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!