Ok, so I’ve been a big time blog slacker of late and I’ve got a couple of major updates since my last post.
1) I’m freezing my snowballs off.
2) I’ve made some headway on my quest to win the 2010 Iditarod…
So, I’ll start with being cold…since that’s exactly what I am ALL day. The weather has taken a serious dip in the past few weeks. To be short, it was nearly -40 degrees with wind-chill on my way to work on Thursday! This past week it’s been consistently -10 to -15 degrees without wind-chill. Honestly, I thought I was pretty tough and fairly prepared for the weather here. I mean, c’mon, I’ve survived a few Boston winters! But, it is so cold here that when the weather climbed up to about 5 degrees early in the week I was walking around with out a hat and several people declared it, “warm”.
To make it even more challenging, the sunlight is heading the way of the warmth…Sunrise is after 10am each morning now and it is setting before 5pm. Now that’s not too bad but, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re losing our sunlight at a rate of about 5 minutes every day. It’s amazing to think about but we’re actually just under a month away from the darkest day here. On December 20th, the winter solstice, we’ll have just about 4 hours of day light. In anticipation for this I’ve already started taking Vitamin D supplements, and plan on spending at least a little time in front of our “happy” lamp.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not complaining. I think this is awesome! I’m not sure I’d want to deal with this every winter but I’m very excited to experience what’s well known as a “Bethel Winter”. Even in Alaska, you’re considered pretty hardcore if you live in Bethel. And, there are some really cool benefits to this weather. For one, my walk to work has been almost cut in half. Typically, I had been walking through my neighborhood to a boardwalk that crossed the tundra and ponds to my office. Now I walk out my backdoor and walk straight across the tundra and a pond to come up right behind my office. There is also some cool recreation that comes with the cold. For all of you current and former (tear) BC students you’re probably familiar with “Broom Ball”. The Campus School at BC held a Broom Ball tournament every year in Conte Forum. Well, every Saturday since we arrived in Bethel there have been pickup sports games. It started as soccer and turned into flag football once the fall came. And now, we’ve advanced on to weekly Broom Hockey games. This is no rag tag pick up game. We have official broom hockey sticks that look almost like upside down lacrosse sticks. The ball we use is very similar to a mini-soccer ball. Even at -10 degrees Saturday we had almost twenty people out there for a couple of hours. For the Broom Hockey newbies, the sport is played in sneakers/boots and is just like roller hockey with out any pads, even for the goalies. They’re so hardcore here we even (kind of) play with offsides! Our Swamp Donkey’s team would have our work cut out for us! And it should be noted, that since we’ll have ice here until April, our Broom Hockey season will take us through March...
As for the Iditarod…Recently (and fairly unintentionally) I received a crash course in dog-mushing. Our family friends, the Klejka’s, have their dog team and sometimes need a hand running the dogs. When mushing the dogs outside of town on the tundra you need a small crew of people just in case things go awry…and with a team full of dogs that have been waiting impatiently to get out and run around, small ‘hiccups’ are likely. On the sled, you have the Musher; the person who is standing and controlling the dogs. There is also someone who sits in the sled. Basically, their job is damage control. Typically this has been my job. I was handed a pair of hooks attached by about 8 feet of rope to the sled. In case the Musher gets tossed from the sled, I can theoretically stop the dogs simply by tossing the hooks to the side and allowing them to catch in the tundra, pulling the sled to a painful and abrupt stop. "Theoretically" was the key word in that sentence. A couple times on our training run, our fearless musher Jessie was thrown from the sled leaving me in a semi-panic stricken, semi-ecstacic state bouncing around on a runaway sled. And, while the hooks stick well in the snow on the Tundra, they are completely useless on ice. A couple of times I was left trying to jam hooks into the frozen ponds as the dogs pushed eagerly on into the great Alaskan wilderness. Needless to say, I finally jammed the hooks into the ground once we reached a patch of tundra, Jessie breathlessly stumbled up to the sled and we made it back to tell the tale. It may not have been the smoothest few practices but I’m finally making some serious progress in conquering the Iditarod. In fact, Jessie Klejka’s older sister Jessica (interesting fact: all 9 members of the Klejka family begin with ‘J’) actually won the Jr. Iditarod last year in dramatic fashion, coming in just 3 seconds ahead of the 2nd place finisher after having to carry an injured member of her dog team on her sled for the final leg. Soooo, I’m learning from a family of winners…Basically, it’s in the bag!
