How Popa spent his Thanksgiving

Here's a picture of Dad shoveling (one "l" or two?..too lazy to spell check!) the snow for the 3rd time on Thanksgiving Day...I believe he shovelled(again 1 or 2?) one more time before the guest showed up.

Kenai was his constant companion. She even got his hat off his bed today (Friday) so they could take a walk.

We had 12 people all together. Three guys Tim works with and their wives...but no kids. LeighAnne asked that I make sure next year to have more kids come too.

PETA would be proud

Found this article in The Alaska Star, a local paper for Eagle River. I won't even bother expanding......this is the best!

Ha, Ha, H-ha, Ha

It's currently 43 degrees in Anchorage, Alaska. What, pray tell is the temp where you are?

(OK, I know you'll still be the winner in the end, but give me this moment!)

Only in Alaska

Our new church is a great place. We are still trying to find our niche, but it offers so much to its congregation and the community. Like this section here...I pulled it off of the web site. See if you can find the uniquely Alaskan service they provide to the community.


CARE MINISTRIES

These are a few of the various ways to care for people within the church.

Care Meals: Help meet a tangible need by periodically providing meals
during the various transitional seasons of life.

Hospital Visitation: Visit with people in the hospital to encourage,
support, and care for them and their families in a time of physical, emotional
and spiritual need.

Military Deployment Ministry: Help support and honor our military
members and their families by prayer, fellowship, and providing for basic
needs, especially when a spouse is deployed to another part of the world.

Moose Kill Ministry: Help salvage and distribute meat from moose
road-kills. Harvested meat is given to families in need. This is a unique
ministry with several ways you can serve such as a dispatching the team,
harvesting the moose meat, and processing and distributing the meat.

Encouragers: Help provide a safe place for struggling people in our
community to seek help in a counseling situation. Receive training and
mentoring in guiding people towards wholeness in Christ.



Uuummm, yeaaah, can you guess which one is at the top of my "no thanks" list.

from Leigh Anne

Hi! Sleding was a lot of fun! We only sled down the driveway. Haley, Sarah beth, and I stood up, and used sticks to have fun. We,or Haley and I,sill sat down. Jamison wasn't so sure about it. One reason, he hates hats. But we all, including daddy had fun in the end.

SNOW!

Well, the first real snow fell today. The other stuff we've had has been so little that it just blew off the roads and never amounted to much. As I write this, the girls are still outside sledding.




Jamison, however, was not as thrilled. His mittens were a little big and he didn't understand how to put is thumb over...his boots were also too big, he had on more layers than he could handle and to top it all off, he was forced to wear a hat!








But these two girls were in Alaskan paradise.

EDITED:Candy please moma

If you haven't seen this yet, its darling. But if you caught it earlier before I changed the format, then it's still the same video; it's just not clogging up the blog.

(P.S. a little blog knowledge-click on the highlighted words to get you to a new page or picture.)

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Halloween?

Crazy Hair Day

For those of you that remember the Stafford Crazy Hair Day, I learned my lesson and the red in the girl's hair was just this gel stuff that came right out. No left over hot pink tinted hair here! (Although SB did try and convice me to do it again)

While on the subject of siblings...

This article was in the paper last month, but I've just found the time to copy it. The baby bear's moma was killed by some fool that gut shot her and left her to suffer for at least 2 days before she died. They found the shooter and he's in jail now. However, the babes have become the sweethearts of the Kenai Penisula and while Alaskans respect the all important food chain boundaries, they (and us all) have come to love the young bears and their antics.

Russian River orphans stick together
Healthy female grizzly helps injured male find food

By DOUG O'HARRA
Anchorage Daily News

Published: September 23, 2005
Last Modified: September 23, 2005 at 08:41 AM



Ever since their mother was gut-shot and killed during the midsummer climax of Russian River fishing, a female bear cub has stayed by her wounded sibling, sometimes allowing the male with a gimpy leg to eat fish she has hauled ashore.


