First Snowfall

I started this entry yesterday using my mother's ancient eMac.  Her computer (nay–her glorified abacus) suffers from epically-long load times, a terminally-fragmented hard drive, and a lack of Flash for my facebook Scrabble addiction.  If I pull more than two tabs up in Firefox, the puny CPU goes into seizures and I'm stuck in an infinite wait-time loop with Apple's hatefully hypnotic color-wheel cursor.   I have never wanted to cause physical pain to an inanimate object before, but I do now.  Excuse me while I have a Michael Bolton revenge moment with the machine.  I know of an abandoned field where no one will ever find it.

The reason why I was using the eMac yesterday was because John had taken his laptop to school for his First Graduate Class Presentation.  I can't accurately describe the topic of his report, but it was on rift valleys and deposition and erosion and all sorts of neat-o science-y stuff.  He was a little nervous about it, but apparently he hit it right on the mark, receiving kudos from his prof, applause from his peers, and a ticker tape parade from UAF administration.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the school is just going to confer an immediate degree on him and save us this rigmarole of a prolonged education.


So at least we have John's awesomeness going for us.  We had hoped to have big and exciting news about our house-hunting adventures, but there's no happy ending in sight yet.  Last Thursday, we toured a house on Waldheim (two miles northwest of Ivory Jack's in the hills off Goldstream) that mostly matched what we were looking for (energy efficiency, a little bit of acreage, lots of light, a heated garage, good well water).  The house also came with an adorable (and heated!) one-room cabin.  Visions of a fairy-tale guest cottage or art studio danced through my head; I was smitten.  We made an offer late Thursday night; I think our realtor was still wrapping up paperwork that midnight (thanks, Joel!).  Then on Friday afternoon, minutes before the sellers were supposed to meet with their realtor to make a decision on our offer, a counter-offer from another potential buyer came in.  Hearts were broken, then unbroken when we were informed on Monday morning that we were still in the running after all.  The saga continued to play out until yesterday afternoon, when we were told that the sellers went with the other buyer, and it became apparent to us that our involvement in the whole affair was mainly as leverage by the seller's agent against the other couple so they would offer more money.  Bah.

You know you might be a little fragile when not getting the house you made an offer on causes such an emotional blow.  Other telltale signs: when catching a scene from the 2002 Seattle episode of Rachael Ray's "$40 a Day" travel show, you start to weep uncontrollably. 

In all my sadness about the end of summer and fall (yes, I know that technically the season of fall just started, but believe me, it's already winding down at this latitude), leaving Seattle, and our interminable search for a house, I had forgotten about the magic of Fairbanks in winter.  And winter is definitely on its way.  This morning, my father announced that the temperature outside was 14º F.  My mother has taken her two rose bushes inside, hoping to cajole them into a few more blooms before they die (what she's mainly accomplishing is offering the cats a round-the-clock buffet of rose leaves to chew and then vomit up).

The birches have shed most of their leaves, and there's a grayness in the hills instead of fall's bright orange.  John and I spent last weekend on a couple walkabouts on local nature trails, which are actually local ski trails–us mere mortal pedestrians get to use the trails until the snow flies and the nordic skiers take over as rightful kings of the mountain.

Saturday, we discovered one of many hidden (and frozen) lakes on the trails behind UAF.  I was really tempted to jump in the shallows and break through the ice.  (Breaking puddle ice, like Amélie's breaking of the crème brûlée crust, is of course one of the supreme pleasures in life.)  But I was worried about my feet getting wet.  We then spent the remainder of our hike tramping through half-frozen and muddy muskeg, after which, I had to throw away my shoes anyway.

We drove out to Two Rivers Ski Trails on Sunday and walked one of the loops.  Apart from a group of horseback riders who were on their way out, we were the only ones in the forest.  (Okay, at one point, a guy zoomed up the neighboring road on an ATV and the engine roared like a sputtering chainsaw, but really, other than that, nature afforded us a Thoreauean silence.)

As we shuffled through the thick pile of leaves on the trail, we heard the wind crackling through the treetops.  Chickadees flitted by.  The sky was overcast.  The northern horizon was a deep, portentous gray, stifling and heavy, the color of steel.  Definitely not a summer sky.  We unearthed the shattered shell of an abandoned wasp's nest and cleared the trail of dead logs and debris.   It seemed like we were looking at the world through one of the camera's color tricks; everything was a shade of gray except for the faded orange leaves carpeting the trail and the bright red high-bush cranberries still clinging to their branches.

