Sunset a la Seward

We had a beautiful sunset in Seward this afternoon! I took this picture just after 3:00pm, as the last beams of sun were hitting the side of Mount Alice in front of our apartment. My camera doesn't do the scene justice-it looked like a tropical fruit explosion on that mountainside, complete with oranges, yellows, pinks, and reds. Perhaps a rather large passion fruit had sliced itself sledding down those icy slopes. Our temperature has warmed as well--a downright balmy 36 degrees during the peak of the day. We had the sun out today, so the day lasted quite a bit longer than it usually does with the heavy light-dampening clouds around here. If those clouds had been in, I would not have been able to take a picture at 3:00 from the simple lack of a light source. We have about a 4 hour window of actual daylight right now, so the sun itself doesn't do much heating. Today, for example, we had a high of 36 degrees and a low of 34 degrees in a whole 24 hour period. It is nice to have the warmer weather coming off the Gulf of Alaska, though. It means the streets have slightly melted, so we can drive to the grocery store again!

This is an example of what the pavement looks like. This was taken this afternoon, in warm weather, so the ice isn't as thick as it has been for the past few weeks. But you can see the white line on the pavement from where the ice begins. This is what all the roads around town are like, as well. Complete sheets of ice. I wish I had ice skates and the proper ice skating skills to just get around town with, it would be much quicker and safer. As it is, everyone walks very slowly and we all wear special metal grips on our shoes so we don't fall face first onto the roadway. They plow around here, but with all the thawing and re-freezing we get being at sea level, the whole town turns into one big ice skating rink. And since the four-wheel-drive doesn't work on our truck and we live on a slight incline, that means we can't really drive around town now, even though we have a working vehicle again. Ah, such is a poor-couple's life. Good thing it's pretty to look at so we can enjoy it!

Squirrel on my Counter!

Our Thanksgiving weekend held many new adventures, including the rambunctious ice-fishing/sledding in the last blog. The latest shenanigans, however, were purely Tyler's. Tyler made his first squirrel taxidermy attempt last night, which was quite fun to watch. Here is Tyler, matching the eye of the dead squirrel to the glass eye in his hand, ensuring proper size and fit. He had to shave down the mount in order to make it the right size for the squirrel hide. Then, he had to cover the inside of the hid with an antimicrobial to kill anything that would cause it to rot. He ran into a problem, however, when the antimicrobial material caused the hid to shrink by about 50%! It consequently would not fit over the mount (although he tried--the face fit and it looked really cute, because you could give it facial expressions!). Also when he went to turn the hands right-side-out after coating them in the material, they shrunk so fast that the wrists ripped off during the flipping because they shrunk so much the hands wouldn't fit through them! He learned many lessons during this taxidermy attempt, and unfortunately all that is left are these pictures--no squirrel mount! I didn't even save the bones, since I've got too many bone projects going on at work with bird skeletons right now. We even have flesh-eating beatles at work to clean the skeletons for us! So, I get to use them for any skeleton articulation I need to do at work, but I can also bring in any roadkill/taxidermy garbage to have the beatles clean it off for me. Super fun. 

P.S. I took down the much niftier, but apparently exponentially grosser, picture of a close-up of the skinned little dead squirrel. It was cool. You could see all its little muscles and tendons. But after a few complaints, I thought it best to refrain from a prominent public viewing of said picture. 

Festivals of Feasting

Today was a glorious Sewardian Thanksgiving, with much merriment to enjoy. The day started as pictured below: ice fishing on Grouse Lake. Tyler, having grown up a native Iowan, was our expert fishing guide, showing us all the proper use of an auger, which drills a hole in the ice as shown below. Being a Washingtonian, it was my first time walking across a solid lake and drilling a hole in the ice to the cold waters below. After Tyler drilled his hole, it was my turn. I was very proud of my hole, and drilled into 10 inch thick ice almost as well as the hubby. I felt like a Weddell seal--quite possible the saddest of all marine mammals. They live in the Antarctic and have a very short lifespan. This is not due to predation or disease, but rather to the fact that in order to breathe, they have to scrape open holes in the ice with their teeth. Their entire life (between the random fish hunt) is spent scraping these breathing holes with their teeth so they don't ice over. Consequently, Weddell seals all die from starvation: their teeth get too stubby to actually catch fish with. And yes, I felt like a Weddell seal, scraping at the ice to get what I needed. However, I was quite happy in the process.

