Alaska

So about 9 months ago, my dad calls me up and says, "want to go on a cruise in Alaska? I'm paying for it." So of course I said yes. That happened in July / August. I flew up a week early with a travel buddy, and we went to Denali National Park for a couple days, then bumped around Anchorage for two days. I have the pics backed up online and will post a link once I've sorted through them, pulled the best ones, and posted narrative descriptions.

The short version: 
* Tundra is made up of a 6-8" deep carpet of spongy lichen and sometimes-woody plants (miniature versions of scrub that grows higher at lower altitudes).
* The treeline descends as you get further north. In mainland Alaska, it's around 3,000 feet. Above that there's taiga (scrubby, woody stuff up to 8' high) and then tundra. It all intermixes, of course. There aren't any sharp delineations.
* The interior of Denali is almost treeless, surrounded by mountains separated by great U-shaped glacier-carved valleys, at the bottoms of which are flat gravel plains with multi-channel streams of glacial meltwater. The valley floors are sometimes miles wide. The vistas here are very, very long; much longer than anything I've seen in Colorado. The whole place looks primal, like I imagine cooler areas of the young Earth before trees evolved.
* The sun sets that far north, but it never gets completely dark in the summers - just a perpetual twilight. I did not need a flashlight the entire time we were in Denali.
*Glaciers are huge. Really, really huge - miles across, if several merge to make one big one. Several hundred feet high. They do actively calve into the sea and it does sound like thunder. The ice does look blue in places; sometimes the icebergs that have rolled recently are deep, deep blue.
* Glacier Bay and the mountainous coast can only be truly seen via watercraft - there are no roads here. Just endless mountains and the sea. If you only go on one cruise in your entire life, go on one that visits Glacier Bay. Anytime I was bored on the ship I could go up on deck and just watch the scenery go by.
* The Inside Passage is a lot like it is further south, on the Washington and Oregon coasts - tall trees and cool humidity.
* Some jellyfish are actually not that fragile. They do have a surface texture like Jello, but are much more firm. Not all of them sting, either. I guess they're filter feeders.

 We got back on a Monday, and on Thursday I turned around and drove down to San Antonio for a convention. I did four more events this fall, and now I've got a "break" until my next event right before New Year's. Which means 3 weeks (heading north for Christmas) of time in which I can make more and new products, do those landscaping projects in the back and the front, maybe get a functioning website up, and try to organize all my stuff (part III). I also finally found my stash of Christmas cards, so will be verifying addresses and actually mailing some out this year!

Spring Season

My first two events this year have seen a 10% and 20% increase in sales over last year. Will be nice if this trend continues. I managed to get my two tables for my biggest convention of the year (they sell out in about a minute and a half once online sign-ups open). There are so many people who want in that con that they're complaining when they get waitlisted or don't even make the waitlist. Enough people are clamoring for a random draw that the person in charge is actually considering it for 2013.

This would suck, a lot, because chances of getting in would be roughly 1 in 10. I'm on the waiting list for the dealer's room for this con (once you're in there, you're in), so hopefully either there will still be a portion of tables that are FCFS in the artist alley in the future, or I will pop off the wait list for the dealer's room soon. This con makes up about 20% of my income. Not sure what I will do if I can't get in in 2013, other than to assume that it's not going to happen and start doing what I need to do to fly to large conventions on the east and west coasts, and bring in more income. I've doing almost everything worth doing in TX right now.

I've got two more events back-to-back in a couple of weeks, and then a bit of a break in April through mid-May in which I may do some stormchasing with a friend when I'm not doing business stuff.

Over the next couple of days I'm going to do some weeding in the beds front and back, and start planting stuff. Last freeze date down here is St Patrick's day, but the 10 day forecast says it's not going to freeze between now and then, so I'll get a bit of a head start. Going to try corn, beans, and zucchini in the the back (spaghetti squash was a no-go last year), along with more carrots (much success last year) and beets. The beets are puzzling to me - I planted a patch, and only the ones along one edge actually grew beyond seedling size. But, you can plant them in the fall and overwinter them, like carrots, and I just ate some for the first time tonight. Wow those were good! Just boiled them and buttered them.



My other winter crop besides carrots (not mature yet) and beets was sugar snap peas, which I'm happily munching on every time I'm out in the back yard. I've even got a couple of mutants, which are making extra-large wavy pods. I ate one to make sure it was good, and the rest of those I'm leaving on the vine to go to seed (bigger pods = more to eat). The snap peas are the one crop I can reliably get seeds out of; I'm on my second generation. I left carrots to bolt last year, and only two of them did. I've read that carrots tend to lose their genetic identities fairly quickly without a lot of mixing, so I'm curious as to what this limited second generation will produce.

