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Yesterday: Sunny spring day, roads clear, patchy snow.  Today: five inches of soft white powder.

Will winter ever end?

There’s been some great spring skiing here the past few days.  The nights have been cold, down between about 5 and 10 degrees…so the snow has stayed firm.  But then the days have been clear and sunny, warming up into the high thirties.  I’ve been out in short sleeves, no hat, flying along the trails.  This is as good as it gets!

Last weekend I raced the Tour of Anchorage 50k.  It was grueling.  I went out a little to0 hard trying to power through the first fifteen kilometers (the hard, hilly 15k) and expecting to be able to hold on and cruise through the flats.  It didn’t work.  I used up too much in that first 15k.  By the time I hit 40k, I was just trying to hang on and keep moving to the finish.  Oh well…it’s almost time to start running again.

Skiing has been one of the best parts about being up here this year.  It’s kept me sane…allowing me to get outside during the day and soak up some real daylight.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that it’s why the Alaskan winter never seemed that bad to me.  Plus, it’s just been fun to get back into it after a long hiatus after high school…especially the races.

Wow.  It’s the 31st.  Crazy.

It’s been another negligent blogging month.  But hey, I’ve been working hard.  Things are a little nuts up here in Alaska.  Teaching two classes from scratch has proved to be a good challenge.  I’m finally getting to the point where I have a little breathing room between my planning and my teaching.  But only a little.

In other news, it’s sunny!  I mean, there’s actually daylight!  Hours of it!  Yes, there is a drastic difference between mid-December in Alaska and end-of-January in Alaska.  I mean, it was getting light at 8:30 this morning.  And the other day, I was out skiing until almost 6pm…with no headlamp!

We could use some snow up here.  I have to say…I’m a little disappointed in Alaska.  I’m starting to believe that it doesn’t exist. I thought back in November that I was really in for it.  But things just haven’t panned out to be as intense as they initially seemed.  I mean, temperature usually sits around 20-25 during the day and then drops to around 5-10 at night.  But seriously, I thought Alaskans were supposed to be these Xtreme folks.  And the snow?  We’ve got about a foot and a half or so…Where’s the heaps and heaps and heaps of the stuff?  Fortunately it’s enough to ski on, although right now we really really need a fresh six inches or so because it’s basically like an ice rink out on the trails…and I’m only exaggerating a little bit.

But in exciting news, I signed up to do the Tour of Anchorage.  It’s a 50k ski marathon.  Should be fun.  It’s five weeks from today.  So I’m trying to get strong again.  The good news is that that’s more time than I gave myself back in September…and I have a better base now.

Well, that’s the exciting news.  Except that yesterday I came home and climbed out of my car and there was a mommy and baby moose standing in front of my door…blocking my entrance to my house.  But they moved.  So I don’t actually have an exciting story related to that occurrence.

12:13pm.  December 17.  Four days before the winter solstice.  I guess “high” is relative.

1. Sunrise was at 10am this morning.  Certainly, dawn arrived much earlier, but I still tend to get this feeling that I’m in some sort of ethereal time-warp.
2. Yesterday was the winter’s first ski.  It felt good.  I’m about to head out for the winter’s second ski.
3. Healing takes time.  One of the advantages of being up here at ACC is that I get to take advantage of professional counseling from the counseling center.  So I’ve been going.  And I’ve been realizing that some scars still run pretty deep.  But I’m also starting to see that maybe the point isn’t to get rid of them but to be shaped by them.  After I got a stress fracture in college from overtraining, I had to learn how to run again, how to train again…I couldn’t go about things in the same way and expect to not get hurt again…and even now, when I start training hard, that same spot, the left tibia, sometimes acts up and I have to be careful.  Maybe emotional injuries work the same way.  Be careful, learn from it, be shaped by it, but never forget it, never act as though it isn’t still a deep part of me.
4. My application to Duke’s Ph.D. program is all submitted.  Now I get to wait around for a couple of months to see if I’m even in the running.
5. N.T. Wright is a phenomenal thinker.  I’m getting close to finishing Justification and though it’s a pretty heady book, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to believe that maybe the message of Jesus is better than even we imagined.  I never used to like Paul much…but Wright is convincing me that I need to give him a new, better, more informed reading.
6. Somehow I’ve found myself “in charge” of organizing worship at the new The River Covenant Church plant here in Soldotna.  Challenging.
7. The semester is coming to an end.  Ethics was discussing food last week.  I ended on this topic because it ties together a lot of the other issues and shows how they are connected.  We are going to watch a documentary tomorrow, Food, Inc. I recommend that you all see it.  It will change the way that you think about what you eat and it demonstrates those connections to many other ethical issues.  Final exams next week.
8. I’m headed home in less than two weeks.  And by home I mean Portland and then Winthrop for a little while and then back to Portland to fly back here to Alaska.  Hope to see many of you then.

Winter.  It’s here.  No doubt about it anymore.  We were flirting with it for a while…on again, off again.  But now, I think it’s here to stay.

I didn’t realize how cold it was on Sunday when I decided to go for a run.  But before too long, I figured it out…somewhere between the burning sensation in my lungs and the fact that my legs were numb despite my sleek running tights.

I never looked at the temperature, but I’m guessing it was somewhere around 5 degrees.  That’s Fahrenheit.  But wait…it gets better.  When I woke up Monday morning to drive to work, the thermometer was registering at about -15.  That’s FIFTEEN BELOW ZERO!  IT’S ONLY NOVEMBER!!  I can see this happening in the depths of the Arctic winter that will be upon us soon enough, but we haven’t even hit Thanksgiving yet.  Ah, Alaska.

By 1pm, it had warmed up to a toasty 4 below.

I elected to refrain from running yesterday.

Today doesn’t look good either.

Back down to -15 today.  Almost noon and we’re showing -10.

Good news is that we’ve got a hot streak coming in over the next few days.  We’re going to be gong up to about 16 ABOVE (!!) on Thursday and then continuing up a bit through the weekend and hopefully getting a bit of snow dropped on us.  With any luck, I’ll be skiing by this time next week.