It's at this point in the narrative that something exciting should happen, like, we saw a bear!  (As we left the house earlier, announcing our intentions to hike around a bit, my mother called out to us, "Make sure you make a lot of noise to scare the bears away!"  Boy, nothing inspires me to relax like the mere possibility of running into a bear.)  But there were no bears and no other wild thing, except for the aforementioned ATV man and the chickadees.  In this moment of stillness and anticipation, it started to snow.  Or at least, I think it did.  We can't really be sure, it was over so quickly.  Small white crystals–not even real flakes, just tiny bits of ice–fell against the backdrop of a steel gray sky and onto our fleeces then quickly melted away.  When we looked again, it had stopped.  Our first snowfall, or hallucination of snowfall.

So just like that, with the season's first cold spell and the hint of snow yet to come, my brain has shifted gears.  I'm not thinking about missing the green and wet of Seattle, or the lemonade (or gin and tonics) of summer.  I'm thinking of red winter berries on white snow, and steaming cups of hot chocolate after a brisk walk.  Of perpetual twilight and then darkness and the aurora at midnight and finally being able to see whole star constellations again.  I'm thinking that it's less than three months away until Christmas (Kaleb, I like to give you early enough warning so you can start your shopping list for me), and that means less than three months away until solstice and we start gaining light again.  Bread–I must bake you!  Sweaters–I must knit you! (Naomi, I'm going to need your mother's help with that one.)  Spices–I must inhale your festive, sweet scent!  I'd go try to burn cinnamon and clove as holy incense if I weren't afraid of burning the house down (now I know what kind of olfactory magic those pumpkin-spice lattes have over people).  Bring on the scratchy wool mittens and the ugly Sorel boots I bought in 8th grade, because, winter, I embrace you!

Or at least I will until round about January, when I'm depressed to death of your cold and darkness and will use all my Alaska Air miles to escape your evil clutches.

There is no Yo-Yo, there is only Zuill ...

We just returned from a concert at Davis where we heard Zuill Bailey perform the entirety of the Bach Cello Suites (sans repeats).  It was pretty amazing.  John's introduction to the music first came via the West Wing episode when Yo-Yo Ma performed the Cello Suite in G and Josh was having flashbacks about getting shot.  Mr. Bailey (I'm just going to slip into reviewer mode now) provided the audience with an espressive tour de force of passion and charm ... and he's not so bad on the eyes, either (my seat mates Darcy and Donna Olsen would agree).

Zuill Bailey, cellist and international man of mystery

I get the sense that he's not discouraging fans from appreciating his swoon-factor.  Oh well, whatever fills the seats, and the concert hall was amazingly full for a Thursday night.  The only thing that possibly marred the performance was some intermittent banging coming from backstage that we could hear during quieter moments ... Darcy and John speculated that it was either a vent or the pottery wheel from the nearby art department.  To me, it sounded like my dad ritualistically beating his coffee grinder with a spoon (he tends to do this every morning at 5 unless we're lucky and he remembers to do it the night before).  Arrhythmic banging aside, it was an awesome concert, and Zuill is a rockstar in the classical music world.  And he apparently had a recurring role on HBO's Oz?  See, this is why you need to get into classical music.  Celebrity Cellists – They're Just Like Us!

I'm trying to figure out how to start a conversation about this without making my blog devolve into a whiny rant about how much I miss Seattle, but I'll just go for it.  The food kind of sucks in Fairbanks.  Not, obviously, the food coming out of the Johnson kitchen (Arroz con Pollo for dinner tonight!) but the Fairbanks restaurant scene, in general, is lackluster and nothing to write home about.  We did have a great (and free!) buffet dinner at Bobby's last weekend (prime rib, dolmades and more) and I enjoyed my steak from Silver Gulch a couple of weeks ago.  And I always like Lemongrass (still haven't made it to the Thai House) ... but nothing here compares to the food in Seattle.  Sure, Fairbanks can do steak and halibut nuggets, but if you require anything more subtle than deep fried or grilled proteins, you're SOL.

