It's a rather blustery day

     Most of our deciduous trees are well on their way to naked. We did have two rain free days in a row this past weekend, with a sun out and everything! I don't think that has happened since the first week we were here- and I can't guarantee that it happened even then.

This is the pond by our house that they call a lake.

Looking down the path toward the pond.

Snow covered mountains that didn't have snow last week.

     I have noticed that people here are more accepting of winter weather than we are in Minnesota. I'm used to seeing people resist putting on their winter coats until it is simply unbearable not to have one on, but yesterday we were out and most people had on a winter coat or some layer of it and it was not that cold at all. Some people do come down from the hills though and apparently they had four inches of snow in one night, so maybe that explains it a bit. Apparently we did have a slight dusting down here in the bowl, but I chose to ignore it because it was gone by the time I woke up. To me, that is not snow.     Something is different here in Alaska. Well, many things are different, but I think this is in reference to air pressure. Dan's shoes arrived in the mail from home the other day and they contain gel insoles. After wearing them for a bit- including a walk to church, Dan realized the gel was not so much in as outside the sole. Goop everywhere. Both shoes. Very weird. Another strange thing is that glass jars are nearly impossible to open here. It is very annoying. One particularly hard jar was our strawberry jam from Costco. After about 5 minutes of attempting to open this jar,we were successful, but it came at a price. Not only did we lose about half a cup of it from the jar tipping over, but we also lost our coffee pot, which was killed when the jar of jam flew two feet from the momentum of the opening. In retrospect it could have been worse- but now we need to buy a new coffee pot, which is annoying because they aren't as cheap as one would hope and we have two in Minnesota.
     Another thing that we have encountered is that fast food joints don't have ketchup pumps- just packages. Granted I think we have just been to a couple different Arby's, but still. They also ran out of Arby's sauce though... maybe they shouldn't be trusted.