1) I’m freezing my snowballs off.
2) I’ve made some headway on my quest to win the 2010 Iditarod…
So, I’ll start with being cold…since that’s exactly what I am ALL day. The weather has taken a serious dip in the past few weeks. To be short, it was nearly -40 degrees with wind-chill on my way to work on Thursday! This past week it’s been consistently -10 to -15 degrees without wind-chill. Honestly, I thought I was pretty tough and fairly prepared for the weather here. I mean, c’mon, I’ve survived a few Boston winters! But, it is so cold here that when the weather climbed up to about 5 degrees early in the week I was walking around with out a hat and several people declared it, “warm”.
To make it even more challenging, the sunlight is heading the way of the warmth…Sunrise is after 10am each morning now and it is setting before 5pm. Now that’s not too bad but, as I’ve mentioned before, we’re losing our sunlight at a rate of about 5 minutes every day. It’s amazing to think about but we’re actually just under a month away from the darkest day here. On December 20th, the winter solstice, we’ll have just about 4 hours of day light. In anticipation for this I’ve already started taking Vitamin D supplements, and plan on spending at least a little time in front of our “happy” lamp.
Don’t get me wrong…I’m not complaining. I think this is awesome! I’m not sure I’d want to deal with this every winter but I’m very excited to experience what’s well known as a “Bethel Winter”. Even in Alaska, you’re considered pretty hardcore if you live in Bethel. And, there are some really cool benefits to this weather. For one, my walk to work has been almost cut in half. Typically, I had been walking through my neighborhood to a boardwalk that crossed the tundra and ponds to my office. Now I walk out my backdoor and walk straight across the tundra and a pond to come up right behind my office. There is also some cool recreation that comes with the cold. For all of you current and former (tear) BC students you’re probably familiar with “Broom Ball”. The Campus School at BC held a Broom Ball tournament every year in Conte Forum. Well, every Saturday since we arrived in Bethel there have been pickup sports games. It started as soccer and turned into flag football once the fall came. And now, we’ve advanced on to weekly Broom Hockey games. This is no rag tag pick up game. We have official broom hockey sticks that look almost like upside down lacrosse sticks. The ball we use is very similar to a mini-soccer ball. Even at -10 degrees Saturday we had almost twenty people out there for a couple of hours. For the Broom Hockey newbies, the sport is played in sneakers/boots and is just like roller hockey with out any pads, even for the goalies. They’re so hardcore here we even (kind of) play with offsides! Our Swamp Donkey’s team would have our work cut out for us! And it should be noted, that since we’ll have ice here until April, our Broom Hockey season will take us through March...
As for the Iditarod…Recently (and fairly unintentionally) I received a crash course in dog-mushing. Our family friends, the Klejka’s, have their dog team and sometimes need a hand running the dogs. When mushing the dogs outside of town on the tundra you need a small crew of people just in case things go awry…and with a team full of dogs that have been waiting impatiently to get out and run around, small ‘hiccups’ are likely. On the sled, you have the Musher; the person who is standing and controlling the dogs. There is also someone who sits in the sled. Basically, their job is damage control. Typically this has been my job. I was handed a pair of hooks attached by about 8 feet of rope to the sled. In case the Musher gets tossed from the sled, I can theoretically stop the dogs simply by tossing the hooks to the side and allowing them to catch in the tundra, pulling the sled to a painful and abrupt stop. "Theoretically" was the key word in that sentence. A couple times on our training run, our fearless musher Jessie was thrown from the sled leaving me in a semi-panic stricken, semi-ecstacic state bouncing around on a runaway sled. And, while the hooks stick well in the snow on the Tundra, they are completely useless on ice. A couple of times I was left trying to jam hooks into the frozen ponds as the dogs pushed eagerly on into the great Alaskan wilderness. Needless to say, I finally jammed the hooks into the ground once we reached a patch of tundra, Jessie breathlessly stumbled up to the sled and we made it back to tell the tale. It may not have been the smoothest few practices but I’m finally making some serious progress in conquering the Iditarod. In fact, Jessie Klejka’s older sister Jessica (interesting fact: all 9 members of the Klejka family begin with ‘J’) actually won the Jr. Iditarod last year in dramatic fashion, coming in just 3 seconds ahead of the 2nd place finisher after having to carry an injured member of her dog team on her sled for the final leg. Soooo, I’m learning from a family of winners…Basically, it’s in the bag!