I miss La Carta de Oaxaca.  Oh, for just one bite of their beefy (and crack-laced?) tostadas!  I miss Serafina – brunch, lunch, dinner and cocktails (really, how can any meal go wrong when it starts with a tall, cool flute of prosecco laced with elderflower or parfait d'amour liqueur?).  I miss the vietnamese sandwiches from the Seattle Deli.  Hell, I even miss the phở from Than Brothers (enough so that I go to great lengths to copy and paste those little squiggly accent marks on the "o" in phở).  Oh gosh, I just remembered the signature fresh rolls from the Tamarind Tree and started to tear up a little.

My food envy is not helped by my recent spate of watching Top Chef DC reruns (sigh, there's just no place in town to get a decent parmesan foam) ... I'm fighting the urge to attempt a spring risotto with wheat berries that I sampled off Andy's plate at SAM's Taste Cafe a few months ago.  It was served with some kind of sweet/savory reduction sauce and for the life of me, I want to duplicate it by simmering Knudsen's Razzleberry fruit juice and chicken stock ... what is wrong with me?

In an attempt to recreate the wood-fired, thin-crust pizza I'm used to in Seattle, I bought a baking stone (or rather, my mother bought it) and I tried my hand at throwing a pie with homemade dough.  Whoops that the baking stone wasn't rated oven-safe to 550, but the pizza actually turned out pretty good.  Not Serious Pie good, but adequate ... oh, who am I kidding ... I'm just going to chop down the few remaining birch trees in the condo complex yard and stuff some wood into the oven to really get the kind of intense fire I need for a good crust.  Or ... someone needs to send us a box of Tom Douglas crisp doughy goodness via Alaska Airlines Goldstreak.  I swear I'll make it worth your while.

In actuality, my next food challenge will be to create a cake sans sugar and butter that's worth its salt weight in gold.  A couple months ago I made an olive oil and orange cake (I swear, *not* the one listed on Orangette, but something inspired by The Improvisational Cook cookbook that Naomi lent me).  Basically, it involved blending a whole orange (peel and all) in a food processor with olive oil to make a kind of jam, then I added sugar, flour, eggs and baking powder, and presto – a dense (but not too dense), rich and citrus-y cake.  I want to make this same cake for a friend with diabetes, so I'm going to have to play around with xylitol as a substitute for sugar ... and maybe I'll try to investigate some non-wheat flours to boot.  Any baking advice for sugar- and wheat-free adventures would be greatly appreciated.

Fall Photos

Looking northwest-ish off Murphy Dome

John was playing around with the color feature on the camera – look! It's Mars!

John can't breathe on Mars!

Meanwhile, back on Earth ...

I've always felt that Interior Alaska could totally vie for the "Big Sky Country" moniker.

The flowers that bloom in the fall, Tra-la!

Birch trees on John's parents' property near Lincoln Creek.

I'm sensing some birch tree prints in my future.

Cranes leaving for warmer climes. 
I love their call – it's kind of like a soft chortle rather than the sometimes obnoxious honking of geese.

Fall

Instead of going to the Labor Day parade with my dad, John and I are going to celebrate the American worker (sadly, I can no longer claim membership in that category of people) by going to a matinee.  Inception starts at 1pm.  Then at 4:30pm, John's fantasy football draft begins.  So while he's commishing it up with the other leagues in the online draft (I already pre-selected my draft picks), I'm going grocery shopping with my mom at–you guessed it–Fred Meyer!  Hopefully, this time she won't be accosted by a man in a yellow star costume in the middle of the road.  We eventually figured out that it was an overly eager Carl's Jr. fast food chain mascot who jumped in front of her car while she was driving away from her last shopping expedition.  She was more confused than anything.  It's so hard keeping up with these modern times.

I feel like there's something more important and fall-centric that I should be doing, like berry-picking or hiking Angel Rocks, or canoeing down the Chena.  Oh well, I can always accomplish those things in the next few days before winter sets in.  My dad likes to begin each morning by taunting my mother that it smells like snow.  Earlier today, she was sitting at the dining room table looking out the window at the yellowing birch leaves, announcing each leaf as it fell to the earth.  There's definitely a sense of, not resignation, not anticipation, but a kind of resolve in the air.  People are nesting, preparing, buckling down ... friends ask each other what their plans are for the winter, like there's this tangible thing looming just over the horizon that we all need to be ready for.  It's difficult to adjust to a world of welcoming winter when it's been 80 degrees and still summer in Seattle.