Fur Rondy and Streetlight Manifesto

This is my favorite time of year in Alaska. Yes, the summers are amazing, but February is a really exciting time. We're gaining almost 6 minutes of daylight every day and that means we are rapidly approaching a normal day. If you can make it to February without losing it to seasonal affective disorder, you can make it to summer. But the best part of the month is the Fur Rendezvous Festival.

You'll never see more fur products anywhere. And they are all amazing.

It's been going on for 77 years (longer than Alaska's been a state!) and it's purpose is essentially to keep Anchorage residents from getting cabin fever. It was originally a 3 day event that lined up with the time the miners and trappers came into town but has since spread into a 10 day festival turning Anchorage into a crazy town. There's dog sled races down 4th Avenue, running of the reindeer, outhouse races, snowshoe softball, blanket tosses, a beard and mustache competition, a beer chugging contest, snow sculpture contests, etc etc etc (some of those are sanctioned by the Fur Rondy organization, some aren't. You can probably figure it out.)

Getting ready for the World Championship Sled Dog race

All of the furs being auctioned were illegally poached, from animals that had to be put down, or animals killed in self-defense

At Rondy 2010, I had my very first reindeer dog. Pure heaven.

Wolf pack meeting

Nothing quite like a below freezing scrambler ride.

I love a good cover song. I think the key to a good one is to make sure not to copy the original. Folks, you aren't going to sound as good as Eric Clapton, but if you make Tears in Heaven sound like yours, you have a  chance.

One of my favorite covers is Streetlight Manifesto's cover of Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard, this week's hot jam. They aren't trying to sound like Paul Simon which is why I think it works. (Not that a multi-piece ska punk band could sound like Paul Simon, but still.)



Want more Streetlight Manifesto covers? Try their cover of former hot jam of the week, Red Rubber Ball.

Jergen's Natural Glow and Ricky Skaggs

So my world looks like this these days:

Which means I look like this these days (it's an evolutionary advantage to blend in with the snow, right?):

Pre Jergen's Natural Glow

Needless to say, 5ish hours of weak sunlight does not a healthy glow make. But thanks to Jergen's Natural Glow I can go from being so pale I'm clear to being off-white. (or white lion to slightly-less-white lion)

Post Jergen's Natural Glow

And by this time of the winter I'm happy to be slightly less white lion colored. Natural Glow doesn't turn you orange and won't suddenly make you tan, which I consider to be a good thing. (Who wants to go to work practically clear one day and Snooki the next? That's tacky). The only downside is it does make you smell vaguely of self tanner, but the smell fades pretty quickly and the color lasts for a long time so you don't constantly have to smell like a spray tan booth.

Bonus: No risk of turning out like this

Jergen's isn't paying me for this, but if they want to send me some free lotion, I wouldn't turn it down. It will be a long time before my skin sees the sun again.

This week's hot jam is Little Maggie by Ricky Skaggs. Maggies aren't painted in a very flattering light in most songs. Rod Stewart's Maggie May is a cougar keeping Rod out of school and The Beatles' Maggie Mae is a sailor-robbing prostitute. Not to great for the Maggies of the world. Little Maggie is a traditional bluegrass song and it isn't particularly flattering either, I guess. Maggie has a dram glass and a shot gun and she's courtin' another man, but I've always liked it anyway. Maggie seems sassy rather than sad. I like the version by Ricky Skaggs because he plays a mean-mandolin and I don't get to write things like that very often.

First Snow and All American Rejects

According to the National Weather Service it's supposed to snow tomorrow morning. While I'm not looking forward AT ALL to driving to work, I'm still pretty excited about the snow.

Side Note- Anchorage sees approximately 6-8 months of snow every year. It starts snowing usually around Halloween and doesn't melt until May, sometimes June. So one would think that people, on average, would have a handle on winter driving. But for some reason, every year people forget how it works. It's like that pregnancy amnesia business. Anchorage residents seem to have winter amnesia (probably to keep us here year after year.) Winter amnesia causes people to turn into idiots the instant snow hits the ground. I'm sure I'll see at least one car in the ditch tomorrow morning. Hence my lack of excitement for my morning commute across town.

First snows always see so magical. Everything is so clean and white. (Unlike snow in February when everything is gross and grey.) Snow forces you to slow down. You can't be in a hurry when you can only drive 30 mph. You have to work a little harder and plan a little more, but I think it's worth it to see a fresh blanket of snow. It's like living in a Thomas Kinkade painting.

This past weekend I was in Talkeetna, AK celebrating two of my friends' birthdays.

Happy Birthday Jim and Michaela!

We woke up Sunday morning to Talkeetna's first snow. It was beautiful. Especially since we stayed in an adorable, cuddly warm cabin and got to eat bomb.com biscuits and gravy at The Roadhouse.

This week's hot jam is The Last Song by All American Rejects. Earlier this week I heard an AAR song on the radio. I hadn't heard one in awhile and it reminded me that I kind of totally love them. Sure, they don't have spectacularly deep lyrics or intricate chord progressions. But they are poppy and fun and sometimes that's what you want. In high school I was an AAR super fan. I saw them 6 or 8 times, and even met the band twice.

I nearly died.

The emo lyrics of The Last Song are covered up by a fun pop punk arrangement and a totally unrelated video and it's just as great as I remember it.

Four Seasons and George Jones

I'm once again at a place in my life where I can decide to go pretty much wherever I want. (Assuming that someone will actually hire me, but that is one of my least favorite topics, so it certainly doesn't belong here.) In my search for a job, location is of the utmost importance to me. I've come up with a pretty good list of requirements, one of the which is having four seasons. (Other things on the list include: fireflies, thunderstorms, and relatively close proximity to a major airport.)

It's been a few years since I've lived somewhere with textbook seasons. You know, cold in the winter, hot in the summer, red/orange/yellow leaves in the fall, and rain and tulips in the spring. I like the balance of the seasons; as a reward for a surviving a cold and snowy winter, you get a hot and sunny summer. It all evens out. Here in Anchorage we have two seasons winter and not winter; dark and light, which has a balance of its own, I guess, but it's just not quite the same. For example, it's May 4th; it's raining, which is spring-y, but it's also 35 degrees, which is not.

This week's hot jam is He Stopped Loving Her Today by George Jones. Generally, I wouldn't consider a song this melancholy to be a hot jam, but I do love it. Released in 1980, it was George's first #1 song in six years, and it's often considered the greatest country music song of all time, although I'm not so sure about that. How do you judge such a thing? But it does have its own website (http://www.hestoppedlovinghertoday.com/) so that must count for something. Also I love any song that has talking in the middle.



Fun fact about George Jones: His alcoholism is/was well known, and apparently one time his wife got mad at him for being drunk all the time so she hid the car keys and left. The liquor store/bar was 8 miles away and she knew he wouldn't walk that far. Fueled by alcohol withdrawals and a stubborn streak, George rode the lawn mower all the way there.