More Buskin Lake

A good thing about skiing in the same place every day is that you get to take pictures of the same views, and try and make them better. I think the top photo here is my best yet of the outlet to Buskin Lake. I've been trying for years to get the reflections on the water and snow right. And who's to say I will not get another good one, a better one even?

Today was the best skate skiing I've experienced this winter. It was ski anywhere fast snow. I flew across the lake and up the river on the other side. A couple miles up the river there is a deep canyon, and I skiied another 1/2 mile or so up into the canyon until I got to a frozen waterfall and the pool below it (bottom photo). The waterfall is sort of a winter Mecca to me and I try and get there at least once every year. Today it took me less than a 1/2 hour (even with some some difficulties outlined below).

On the way, in a very narrow part of the canyon, the snow shelf I was skiing on broke off of the rock wall and fell into the river. I ended up standing on the bottom in my skiis in thigh deep water. No problems, but I did not want to get wet again on the way home, and the shelf had been the only dry route on the way in. So when I got to the waterfall I climbed up out of the canyon and skiied home along the rim. The middle photo is the view from the rim down into the canyon with Pyramid mountain in the distance on the horizon.

I flew on on back to the lake and even did an extra lap around the lake. It was so fast a trip that I even with the extra lap I was still gone from the truck less than an hour and a half. Perfect skiing. Patrick

Buskin Views

Lately I've been skiing at Buskin Lake - getting on at the outlet and skiing across the lake and then on up the river above the lake. Plenty of snow and the scenery is always stupendous. For a while there we almost had too much unconsolidated snow. It was almost getting too deep to move around on skiis. So the recent warmth and wet snow will actually improve things in the long haul. Still right now it is a little icy, but not icy enough to hold me up above the crust when I tried skate skiing today.

Top photo is of the lake outlet yesterday - a pretty warm dismal day (at least in the morning when I went skiing). The bottom photo is of the lake inlet today. Sunny and crisp, but still too warm for my tastes. Patrick

Visit from Homer

Cathy and Mike are here from Homer for 3 days....Nora loves having extra laps to sit in and it is fun to have family around. Stuey is back to normal with his energy levels and loves the attention as well.
Last night we were blessed by a delivery of 4 tanner crab from Dave Kubiak. Patrick shucked it all and we enjoyed it with dinner, chili. Gosh there is nothing better than fresh crab!!


Zoya

Valentines Day at the Saltonstalls-Sick house

Yesterday was quite the sick house here at the Saltonstalls. When we woke up, Patrick felt VERY ill. Shakey, cold and achey. Poor guy. He spent a good part of the morning sleeping in the recliner and the afternoon in bed. I gave him some theraflu which helped ease his aches for a little bit.

I cancelled all of my planned activities-and did nurse "mommy" roles with the kids as well. Nora had almost no voice at all and still quite a cough. It was a good day to lay low and let everyone heal. A trip to Safeway with the kids got the necessary ingredients for homemade tomatoe alphabet soup. AND I made cookies-its been months since I've made home made chocolate chip cookies. And boy were they yummy!

I rather enjoyed the sick day. At first I was horribly annoyed in the morning, the kids were screaming, Patrick was insisting that he wasn't that sick and he was going to go skiing. The broken toilet in our bedroom started overflowing onto the bathroom floor and I cursed myself in frusturation that I hadn't called the plumber on it already.

But by the afternoon, things looked up and I thoroughly enjoyed the day at home with NO commitments.

The day ended with me going to the ferry dock at 10:30 PM to watch Cathy and Mike arrive on the Kennicott from Homer. The Kennicott is the larger of the two ferries which service Kodiak, and boy is it fun to watch the Kennicott dock. It is an orchestrated process of men throwing various ropes, adjusting the tension from forward to back, so the boat can get in just the right position for the car loading dock. The weather was sleeting and raining--cold--- but the men working didn't seem to notice as they worked to get everything into position for the Kennicott.

Zoya

Stuey wore his "pimp daddy" heart hat in honor of Valentines Day. He was dressed up with no place to go!! :)

Total Fraud

Yesterday I was feeling pretty good about my sunrise over Kodiak photo - and I even waxed poetic about aplenglow and all that in a blog post. But then I talked to people at work and discovered that I had just barely missed the full moon setting over Barometer Mountain. By all accounts I must have missed it by minutes. Then I just happened to glance at Sven Haakanson's moon setting over Kodiak at sunrise photo on the Alutiiq Museum's website. His photo is better. It ate at me for an entire day - I should have gone to work 15 minutes earlier! I should have got the moon in the picture!

