Bbbbbbbbbbbr

No, it's not another post about the temperature. This one is about trucks ("Bbbbbbbbbbbr" is Soren's truck noise).

Soren loooooooves trucks. Airplanes? Deserve no more than a passing glance. Trains? Meh. But even the humblest of trucks rates widened eyes, a pointed finger, and some kind of exclamation (ranging from a curious "Das!?" to an awed "Woooooooooow!") (yes, he usually says "Das?" instead of "What's that?" It must be the German in him).

As you might imagine, we have a few toy trucks around the house. Soren likes pushing them around and saying bbbbbbbbr, of course, but lately, he's been spending some quality relaxation time with his trucks. He parks them all neatly on the couch and then climbs up to sit with them.



He also likes to park them on a shelf on my computer desk. The other day, I found them all neatly parallel-parked along the bottom of the bathroom door. He's a funny boy.

Brrrrrrrrr++

Aaaaaand it's snowing.

Brrrrrrrrr

Autumn is over, man. The leaves are pretty much off the trees, the snow line on the mountains moves farther down every day, and the temperature was in the TEENS this morning. It's crazy. On the other hand, it's fun to dress Mr. Baby up in his furry coat and mittens and enjoy the sunshine.





The middle picture shows how long the shadows are already at 2:30 PM. We lose about 5 minutes of light per day at this point.

I've learned that Anchorageites (or whatever they're called) have no idea how to properly celebrate autumn. We went looking for something festive and pumpkin-laden last weekend, got a recommendation from a local to go to a nearby nursery, and found a small pile of pumpkins in a glorified gift shop that smelled like potpourri. We were the only people there.

They've got it all wrong. I can understand being lame about fall in parts of the country where there isn't crisp air and golden foliage (read: L.A.), but they have those things here! And they must be celebrated with hay rides and pick-your-own pumpkin patches and pies and hot cider and corn mazes and hot dogs with curly fries that you eat outside even though it's windy and cold and your napkin keeps blowing away!

But they did none of those things, and now the Autumn Gods are displeased and have sent Winter down upon us. On the other hand, everyone here is pretty sure that's a good thing. The weatherperson on the news the other night said this: "Well, winter's here, and we've got cold temperatures, but we're still waiting for the snow!"

You would never hear that in a weather report in New England. Everyone there is still pretty sure that stuff falling from the sky is worth whining about. But at least they don't take it as a sign of the apocalypse, like the weather people in L.A.

I'll leave you with a shot that combines serene snow-capped mountain scenery with heart-pounding rock-throwing action:

I Know What I Did This Summer

I'm not sure why, but I'm going to tell you all about the slacker goof-off things I've been doing this summer/fall while Soren's been napping. Sure, I'll occasionally work or clean up or do something productive while he's sleeping, but my true joy lies in doing things that have no practical value. Just fun value.

I'll start with reading, just so that I can impress people with my crazy literacy skillz before I start talking about video games. Why is reading better than video games, by the way? A complex game with an intricate plot can be much more intellectually stimulating than a bad book. Even games without interesting plots can exercise the brain, or at least induce a zen-like state; meditation doesn't work for me, but Tetris does. Hey, I love reading and always have, but I think video games get a bad rap. Even when I'm playing Final Fantasy and going around killing monsters, it's not so much a thirst for virtual blood that drives me as a motivation to see which cool treasures the monsters will drop and which new abilities my characters will learn as they level up. Wow, that's really girly, isn't it? I'm not doing it for the fighting and killing; I just like to nurture my characters and gather shiny objects. Math is hard! Let's make cookies for the boys!

Like I said, I'm going to list the books I've read before I talk about video games. Starting now. Earlier in the summer, Soren and I were always bugging visiting Kelsey at the lagoon, and I ended up borrowing a fair number of books from her:

- The Abhorsen trilogy (Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen) by Garth Nix
- Shade's Children by Garth Nix
- The Wind Singer (book 1 of the Wind on Fire series) by William Nicholson
- Elvenbane (book 1 of the Halfblood Chronicles) by Andre Norton and Mercedes Lackey
- The Firebringer trilogy (Birth of the Firebringer, Dark Moon, The Son of Summer Stars) by Meredith Ann Pierce

I really enjoyed the Abhorsen books, and would definitely recommend them to anyone who liked His Dark Materials or The Dark is Rising. Shade's Children was all right, as was The Wind Singer, but Elvenbane was pretty bad (sorry, Kelsey) :^) The Firebringer series is A Number One in my book, because it is about kick-ass unicorns who come in pretty colors like blue and go around fighting wyverns and stuff. If you are male, you will not like the series, but that's just due to your unreasonable prejudice against unicorns.

I also read a couple books I didn't borrow from Kelsey: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Sophie's Choice. I was very satisfied with HP, and I'm not sure what I thought about Sophie's Choice. One can't really claim to enjoy it, exactly, but it was an interesting read. I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how it compares.

