Winter Activities

Life in Juneau in the winter is pretty mellow, compared to the whirlwind pace of summer.
Still, there is a lot going on during the dark months, and I often feel busier during the winter than I do in summer.

Of course, one of my priorities is hockey, which fills up many of my winter nights.  It runs from September thru April, with a break for the holiday season.  We have some Sunday games, but mostly the games are on weeknights, starting at around 10 pm.  I'm not good, but I am getting better nearly every game, and it is more fun than I ever thought possible.  And I do score a goal every once in awhile.  Now I really need to learn to stop...

There are a ton of lectures and seminars that go on during the winter nights.  There are Fireside Chats at the glacier, and Wildlife Wednesdays, and Evenings at Egan, and Sailor Talks, and plays and music and many other events that don't even make it onto my radar.  We go to some of them, but there are many more that I would like to see but miss.

The recent highlights: 

• a Sailor's Talk about a Juneau couple that bought a boat in Turkey and spent five years cruising around the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.  Rough life.

• a Fireside Chat about the recent magnitude 7.5 earthquake not too far from Juneau, and the potential tsunami danger in our area.  The good news is that we are unlikely to be in much danger from an event that is far away.  The bad news is that if there is an event that does effect us,we likely won't have time to react.  We did feel this earthquake because our friends were housesitting and we were hanging out with them.  It takes four boat people sitting around in a living room during an earthquake a very long time to figure out that something is wrong.

•  the film Chasing Ice.  It chronicles a really ambitious project to film glacial retreat around the world through time-lapse photography over several years.  It is a bit depressing, but beautiful.  I didn't find the film to be as preachy as the websites are, and I would highly recommend it.  One of the glaciers featured was the nearby Mendenhall, which has receded quite a bit over the last several years.

Other winter projects include:  designing an independent energy system for the boat (mostly solar, maybe some wind), learning Tibetan (more complicated than I thought), knitting, perusing seed catalogs, and reading. 

I have made more of an effort to carry my camera around with me, but Juneau hasn't been very photogenic of late.  The local weather has mostly been cold rain, and it hasn't been a great snow year, so we haven't been out in it too much.  The days are getting noticeably longer, and soon there will be more playing outside.