"Be safe," says the dizzy pregnant woman holdling the knife

I learned on Alaska State Troopers that all moose roadkill is harvested and used for charitable causes. I thought that was neat. I think you can take the meat yourself if you want to, but it is illegal for it to be wasted. Good job Alaska.

Speaking of local meats, I made caribou chili. This is where the title for this post came from. Don't worry, I was sitting down. The chili was pretty good. It smelled incredible, I guess I'm just not entirely sold on the caribou, but I am glad that we used it and I will do it again. It definitely carries more of its own flavor than beef does and that flavor really pops out in the bites of chili that contain it. I guess I might have found it gamey- but I don't really know if that is the right term. Dan really liked it a lot. That always surprises me considering how he wavers back and forth being anti-meat and pro-meat. I guess he thinks that if there is meat, it better be good and taste super meaty.

Dan ran in a half marathon on Saturday that he didn't train for. It was also a zombie race and he didn't dress up for it. It was his slowest at 1:41:20, which is about 14 minutes slower than his best, but he's okay with it due to the not training business. He did have fun at the race and ran most of it with a guy from church. The course they ran was right along the coast so I guess it was pretty beautiful. He also bought some trail running shoes so he won't tip over when running in the hills tonight for the Tuesday night races.

Dan also decided to get some vitamin D pills, which isn't a terrible thing considering we lose about 5 minutes of daylight every day. To paint you a picture, when we moved here, sunset was around 10:00. Apparently the sunset tonight is at 6:42. It's different. Just to be safe I looked up vitamin D toxicity to see if we needed to be careful with these things. No, no we do not. The dosage of the pills is 1,000 IU. Toxicity occurs at 50,000 IU. We're safe.

On Saturday we enjoyed an evening with friends and a casserole in which I can actually enjoy salmon. We got a decent amount of snow that day, probably about an inch and a half. Although it is all gone now, it was really pretty and came with that delicious cold outside smell of fall/winter. You know what I'm talking about. Observe the beauty:

Okay, so the picture isn't great, but it was that nice fluffy snow that sticks on trees and makes everything Christmasy. It was good. We have studded tires on our teeny tiny car for the upcoming snow pounding. It looks ridiculous. Apparently they don't salt the roads here so they are necessary. It still looks funny.

We also saw some northern lights. That was cool- I had never seen them before although I know some people have seen them at camp. I felt like crap and it was cold and we have a lot of trees in our backyard so it wasn't an optimal viewing situation, but we got to see them swirl about and they were very high in the sky. For being in the middle of a city, it was especially impressive.

Recent events have led me to conclude that it is indeed winter here in Anchorage. Luckily I bought some slippers last week, so I'm ready.