Earlier this winter I obtained an interesting book from an auction in Europe, a theological work by Thomas Aquinas that was printed 530 years ago this month (1490).
Continue readingCategory Archives: Alaska
Antisocial Distancing
Man, I was preadapted for this. My to-do list is perennially at cubic light-year proportions and is diverse enough to have kept boredom an abstract concept for decades. And we live in a home in the woods with neighbors we rarely see. We did have some unexpected guests drop by the house a couple times last week, but they were welcome, kept their distance, and didn’t stay long.
Continue readingGertrude Gets Her Lips on the Moose Candy
We feed our birds sunflower seed chips. This food is high in energy content and low in handling time. They need that when it’s really cold out and the days are short (on 21 December we have 3 hours and 41 minutes between sunrise and sunset).
Continue readingWhen Mr F Meets Mr C, it’s Cold in Alaska
(I wrote this 20 years ago, before I had a blog. With -40s on us again, it’s a good reminder of the old days, when these temperatures were more frequent.)
It was cold here in Fairbanks for the past couple of weeks—down around -40º for days. That is the temperature where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet. And air that dense tends to hang around for a while when it’s in the neighborhood. With the proper clothes, this isn’t much to get worked up about. It’s too cold for skiing, but strolling around out in the crisp is actually fairly pleasant.
Continue readingAlaska Shoots Itself in the Head, Part 2
tl;dr: We live to fight again another day.
We have been living in a self-imposed crisis since Governor Dunleavy introduced his proposed budget in February 2019. The legislature deliberated long and hard, with a lot of input from people throughout Alaska, and produced a balanced budget on 10 June that had sensible reductions in state expenditures and still enough left over to give every Alaskan a good gob of free money (the mother of all entitlement programs, the Permanent Fund Dividend, or PFD). On 28 June, the last working day of our fiscal year, the governor line-item vetoed the university line and many others back to his proposed budget of February 2019, as though widespread, intense statewide discussions had not occurred. Although most legislators were clearly put out that the governor had ignored all the hard work they had performed in listening and responding to their constituents in constructing the budget they had passed, they were not able to override the governor’s line-item vetoes (he has more power in this than any other governor in the U.S.). The cut to the university was 41% of the state appropriation—absolutely devastating, and implemented as the new fiscal year began.
Continue reading