Isn't it ironic...

This kind of cracked me up a bit. But it's too true.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080718/lf_nm_life/gasoline_alaska_dc

Anyway, after that bit of levity (or lack of it, perhaps), I'll be posting here pretty soon about the things that people can do when they come up to Alaska for a visit. My husband's brother just left after a 10 day excursion here and we went out and took many pictures of our misadventures. I won't be able to post them all, of course (we took over 300!), but I'll post the ones that best illustrate our trips.

In the meantime, I'm still unemployed, but I did talk to the operations manager at one of the local fitness clubs here. It's so frustrating that my masters degree in kinesiology and second degree black belt all mean nothing in the light that I'm not "certified". This certification is just a brief reenactment of everything I studied for my bachelors and masters degrees. And it cost nearly $250 for the privelege of taking their test.

Sigh.

Well, I'm biting the bullet and getting it done. Got my CPR and First Aid cert a few days ago. I'm signed up for the test on the 5th of August.

And my parents are on their cruise, heading here to visit us! I can't wait!

Gotta go. More later.

Swords and Flowers

Haven't posted in a while because being unemployed, I don't have much to say. I spend a lot of time at home. Mostly cleaning up for the guests we'll have this month. First Logan's brother and then my parents and aunt and uncle.

But other than that, my life is pretty dull right now.

I've signed up for a CPR class so that I can take the ACE exam and get certified to teach group fitness courses.

I've applied for a temp teaching position at the local college. I hope that will get my foot in the door there and lead to a permanent position.

And a friend of ours gave me swords!

Yes, Heather has swords now! Yahoo, yippee!

He'd been trying to sell them and no one was buying. (People are nuts.) Since he wanted to get rid of them, he asked if I'd like to have them.

I was totally floored that he would just give these beautiful items away. I don't care what true sword collectors would say about them. I think they are absolutely gorgeous. Here's a picture of one of them, my favorite:



I also took some pictures of the flowers that are sprouting up all over the place here in the valley. These are just the ones in abundance at our apartment complex:



Normal everyday dandelions. But get a load of the stems on these suckers!



They look like they'd reach out and choke you if you got too close. "Feed me, Seymour, feed me!"




It alternates rain and sun here almost every other day, and what with all the daylight hours we have, we get a lot of green and some colors, too. It is beautiful here.

Movin' On Up... Well, movin on, anyway!

I've decided to leave my job as an office manager. The very job that helped me and Logan get up here to Alaska. Logan is not quitting his job, though.

Why am I leaving? I can't work for a company that refuses to see the people that work for them as their major working organs that keep their life's blood (the customers) flowing in and out and back again. The corporation sees the employees as numbers on a page and those numbers are wrong a majority of the time. So they make knee jerk reactive decisions based on false information that affects the employees in negative ways. I will not be party to that anymore.

So what will I do next?

First thing, I'm going to get my ACE certification. I can take the test in Anchorage. That's a relief because I was worried I'd have to try to squeeze it in during a trip to California or something! Then I'm going to apply at the local fitness clubs and start teaching kickbox aerobics and stuff like that again.

I'm going to see if I can get a foot in the door at the local college here, too. Only problem is last I looked in their website, they only had three PE classes and one was canceled. I have to find out why that is.

Anyway, I'm a grouchy bear today because I'm in limbo. I'm training my replacement, but aching to get on with my life. Logan has been very supportive through this whole mess.

Well, that's the update on my life. Tune in later to see what happens next! (You can tell when I've run out of things to say because I turn to the very cliche!)

SingSnap Stir Crazy!

I've been going nuts over a website called SingSnap. It's a karaoke community where you can record yourself singing songs and post them to things like Myspace or blogs or whatever. There should be an example embedded here somewhere.

And you can open it to all the other obsessed singers on SingSnap and they can rate you and leave comments.

But that's not the really cool part.

You can also record a duet with yourself. You know, record yourself singing one part, then again while singing another part with yourself.

Or you can harmonize with complete strangers you've never met who live thousands of miles away. Or with people you love.

Hint, hint.

The idea that I could sing Broadway show songs with my closest friends or country songs with my daddy or make my mommy happy just hearing my voice, it blows my mind. And brings tears to my eyes.

Okay, that's not a hint, that's a tell.

I've got "Suddenly Seymour" on there right now waiting for a guy to sing Seymour's part. (Batting eyelashes at Matthew.)

My voice is beginning to return to its former strength. My upper range is still nonexistent (aarrrrrrrgh!) but it's creeping back like a nervous cat. I have to be careful not to push too hard and lose it again, but I was having so much fun today, I recorded several songs and had to make myself stop. I'm such a karaoke freak!!!

Anyway (one), please feel free to stop by for a listen. If you sign up for a free account, you'll be able to leave comments, too. (Gods, listen to me. I sound like an advertisement.)

http://www.singsnap.com/snap/profile/overview/b71b440e

Hope you enjoy the website as much as I do!

