Yesterday, the temperature stayed right around freezing all day.   After I had gone to bed, Doug came in from a walk to the mailbox and said it was raining.  When I got up today, it was snowing but the thermometer was reading 34.8, so the highway might not be very slick.

I don't have an urgent need to go to town, but the shopping list has grown to over a dozen items, Greyfox will be free to spend some time with me if I go in today, and he has a customer interested in buying some of the opals I have here.  Laziness and apathy are my only good reasons to stay home.

I guess I'll get suited up and go brush snow off the car, scrape windows, etc. Must remember to take opals, Greyfox's mail... set up the wood stove with a big round to last until Doug gets up this afternoon....  If I'm not careful, I'll talk myself out of going.

Just in case anyone reading this doesn't already know:

Around here, we have 3 TVs in addition to one LCD computer monitor.  The newest of our 3 TVs hasn't been plugged in since Greyfox gave it to us when he bought his new one.  It is sitting in the chair that was Greyfox's when he lived here.  The chair faces the old TV he brought with him when he moved from Pennsylvania in 1990, which is connected to a VCR, obsolete Nintendo, and broken PS2.  It used to be connected to an antenna, until a heavy snow load took down the antenna a few years ago.  Doug and I thought about repairing the antenna, and decided that network TV wasn't worth it.  The other big old CRT TV is placed in comfortable proximity to Couch Potato Heaven, and is used as a monitor for a PS2 and XBox, both of which sometimes show DVDs for our entertainment.  Maybe, if we could afford a satellite dish, or if cable TV extended this far, we might renew our old TV addictions, but for now Doug and I are still abstaining.

This is why I tend to ask my friends if they saw SNL, and get my Tina Fey second-hand from YouTube.  Last night, Greyfox told me during our nightly phone call that the real Sarah Palin was to be on Saturday Night Live.  I was thinking that Tina Fey probably did a better Palin than Sarah herself, but I did want to know how she did, so I checked Google this morning.

It was widely agreed that the best part of Palin's appearance was Weekend Update where she recited rehearsed lines saying she had decided not to do the sketch they had rehearsed, and Amy Poehler took over and did a rap number complete with Eskimos and moose backup.  The moose is identifiable in the video, and was mentioned in the sketch, but some of the news stories call it a "caribou."  Which reminds me, do you know the difference between a caribou and a reindeer?

The general consensus agrees with rushPRnews, that, "Sarah pales in comparison to Tina Fey."

Frank James of the Tribune said, "One thing Poehler's rap steered clear of was
Troopergate. Was that an accident or in the terms behind Palin's
appearance on the show?"  (The video is embedded at that link.)

John McCain appeared on Fox News Sunday today.

After Baldwin realizes his mistake, he says, "'You are way hotter in person.' But the 'Caribou Barbie' replied with
her best line of the evening 'Stephen is my favorite Baldwin brother,'
as Alec took her by the arm and led her off stage." (rushPRnews)

Did you see it?  What did you think?  Did it help or hurt Palin's image, or do you think people will just see in her whatever they want to see based on their preconceptions?

Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama.  NPR says this gives Obama, "national security credibility."  Do you agree?

During the 1980s, on several occasions while working in my garden, I saw unmarked black helicopters flying over this part of the Upper Susitna Valley.  At the time, I talked to several neighbors who had seen them, too. We are accustomed to seeing aircraft here.  Alaska has more airplanes and helicopters per capita than any other state, and more per square mile than most.  Aviation tends to follow the rail line and highway that define this Railbelt area where most of the state's population is concentrated.  Since the presence of aircraft might convey information, and helicopters circling, as opposed to just following the road, often signals wildfire if they belong to the forestry people, or searches for fugitives or missing hikers if they belong to the State Troopers, I pay attention to markings when something flies over.

Some of those people I talked to then had also seen lights in the sky at night that did not conform to regular aircraft lights, or meteors, or stars, or the aurora borealis, and moved in ways that aircraft generally don't.  I had seen some of those lights, too.  Since we didn't know what they were, we called them unidentified flying objects.  Some time after that, I learned that unmarked black helicopters have been associated with UFO sightings in the U.S. and U.K. since the 1970s.  Often, men dressed in black are seen around the same times that UFOs and unmarked helicopters appear.