The male cub was shot in the leg the same weekend its mother died, perhaps in the same incident. Since then, the two half-grown orphan bears have remained at the river to feed on salmon. But it hasn't been easy.

The male bear limps and swims slower. Snatching fish appears to be more difficult.

But to the amazement of tourists and bear-savvy locals, the female bear seems willing to share the salmon wealth.

"I've observed her kind of sticking close to him and it seems like she's helping him fend for food," said Cooper Landing fly-fishing guide Stacy Corbin, who saw the two bears recently during a driftboat trip.

"She came out and got a fish, and pulled it back, and then she let the other one eat," he said.

The fate of the crippled bear -- along with the cinnamon-colored female and a third cub that has disappeared -- weighs on the minds of many Cooper Landing residents. Even as birches go yellow and the last sockeye spawners rot in the shallows, people say they're still angry over the shooting of the well-known sow.

"Every day I have more than one customer who comes in the store and says that he's worried about that bear," said Glenda Mitchell, who owns the Cooper Landing Grocery and Hardware store with her husband. "I don't see how he can defend himself from another bear with that leg. And I'm concerned that he can feed himself."

The sow's killing and its aftermath is only the latest major conflict between people and bears on the Russian, maybe the state's most intense and popular salmon fishing stream. A young man was severely mauled two years ago, and anglers have been asked to stop leaving the remains of filleted fish, backpacks and new catches within reach of foraging bears.

"Unless something changes up there, it's going to be the same story year after year," said Jeff Selinger, area wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. "If you put thousands of people ... in close proximity with brown bears in essentially an unsupervised area and have a food source available for those bears, bears are going to die and people are going to get hurt."

So far this year, 17 brown bears have been reported killed by people on the Kenai Peninsula, including at least seven sows of breeding age, Selinger said. Brown bears are considered a "species of concern" on the Peninsula with questions about their conservation and population still unanswered.

Selinger said he plans to meet with federal land managers this fall to talk over ways to reduce conflict at the Russian. One idea might require fishermen to grind up the carcasses left after filleting their catch, Selinger said. A goal is to stop people from dumping so much easy-to-get food in the river during fishing season.

This week, fishing has slowed dramatically, but a few anglers still drift the river and cast into riffles. There were rumors that the cubs had recently ripped into rafts parked on shore, though other reports blamed a lone adult bear for the damage.

On Wednesday, several people watched the cubs eating grotty old spawners and behaving themselves.

The bear family had been a remarkable sight for at least two seasons, often delighting anglers with their bold tolerance of people. But the cubs also occasionally misbehaved, according to some observers, raiding backpacks and stealing fish from people.

Corbin, who said he never saw the bears act aggressively toward people, said his clients loved to watch them.

"It was like, 'God, I just hope that those bears don't come across the wrong person.' It's almost like you knew (something bad) was going to happen."

The sow was discovered dead in the forest from at least two bullet wounds during the first week of August. The three nearby cubs were agitated, and one was limping.

A 26-year-old Anchorage man was later accused of shooting the mother on July 31 with a Chinese-made assault rifle and leaving the area without reporting what happened to authorities, as is required.

Last month, Michael Oswalt pleaded not guilty in Anchorage District Court to six misdemeanors, including shooting a brown bear in a closed season, failing to salvage the hide and skull, and recklessly endangering people on the river. His trial is set for Nov. 14, according to the district attorney's office in Anchorage.

Within several weeks of the shooting, the boldest and smallest cub disappeared from the river, fate unknown, Selinger said. But the other two, a male and female, remained, with the male continuing to limp as they foraged for salmon.

Selinger and three state biologists darted the male in late August with a tranquilizer so they could examine its condition. Even as the male went down, the female cub stayed close and ended up darted as well.