My dog eats dandelions...

Ooooo-kay.

My dog has discovered the joy of chomping on those bright yellow flowers and flinging petals around. There's a big bed of them right in the area I usually walk him. My dog is a flower-puppy. Bliss and rapture.

There are actual flowers here! I was starting to wonder if it would all just be green until fall, but I'm seeing some nice things, like bluebells (I think) and dandelions. And this is just at my apartment complex.

And now for something completely different...

Switching to rant mode...

Krrrscchh!

Ah, okay. Here we go.

WHY DO PEOPLE FEEL THE NEED TO CHANGE THINGS THAT WERE ALREADY GOOD TO BEGIN WITH AND MAKE THEM WORSE IN THE PROCESS!?!?!

Whew. That's better.

What I'm talking about is a set of DVDs I just bought. When Quantum Leap first came out, I didn't watch it too much. I saw repeats later on, though, and my mom had recorded a lot of them with her ever-present and trusty VCR. I fell in love with a few episodes in particular, one of which I even put on an audio tape.

Why would I do that? I was scared of the dark for most of my life until my later teens. I would listen to favorite movies, like The Little Mermaid, while going to sleep to keep me distracted from my fears.

So I put the episode called "Good Morning, Peoria" on tape and listened to that at night. It had some of the great oldies songs, including one during the most romantic scene that I have no idea who did or what it's called. I'm sure Mom could tell me if I asked.

Anyway (one), when you listen to a tape for many, many nights in a row and love it as much as I did, you expect it to always be that way, right? I mean, why would anyone change anything about a single episode, right?

But that's just what the bastards did.

I bought the entire collection of Quantum Leap on DVD so I could see all the cheesy early episodes I missed and all the good ones later on that I loved. That show truly improved as it aged.

I was jubilant when I got to "Good Morning, Peoria." I insist on watching it all in order, so I had to go through the whole first season and part of the second before I finally got to it last night.

THEY CHANGED SOME OF THE SONGS!!!!

Why the hell would they feel the need to DO that?!!?

The song they picked to replace the romantic one I loved was beyond cheesy and even inappropriate to the momentum of the scene. It just didn't work as well.

Of course, now I'm asking myself why I'm so irritated with it. It's just one episode. And technically not one of the better ones, either. Nothing poignant or special about it, like the evil leaper ones, or the finale, or the one where Al and Sam switch, etc.

I guess it's because I loved it the way it was. And they f***ed with it.

Mom, if you still have that one that you recorded off the TV all those years ago, can you make me a copy and mail it to me? There's nothing like the original.

Close encounters of the moose kind!

It might have been the same moose we were taking pictures of the other day, I'm not sure. Maybe she's a closet spotlight hog. (I'm so lame I don't even know if it was a girl or a boy moose. Of course, during this episode, I hardly cared to look that closely!)

Oh, wait. Maybe you'd actually like to know what happened.

Very simple,really. I was taking Bruno through the parking lot of the apartment complex to his usual potty spot. It's to the edge of the property where there's grass, bushes, and short trees along the fence belonging to one adjoining property. One is fenced, the other is not.

So as Bruno is doing his thing, I notice a big brown blob out of the corner of my eye. My first thought is, what's that horse doing over there?

When I finally pulled focus, I realized a moose was standing not more than 25 feet away from me in the unfenced yard!

It was ignoring me at that moment, busy chewing on nearby bushes. But then Bruno, that slow wit, stood at attention and wuffed.

The moose looked up. Oh, crap, I thought.

"Come on, Bruno," I whispered. "We're backing up, we're backing up." Luckily, Bruno followed along with me slowly and without protest.

Except that the moose started following me, too! He (she, it) was crossing the parking lot in the same direction I was heading!

As soon as I passed the stairwell, I picked up the speed. I didn't head up because Bruno had not finished his nightly business yet, so I dashed to the other side of the complex. Checking behind me, I saw the coast was clear.

The moment Bruno had finished, I headed back the way we came and saw one of our neighbors with her dog in the same area we had come from. I looked up and down and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

One thing I've heard over and over since we've arrived is how unpredictable moose are. How they can charge your car if you honk your horn. How if you and a moose play chicken on the road, you both loose.

I guess this one was just playing with me. Probably cutting me up to his friends afterward. "Boy, you should have seen her go, dragging that dog behind her like she's was trying to fly a kite! Ha, ha, ha!"

Attack of the Mooses!

Well, one moose. And it wasn't really attacking anything but the bushes in the area surrounding our apartment complex.

I felt like such a tourist taking pictures of him, but I took pictures of deer in California whenever I had the chance, so this wasn't any different, really.

Besides, moose are so cute! (Unpredictable and mean, but cute.)

I wish I had a better camera, though. I had this one zoomed all the way in and it still looks like he's way off when he was actually pretty close.