I was right that there'd be more snow...

… but I wasn’t really going out on a limb, was I?

Anyway, I have this humongous backlog of photos to share. I think I named them in reverse-chronological order, meaning the “2″ or “3″ was taken before the “1″ on most of them, for those who bother mousing over and looking at photo names. (I do try to make relatively helpful names, or at least ones that amuse me. I mean, a lot of my photos are of snowy mountains, sure, but if there’s some point to the photo, other than “Look at these huge freaking mountains,” I try to put it in the name.)

I took a couple of photos as I was driving through midtown on Thanksgiving; driving in snow that thick is kind of a freaky experience, but it went fine. Speaking of Thanksgiving, I’ve been up toward Wasilla, now, though I haven’t driven through the town itself. My boss invited me along to Thanksgiving dinner, which was really nice of him. Everyone was super friendly, and the food was awesome. (And now back to roads — maybe I should have called this blog “Driving in Alaska.”) Driving back down the Glenn Highway that night was a little scary, because, while large parts of it are lit, not all of it is; visibility got low, at times. And given how many cars we’d seen flipped over on the way up, I was–I think understandably–cautious. But I made it home without even going all that miserably slow, except for a few minutes when I got stuck behind a car going 35-45mph. I’m chicken when it comes to changing lanes in weather, but I got over it to get past that guy.

I think 70 miles of highway driving was good for the car’s engine; my gas mileage has been up since then.

Anyway, as you can see, I have pictures from before and after Thanksgiving, and quite a few of them show not-too-miserable roads. The before pics show good roads due to heavy use; we wore the snow and ice down to pavement over a couple of weeks. The after pics have good roads due to plowing, because however much snow we got the night before Thanksgiving is clearly beyond the limit at which they plow. (You can get a rough idea from the photo I took of my car the next morning, keeping in mind I’d brushed it off 1/3 of the way through the storm. Also, yeah, I doctored the photo really poorly to hide where I park in the morning, because I’m paranoid. ) Unfortunately, my picture of the pre-Thanksgiving snowstorm didn’t come out all that well; you can’t really see the snow, but the windshield is obviously wet (what’s not obvious is that I took the picture right after the wiper swooshed–it was snowing that fast).

Other photos: I went out to look at the duck pond, now that it’s iced and snowed over. I only saw two ducks, and they didn’t stick around to be fed. (Note the “Thin Ice” sign, the clearly-still-flowing water-over-rocks photo, and the footprints out on the water/ice. People are amazing.) I took a picture of my office, now that I have lights up; don’t bother clicking it, since it’s all blurry–it’s probably a better-looking photo in thumbnail size. And I got pictures of those ice lines I was talking about, forming on the inside of the windshield. I don’t know if you’ll be able to parse the picture, not having seen them, but it was the best I could do.

Anyone following the drama of the windshield crack will notice from some of the photos that it’s gotten bigger. But it’s not growing all that quickly; I’m not too worried about it. I think I’ve seen a crack all the way across someone’s windshield nearly every day, up here, which makes my windshield crack look really piddly by comparison.

Oh, and, finally, I took pictures on my way into work this morning. Those photos are from right around 9:15am. It’s now 4pm, and it’s almost as dark as it was when I took those photos. Apparently the four days we took off for Thanksgiving made quite a difference in the amount of daylight we get. Or, you know, it could have been overcast all day.

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