The Halloween Play Date

I actually think it's quite ridiculous to celebrate Halloween with children under 2 years of age. They hate wearing silly costumes and they're too tired at that time of night to go trick-or-treating. In addition, they don't yet know about the things they're dressed as and aren't really able to eat candy. But, one of my friends had a party for our kids, and I went in good spirit. It turned out to be a fun time. My son recognized one of his friends as a kitty (even though he was actually a wolf) and another friend as a duck, which she was. In addition, he had a good time playing with the host's markers, because we don't have any at home. It made for a good play date.

My best memory is of us making mud pudding with worms before the party

and a close second is my Charlie Brown, because he was so cute with his light hair. I sewed the stripe on his shirt myself, which was my first project with my new sewing machine.

Only in Alaska, . . . .

Well, there are A LOT of "Only in Alaska, . . . ." comments that are made in Fairbanks. But, this one I will share because it is applicable come October. Only in Alaska, do you have to wear snow-pants, wool socks, boots, hats, mittens when there is not any snow yet . . . and then a sun hat at the same time! It's cold, but the sun is ALWAYS in your eyes unless of course it is DARK, which is pretty common too!

P.S. Thank you, Grandma, for the book of us and the farm. I "moo" at it all of the time.

And, yes, mom took this while she was driving the car :)

It's Wood-burning Time Again

It's actually not that cold (30s-40s), but it feels every bit of the 40 degrees colder than summer that it is. We have a lot of cotton wood to burn. The other options up here are spruce and birch, which are both much hotter and longer-burning Alaskan hardwoods. Cotton wood is a fast - growing, very moist (until dried) and not very dense tree. It produces a type of cotton seed that blows through the air that can be obnoxious, so most people regard it a weed, a very huge weed, and cut it down. We did just that when we bought the land. We didn't cut a single spruce (well 2 by accident) or birch when building the house or making the driveway, but we cut probably more than 50 cottonwood. Most are buried in our front yard and a lot were burned along with brush down by the river, but some ended up in our wood pile. Besides the vast amount of ash they produce when burned, they are a good fall and spring wood, because they don't burn as hot and therefore don't sweat you out of the house. It's been nice burning the cottonwood. The 4a.m. stokings have already begun. Last year it was because our son was breastfeeding, would wake me, and I would feel obligated to refill the stove before the coals died. But, now I'm just waking because I feel it getting colder or because I'm pregnant. I don't know why, but I'm wide awake. But, it's kind of relaxing to reload the wood stove and wait for it to get back up to temperature when everyone else is asleep.

School Can Be Very Frustrating

So, lately I've been kind of irritated with the professor of the class I'm taking. For the first month, things were going great. But, then, he posted our homework in the wrong spot so no one knew we had any, but he didn't adjust the due date. Also, he is constantly updating our text, which is a unpublished textbook scanned into Blackboard that some professors at the University of Alaska Fairbanks wrote at some point. It conflicts with our notes sometimes, and uses different notation, which is very confusing. Still, I like this class and this professor. No one is perfect.

Now, Blackboard really screwed me over. The first day of class, we all wrote down our email addresses, so that we would get updates from the professor. I never got any, but only because I figured there wasn't anything the professor needed to tell us. Well, I just figured out that he disregarded that list and emailed through Blackboard instead, which uses all university email addresses. I've been using Blackboard for (going on) 3 years now at this University and have my mail forwarded to my personal email. I was unsuspecting that anything had changed. Well, the University sometime within the last 2 months switched from @uaf.edu to @alaska.edu or something like that email ending. Anyway, they use a free Google application now for their mail. When this happened, emails through Blackboard stopped being forwarded. On top of it, sometime within the last month, it was made official that I am a University of Alaska Anchorage student on top of being a Fairbanks student. Well, again Blackbaord didn't inform me, but my Blackboard-designated email address was changed to an Anchorage email account. Long story short, as a surprise to me, Blackboard has used 3 different email addresses for me in the past 2 months.

So, I had emailed my professor a question Wednesday night about our homework that is due Friday. He didn't respond. Turns out he had responded to everyone in the class Wednesday night through Blackboard. He in fact told the class the exact equations to use for each problem. So, after spending 2 days straight doing my homework without help, I just realized after checking this new email account that I did at least half of the problems completely wrong. Aaaaah, and I thought I had done so well! What a let-down. Better luck next time, I guess.