Our perfect Storms!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We hope you all enjoyed good food and good company, we certainly did! (although we did miss family being close, and not just for Dad's tastey pumpkin soup!) We spent the day frolicking in the  snow banks around Seward and went ice fishing on Grouse Lake, just out of town. This is a picture of all those who went, standing astutely around the fishing holes.

I took a picture down the fishing hole! It's just a little black hole of shineyness. If you keep your face close to the hole, you can watch the fish come check out your lure. I have the misfortune of only attracting fish the same size as my lure, but it's funny to watch them try and stick a big fake fish in their mouths!

Here Tyler models the close-face ice fishing technique. It gets pretty wet awefully fast.

Tyler caught a few Dolly Varden on the lake....aren't they pretty while they die in the snow? We fried them up to have on the side with Thanksgiving dinner.

We're house sitting for some friends right now, who graciously allowed us to have a few people over for a dinner feast. We had quite the turnout of food, and it was all amazing! Tyler and I provided all the meats...four kinds of birds, two kinds of fish, and clams.We spent all day cooking after the morning fishing, but it was well worth it.

Here we have the main course: a Turduckouse! Yes, that's right; a turkey, and duck, and a grouse all wrapped into one fabulous dish! I of course put a layer of thin bacon in the middle for a little extra 'umph' and coated the outside in my special herbed butter. It was amazingly good...we only ended up with one little leftover peice! In all, we had a marvelous Thanksgiving day.

The people we're housesitting for also have an adorable puppy. We made a snow kitten together the day after Thanksgiving. Immediatly after this picture, she jumped on it and ripped out its stick arm. I guess she already hates kitties....

I literally just took this picture at noon from the side of the SeaLife Center. We have a big storm surge right now, and all the snow is melting away and adding to the rain...it's rediculously wet outside! In the back of the picture is a concrete wall you can usually see much more of. The waves have been so intense we've actually had concrete blocks getting tossed to where I was standing to take this picture! It's a nasty, stormy Alaskan day, and it's not going to get any brighter than that...we're in for a few days of darkness!

This is Gwen (the co-worker who's sadly leaving for an awesome job in Oregon soon!) and I just after we braved the storm for 3 minutes to try for some pictures. It was brutal. We should have been in a video for a heavy metal band!