So tonight I did - I went back and took the photo all over again, and I got the moon just perfectly off of the shoulder of Barometer. Nice eh? Too bad it's a total fraud. I took the moon from a sunrise over Pyramid photo I took a couple of months ago and photoshopped it my 'Morning Glory' photo of Kodiak. The sad thing is that I like it with the moon so much better, and I will now never be able to like the original. And never fear, I will never claim a bogus photoshopped photo as the real deal. Trust me.
Patrick

Morning Glory

What do you call it when the top of the hills glow with the first of the sunlight before sunrise? I know they call it alpenglow when the mountain tops hold the last of the sunlight at sunset. But does it have the same name in the morning? Perhaps we should call it morning glory.

I took this photo of Kodiak off the 'Hoser' bridge on my way to work. The sunrise is now so early that I was not even late for work. Patrick

Volcano contractions and more

MT.REDOUBT
As Patrick avidly watches the volcano activity with Mt. Redoubt, he looks at the activity monitor of the earth quakes around the volcano and they go in gradual surges, up and down. Birth is on my mind, because I can't help but think that the graph read out looks very similar to labor contractions when having a baby! They start, slowly build, build, build then decline. Just like labor. Patrick awaits the big eruption. The geologist in him loves this stuff.

STUEY
Stuey is feeling better, finally recovered from his wasn't-supposed-to-be birthday party. Poor guy. He didn't have a choice but to party hard to bring in the big 0-2. Today he went to his first day at Ms.Garahs (well, its actually Ms. Sarah's but Nora says Garah).....gotta love speech impediments. Stuey did fabulous. He still had a remnant of his little illness, but you never would've guessed. Sarah said he took a nap like a champ and when I went to pick him up, he was standing at a table stacked high with big leggos. He looked at me, smiled, then said, "Bye Mamma." He wasn't ready to part with his newly found lego creation. I couldn't be happier to have both of them going to the same place for childcare. It is in a private home, small number of kids and Nora and Stuey really like it. And the BEST part is that Sarah gets the kids outside in all sorts of weather. Shes not intimidated by a little wind or rain.

LOVING MOMMYHOOD
I'm loving mommyhood with the kids at 3 & 2 years old. They crack me up. I love being with the kids and I love my job. Its a toss up. I just know that I couldn't do 1 or the other full time. I've struck a balance which I hope continues to work. A friend recently told me that she is going to stay home for a year with her kids and I had a pang of guilt-like, "Should I be doing that? Does that make me a bad mom if I'm not staying home with my kids?". 15 minutes of reassurance later, I'm ok with the fact that I enjoy my job and I"m not going to play the guilt game. When I'm at home, I enjoy being at home. When I'm at work, I enjoy being at work. Living in the moment is the way to go.


Zoya

Kodiak's Road System

One of the best things about living in Kodiak, and something that we tend to take for granted, is our undeveloped roadsystem. Most people live either in town, out at Chiniak or in Bell’s Flats, and the rest of our road system is undeveloped land where people can hunt, fish, hike or whatever. In this regard Kodiak is like many European cities where everyone lives in town and they keep the countryside undeveloped. We are very unlike most American cities that tend to sprawl.

What most people do not realize is that our undeveloped roadsystem is an historical accident. And until last summer when Lesnoi, Inc., a major roadsystem land owner, decided to limit access to their land – most people did not even realize that most of the road system is privately owned. But for 30 years because of the ongoing litigation between Omar Stratman and Lesnoi, Inc we have largely treated it as quasi public recreation land, and it has remained undeveloped.

Now with the litigation wrapping up it may be time to pay the piper. Regardless of which side wins (and I’m not here to pick sides) Kodiak recreational pursuits could lose. All that land could get developed and closed to public access. Kodiak really does not have good long term planning, zoning laws, or land trusts to help guide the development of the road system. For instance, we could lose all the beaches we take for granted to private condominiums, the rivers could end up with private lodges on them, we could even end up with houses every 5 acres and a gravel pit around every corner. My worst nightmare is that we end up like either Wasilla (unfettered development) or Homer (a house every 5 acres and no wild undeveloped land for hunting).

Kodiak needs to plan for the future, and decide what we want where. We need to identify what places are special to us, and what places would make good gravel pits. We need to think of ways to purchase private land and keep it open to the public, to work with landowners on obtaining public easements to their land, and we’ve got to stop taking continued public access to the roadsytem for granted. Patrick

Ghostly Galleon

Yesterday we had a full lunar eclipse at around 5:30 in the morning, and I had intended to try and make a movie of it. But when I woke up it was cloudy and I was 'tired' from Stuey's birthday party anyway. So no lunar eclipse movie and it sure felt good to go back to sleep.

