Merry Christmas!

     Sorry it has been so long since I posted. I know some of you are wondering how we are. Allen come home last week and we have been busy with all the holiday stuff and I haven't had time to post, especially since Allen is always on when I remember to.

     Our Christmas was wonderful! We braved the post office line and got our holiday packages. The Palmer post office is the busiest post office I have ever seen! There is always a huge line, and the last three times we went there, we waited for thirty minutes. Anyway, we got our packages without pulling our hair out or being rude to the obnoxious person you always get stuck behind, and got to open them bright and early Christmas morning. Even though I am not a home anymore, I still felt like a kid. Not from the excitement, but the fact that Allen took great pleasure in making me wait to open my presents. He declared that he had to eat first, which he took his good ole time doing, and then that patience was a virtue and he felt it was his responsibility to teach me that virtue! Why husbands take such delight in picking on their wives, I will never know. He finally let me open my gifts and they were all wonderful! Both of us were very excited about them. Thank you all!

     Well, for Christmas day we went to Josh and Ami's house for dinner. They are a couple we have met at church that doesn't have family up here, so they invited us over so we could be alone together. :) They are close to Allen's age and they have four children. It was so much fun! We had an amazing Christmas dinner with all the trimmings and then we went sledding! Of course it was dark (this is Alaska) but that just added to the excitement! It was snowing (yes.....my first white Christmas!) so as you raced down the hill your froze and as you climbed up the hill you burned up. The funny thing that happened to me was that all the little fly-away hairs that I had sticking out of my hat........they froze! It was so funny, I had to think of Cool Runnings (the movie). Ami was quick to tell my not to touch them though cause they were very brittle and would break. She said that is the way to have an Alaskan hair cut ; wash your hair, walk outside, then break it to the correct length. lol

     After sledding, we went inside for desert and then watched "It's a Wonderful Life". I know that my family back home watched it without me, and since I can't remember a Christmas where I didn't watch it, I wasn't going to skip this year. It is a great movie and I always get something new out of it every time. And that is how our Christmas went!

     Allen has found some really neat web sites since he has been home and I figured I would share them with y'all:

This is the Aurora Forecast: http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/

And this tells you of all the latest earth quakes: http://www.aeic.alaska.edu/Seis/recenteqs_sub/index.html

 

I am not sure if y'all know that Alaska has lots of earth quakes! It is in the Pacific's "Ring of Fire" and so we even have active volcanoes along with all the seismic activity. Here are some awesome facts about Alaska:

-It has one fifth the land mass of the entire continental U.S. 586,000 sq miles

-33,000 miles if coast line

-19 mountain peaks over 14,000 ft.

-3 million lakes larger than 20 acres!

-Has more than half the world's glaciers; 100,000 glaciers that cover 30,000 sq miles. Malaspina, 850 sq miles is the largest and roughly the size of Rhode Island.

-Highest mountain in the US Mt. McKinley; 20,320 ft.

-70 or more active volcanoes

-Has approximately 50 quakes each year that register over 5 on the Richter scale; over 22,000 total a year :)

-Shortest day Dec. 21 (winter solstice)- 5.28 hours of sunlight (Anchorage)

-Longest day June 21 (summer solstice)- 19.21 hours (Anchorage)

-In Barrow, the sun rises May 10th and sets August 2nd (84 days of constant light). Then it will set on November 18th and not rise till January 24th (67 days of darkness)

 

BTW- I left my camera at Ami's so picture will be posted later.