I don't obsess on these matters the way my second husband did.  [someday, I must write more about that guy and his fraud/fantasy life]  I haven't thought about MIBs and UFOs much since I saw the MIB movies, except when Xanga footprints show that someone has accessed my "Elves and Gnomes of Christmas" segment from the Countdown to svwX, and I remember this:

...but I digress.  I barely think about UFOs, unmarked helicopters and men in black at all, unless something brings them to mind.  That happened this week.  Traffic is sparse on this back street.  The street goes nowhere.  It loops around from one part of a back road to another, there are not more than ten houses on the loop around a "block" a lot bigger than any you'd tend to find in a city, and about half of those houses are abandoned or only occupied on weekends and summer vacations.  When the dog hears a car coming, he alerts and often barks.  When I hear a car go by, I look out the window to see who it is.  Several days ago, I was still processing the sight of an unmarked black minivan full of men in dark suits (it went by fast, and I couldn't swear that all the suits were black), when a second one followed it past my window.  That one was only about 2/3 full of guys in dark suits.  What's up with that?

UPDATED

I'm breathing okay today, but when I turned over in bed early this morning, I re-injured the spinal problem I've had since one of the times I slipped off a rain-slick step this summer.  Stretches have made it feel better today, but there is still a hot spot back there, and a tendency for muscles around it to spasm.  TMI?  Don't worry about it.  This is my journal.  You read at will, and at your own risk.

Sunrise was lovely and colorful today, and between the first light of dawn and sunup I got some nifty shots of a frosty window with the dawn woods outside it.

Before I got these posted, I noticed that the now-sunny treetops are glistening with hoarfrost from yesterday's ice fog.  I'll upload those photos next.

UPDATE:
Here's one--
 
Three more, and an accidental shot of empty sky, are in the photo module.

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday shoveling about a foot of snow that fell over the course of those two days.  It's not all I did all day.  I worked in brief bursts and did a lot of resting between.  A year ago, I would not have been able to work that much.  First there was the atypical fungal pneumonia in August.  In October, when I was just getting over that, I got flu.  As if that was not enough, along came December and a little bit of improvement in my breathing, when I caught a cold and had a hairy late night ambulance ride about 60 miles or so, and three days in the hospital.

My recovery has been slow.  Being able to shovel snow is really good news.

The work wore me out.  Fatigue set in, the fibro flared up, and today I was short of breath with only slight activity.  Doug, my son, on his way to bed this morning about the time I got up, ordered me, "Don't shovel any snow today, not even if it falls a foot deep... especially if it falls a foot deep."  It was wise advice, and I would have taken it, even if it had snowed again.  It was overcast and foggy at dawn, so thick that I couldn't tell where the sun was.  Then the clouds thinned and the sun came out.

Here are a couple of the pictures I got.  The rest are in the photo module.

 

There was some color in the sunrise today, and lots of pretty snow on the trees, so I went out to catch the light.  What I got wasn't too exceptional.

While I stood there in the road, I could hear geese honking behind me, toward the west.  All I could see in that direction, of course, was the forest.  But the sounds drew closer and then the birds came into the open right overhead. 

They were in a big, strung-out V formation, about fifty or sixty birds, with one trailing line of a dozen or so who must have started late.  They were flying east, just a little to the north of the point on the horizon where the sun was rising.  It rises noticeably farther south each day.  In six weeks or so, it will be rising over the trees to the south, not over the muskeg.

  ...but he doesn't need me, now I'm sixty-four, and he is sixty-one.  He never needed me, and I think that is great -- that he'd still want me around even though I'm non-essential.  What a privilege that is.  What a guy.

In my mind, he often appears the way he looked on our honeymoon.

The years have changed him some.  Now he looks more like this:

...still kinda cute, I think.

He was born the same year as O. J. Simpson, the year Aleister Crowley died, Howard Hughes flew the Spruce Goose, and Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1.  Ironically, he was born on a holiday honoring a man not particularly beloved of his Muscogee relations, a man without whose existence and accomplishments neither he nor I nor any of us cross-bred American mongrels would have been born .