The female bear was in good shape. The skinnier male bear had been shot in the joint of its left front leg, Selinger said. The wound was healed over and didn't appear infected. The biologist worked the limb closely to check for a fracture or grating noise. It appeared stiff, he said, but sound.

Selinger said they decided the two cubs had a good chance of making it if left alone on the river.

"That bear will always have a limp, but bears survive that way," he said. "If it can gather enough food and avoid being killed by other bears and stay out of trouble with humans, that bear has a good chance of surviving."

The Baby

The baby was worried about making the blog during his visit...so...

Happy Late Birthday!

Exactly one month late, LeighAnne celebrated her 9th birthday with a costume party.

*Please spare me any fire hazard or hair in the cake lectures. Scroll down 2 entries to see what other health code violations the cake suffered that evening.

The Birthday Gang

We had a few more show up after this picture, but getting the whole gaggle of 'em to stand still for this picture was hard enough.

We had 3 witches and 2 vampire queens. Jamison and one of our neighbor boys went as impossible toddlers...meaning they refused to wear their costumes. Jamison was in a darling little pumpkin sweatsuit when he saw his train shirt and it was all over then.

Uncle Brandon was a real champ and played "bouncer" at the door. He also managed to rally the troops into a game of "frog, frog, toad" (duck, duck, goose) and get a few ghost stories in before present time. Honestly, the whole event would have been a little too hairy without him.



At LeighAnne's insistance we invited all ages. It was important to her that siblings be invited. During the party they became known as the "babies" and were allowed to do just about anything they wanted. They were allowed to leave the garage area and come "help" me in the kitchen. They also got extra candy and a quiet place to play when things were a little loud and crazy. Yes, they were extra work, but tell me this face isn't worth it!

Bad Dog!!

After the party we took a little girl home and left Uncle Brandon in charge of walking Kenai. He told us she wasn't happy to be outside and just wanted to get home...can you guess why? She was atleast kind enough to take a bite out of the opposite side.

In case you missed it

Hard to believe this time 2 years ago!

Karate

Just a picture of LeighAnne at karate. They both seem to love it. Ofcourse 3 nights a week with your bestest friends (the neighbor girls, not each other) can't be all bad.

As per Kent's Request

"Sir, the colors are present"

Activation Ceremony

The Activation of the 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment took place at Fort Richardson on October 13th, 2005. Basically, this means a group of soldiers recently came together to form a unit and took on the history and tradition of a previous unit orginating back in World War II.

Here the Brigade Commander and Squadron Commander and Sergeant Major are unfurling the unit colors.

Just take the d@^^# picture

So, with Tim's parents visiting we headed southeast of Anchorage along the Turnagain Arm to Alyeska and Portage Glacier. A little hiking and sight seeing...when we went with Popa we saw beluga whales...but...ahhh...it is October in Alaska and freezing cold rain blowing sideways kind of takes away from the beauty.

None the less, Grammy and Poppy didn't spend hours on a plane, hundreds of dollars, and most of their vacation time to sit around and watch grandchildren sit in front of the TV. So here's what they found at Portage Glacier.



Actually our trip ended up pretty nice, but this was almost the turnaround point.

Most likely my favorite picture to date of Tim's parents.

Cavalry Fitness Test

Tim's newest boss is a proudly sadistic infantryman. He decided there were certian standards that would help any calvary man during his deployment. The follow is what is required of each 1/40th soldier:

**Max Bench Press with goal @ 300lbs.

**40 Yard Dash

**10 mile run in 75 minutes

**8 event obstacle course to include (while dressed in body armor, helmet and rifle weighing around 30 lbs.)
-rope course
-440 yard run while "fireman carrying" 180 lb dummy
-rope climb 8 ft wall

All of this is done at one setting...they start around 9:00 and finish up early afternoon. Tim got his done early and is glad to only have to sit and help each new group.

It's a little frightening when you put it all into the context of war. These events will help them train and prepare for spending days clearing Iraqi villages.

That's all I want to say about that.