Looks like our chinook weather is going...

...and I will bid it a fond and wistful farewell.

For the past week we've had record high temps here in the Interior...it actually hit 41 degrees on Wednesday. It's weird to see enormous piles of snow, rivers frozen solid and yet people are in shorts. Not me, mind you, because I retain so little heat that I might as well be reptilian, but some of those crazy Fairbanksians that think that 5 degrees is sweater weather. The Chena started melting in places, causing quite the flutter...that doesn't usually happen til April so February is a tad unusual to say the least. There's been a lot of muttering about global warming too, and the good old days of 60 below til March. Well, it takes all folks but I really don't mind a bit of unusual warmth. My toes are warm for the first time in a month.

This kind of weather is called "chinook" -- not sure why, but apparently it happens occasionally when really warm air from down south forces its way up here, rather than our forcing cold air down to freeze the good people of the northern United States. But today it's only supposed to be 10 degrees, and tomorrow it's supposed to snow in a goodly way and have a high of 4 degrees with a low of 11 below. Sigh.

We'll take some pics of the winter wonderland and post soon...it snowed last night and it's quite pretty. We couldn't take many pics in the really cold weather because the camera battery would freeze after a few seconds and no longer function properly. I REALLY want to get a pic of a moose for everyone...we had traffic stopped while Connor and I were leaving Fort Wainwright on Friday because a moose was munching their way through the trees at the gate. It was BIG...probably seven or eight feet tall and just massive. When something that big, ornery and near sighted comes tromping around, the gate guards scatter, in case they piss it off and become a tap mat for a moose stomping hoe down. A police car came and honked and flashed at it to make it move along -- I tried desperately to get Connor to check it out, but he liked the police car better. No accounting for taste eh?

Anyway, so it's getting cold again. Eeesh.