Weekend Visitor

We awoke Saturday to an early morning visitor. We could see through the window a huge moose in front of our home. The moose was making its way across the yard but decided to stop and enjoy breakfast.

 Unfortunately for us, the breakfast turned out to be one of our young birch trees.

 The moose must have really liked the taste because it stepped up on the raised bed and proceeded to nibble away!

 Greg tried to shoo it away without much luck.

 You don't want to make them mad because they might still be mad when they encounter the next person. They can be incredibly aggressive and dangerous when agitated.

 To give you a sense of scale, the spruce tree on the right is almost 7 and a half feet tall.

Eventually, the moose moved on but not before deciding to stop in the corner of the yard and really put the hurt on a smaller birch tree!

 It finally tired of that tree and slowly made its way around the neighborhood.

Something I had looked forward to this weekend was the big snowstorm the Weather Service predicted for us. Some predictions had up to a foot of fresh snow!  Of course, we got maybe an inch total of new snow this afternoon. It was enough to stop our record streak of snowless days at 37! Can you believe it? We had not seen a measurable snowfall in 37 days! Greg hadn't complained about lack of new snow but I missed it!

First blog post of the new year!

Hello everyone and hope your 2016 is going great for you! It's been very busy for us so far. It took us a little while to recover from our Christmas trip. Then we started moving to our new home. We finally got totally moved in over the weekend. Greg's birthday was spent cleaning. He did get a drive-thru hamburger as a treat for dinner. No cake though. I think we are going to enjoy this new home. We have over twice as much space as our condo, a beautiful yard, a nice sunroom/greenhouse, and I can get a pet! I won't let it out alone, however, as we have two huge bald eagles that winter in the trees four houses down! These birds are gorgeous and it is so exciting to have them so close to us.

 The last week of January, Greg and his friends, Kay

                           and Melody,

 were able to walk to Town Square on their lunch break and see this year's collection of ice sculptures.

 We may have go see them again, as they are much more impressive at night with the lights illuminating them.

 For the most part, the ice sculptures seemed to have survived a huge 7.1 earthquake here in Anchorage.

 It happened Sunday, January 24, at 1:30 a.m.

Our local newspaper said that most of Anchorage was asleep at 1:29 a.m. but everyone in town was awake at 1:30 a.m., including me.

 Greg was still up and it probably frightened him more because when he made it to the bedroom doorway, he could see the dining room chandelier swinging almost touching the ceiling as it moved from side to side.
 It was quite scary and seemed to go on forever.

 It lasted actually less than a minute. Hopefully, we will never experience another one like that or stronger. There was quite a bit of  minor damage around town.
Thankfully, the new home doesn't seem to have suffered any damage.