Winter is there

January 23rd, 2008 · No Comments

IMG_0589.JPGAnd I thought 2007 was a busy travel year… We inaugurated another year of criss-crossing the globe and getting to know LAX far better than we’d like (13 trips planned in 12 months this year, up from 10 last year…) to with our now-annual January trip to Alaska. We celebrated my dad’s birthday and a late Christmas, complete with the tree and decorations still up, Swedish Christmas music, and hot buttered rum, this year’s answer to our usual glögg. The landscape was blanketed with a beautiful, thick layer of fluffy snow, and the weather was great. I went for an hour-long run on the coastal trail on Sunday, punctuated by a close encounter with a moose cow and calf; it wouldn’t have been a complete trip without a moose sighting. On the flip side, I also managed to render my dad’s computer inoperable, screw up the chocolate fondue, and give my mom a gift that was D.O.A. from Amazon, though, like the fact that we missed our Seattle-to-Anchorage flight and had to be rescheduled, and the fact that our lunch order at the Bear Tooth was so late that they gave us our money back plus free movie tickets, that wasn’t really my fault. All in all, though, it was a great visit, with a nice afternoon with Neil and Melanie at their house, a trip to Snow City for their Ship Creek Benedict, a stroll through the ice sculptures outside the Performing Arts Center, and a delicious dinner at Orso for dad’s birthday.

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I also went through another enduring ritual, that of cleaning out old stuff from the basement. This time some of the casualties, as I consolidated four banker’s boxes into one, were my German declamation contest medals and ribbons, old junior high band sheet music, and binders full of grammar quizzes from eighth grade English class. I can go through and get rid of only so much at a time; the archivist in me hates to see some of the stuff go, but then I take a look back in the basement at all of the other stuff, and I don’t feel so bad. Boxes of photos, letters, and journals remain, as they should – it’s the Western Airlines swizzle stick and napkin collection that’s going into the trash (though maybe it should go on eBay, now that I think about it…)

Old medals and ribbons

In looking at yesterday morning’s nominations announcement, I thought I’d done pretty well this year, until I did the math and realized I’d only seen 17 out of the 58 films nominated. I don’t have any hopes (and in some cases, no desire, either) to see the other 41, but I’ve got about ten on my list that I’d like to catch in the month between now and the show.

My plan for 52 Weeks, 25 Books (a little less ambitious than it could be, but 25 will be an improvement over the 2.5 I think I read last year) continues, as I finished off the fascinating Word Freaks on the plane, a book about Scrabble obsession that Aimee got me last year. I’m starting on a book I got her for Christmas this year, the Ira Glass-edited New Kings of Non-Fiction, which looks great as well.

Tags: Alaska · Film · Los Angeles