Fall

This is from several weeks ago. Many trees have already dropped their final leaf. I really love fall -- more pictures to come.

Permanent Fund Dividend

This year the state of Alaska is paying me $845.76 just for being an Alaskan resident.

Not only is this one of the nice perks for living way up here, it's become an entitlement in the eyes of a lot of folks. There will be complaints like: ONLY 845.76 for every man, woman and child?! That's about 100 less than last year, and another 100 less from the year before.....

You won't hear me complaining.

Where I live

This little cabin above the text is one of the places I house-sat at this summer. I think I stayed at 5 or 6 different places, all in Palmer. It was nice to be back where I started my AK life and be with "old" friends. I also filled in quite a lot at the coffee shop. It's a great place and I was reminded how lucky I was to land there of all places when I first arrived. The rest of these pictures are from Anchorage: Flat Top mountain, a favorite hike/run, takes about and hour; Goose Lake by the university; my new apartment building -- we're up on the 3rd floor, closest to the street; and anchorage diversity. Anchorage is a big town, and after living here for a little more than a year, I'm still impressed with how diverse/cosmopolitan it is. Last week had authentic turkish food.

august

I returned to AK august first after my 5-week family oddessy. One afternoon Keri (a friend from Palmer) and I went blueberry picking on Lazy Mountian in Palmer. Tana and Mazlow were happy to help.

more from july

For family vacation this year we went to New Bern/Atlantic Beach, NC. on the way there, we passed through Kentucky. We had yet to summit Kentucky's high point, so of course we went way out of the way to check it of the list (19 down as of now). The high point lies under a condemned look-out tower. Near this high point, which we drove up to, was the town of Cumberland. an old mining town, like most in SE Kentucky. That night we got a room at the cumberland motel, seemed nice enough and our only option. long story short, at midnight mom discovered her bed was full of bed bugs and we took off driving until we found another open room in the area, but not until 4 am. NC was beautiful, had lots of fun at the beach. so hot we couldn't do much else.

July

Spent a week in International Falls with G'ma and G'pa stenberg. Got out on Rainy Lake (my first time navigating -- notice grandpa's face), walked to Canada, gathered peet moss for g'pa's strawberries and went shopping with grandma. Trips up there are never disappointing.

More to come...

A first

Here begins my life as a blogger. From now on, all of you who would like to know the very latest and greatest news from my world can come and see for yourself. And because this is oh so very important, I will sacrifice valuable school work time to keep it up to date. Just for you.

I skipped my third Wednesday of classes today because I have a cold, headache and have already fallen behind on class work. So instead of going to classes, I went to financial aid to learn how messed up my student loan situation is, had a Thai lunch with Paul, had my engine oil topped off at Jiffy Lube (did you know that they do free top-offs inbetween changes?), went to Fred Meyer to buy batteries for my camera and chocolate for my mood, and then home where drank some TheraFlu, demanded that CellularOne fix my phone bill, and read some articles on social/psychological theories applied to social work practice.

The day ended fairly well because I recieved a $35 check from my car insurance company for the amount I had to pay a cab driver to break into my car when I locked myself out. Some other good things are that I was able to actually concentrate on most of my readings and the medicine has kicked in an I'm not feeling as stuffed in the head. I also feel as if I'm floating away from my computer....hmm. Maybe I should check the box the stuff came in.

Aside from the chaos of starting a new semester and a horribly late financial aid check, there's been some crazy things going on here where I live. On monday when I was leaving this brand new, state of the art apartment for internship, there were 5 cop cars and a paramedic vehicle outside my building. several cops were taking pictures and entering the building. After getting more details later on in the day from my roommate, who was questioned by police, sounds like someone was attacked/murdered monday morning in the apartment right next to ours, right on the other side of the wall. Cops were here all day monday and part of the day tuesday. the only info building managers are giving is that there were two assults this week, in our building, by the same guy, and that we all need to be very careful, vigilant. And, by the way, in the two previous weeks there have been several break-ins into cars in our parking garage. All thanks to our state-of-the-art security system. In addition to the security system, we now have round-the-clock security guards. Yesterday one of them asked me as he pointed to the notice about the attacks, "what's this all about??" I ignored him.

Looks like I had more to say than I initially thought. Coming up are some pictures of what I did this summer and of scenes from my day-to-day travels.