A tale of a frozen family

Since I’ve been kind of a slack azz in the focused weight loss arena in the last few months/years/decades I figured instead of focusing on ME ME ME… the one thing I could do would be to share a low fat recipe that is tried and true with others… and then perhaps others could do the same.

If I can’t be hard core weight buster, I can at least help others to get healthier.. with what I KNOW.. versus what I do!

Here is my latest though… which I have been using every day. You see… we gave up all artificial sweeteners and high fructose corn syrup in this house. A very big leap for this diet pepsi aholic. I have replaced it with home made lemonade, made with Stevia… What is Stevia???

Stevia-From a South American plant called Stevia, this herb has an abundance of positive effects. The whole leaf contains numerous phytonutrients and trace minerals and is much sweeter than sugar with out negative effects. It can sweeten with no calories, no carbohydrates, no tooth decay and is diabetic safe. Stevia nourishes the pancreas and does not raise blood glucose levels, making it not only safe for diabetics but also beneficial. (Source: www.alacarb.com/glossary.html)

GOOD STUFF! I works wonderful!

Here’s my stevia lemonade recipe… very simple.

I juice 6 or so lemons (to get 2 cups of juice) I mix that with six to eight cups of water.. depending on how “potent” the lemons are and then mix in a couple of teaspoons of stevia powder. I taste. If it’s still a little bitter, I mix a little more stevia, until a yummy mixture is achieved. Easy Peasey… and GOOD FOR YOU! AND… virtually no calories.

OK. Time for another weekly installment of “Only in Alaska will you see…..”

This week is Fur Rondy. Our events started on the 22nd and will run through the 2nd of March.

What is Fur Rondy? It’s the Fur Rendezvous, also known as “Fur Rondy,” Anchorage’s February festival. It’s filled with events like the weight pull. In this event, the dogs demonstrate their strength by hauling weighted sleds several yards. The weights can total 1,000 pounds or more.

Alaska’s fur trade isn’t what it was a generation or two ago, but Fur Rondy provided parade watchers with an opportunity to see folks who “shur nuff” looked like old-time trappers.

There are also parades, ice sculpting competitions, a carnival (a favorite of Em’s!), Cribbage tournaments, native music, horse drawn carriage rides (keep in mind this is all happening right in the middle of downtown Anchorage! Our biggest city in the state… FOR A WEEK!). We have crab races… The Crustacean 500. We have car races on ice and the newest edition of Rondy insanity… The running of the reindeer!
Here is a photo taken by Anchorage Daily News

And check out this link for a complete slideshow!

If you want to read up on the details of this new (and VERY popular event) you can check it out here:

Soooo… are ya’ll convinced that we are just the craziest batch of folks in the northern hemisphere or what??? What can I say… I dig it here. What.. what does that say about me? hmmmmm… no comment!

Most parents of 4 year old girls are far too aware of all things barbie, or princess or ballerina. These are things of which we’ve not a clue. Our girl loves Power Rangers, and bull riding, and Hockey. She LOVES her some Hockey!

We made a very big mistake originally. Her very first hockey game was an NHL game, between the Montreal Canadians and the Ottawa Senators. AMAZING game… on Montreal’s home turf. The crowd was electric. The game was fantastic. She was HOOKED!

We have a minor league team here in our area, which is owned by the St. Louis Blues. We always talk about going, but the stadium is 60 miles from our house and they are always in the evenings and it just never works out.

Saturday night however…. the stars aligned. Our errands ran late, we were already in town… they had a game that night, so we went.

Em had the time of her life! It really does warm your heart to watch a child absorb the world around them. I love just watching her light up. She had such an amazing time. And of course, I can’t give you a story without a photo montage…. from that bad boy camera that I’m still trying to figure out.

Soooooooo… without further ado!

When we first arrived, the players were warming up. She was immediately infatuated and ran to the closest area to the ice she could get. She stayed there until they left the ice to get ready for the game.

Hmmmm… that big screen up there is really interesting!

I have no idea what she was doing when I snapped this picture, but it still makes me giggle!

OOOOHHHH MAN! The game is getting ready to start! Wow… these guys go all out for a pre-game production!

Pure craziness I tell you!