I gave him a book for his birthday, because I could.  If I'd had the means, I would have given him a lot of things he'd value more, such as

and

...but he can't afford to have me blowing our money on expensive gifts, even though he is pulling in the currency fairly well this weekend at the gun show on the fairgrounds.

Today, in case you haven't guessed already, is ArmsMerchant's birthday.

[image: barracuda riding dinosaur to the White House]

Investigator Stephen Branchflower, in a report to a bipartisan panel
that looked into the matter, found Palin in violation of a state ethics
law that prohibits public officials from using their office for
personal gain.

Of course, she's not accepting the determination.  Her people say it is all partisan politics.  Greyfox says, "Let's see her wink her way out of this one."  I say it's quite possible she can, considering what she has already gotten away with.

Meanwhile, after she accused Barack Obama of, "palling around with terrorists," McCain has been forced to deal with the consequences. 

On Friday during a town hall-style meeting in Lakeville, Minn., a
supporter told McCain that he feared what would happen if Obama were
elected. McCain drew boos when he defended his rival as a "decent
person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president
of the United States."

The Associated Press

It is unclear whether this is just an example of the good cop/bad cop ploy.  Traditionally, the veep candidates are assigned to the attack dog role.  In Sarah Barracuda, the GOP picked a real conscienceless pit bull.

Alaska Native groups, commercial salmon fishermen, and environmentalists are opposed to the Pebble Mine because of the damage it will do to the watershed and fisheries.

With the support of Gov. Sarah Palin, mining
interests have defeated an Alaska ballot measure that could have
blocked a huge proposed mining project. Now, plans are moving forward
to exploit the massive gold and copper deposit at Bristol Bay, home of
one of the world’s greatest salmon runs.

Read Bill Sherwonit's article at Yale Environment 360

A lot of media attention has been paid to Palin's charging rape victims for the police rape evidence kits (against state law) while she was mayor of Wasilla.  Rape victims, fish, and subsistence fishers and hunters are not the only groups being hurt and endangered by her pit-bull tactics.

As Governor of Alaska, Republican Vice Presidential Nominee
Sarah Palin has championed the cruel aerial killing of wolves to
artificially boost game populations for mainly out-of-state trophy
hunters. [1]

Palin’s Administration issues permits to shoot wolves from
low-flying aircraft or chase them to exhaustion and kill them at
point-blank range. [2] To encourage more killing, she even proposed a $150 bounty for the left foreleg of each dead wolf. [3]

If you are as appalled as I am at the idea of gunning down wolves from aircraft, Defenders of Wildlife have provided a way to get the word out before the election next month.

[image:  my fantasy of wolves shooting back at Sarah Barracuda]

Before people start leaving comments on my last entry, wondering what happened to me:

The trip to Willow was rough.  There was a long wait.  Greyfox was delayed and was irritable when he got there.  We completed the planned exchange of goods, and everyone got a flu shot.

Doug and I stopped at the local general store on the way home, at Greyfox's request, to post a flyer for his upcoming gun show.  While there, we rented Sweeny Todd.  We not only wanted to see the movie, but wanted to erase the ludicrous mental images of Severus Snape and Captain Jack Sparrow singing a duet, acquired by listening to the sound track CD.  Now we have more accurate images.

I had a bad night Wednesday and worse day Thursday.  The flu shot triggered a hellacious immune response and I was shaking with chills and fever, aching all over, and running to the outhouse a lot.  I'm better, now.

However, although it was two days ago that we rented the video, and we were supposed to return the DVD yesterday, we need to go back again today because the store was unexpectedly closed yesterday.

It was snowing when we went to the store, and kept snowing all day.  By dark, there was about a 5-6 inch accumulation, and it was still snowing hard.  Early this morning, before dawn, there was rain mixed with the snow.  Now it is raining and there's deep slush on the ground.  That heavy wet stuff needs to be shoveled out of paths and driveway before it freezes hard.  I cleared the path to the outhouse and Doug says he will get the rest when he gets up today.

That's all for now.