As you may have already figured out, I also spent some time playing video games while Soren was napping. Games are my motivation to exercise; I fire up the Playstation and start doing step exercises, and before I know it, 40 minutes have passed. It's a great system. I just recently finished Final Fantasy XII after logging about 150 hours (I've had the game for a long time, although I'm not going to say how long because I don't want anyone to do the math). It was a really fun game, with tons of sidequests (things to do in the game that don't advance the plot), but it wasn't my favorite FF. The story was really boring, which is a real shame, because several of the previous FFs had fairly intricate plots, with all kinds of shocking twists and surprises (they usually didn't make a ton of sense, but they were still interesting). I was also disappointed to find that there was no character development, and all the characters were pretty much the same in battle. With previous FFs, you really had to choose the members of your party carefully based on their strengths and weaknesses, but all the FFXII characters have the same stats and the same abilities, so it doesn't matter what you do. In all, though, the game clearly had some merit, because I've never spent quite that much time on one game before. And I didn't even finish all the sidequests (I've learned not to care about the optional ubermonster that has 7 million hit points and takes 5 hours to beat).

I also took a little time and finished up Katamari Damacy (I bought it when I was pregnant, and playing it made me feel ill, so I've had a slight aversion to it ever since). It was fun, but it has zero replay value.

Now that Final Fantasy is over, I've moved on to Kingdom Hearts II. Despite being full of Disney characters, it's a pretty fun game, and the plot is (so far) pretty interesting. The battle system is lame (mainly involves mashing the X button 1000000 times) and I hate the effing Gummi Ship, but the plot makes up for it. Man, a game that combined the gameplay of FFXII with the story quality of Kingdom Hearts would pretty much rule the entire world. Maybe such a game will exist by the time I retire, and then I can spend my golden years doing something I really love. Meanwhile, Chris can feel free to play as much golf as he wants and cook gourmet dinners for me. Sounds like a pretty good retirement to me.

The Marine Scene

So, as I mentioned before, Brian and Edith and I went on a cruise last week, and most of it was not tragic and depressing! So let's talk about the good parts.

It was my second attempt at a Kenai Fjords tour, and the weather was much more cooperative this time around. It was rainy and hideous in Anchorage, but sunny and clear in Seward and out in the gulf, so we got lucky. We saw quite a bit of wildlife -- orcas, various sea birds (no puffins this time, sadly), bald eagles, Dall's porpoises, Steller sea lions, mountain goats, a sea otter, and some awesome jellyfish. I really only managed to get decent shots of the orcas and sea lions:






We stopped at a glacier out in Aialik Bay (can't remember the name of the glacier), and it was really hard to appreciate just how big the ice frontage was -- the captain said it was a half-mile across, and we were a quarter-mile away, but it really seemed like those distances were a few hundred yards. You know, a big slab of snow, sure, but not THAT big. Then a chunk of ice would fall from the glacier, and even though it just looked like a couple chips falling into the water, there would be a pretty impressive rumble and rather large splash, so the chunks were clearly bigger than they seemed. It was impossible to get a good sense of scale, for some reason.



In sum, a good time was had by all! Except when I got hot chocolate and burned the holy hell out of my tongue.

Spaghetti

I was impressed the other day when Soren started saying "ball" -- but he seems to have moved on fairly quickly to more complicated words.

Untitled

A couple days ago, I joined Brian and Edith on a Kenai Fjords cruise. I was just now writing a post about that, and was going to tell an interesting story about something that happened on the trip, but I just did some quick research, and I'm afraid the story isn't so much interesting as really sad and unfortunate. While we were on our way out of the bay, we suddenly slowed down and turned back for no apparent reason. As we came to a stop near a little sand bar by Fox Island, the captain announced that the crew had been told by the Coast Guard to search the area for a diver who had been missing for 20 minutes. We slowly moved around the sand bar, and a couple other boats in the area joined us in the search. The passengers on our boat were subdued, scanning the water and shore. I very much hoped to find the diver safe and sound, and I dreaded the idea of finding his body. Honestly, I didn't know what I would do -- I didn't really believe it could happen. That's one of those things that only happens on TV.

In the end, none of us found anything. After about half an hour, the Coast Guard showed up and released our ship. When we passed by on our way back (about four or five hours later), there was no sign of any boats or activity. We hoped it was because the diver had been rescued, but sadly, as I just learned, that was not the case. Matthew Myers, of Anchorage, had been on a research dive for the SeaLife Center, when he ran out of oxygen; his dive partner lost hold of him while trying to pull him to shore. They found his body a little while after our boat left the area.

Sorry about the depressing post, but it doesn't feel right not to tell the story. My heartfelt condolences to Matthew's family.