Now… we had REALLY good seats. But they just weren’t good enough. You see…. we couldn’t physically touch the glass where we were sitting. Thankfully it was a very slow night for attendance (well, that and we were on the dry side of the arena…. and evidently not many people want to watch hockey sober) so Em was able to con daddy into joining her down in the front so she could get a better look.

She was even able to go over to the side lines and get a few high fives from the guys as they left the ice. She was over the moon!

The game was neck and neck all night.

It ended up going into over time and THEN a shoot out. Our team won! WOO HOO

And at the end of the evening, she got to meet #24, Ed Hill. He was a very sweet guy, who humored her with a hug. There were many “grown up” girls that were VERY jealous of the lovin my kiddo was getting LOL.

It’s been three days since the hockey game and she’s STILL talking about every aspect of it. All I can hope is that she doesn’t actually still want to PLAY hockey when she comes of age, because I have no desire to be up at 6am on weekends so my kiddo can get ice time. Nor is she a morning person. I will hope she will keep her enthusiasm at a spectator level

I’ve not been blogging much this week because my laptop is in a sad sad state. It was gracefully dropped off at Geeksquad yesterday and will be in intensive care for a couple of weeks.

Shall we take a moment of silence and send healing thoughts to the poor soul.

And in the meantime… it really sucks! My laptop is my lifeline!

The one thing about Alaska, is that I can say over and over and over “Only in Alaska will you find/see/do….”

The Iron Dog race is one of those things. 

The Iron Dog is the longest snow machine race in the world.   It goes from Wasilla, Alaska to Nome, Alaska and Ends in Fairbanks, Alaska.  A total of 1,971 miles.  (here is a link to the course map:  http://www.irondog.org/archives/Course%20Map.pdf )   This years winning purse is: $165,775! No wonder it’s such a popular event!

Each team consists of two snow machines and two riders.   They ride in pairs for safety.  The course goes through some pretty tough terrain, and it’s always good to have a partner with you, should something go wrong. They face amazing weather obstacles in addition to the terrain. All in all, it’s a ROUGH ROUGH race. Most racers virtually throw their snow machines away after this race. And they leave with BRAND NEW snow machines. Did I mention it’s a tough race? Hard on racers, hard on machines.

This years race started on Sunday, February 10 and finished on Saturday, February 16. There as a total of 40 teams. 23 of those teams were rookie teams, 5 of those team are out of state teams. The racers leave the starting line in 2 minute intervals and their times are tracked till the finish. The team with the shortest time is the winner. Their starting position is decided by draw before the race day.

This years winners were team #14, Quam and McKenna (their bio is here:  http://www.irondog.org/racers/bios/2008/14.htm )

Even our lovely Governor, Sara Palin’s husband gets involved. He’s won this event several times. He had a bit of a crash this year that evidently required some medical care, but ended up finishing 4th. Not bad for the “First dude of the frontier” (their bio: http://www.irondog.org/racers/bios/2008/22.htm )

Here is a link to the numerous photos that were taken from all the different areas of the course this year. It gives you some great perspective to just how “out in the middle of nowhere” these teams are! http://www.irondog.org/gallery/2008/index.htm

So there you have it.  Only in Alaska will be race just about anything (just wait till I get to some of our summer race events… you’ll roll over in laughter) but we’ll race just about anywhere… for ANYTHING :)  You just gotta love us crazy Alaskans!

I am sick….

First thing yesterday morning, Em barfed :(  Bless her heart… the first explosion was all over the living room carpet.  She ran with me to the bathroom and I tried to teach her the art of praying to the porcelain god.  She got *most* of it in the toilet LOL   It felt very strange to hold my daughters hair back so she could vomit.  Brings back WAYYYY to many college party memories LOL.

Needless to say… I started feeling horrible yesterday afternoon.  My stomach gurgled all day and I thought for sure I was next.  KNOCK ON WOOD that hasn’t happened, but I do feel like I’ve been run over by a truck and my head is POUNDING.   With a stroke of luck, that new doctor that I made an appointment with to interview… that appointment is tomorrow.  Looks like she can treat me while I get to know her. LOL

Anyway, I’m going to bed!