Once the holes were drilled in the ice, it was time to pick the proper bait and/or tackle. Pictured below is: Tyler in the bright orange life preserver coat (yes, there really is a built-in life preserver made of foam in that jacket), Chad (one of our new found Sewardian friends) in white on the left, and my boss Nikki on the right. Tyler, of course, is showing everyone how to properly bait their line. We were all quite grateful for his expertise. Chad and his girlfriend Sara (who is my friend from the SeaLife Center) are from L.A. Nikki (my boss) is from Texas. We are all sharing our first Alaskan winter together, and Tyler has become our expert to lead the way. It gets colder in Iowa, but our wind is worse. Pictures can't describe the force we had to deal with upon this lake. The wind was clocked at 72 mph in Seward's harbor yesterday.

Once the lines were baited, we dropped them in the hole. I never knew ice fishing poles were so tiny! The handle to the pole in the picture is literally right where the picture ends. What you see is the complete length of the rod. So miniature! Nikki and myself each got a bite from a fish, but none of them hung on long enough to reel in.

Once ice fishing was finished, we tried to find a place to sled. We drove up and down the Seward Highway looking for a place multiple people had recommended, but no one in Alaska seems to be able to give adequate directions. We ended up in Sara and Chad's backyard and made quite possibly the best snow run I have ever been on in my life. There were a myriad of airborne takeoff points, and by the end of the day, we had the thing so smooth you shot out of it like a Jamaican on a bobsled! (Cool Runnings, anyone??) We have decided to have a weekly sledding/potlatch night complete with a sledding code of ethics. It shall be quite enjoyable, perhaps comparable to the next Free Mason club.

Once the Bobbsled Snowathon was finished, we retired to a wonderful Thanksgiving feast with some friends from the SeaLife Center. The meal was wonderful, complete with a Peppermint ice cream cake and more food than any of the 10 of us could eat. It was definitely the next best thing to my Dad's home-cooked meal (nothing could have replaced that, of course). Food, Friends, and Fun, the best thing there is about the holidays!

We wish you all a happy Thanksgiving! Love to you all as well! We wish you were all here to share our adventure. We're enjoying ourselves in this beautiful, sparsely populated land!

Oh--by the way--I have a new position at the SeaLife Center! Starting on Saturday, I will be working part time in our bird department, feeding birds, cleaning bird poo, and learning all about animal training! I'm so stoked--It's exactly the experience I want to gain to put on my resume, and it'll be so much fun! Hoorays! (and yes--I work at an aquarium, and these are seabirds, much like seals and whales are marine mammals, these are marine birds. Raddness!)

Harvesting the Whale

We had our holiday party at the SeaLife Center last night, full of good food (although, coincidentally, no seafood was present at the long harvest feast buffet table) and shananegins. The above picture is from my shared cubicle at work: the interpretation department (that is, my friend Sara and I) entered the centerpiece competition for the night. We were given a little bag of goodies-a wicker cornicopia, red and yellow leaves, some plastic gourds-that we had to incorporate into a Harvest Feast centerpiece for the tables at the party. We wanted to keep with the harvest theme of the party, so we titled our piece "Harvesting the White Whale: Ahab's failed attempt". We made Moby Dick out of paper mache (he even had red googly eyes) and utilized a cheap Prince Charming Ken doll to create a proper Ahab, complete with a whaling spear. The bright neon blue is a Jell-O ocean, welling forth from our cornicopia. We had looks from everyone at the party, but we won't find out the winner until later. There was some formidable compition: a pilgram scene made completely out of chocolate and cookies, a bird coming out of a pie, an octopus battling a cornicopia. Apparently, I have quite a reputation at the center already. Everyone automatically assumed the centerpeice, with a Ken doll stabbing a whale, was my creation. Hooray. I'm a radical. At least Ahab doesn't actually win in the end--it was really a piece for animal rights. Win, Moby, win!

