Melinda 🏳️🌈
@akbumpkin
Retired protocol nerd, formerly kernel hacker, glad to be shed of all of it. Spending my time with dogs, fishing, and beautiful Alaska trails. Owner of what's probably the largest collection of distance dogsled race data.
The sun sets twice today. It's still not getting dark at night, but it's definitely getting darker!
Okay, some first-day signup numbers from 2015 to 2022. I have no idea where I put more recent ones and I apologize for putting numbers is a freakin' image (I may or may not have had a good reason for doing that - dunno)
A new fox showed up this morning. There's another one that's been running back and forth, often carrying food, so there are likely babies somewhere but we haven't seen them yet.
Found a NOAA radiosonde on the porch this morning, with a string running to the roof that I can’t pull down. I suspect we’ve got a dead weather balloon on top of the house.
First time I've had a porcupine show up on the camera. Don't love having it this close to the house (a few hundred yards), but it grunts when it walks and that makes up for a lot.
Two foxes! The one closer to the camera is Screamy's daughter; not sure who the other one is (it's definitely not Screamy). Here's hoping for puppies!
Around our place, the willows all look like they've been lopped off about 5 or 6 feet above the ground.
I tapped a couple of birch trees today. It’s my first time doing this and I’m curious to see how it goes. My understanding is that it needs to be reduced about 100:1 to turn into syrup, so wish us luck
That "When it's springtime in Alaska, it's 40 below" stuff is correct, until it isn't. We have a reflecting pool in our driveway.
I looked outside this morning and thought “Ugh,” and Chris said “Awful,” and the dogs all said “Nope.” Except for Harry, who declared this a perfect day
I'm not saying this black-capped chickadee was hiding from the redpoll hooligans, but I'm not saying it wasn't.
Impressive lineup for La Chic-Chocs this weekend, a casual, low-key 150-mile race on the Gaspé peninsula (Quebec)
We can (and do) complain about the cold this winter but I can’t say it’s not beautiful
This, btw, was Screamy. 2am (during the period it's light all night) in front of the house.
Finally got down to one of the trailcams. We had a fox visit us every night last summer, nicknamed Screamy because reasons. He sired a litter, and they and their mom ran around our trails through the fall. I think this is one of the pups
Okay, here's what I think is going on with Wade - I think his tracker sent a bad update. The reason I think that is because his speed is unreasonable. He's not off the trail.
1/ Iditarod starts in a few hours, so I thought this might be a good time to talk about that first run, up to Yentna. I took a look at how, over the past 10 years, runtimes to Yentna related to finishing position. The TL;DR of it is that the top-finishing teams are faster but NOT fastest.
When I was in grad school I used to schlep myself up to Wrigley Field as often as I could to watch the Cubs play (although the 1980s weren't a great decade for them ... ). Sign in front of Sloan Park in Mesa today.
From the Can-Am 250. When you just add on 5 hours but don't do modular arithmetic on the result you end up with earliest departure times of 28:07.
1/ In the Iditarod Trail Invitational, you tend to see more instances of people getting lost than you see in dogsled races. These can be distinguished from bad SPOT readings by 1) there's an actual path to them, and 2) bad SPOT readings will typically show unreasonable speeds