Last night I decided to look into the technical aspects of making a movie of the moon. It's pretty darn complicated! I got out both of my cameras and their instruction manuals and went at it. It turns out that my little point and shoot (Pentax W60) does better at night time time lapse photography than my 'good' camera (Canon G9). The G9 creates better time lapse movies but I could not get it to do this and expose for night time light. And while the G9 takes excellent, high quality night time photos there does not seem to be a time elapse automatic picture feature on it. I ended up using the time elapse feature on the W60 and then stitching the photos together into a movie in imovie, but I also shot a long (over an hour) time elapse video on the point and shoot. I have stitched both of the movies together so that you can decide which one works better. I do know that next time I need to turn of the little green auto exposure light.

Anyway, the next time we have a lunar eclipse I'll be ready for it!
Patrick

The Party that we tried to cancel. ... .

Yesterday Stuey turned two!

Over the course of last week, I casually invited a lot of people over for a dinner/birthday party. Casual dinner, no gifts, etc...
Well, the day before Stuey's birthday I could tell that he still had a cough and wasn't feeling 100%, so I called the people I had invited and told them it was cancelled. Since Patrick had already thawed out meat for the party, we decided to have Mike and Roxann over, as they had already been over last week with Stuey sick so we figured they were already contaminated.

So 5:30 rolls around, Mike and Roxann are over and lots more people come in the door! I forgot to call about 1/2 of the people I had mentioned it to last week. We barely had enough food, but there was definitely a surplus of alcohol. Stuey played some with the other kids and spent a lot of time on my lap. Nora went to MJ's arms and Marita's arms quite a bit. And Roxann was a saint about playing fun activiities with the kids-as always!!

And Patrick was in the kitchen enjoying himself telling stories and laughing with the guys!

It was a fun night, and the kids went to bed late. But then they slept in late, thank heavens.

When Patrick put Nora to bed, he ended up falling asleep as well-and I couldn't resist the adorable photo of the two of them together. Priceless.

Zoya

Photos: Yesterday morning we got both the kids on skis for the first time together! Heather Preece gave us a hand-me-down pair of skis so now we have two pairs. Only problem was that Nora ended up crying the entire time about wanting Stuey's ski boots. Go figure. Stuey was a sport about wearing his birthday hat while skiing. We got a good 5 minutes with them on their skis outside. A success by all measures for an outing with a 3 year old and 2 year old.

Snow Conditions Forum

If you're a regular reader of our blog then you'll know that every week or so I like to report on Kodiak snow conditions. Today I discovered a new website dedicated to just that - A Kodiak snow conditions forum. I love it!

Just glancing through it I learned that the cross country skiing on Salonie Creek and up above Buskin Lake seems to be good while the downhill on Pyramid is not as good as one would expect. In the past, you had to go to these places to find out what the snow was like. When you visit the site be sure to check out the Salonie Creek thread - it has some awesome pictures from this past weekend.

Anyway you can find the site at the following address (and I hope to have Zoya, our family webmaster, add it to the links on the side of our blog).

http://kodiaksnow.proboards.com/

The above photo is from way back in 2002 - a skate skiing safari up the American River.

Kids and Birth

The past 3 weeks have been busy-between piece mealing day care while our day care provider was on vacation, to teaching my birthing class, to being a support person for 2 friends in labor, to coordinating a midwife talk from Anchorage & seeing clients at the clinic...never a dull moment. But it will slow back down significantly this week.

As many people close to me know, I have recently taken significant interest in birthing and womens health issues with my new clinic. One goal of opening up my clinic was to have a chance to teach birthing classes, post partum classes AND be able to do doula/labor support work. A doula is someone who is with a mom (and her husband or others) during labor to provide support, ideas, comfort, massage, etc... research shows that having a doula at labor decreases the need for interventions, decreases c-section rates AND improves the mothers feeling of confidence and sense of well being after delivery. There is currently 1 other practicing doula on the island and a need for many more so we can help many more women in labor!
I love being in labor with women-I get to utilize my massage skills, my knowledge of anatomy and physiology in helping explain what is going on, and I LOVE coaching moms through contractions. And of course-the best part where they meet their baby for the first time. What an honor to be part of that experience.

Last night was the midwifery talk and around 40 people came-about twice as many people as I expected. People kept coming in the door and we kept pulling out more chairs. Barbara Norton spoke-she is a certified nurse midwife from Anchorage who owns and directs the Geneva Woods Birthing Center. She spoke about the rising c-section rate in correlation to rising use of electronic fetal monitoring, how to encourage moms to do healthy laboring and how the US is #26 in the world for infant/mother mortality and we spend twice as much on maternal health care as the countries towards the top of the list (like France for instance).