    I was even able to take Tyler on a flashlight tour of our aquariums we keep behind the scenes. The fish look so much creepier in the dark when they're spotlighted by a flashlight. I think one of the rockfish thought the flashlight would have been a tastey treat, too. It was attempting the heave itself toward the light at the surface. Silly rockfish. 

   

Yammysun

Look what I made! It's my dear friend 'Yammysun'. Yammysun is a pincushion I knitted to keep me company during the cold fall/winter months ahead. He has a hat, googly eyes, and little twiggy arms. Yammysun is very happy showing of his chic physique atop banana-bread worthy fruits and fall-themed squashes. He is my new favorite friend--by little stabbable yam.

Our first big snow day! Our winter has officially arrived, with minimal sunlight (yes, this was the brightest time of day) and snow! Since we're at sea level, the snow is quite wet and gets slushy easily, but it makes for a pretty scene!

This is the view from our front porch on the snow day. When the clouds aren't around, it's much brighter and you can see the big snow-covered mountains on the other side of the bay. Later this day, we decided to walk to Safeway for groceries. The walk usually takes about 20 minutes. It took us an hour to get there in the snow. Whew! It was a pretty walk, though.

When we got back from Safeway, we decided to make some warm comfort food. Nachos! There are french fried onions and ground bison on those bad boys. Good thing we spent two hours hiking through snow drifts before we sat down and ate these. My stomach still hurts. 

Good news! We drove the truck around the block! Mr. Amazing Tyler was actually able to fix the problem that has ben vexing us all summer. However, since every road in Seward is now covered in sheets of ice, we can't really drive it around town yet. We need to modify the chains we got for the truck so that they'll actually stay on the tires. But if something actually finally goes well with this silly peice of machinery, we should have a working vehicle in the next week or so! Which means *gasp* we can haul furniture to our house! A bed! A bed! I want a bed! I woke up face down in the carpet this morning because I nocked my Thermarest away last night. The resulting drool/carpet combination was not a pleasant way to start the day. 

Eat a Kitten

Everyone knows how much I love ocean critters. And I think they're pretty darn tasty, too. And yes, our oceans are dyeing and something needs to be done about it, but really, PETA, really. This is just going a little too far. It's really kind of creepy....Sea Kittens. I love kitties and I love fishies, but putting them together in a campaign to make people of the world stop eating fish? PETA, you're ridiculous. 

Really, you should check out this link. Click here for PETA craziness!

Suicidal Tendancies

The time is 10:07 am. The NOAA website reports a temperature for Seward's harbor of a balmy 41 degrees, the warmest we've seen since August. The rain pours sideways from the steady southerly wind, gusting up to 26 mph. The warm temperatures have melted most of the snow, but the layer of thick ice  stubbornly does not want to leave the gravel. And here toils Tyler, utilizing the short half hour window of morning twilight to attempt a truck repair. Most people have heard our horror stories of this truck. It brought us to Alaska, then wanted to die. It hasn't been running since the beginning of June, so the penniless Barenjagers have to get around town with some generously gifted bicycles, which can be a little tiresome with the wind and the rain blowing the opposite direction. And yes, when the roads were a thick layer of ice last week, Klutzy Kristen biffed it and has the giant lump on her knee to prove it. 

We made progress on the truck two days ago, however, and fixed a problem that had been the bane of Tyler's existence for the past few months--he had to fabricate his own part. The excitement of the fix was short lived. Yesterday morning Tyler left for work, the truck sat steadfastly in the cement driveway. By the time I'd finished my shower and looked out the window, the truck was in the middle of the road waiting to be hit by a car. Tyler rushed home from work and we were able to push it to the side of the road in the gravel, which was hard to do yesterday when ice and slush covered everything. 

So now Tyler's trying to repair the truck enough to get it back in the driveway so we don't get a ticket for parking it on the wrong side of the road. The battery is dead, though, from sitting for so long, and Tyler and I have to go to work. But here is a window into our frustratingly poor life here...a suicidal truck with no will to go on that haunts us every day. And Tyler's been working on it like this for months...in his rain gear, with the wind blowing like crazy. And all I can do to say thank you is bake some cookies. And maybe give him a mug of warm wine for his troubles. 

