I’m enjoying some hiking time on the Diamond Creek Recreation Area trails with my favorite kiddos this month. 🙂 See what others are viewing this month with Clare’s Share Your Desktop challenge!

Bear Mountain Trail, Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. 0.8 miles of lovely trail, mostly up. (And the reverse coming back.) Lots of mosquitoes and humidity. At the top? A wonderful view of Skilak Lake, looking amazingly calm. The Kenai Mountains are feeling shy, mostly hidden by the lazy clouds. A perfect place to pause, slow the […]

Some of the young softball girls helped me chalk one of the fields this summer. We put the chalk dust in the applicator and I explained how to figure where to start and how to keep the lines straight, or in a good circle. It should look something like the lines on the photos in […]

A light gone out. My grandmother passed away the end of last month. She was 98. So, not unexpected. Yet, only 2 weeks before she’d been living solo with only moderate assistance. So, unexpected. It seemed sudden. It was peaceful. She had family with her all the time at the end. She had prayers and […]

A quick pic for a fun challenge! Cee’s Which Way Challenge: any which way with people…. My kids were amused that the people on the sign were walking to the right, but the trail actually went forward and to the left. 🙂

Last week, we hiked the Hidden Creek trail in Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Not a bad view, for sure, and a great scene now on my desktop. 🙂 See what else folks are viewing over at Clare’s monthly Share Your Desktop challenge!

The last few weeks have been a flurry of activity – planes, trains, & automobiles! Delayed flights, cancelled flights, missed connections, rerouted luggage, unexpected overnights in far away cities… And in the middle, a wedding, family, new-to-us old cities, exploration, learning, walking, being. Home now (and hopefully our luggage will be here soon)! It is […]

A few weeks ago, we embarked on an adventure overseas for my brother’s wedding. Long story short (or more likely a story for another day), a canceled flight left us with a free day in Seattle. (Kinda free. We had all our luggage, and didn’t have time to venture far from the airport.) But, we […]

We had some magnificent weather while in England, and we did a lot of walking. It was amazing!! Our last day there decided to get a bit spitty, but we walked anyway. I do love the ease of walking places in all the areas we visited! I always enjoy Cee’s Which Way Challenge, even if I don’t participate […]

On one of our last days of our UK trip, we visited Edinburgh. After a day at the castle, we explored the Christmas Market. (Look for the bright line just under the Ferris wheel and stretching across the photo. That was the row of booths that stretched from the just left of the right-most building all the way […]

Sometimes British signs and phrases make so much more sense than those in the US, and sometimes….well, sometimes they make me giggle. Humped zebra crossing = raised crosswalk. (Yeah, I took a photo of the sign and the roadway, but not the actual humped zebra crossing!) Thanks to Cee for her weekly Which Way challenge! :-)

While those down in the southern hemisphere are enjoying the summer, up here in the north, we are deep in winter!! One of the cool things about living at 59*N latitude is that the stars almost circle the sky, rather than go up and over. (Even in the summer, the sun doesn’t go up and over, it […]

Last spring, possibly for my birthday or Mother’s Day, my daughter purchased me an orchid. It was beautiful! As a green thumb with a horticulture background, I also knew that as a grocery store purchase it was grown for visual beauty, not plant strength or longevity. I enjoyed the flowers immensely. When they eventually faded and fell off, I […]

People tell me I’m crazy to live in Alaska They say if they lived here, they’d only live here in the summer. They ask me how I “deal with” the winters.  The winters are easy. It’s the summers that are hard. I love Alaskan winters for so many reasons. One of those is the light. It’s incredible. I mean, how can you […]

Across the ocean, in Newbiggin-by-the-Sea, stands a couple. Sculpted by artist Sean Henry, they stand, forever looking out over the water. Closer in, next to the beach, a smaller version of the sculpture, titled Couple, stands looking out upon that couple, allowing for a closer view for those of us not out in the water. This […]

On our trip to the UK last fall, we took a long wandering walk. We ran across this pond FULL of birds!!  We enjoy birding (recreationally) and we had fun in England and Scotland identifying birds we knew (and learning their British names) and discovering some new ones! This lake even had a lovely sign to […]

-20*F at the beach: even salt water turns to slush. More ripples at the weekly Pic & A Word challenge! (Probably warmer ones, too.)

After a long stretch of COLD (as in negative twenty degrees Fahrenheit), we’ve warmed back up to springlike temperatures (forty degrees and above, with some rain and sun). Combine that with a large tide cycle, and we’ve got lots of large chunks of sea ice being washed up onto the beaches. This ice chunk was cool […]

When I saw this week’s word, I knew exactly the photo I wanted to use. It was of a fence piece at our old property that always intrigued me. It seemed to have no real purpose, just a wooden relic that may have been the beginning of a project, or maybe the leftovers of another […]

Our green is still mixed with a lot of white. 🙂 Find more green at Terri’s Sunday Stills challenge this week!