Some people may think, "well, whats the big deal? About having a healthy, good delivery?" The big deal is that physically for the mom it is a MUCH EASIER recovery for the mom to avoid a c-section. AND to mention how empowering it is to have a regular childbirth with your family/friends/support around--to know you did it. And as Barb mentioned, how empowering it is for the husbands involved to know that they were part of the experience. And to see their wife in labor and to be proud of their wife for doing such an amazing job. It sets the stage for feeling confident as a parent.

As Patrick says with regards to me and womens health/birthing---I need passion management therapy. I'm way to excited about this topic!

This afternoon is my 5th prepared childbirth class, which I'm excited about. I'll be doing another session in April.

Tomorrow Stuey turns 2!!! How fun!!!

Zoya

The top photo is Stuey asleep in my arms two days ago-he wasn't feeling great with a bit of a cough. Its still lingering, but the kids cough syrup from Cactus Flats really seems to be helping keep him clear!!

What a difference a day makes

What a difference a day and 8 inches of snow makes! Er, actually make that 48 hours between the picture of Kodiak at dawn and the one I posted two days ago. In between we had a very snowy day. I love the snow because it makes Kodiak seem so much brighter. The picture of town was actually taken about 1/2 hour earlier than the one from 2 days ago and see how much brighter it looks. I took the other 3 pictures after the sun had officially set under the trees in Abercrombie. The snow on the ground made it seem like much earlier in the day. Too bad we don't quite have a full moon!

Even without a full moon the new snow makes it possible to go for a ski or a walk after the sun sets. Lately the cross country skiing on the lakes around town has been outstanding. I beat in a skate ski track around Island Lake. The first couple of laps were pretty slow in the deep snow, but by the time I finished I had a pretty darn good track. Not groomed like the ski trails in Kincaid Park in Anchorage, but I much prefer the 'character' of our local trails. Patrick

True Comfort

Nothing quite like reading a book on a bed with dogs on either side for complete comfort. This is the 'dogroom' - the bed where the dogs sleep in our house. It used to be where I slept when I first moved to Kodiak before I married Zoya. These days it's where I go to read with the dogs, or sometimes,very occasionally, to sleep 'when I'm in the doghouse'. Patrick

Sunrise BEFORE Work

It is officially now light when I drive in to work in the morning. Admittedly, I did drive in a tad late to work, but these pictures were taken right at about 9 AM. And before I went to work. Not long ago this was a scene you'd not see until well past 10 o'clock. Not that I'm all that wild about the sun coming up later - more daylight is a harbinger of spring, and, de facto, the end of winter. I love winter. Still, I will admit a little more light is nice. Patrick

Ricky and Barb

Recently Zoya and I have come under fire from relatives who do not want their full names mentioned in our blog. They fear strangers googling them and discovering they once 'passed out' after Thanksgiving dinner, shot a living animal and ate it, or, heaven forbid, have an eccentric brother living in Alaska, or a sister who is proud to nurse her two-year-old. They have asked that we give them each an alias- so they are now Ricky and Barb. They no longer need fear the invasive google search.
Do other bloggers out there have relatives with similar issues with offended family members?

Welcome to the family, Ricky and Barb!

The photo is of Barb. Her face has been blurred to protect her identity.

Patrick and Zoya

Home Alone with Kids

This weekend Zoya got a call from her first doula client early Saturday morning and pretty much spent the rest of the weekend at the hospital. So I was home alone with the kiddos - Mano a Mano. It was pretty cold this weekend and I am heartened to discover that the cold really does not bother the kids. They'd beg me to go outside. Once while I had them both doubled up on the sled it wiped out and Nora did a face plant in the snow. I expected tears and the end of good times, but no she started to laugh face down in the snow and wanted to do it again!

Another outside activity was going on 'safari' or 'elk hunting'. The kids would explore under the spruce trees in the unimproved part of our lot. I told them that busting through the salmonberries is just like what I do when hunting elk on Afognak Island. After I told Nora this she did 3 circuits through the salmonberries telling me each time with a serious look that she was elk hunting (see bottom photo). Stuey fell down in the salmonberries and started to cry. I told him that this has been known to happen to grown men when hunting elk on Afognak.

Another activity that Nora seems to love, but Stuey seems a bit indifferent to is painting. Nora took it very seriously while Stuey threw the pens across the room. He prefers to throw stuff. Our little Mr. Destructo.

Zoya is home now and all is well. Patrick

New Hope for Salmon?