Do you just ever have periods of time that you are virtually just uninspired???  I’m not really sure what is up.  I don’t know if it’s the constant weather fluctuation, or the flu season or what.  The last couple of days, I want to sleep all day and night. 

We were suppose to go to an astronomy symposium last night, which would have been a great opportunity for the Man to break out his new bad boy megga kick butt telescope.  Additionally, they have a junior astronomer club for the kids, that the spawn would have gone NUTS over.  It’s normally for kids 6 and up, but at 4, she knows more about our solar system than I do… including the order in which they fall from the sun (which she will tell you is NOT a planet, but a star mom!).  So…. at any rate, I was excited for her.  I couldn’t wait to tell her when we picked her up from preschool yesterday afternoon.  

We get there, I look at her.. she looks flushed.  I say nothing, because it’s gymnastics time and I refuse to be one of *THOSE* mothers.  So I wait till it’s time to go.  I put on her coat and instinctively do that feel their forehead with the back of your wrist move.   She’s burning up :(   We get her home… temp is 101.  Needless to say, we didn’t go anywhere.  She complained about her legs hurting when she walked and that the inside of her head hurt :(  So I gave the poor kiddo some Tylenol and she went to bed at 7pm.  Didn’t wake until 8am.  Again today, between 100-101 all day.  The upside is that she didn’t complain about any pain today.   As a matter of fact, she’s not exhibiting any symptoms at all, other than fevers.   I try very hard not to get paranoid about anything, but who am I joking.  Having my baby in a hospital for 5 days last year about did me in, and I’ll move heaven and earth to try and keep her from EVER having to go through that again… which of course started as a simple cough.  So… I sometimes think I *look* for symptoms that probably aren’t even there.   Long story short… she’s got a constant fever and nothing else. 

 I feel puny, but not outwardly sick.  Still healing up from surgery and just feeling overall worn down.  I suspect I’m coming down with a cold or something though.  I guess that explains the “uninspired”.   

I also acknowledge that I appear to have a serious case of diarrhea of the mouth and that it’s quite likely that NO ONE on this planet gives a rats a$$ about anything that I am babbling about at this very moment. :)  So I think I’ll just go shove myself in a pint of Hagen daaz.

As you all know, Em’s food allergy list has been cut in half in the last year.    WOOOO FREAKING HOOOOOO!!!! BUT… today, we found something we’d never experienced before.

 As you know.  Today was Valentines day.  So I thought I’d do something special for us (even though we don’t NEED that crap) and I got a cookie decorating kit… it had 4 cookies, with some hearts and sprinkles and frosting to decorate with.  We all decorated our cookies and then we had the 1 left over… so we threw some icing and sprinkles on it and we split it into thirds and ate it.

Everything was fine for about 20 minutes.  In that time I noticed her eczema was flaring and before we knew it, she was LOSING HER MIND.  An emotional outburst I’ve never seen in my life, followed by uncontrollable sobbing.  Crying so hard that she couldn’t control her breathing.  At first in the infantile stages, I thought it was a temper tantrum, but it didn’t take me long to realize this was much more than that.

Hubby and I started scouring the ingredients label trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL was going wrong.  The only thing we could find that she’s not had before (even though she’s had this before) was Red Dye.  She’s had red dye before, but never this heavily concentrated.  I’m not kidding when I say our kiddo freaked the hell out!  I gave her a half dose of benadryl and within 20 minutes she was her old self.

So… from this day forward, it is on the do not feed list.  I’m not rushing her back to the allergist… because bless Em’s heart… she’s a trooper, but her annual testing sucks the life out her and I both.  I refuse to submit her to that hell more than once a year.  So… we’ll avoid it till next go round and then we’ll test for it. 

I just really thought we were on an upward trend.  I’ve read though, it’s not uncommon for allergic kiddos to take some steps backwards through their journey.  It’s not like that crap is any good for us anyway!  If we could just trade that for the carrot allergy… that would be cool.

Okay, so last week we only touched the surface of Prudhoe Bay.   We talked about the camps, life inside them, working hours, etc.   Now… lets talk about life outside the camp.

