Thanksgiving, 4 moose, and 12.4 inches of new snow

What do these things have in common? It's the highlights from this past week.

We've been having some internet issues so I haven't been able to download any pictures until now. So let me do a quick recap of the week.

I've been working night shifts most of the week and it has been an active weather pattern. We had a couple of snow storms that dropped a couple inches each early in the week and then yesterday and today, we got another 7 inches at the house. The roads are totally covered now but not too slippery. The early season snowfalls are always the worst to drive on. At some point, I'm going to have to dig my Bronco out of the snow. I've been driving Lisa's truck for a couple of weeks now and haven't taken the time to wipe the snow off the Bronco. Yeah...that's gonna be a pain in my rear at some point.

The girls have been outside a couple times to walk on the 'moh'. They LOVE it. It will be getting real cold the next couple of days so it might be a while before they get to go out again. How cold is real cold? Depending on the cloud cover, we could go below zero at night with high temperatures only reaching the single digits.

Enough weather...Thanksgiving was GREAT! Working nightshifts and juggling babies, we weren't planning on doing anything big for dinner. Fortunately, we got a couple invites and ended up going next door to our neighbors. The girls next door (Hannah is the oldest at 11 and Andrea is 7) LOVE our girls and were happy to entertain them while the adults stuffed themselves silly. It was an awesome dinner.


Andrea took Katy back to her room and brush her hair. It was all very cute.





Katy loving on the bunny.



Last night Lisa and I were getting our dinner ready. The girls had disappeared back to what we thought was either our bedroom or their bedroom. Ended up someone (most likely me) left the bathroom door open...and this was the result. Katy was unwinding the toilet paper while Alyssa flushed the toilet over and over.




There isn't a good story about the moose. Lately, we've had quite the traffic jam of moose going through the neighborhood. No good pictures...gotta undertand we're down to only 6 hours of daylight a day. The sun rises at 9:45am and sets at 3:50pm and we're still losing almost 4 minutes a day of daylight.

I also had another funny story and a couple videos to share but ran out of time this evening before I had to leave for work. I'll get those posted Monday. Hope everyone had a great holiday. Time for Christmas decorating!!!

blog entry number 236

Can you believe I've posted 236 times in the last 2 years? That seems like a lot.

Well winter is in full effect here. We've had a couple light snow events the last two days and it has been pretty cold this last week. We hit our lowest temperature of the season so far, 3.4 degrees above zero. Yeah, that's pretty cold. The girls are still anxious to get outside as much as they can. We went out walking again with the girls the other day and I think the temperature was only about 10 degrees but that didn't slow them down at all. It takes us about 20 minutes to get them ready...so many layers go on that they can't really put down their arms.

So the other day while it was snowing, Lisa saw a moose walk down the street and kneel down in our neighbors driveway to eat some snow. Kinda interesting if you've never seen a moose kneel.


Of course the girls had to get out on the balcony to see the moose with their own eyes.


And later they wanted to see the pictures of the moose so this is me flipping through the camera to show them the pics.

The rest of the pictures I was just messing with the camera. I'm learning all about the new toy and how to adjust the settings to take the best pictures in difficult light situations. The first one is Katy, then Alyssa, and the rest is Katy while she was laying down getting her diaper changed. She was watching a sign language dvd and completely interested in that and not me so I just kept taking pictures and playing around....and obviously zooming in a little more each time.






AND A VIDEO!!! I took this yesterday while Lisa ran to the store. I took the video because there was a bit of a meltdown going on and I was thinking how we don't have enough videos like this. They (especially Alyssa right now) are throwing more mini-temper tantrums. Alyssa was heading in that direction when I got out the camera and turned on the video. It's funny to see their reaction when they realize I was taking a video. They both just look so pathetic.

Did you know next Thursday is Thanksgiving???

So we just enjoyed a fun evening of the Office, 30 Rock, and Survivor. Nate, our new friend here in Anchorage, came over for the first time and was able to experience some of my less than stellar cold weather bbq'ing. I say less than stellar because I was a little too interested in the socializing rather than focusing on the food so I managed to slightly overcook the chicken. GRRRRRR. I'll get it next time. Anyway...we still managed to have a good time. The girls were extremely entertaining tonight too. They warmed up pretty fast to Nate and even started their evening shenanigans a little early.

On to the pictures, these are from just a couple of days ago. This is the day before it got pretty cold. We took the girls out and let them walk around the cul de sac. They LOVED it...especially Katy. Katy immediately took off so I had to follow her while Alyssa warmed up to the idea of walking on the "moh". It wasn't long before both were walking as fast as they could up the street.

The girls checking each other out in their snow suits.







You may have to click on this last one to get the full affect but it's the girls' footprint in the snow next to mine. We thought it was a pretty cool picture.

I forgot to mention that these 9 pictures are ALL of the pictures I took that day. No deletes...no edits. We can't take a bad picture with this camera.

somebody requested videos???

After about a month of no videos, I finally replaced the battery in the other digital camera so we can start taking videos again. I took some great pictures today of the girls but that'll have to wait. For now, I submit another fun evening right before bedtime in the Brown house.

Sunday night post

I decided a long time ago that I would try and post every Sunday night. I actually check how many hits the blog gets and I've noticed that there is a spike on Mondays. So to reward my faithful readers, I always make a little extra effort sometime on Sunday to give you something exciting to look at Monday morning when you get back to work. In addition, I think I'm going to change the picture at the top of the blog on my Sunday posts. I have SO many pictures that would look great cropped down to the banner size.

So the picture above is a rare photo of both noctilucent clouds and the aurora borealis. I took it in August of 2005 here in Anchorage looking north near Point Woronzof at about 1am.

The last couple of days I've been going through a lot of old pictures while we move all of our digital pics over to the new laptop. Yes, we got a new laptop. Our old one was almost 5 years old...that is ANCIENT in laptop years.

Anyway, so I've been going through a lot of old pictures and came across some great ones that we took on a bike ride back in September. I think I mentioned that we've taken over 500 pictures so far with our new camera. With that many pictures, it's easy to overlook a set of 10 or 15 like these even though they're great shots.

So it's been a very early winter this year so back in September, we were still amazed at how fast the snow line was coming down the mountains. It's always a nice contrast when you have the green and yellow leaves against the white snow topped mountains and blue sky.

We took the girls on the Bird to Gird trail. That's short for Bird Point to the town of Girdwood. It's a nice paved trail that's about 12 miles long. Not sure how far we made it but I'd guess about 3 miles or so. We'll tackle the whole trail next summer. This is us getting the girls in the trailer at Bird Point.
The famous Alaska Railroad down to Seward follows the same route...you can see the tracks below. The first hill took us nice and high so we had a great view of Turnagain Arm.

Some more nice fall colors. The one to the top is looking right at Turnagain Arm...the one below is looking left up the side of the mountain.
The girls REALLY enjoyed the view.

I found some more pictures of the girls sharing their little bench toy.



Hope this helps cure your case of the "Mundays".