Good thing I get to play with ocean critters at work!

knitty kitty

These are the arm warmers I just finished! I'm very proud--it's my first time knitting in the round (without a loom to help me out), the first time I've done stripes, the first time I put a hole in my knitting, AND the first time I made something get bigger as I went! Whew! They're nice and warm, though, and the woolen fibers help keep the chill of the 30 mph winds off my wrists. My long arms were freezing from the inadequacies of long sleeves made for people with short arms. I had wrist burn. It wasn't pleasant. I do, however, fervently wish I had more time for the knitting. I'm now officially addicted. Mreow!

Airspace

I pilfered some pictures, despite my inability to keep my camera during my trip to Nanwalek. Just as I boarded the plane, it fell out on the runway. I at least had my video camera with me, and these are some shots from the camera. Not nearly as great as the ones that were on the camera... such is the disappointment of my absentminded ways. 

Top picture: our six-pack plane on the gravel air strip. This one is named "John Deer" 

second picture: View from the plane, we spent the ride flying low in the mountains. so pretty!

third picture: the largest building in any village: the school. The building to the left with the green top is the general store. The village isn't much bigger than what you see in the photo.

fourth picture: The airport in Nanwalek consists of this wooden frame. Local kids painted the whales. And everyone in the town owns at least one of those ATVs!

Bushmen

    I have just returned from my visit to two Alaskan villages: Nanwalek and Port Graham. Each are on the Kenai Peninsula towards the Aleutian Islands. We were quite lucky, as the weather coming off the Gulf of Alaska can be quite horrid. All four days were sunny and *gasp* not windy. The wind around here is constant. In Seward we've had about a week and a half worth of straight 25 mph winds, with gusts up to 45 mph. It doesn't stop. The wind lull was much appreciated.

    Both places were gorgeous. Nanwalek was right on the beach and we arrived early our first morning. With some spare time, since things in the villages go on a much slower, laid back clock than anywhere else in the US, I had a chance to roam the beach. At about 10:30 am, the sun's rays were just erupting over the hillsides. The sun is so low, it pierces the eye sideways. Each rock on the pebbly beach is broken into a color spectrum-for each stone, five more exist in layers behind it, colors throbbing around the edges. It was a beach site I had never seen before. Waves crash as I stare at three immense volcanoes along the Aleutian chain, one of which I can see smoke rising from like a simmering cigar, slowly embering inside. The town is just behind me, the largest building is the school. It also employs the most people--6 teachers. There is a janitor as well. We met him our second night in town. Nanwalek has a park dedicated to his honor. He will be the next tribal chief and spends his mornings in meetings with other elected members of his tribe, his afternoons running the only general store in the village, which is open from 12-5 six days a week, and his nights cleaning the school. We came upon him after dinner at the teacher's house in Nanwalek, on our way to bed in the elementry classroom. His clothes were tattered and dirty, and his face shone with beads of sweat as he slid the vacuum cleaner back and forth across the carpet, something out of a 1980s after school special. 

"Hello! You must be the scientists" he says. We nod and give him our names.  Everyone in the villages calls us that-the scientists. We walk towards the window that overlooks the basketball game playing downstairs. We watch a 16 year old villager jump, complete a 360 degree turn, and make a basket from the 3-point line.

   "You have some great kids," I say, nodding at the game floor.

    Chief looks at me like I'm trying too hard. "They do like the game. My son Patrick, that's him on the court in the white jersey, he tells me everything that happens on this court when he comes home. Every foul, everything. He went to one of those camps, you know, for the game. They have those in Anchorage, and he brought back all the rules, the official ones. He really loves it. He wants to play college basketball. I hope he can find a better career goal, though. Someone from a little village like this can't play professional."

    This whole dialogue takes quite a while to communicate, each word is pronounced in perfect laid-back laziness, not that this man could be lazy. 

    Port Graham was an experience, as well. It was half the size of Nanwalek, so only 20 students in all K-12 grades existed in the village. I found a seal flipper, though, with a big bite taken out of it. I could see all the bones moving under the flesh, quite enjoyable. 

   The worst part of the trip was losing my camera as I boarded the plane home. It fell out on the runway, and we'd taken off by the time I realized it. Consequently, no pictures from the trip. I'm hoping my travel mates give me copies of what they took. 