In addition to the many “fields” or “operating areas” in Prudhoe Bay, we also have the “city” of Deadhorse.  Deadhorse is an area that is not owned by oil companies and is open to the public.  That is where the airport is, which is where the Charter crew change plane flies into, in addition to Alaska Airlines (and I think a couple smaller airlines as well) fly into.   It’s not exactly “large and in charge”, but it’s an airport nonetheless, and they never lost my luggage!

There is also the Prudhoe Bay general store.  This is where I drove on Thanksgiving Day 2002, with my co-worker Todd, to get a pregnancy test!

There is full story of the store here: http://www.colvilleinc.com/store.html

Another part of Prudhoe Bay is the wildlife.  TONS and TONS of wildlife.  For all of the environmentalists that say the oil production is destroying the lives of the wildlife, I have to disagree.  They seem completely content co-mingling, and appear to have no problems keeping up their production numbers!

Here are the cute little caribou grazing in the field.

We have TONS of bears…. who LOVE to get into trouble.  This bear is on the THIRD floor!

This is Toby… Toby is a little too comfortable with camp life.

The soccer mom of Prudhoe Bay?

Didn’t these little ones know that perms went out in the 80s?????

And last but not least… the Polar Bear.   If you ever see a Polar Bear, make sure you head in the other direction.  Polar Bears are the only species, besides humans that hunt for FUN.  They look pretty, but they are mean and nasty buggers.

Another topic of discussion is oil production from Prudhoe Bay.  Since this is the stuff I deal with every day, blogging about it is like asking me to shove bamboo under my fingernails.   To spare me the pain, I’ll include a little “production facts” fresh from the big boys offices for your enjoyment (which subsequently gives you the pleasure of being able to pass right over that link, in the event oil production is as exciting to you as shoving bamboo under your fingernails!) http://www.dec.state.ak.us/SPAR/PERP/response/sum_fy06/060302301/factsheets/060302301_factsheet_PB.pdf

 So, there you have it.  This concludes Prudhoe Bay 101.  Are you ready to jump onto the crew change and start your first hitch? 

You’d think somebody who is just laying around healing up would have plenty of time to sit on the computer and babble babble babble.  I do spend most of my day sitting on the computer, but not so much time babbling… so I guess I’ll just have to admit that I’ve been a slacker. 

Since I don’t particularly have much in my life to babble about at this very second, I’ll put up some pictures we took over the last week or so.   All of these are straight out of the camera.   I can’t wait until I’m actually out of my recliner more often and at my desk so I can photo shop these a bit (that is after I learn HOW to photo shop them )

I just love the mountains at sunset!

But a zoom lens sure would make these pictures ROCK

Did I mention I love sunsets????

I’d like to photo shop the power line out… and zoom in a mile or so.  Did I mention zoom would be cool?

Okay… enough about mountains and sunsets and zoom.   I’ll move onto the spawn.  She goes to preschool 3 days a week.  One of the daily activities in preschool is 1/2 hour of gymnastics every day.  A GREAT thing for kids in Alaska…. who get stuck indoors way too much!  They were particularly good this day, so they got free time.

This is Em’s best friend Grace (I giggle at this since Em’s middle name is Grace).  Grace is a diva… Grace loves the camera.  I probably shouldn’t admit that I have 10 times more pictures of Grace from this day, because… well…. she likes the camera

And of course, the spawn…. trying to run without falling down.  I love my child more than life itself… but she is as coordinated as a slug.

Speaking of coordinated… let me show you!  This was what happened when Em ran into the wall.  The wall is the same wall it’s always been.  It’s in the same place in the house it’s always been.  But Em, is Em… and I love her!

See that knot on her forehead???

She was quite proud!

That’s my girl.  I love her.

OH, and I almost forgot to show you.  We had a rainstorm come through last week, followed by 20 below weather right behind it.  THIS is what happens when you have that combination.  This is the PARKING LOT to the lake, where everyone ice skates in the winter.   People have opted to skip the lake and have been literally skating in the parking lot instead.

And last by not least…. here are the trees right outside the house.  I just LOVE this picture.  The colors are sooooo amazing!  and this is STRAIGHT from the camera!  Who knew!!!

Okay, so that is it.  Have I redeemed myself for my days of absence?  Does anybody care??  Is this thing on??? HELLO???

Alrighty then.