The rest of the back garden is going to be parsley, cilantro, dill, and whatever else I can squeeze in. Giving up on tomatoes and peppers in the back - too much sun / heat. Might work in a mild year, but not another summer like the last one. The basil did great in the front flowerbed up against the house (house faces east), so I'll try my pepper plants there too and see what happens. I got two or three bluebonnets to come up in the front yard from seed. They're not blooming yet. Should be a spectacular year for wildflowers what with all the rain we've had, as long as it's not 100 degrees with no rain every day in April (that happened in '06).

Speak Out Against Internet Censorship - it's real and it's about to happen

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech <-- A good summary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more

Today is "blackout" day, in some form or another, for a number of the web's most highly-trafficked sites. These include the likes of wikipedia, reddit, cheezburger network, mozilla, wordpress, minecraft, and google. There are around 7,000 domains participating, showing solidarity against the ill conceived (and yet well lobbied) SOPA and PIPA bills. If you haven't done so already, consider signing one of the many petitions or personally contacting your representatives. Barring that, at least read up on the bills and find out what this is all about.

Call your Senators:
http://lifeaftersopa.cheezburger.com/
An idea on what to say: "I'm calling to register my strong opposition to the Protect IP act as a citizen and voter of [your state]." It really is that easy.

Send an e-message:
http://americancensorship.org/
They already have suggested text filled in; you can change it if you want.

New Year

I didn't get to make it to Oklahoma for the holidays; I flew to Vegas to see Jason and family, and it was a blast. We found mountain lion footprints in the snow up in the Mt. Charleston area! Eventually I will figure out how to post pictures here...

I had a convention over New Year's weekend, and it went well. I've got 2 months of down time (more like prep time) before my spring season starts. My goal: organize *everyting*. I've lived in this house for a year and a half, and non-essential things are still where I stowed them to get them out of the way when I moved in. Which means a lot of my materials for making the more interesting jewelry and leather items are not accessible, so I want to change that so I can really engage my creativity with metal and leather, rather than just only making the simple stuff that sells (and pays the bills, albeit). I've bought a bunch of plastic storage bins (conveniently on sale, at least the ones with red or green lids, post-Christmas) and will get a few extra shelves here in the next couple of days.

In addition to making room for the second motorcycle in the garage (I find myself loathe to part with my first bike, as it is so much fun to ride... it's like the difference between being a falcon and being a horse - the new bike is a workhorse and will get me places far away in relative comfort; it just doesn't accelerate or corner like the first bike), I would like to have easy access to my many cubic feet of lego bricks. They remain my sculpture medium of choice.

Today the temp was in the high 60's, so I got some gardening done... got the tulips planted (they had sat forgotten in the garage until today, when I noticed they were sprouting - oops!) and cleared out all the dead stuff from the veg garden. It is now a carpet of green, with much of it juvenile carrots (nothing like eating fall-planted carrots in the spring!), and volunteer cilantro and parsley. Those two herbs do fantastically down here, and like the carrots and sugar snap peas, don't mind getting frozen at all.

I'm about to dig up a strip along one side of the front yard and move a bunch of the herbs there; the neighbors took out a fine mature hedgerow for no apparent reason, and now the yard looks like a wasteland. I have a handful of mature beets I am going to harvest and eat within a week or so; it's weird, they only grew along the edges of the garden... guess they didn't like something with which I amended the soil? No idea.

Made some vegetable soup to eat during the convention:
8 cups water or stock
2-4 T. olive or vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
6-8 cloves garlic, minced / pressed
3 carrots, chopped
1/2 cup uncooked pearled barley or brown rice
1 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, however you like them
1 small potato, diced
4 oz frozen green beans, steamed to almost done in the microwave
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 zucchini, chopped
1 15oz can peas or beans (I used baby peas)
2 tsp dried herbs, at least two different ones (I used thyme, sage, basil, oregano, parsley, and rosemary, in order from greatest quantity to least)
2 bay leaves
1/2 t. ground black pepper
1/4 t. cayenne or red pepper flakes
salt to taste - depends on whether you had any in your stock to begin with. I think I wound up with a teaspoon of salt from the stock and added another 3/8 t. after that. If you use 8 cups of regular store-bought stock, you will not need to add any additional salt at all. I used 4 cups of low-sodium store-bought stock and 4 cups water.

Saute onion and celery in oil over medium heat for at least 3-5 minutes. Add garlic, herbs, and spices, and saute for another 2 minutes. Add water/stock, barley, bay leaves, tomatoes, carrots, and potato, bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to med-low and simmer for ~35-40 minutes, until the barley is almost done.

Add bell pepper, zucchini, and green beans. Simmer covered until these vegetables are as done as you'd like them and the barley is done; I did 5 minutes. Add the can of peas / beans at the very end, stir, turn off heat, let sit 5 minutes before serving.

Any vegetables will do, you just have to get them in the pot at the right time so they're cooked but don't turn to mush.