Symphonous Squirrel

And this is a bowl of squirrel meat. Tyler strapped his hunting horn to his side once again to tote home proteins aplenty for the family. He took brave and firearm-friendly Chad with him. Chad is the male counterpart to the 'couple friend' we've made since moving up here (the female counterpart, Sara, is pictured below, slyly slumped against a beluga). They moved up here from the heart of L.A. about a month and a half before we made the journey. Chad, having grown up in L.A., has played the vast variety of shooter games available for his Play Station 2, but had never used a real firearm to shoot a real animal until our bountiful hunter Tyler took him to the woods. And here, in this bowl, lay the spoils of their harvest. I do believe Chad is going to attempt to 'salt' the hide, as well. A good-luck squirrel charm. 

   Tonight I will use the meat to make "squirrel pockets". Much like a Hot Pocket, only tastier. And, of course, true men only eat pockets full of wild meat, roasted slowly over an open flame by the woman of the house. None of those sissy, girly 'microwave' pockets. By the wayside, if any of you hip cats want to hear a good stand-up routine, check out Jim Gaffigin's "Beyond the Pale". He really likes Hot Pockets. 

Beluga Nation

Top picture: My new friend Sara and I draped around a cement beluga, lavishing in our cetacean-like sleekness. Middle Picture: my first time seeing wild beluga whales! The little black line in the middle of the water is actually a white whale! I was very excited. The Cook Inlet belugas (the particular population we were observing) were officially put on the endangered species list last week. We were watching endangered whales forage for food. This was yesterday, the opening to my work field trip to Anchorage. I got paid to watch belugas, go to the zoo, and Anchorage's version of a science center, and had my meals paid for the whole way! It was quite a swell work gig. 

Snakes on a HAT!

This is the hat and scarf hat I knitted Tyler. It's a snake circling the hat, eating its tail. I've had mucho knitting time sitting at the touch tank waiting for SeaLife Center visitors. 

animal carcass

Our blog would not be complete without decaying animal parts. Mr. Barenjager went woodland hunting a couple days ago. He managed to bring home three tasty squirrels, the cutest little chunks of stir fry meat. However, during his wanderings in the wilds of the Kenai Peninsula, he came upon this bear-killed porcupine. Quills encircle the carcass, its mouth agape in its final resting yawn. If anyone knows Tyler, they know he has pilfered his fair share of decaying animal bones--a box of collected elk bones being the first thing to sell at our Bellingham garage sale before we moved. This pile of bone and porcupine flesh proved to be the foulest pile of such rotting carnage Tyler had ever found. The skull is sitting in a vat of cleaning fluid on our porch. I won't share a picture of that mess. 

Our Backyardi

Yesterday was a rare day in Seward--the sun had full reign over the sky! We took advantage of the beauty, and went on this hike. The trail literally starts 5 blocks away from our apartment, then it's straight up Mt. Marathon to witness some amazing views. The Seward small boat harbor is in Resurrection Bay, that's the view from about halfway up the mountain, just before the alpine areas when we were still in the tree line. It's amazing how quickly you can go from sea level (our apartment is across the street from the shore of the bay) to alpine tundra--an hour and a half of steady hiking. The last picture is from as far up as we could get. Our backyard.

Where we've been

Picture 1: Freshly harvested salmon roe mixed with a  tantalizingly simple mixture of garlic, pepper, and dill would surely cause any tongue to twitterpate.  A freshly caught female silver salmon provided the egg explosion when Tyler extrapolated the fishy flesh from the sea. 

Picture 2: 'Moop', one of two farm animal pets that lurk in the kitchen, glowers atop the finest pizza pie we have ever created...complete with a beer-batter crust. 

   These are just a few of the fun things we've done with our food since arriving in Seward. There's not much else to occupy the time, other than playing with your food whenever opportunity arrises. Tyler made pickled spiced salmon that was an entire day-long process to create, looks atrocious in the jar, but tastes quite superb. 

Welcome to the Jungle

Our Alaskan world for all to witness...I hope you will enjoy a look at our life in the little town of Seward. It's been an adventure lead by two poor, crazy newlyweds and I'm quite positive the insanity won't stop. I'm pretty confident our pocketbook won't be inflating anytime soon, either :o)