The other day I was cruising the aisles at Safeway when I noticed they had gourmet frozen salmon on hand. So I decided to do something I've never done at Safeway before - buy salmon. They had a couple varieties of salmon to choose from (and Pacific cod too), but I opted for the sockeye. The other choice 'Pacific salmon' sounded like a euphemism for pink or worse yet dog salmon. Clearly all the choices were wild caught. And it looked like they were flash frozen and packaged well. I checked the wrappers and they were packaged by Lucerne foods for Safeway under the 'Waterfront Bistro' moniker. A little on the pricey side, 12 bucks for 12 ounces, but, hey, finally some good quality frozen wild salmon in the supermarket.

Last year when we visited our family in Maine I checked out the wild pacific salmon for sale in the local supermarkets. All that I found was either canned (and poor quality stuff), or fresh lying on ice next to the farm raised Atlantic Salmon. And I hate to admit it - the farm raised stuff looked much fresher and more appetizing (and cheaper to boot). So enter this new product - wild flash frozen pacific salmon - and you can see why I am excited.

But how did it taste? Back home I thawed it out in the fridge and noted that it was really well sealed in individual vacuum packs. To be honest it looked better than the stuff I package for myself. Zoya noted that it had a nice recipe to try on the back. And last night when we did eat it - it was good. No fishy smell, and I could tell that the salmon had been bled before it was filleted. Really the only difference between the store bought salmon and my own is price. I am not likely to buy salmon at 1 dollar an ounce.

And the price brings up an interesting point because I am likely to buy canned salmon in the future. I've noticed that at $2.99 a can that the Field's Brand Wild Salmon (see post from late December) is cheaper than what I can can myself. And the funny thing is that these days Zoya and I seem to prefer canned to frozen salmon anyway. It's just much easier to deal with and far more versatile.

But it is good to see the 'Waterfront Bistro' frozen salmon on the super market shelves. Perhaps it will expand the market for Kodiak's fish. At least people down south will be able to buy 'fresh' salmon year-round. I just wish it was cheaper. Now if the canneries made a good canned product. .... ...Patrick

A True Look Into The Saltonstall Household

Patrick forced me to write this post. He put the pictures on and I replied, "Oh wow. We should title this...A True Look into The Saltonstall Household"

FAMILY DRAMA
Evidently Patrick's blog post on "Why Blog?" created quite a stir amongst our family members out East. We're all still talking, so thats good.

MAMMA"S BOY
Stuey is still a mammas boy-big time. He turns 2 and continues to nurse-I never imagined I would stlil be nursing my little guy 2 years later---the benefits for Mom and Baby are so great for continuing to nurse and there really seems no reason to wean him. The longer a mom nurses, the lower her risk of ovarian cancer, breast cancer and not to mention health benefits for Stuey (decreased incidence of respiratory infections, ear infections, good immunities from me). It helps me hold on to his baby hood, even as he really walks, talks (well, babbles) and turns into a little toddler.
Stuey and Nora become better and better friends each day-the benefits of having them close together are REALLY starting to pay off now. YEAH!!! Nora actually invites Stuey to her activities and welcomes his company. He will start going to Nora's daycare after he turns two, and I think Nora is THRILLED!! She wants to show her brother off to her day care friends.

CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING VODKA
Last night Patrick went to the freezer to pour himself a glass of Absolut Ruby Red Vodka on ice. The vodka bottle was semi full of frozen ice. Interesting. Vodka doesn't freeze. But vodka that has had water added to it would freeze. So someone who has been to our house in the past few weeks has been drinking it and watering down. Hmmm...this has never happened to us before. We were tempted to leave a sticky note with the words BUSTED on it...still might do it.

Zoya

Trunks

My lower back has been on the fritz lately - so no bending at the waist, lifting, or skiing. I can't do much, but long walks in Abercrombie Park with the doggies seems to help.

What I love about the park is the sitka spruce trees. Immensely tall trunks covered with moss and rough bark. Mossy dead limbs on the lower parts and way up high the green canopy. In the winter with all the leaves gone from the devils club, salmonberry and highbush blueberry bushes it seems you can see forever through the trees, and the trunks really stand out.

So beautiful but difficult to capture in a picture. When I try to take a picture of the whole tree the canopy and sky is inevitably over-exposed while the lower parts are under-exposed. Panoramic views seem to work the best, but they still lack the grandeur of the real thing and do not capture how tall the spruce trees really are. On my walks the last few days I tried to concentrate on just capturing the trunks.

In the top photo I highlighted the trunks against the white ice of the lake. In the bottom photo I chose a place where the nearest trunk was a good distance away and the trunks seemed more spread out - it made the trunks stand out a bit better. Patrick