Tag Archives: quote

19 June 2012

By icefogger

I worked both days this weekend to try to make a push on the siding job. The trim needed to get painted and the deck needed stain. Once again the weather didn’t cooperate on Saturday, as I watched the storm clouds come in while I was painting facia boards.
I did get the trim finished and a coat of stain on the deck Sunday, since the rain held off until late in the afternoon. I was dropping off a truckload of the old siding at the transfer site, when the wife of the couple I’m working for swung through to drop off her own trash and offered to buy me a beer at the local brewery.

Part of our conversation over a couple of Old 55’s:

Client: The house looks great. You really know how to polish a turd.
Me: Thanks. You’re trying to give me a compliment, right?
Client: You know what I mean.
Me: That’s not something I want to get around. Next thing you know, I’ll get a rep, then I’ll do nothing but polish turds and they won’t let me near a nice, level house.
Client: There are worse things.
Me: Well, don’t be offended or anything, but that slogan is not going on my tombstone.
Client: You want another beer?
Me: I do now.

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9 June 2012

A Very Wet Summer

By icefogger

How much rain have we had up here in The North? Well, the picture above is of The Alaska Highway gone River. All roads leading to Alaska from the Yukon Territory have been blocked by washouts after more heavy rain and still melting snow.

Holy shit! The tourists were right all along… Alaska IS an island!

The Alaska Highway is closed from Destruction Bay to Haines Junction, and from Teslin to Junction 37. That’s roughly 220 miles of highway. The Klondike Highway is also closed due to washouts. It’s expected to take days to reopen The Alcan. One washout between Teslin & 37 is over 200′ wide and 20′ deep. That is a bit of a gully.

When asked when the roads were expected to open, The Yukon Territory’s Highways and Public Works spokeswoman Aisha Montgomery said, “We’re hesitant to give specific times.” Especially when the salmon are running…

To the 100 travelers who are stuck between a mudslide and a washout near the Rancheria Lodge I say: “Welcome to the Yukon!”

———————————————————————-

“I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.

Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
— Ray Bradbury from “Green Shadows, White Whale…”

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in public service announcement

23 March 2012

I decided the weekend began today at 3:30pm ADT

By icefogger

“Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher “standard of living” is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.
For us of in the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.”

–Aldo Leopold

I’m feeling particularly anti-establishment today as I look over blueprints and work on bids for customers that keep flip-flopping on whether to “color, or not to color”… “We’re thinking about doing this… oh wait, no we better do that… well, we can order it right? won’t that just look lovely in our kitchen… blah, blah, f****** blah…” The cabin dwellers are so much easier to work for and they don’t own dogs that ‘yap’, but sadly they can’t pay as well, and these days one has to sell his soul for a tank of gasoline.
Over the past two days, I’ve been asked to do another roof job & another siding job this summer, and I, in a Fit of Greed with eyes set firmly on the trail, agreed to do the jobs. Does anyone know when Excedrin will be back on store shelves?

It was -32 here Wednesday & Thursday morning, then warmed up to a balmy -28 this morning. Unfortunately, I left one of the two dampers open on the new woodstove last night, so it was 48 degrees in the cabin this morning, which was disappointing.

I regret not meeting up with friends in St Paul this weekend for the regionals going on at the X. I could have & probably should have gone down for them prior to the Frozen Four, but I honestly figured it would have warmed up to at least normal temps by now in Alaska, and didn’t see the hurry until it was too late to change my flight.

I did finally watch the Leopold documentary “Green Fire” last night. My bear biologist friend loaned it to me, and I figured I better watch it before I leave town, because he’s the type of guy who’d send a grizzly after me if I didn’t. It was well done, but I’m feeling too cynical about mankind today to give it a proper review. I wrote out a nice, long paragraph just now on the film, but then realized that sometimes the delete key is there for a reason.

I am definitely looking forward to this vacation.

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31 October 2011

Happy Halloween —

By icefogger

—Go Out & Hug a Pagan

A pleasing land of drowsy head it was,
Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky.
CASTLE OF INDOLENCE.

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25 October 2011

I’m going to pretend it was a compliment.

By icefogger

I had lunch today with a good friend, and somewhere along the conversational line, the subject of retro came up. Then she looks at me over her bowl of Thai soup and replies, “Oh! You’re way beyond retro.”

Now what exactly is that suppose to mean?

That was rhetorical, by the way…

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9 October 2011

La Nina vs. Interior Alaska

By icefogger

The Experts at The Climate Prediction Center are calling for “enhanced chances that the three-month average temperature (Dec-Feb) will be significantly colder than normal across much of Interior Alaska as well as from the Aleutian Islands to the panhandle. There are also enhanced chances of significantly below normal precipitation across much of the eastern Interior”.

Sweet.

Oddly enough, we’re already behind schedule, as it were. The first hard frost was already two weeks late from average. By October 1 we have usually had our first snowfall of an inch or more, but we haven’t seen any of the evil white stuff yet this year.

But one thing we all agree on: It Is Coming.

“He travels fastest who travels alone . . . but not after the frost has dropped below zero fifty degrees or more. —Yukon Code. —“To Build A Fire”

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13 August 2011

John Haines

By icefogger

“The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away all thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.”
— John Haines

John Haines died in Fairbanks this spring when I was off traveling. I had no idea until today. I had heard of Haines ever since I landed in Alaska, but I hadn’t read his work until a good friend gave me a copy of “The Stars, The Snow, The Fire”. I’ve been searching out his work ever since. The man, more than any other writer I have read, captured the essence of Alaska.
Haines drove up to Alaska in 1947 and bought a homestead out towards Delta Junction. He built his cabin by hand out of salvaged lumber and homesteaded. According to Haines, he came to Alaska as a painter, but when his paint kept freezing, he started to write instead. He hunted, trapped, , mushed dogs, chopped firewood, observed and wrote. Man, did he ever write. Another Alaska writer, Dan O’Neill has called Haines, “the best poet, writer, and author Alaska has ever produced.”

Former college professor John Kooistra, a longtime friend of Haines, stated that Jack London and Robert Service “were essentially tourists” compared with Haines. “This is poetry of a different level. He was a cantankerous, insufferable, unbendable old bastard but he was a damn good writer. He is Alaska’s best writer. He was a standout.” He was an Alaskan.

John Haines was 86. He will be deeply missed.

“By candle or firelight
your face still holds
a mystery that once
filled caves with the color
of unforgettable beasts.”
–“Winter Light” by John Haines

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8 February 2011

Horizon

By icefogger

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”
Cyril Connolly
(1903 – 1974)

2 Comments   |  tags: | posted in Uncategorized