their computers

Southcentral Alaska winters are pattern of cold, snowy, windy, rainy, cold, snowy, etc.  Each year it is a little different as to how much you get of each.  Within a couple of miles, the weather patterns change.  Palmer and Wasilla usually get the worst of the wind and where we live it tends to be a few degrees colder.  Unless we get a Chinook (warm wind from Prince William Sound i.e. Pacific Ocean) blowing over the mountains and then we have it warmer; into the middle 40's isn't unheard in the winter time.  Seeing as I'm still running the kids to Jazz Band in Palmer in the morning and running my legs off on the streets of Palmer, I have a much clearer picture of the weather patterns this year. 

The cabin temperatures are always colder than the house.

There hasn't been much snow, and the little snow we get is followed by the Chinooks.  We've had more grass in our back yard than snow this winter or so it seems.  The coldest temperatures were at our property 10 miles west of Big Lake a few weekends back and the cabin thermometer read -38.  We did manage to trim the windows and around the baseboard.  We also managed to kill a battery in the truck, warm a battery, restart a vehicle, and blow a power steering hose.  Thankfully, one of our friends rescued us and Bryant has some mechanic skills.   Our parts supply place was open on Martin Luther King Day, so other than being inconvenienced we survived that outing.  Although we do have a new rule, when its forecasting 20 below we need to stay home. 

Sledding hill to the trails in our backyard

Warm winds = ICY driveway

So in a nutshell, the darkest parts of winter are put to rest.  In February we gain over 5 minutes of daylight, and all the days until June 21 will be brighter.