You take the good with the bad.

Most notably, it’s been cold. Even for the Alaska interior, the birthplace of cold, it’s been cold. It’s was minus 30 to minus 45 degrees for a week until yesterday, when it warmed up to zero for a while. It was -72 in Chicken. Really, there’s a place called Chicken. With the cold weather, a certain grim determination kicks in for most of us, and we know that if we’re lucky - and a little careful - it will pass soon enough without incident. But certain procedures have to be followed.

Recess is canceled at minus 20. For the elementary teacher, that means kids are in the classroom all day. They can go to the gym, but they don’t all want to. Some of them sit in the classroom and play games. They get kind of wound up doing this day after day, and we all get a little bit edgy.

At home, a moose started hanging around the yard. My wife named her Zeus. Zeus the moose. She was bedded down near a big spruce tree on the driveway Monday afternoon, and she popped out from behind the tree right in front of my truck as I drove up. She was big. My truck is pretty big, but I remember looking UP at her flying by my front bumper. Moose don’t really care who they bother, and they can hurt you if they get it into their heads that you are the one bothering them. So you can’t really run them off. They go away when they want to, and in the meantime, we pick the kids up at school because we don’t want them meeting Zeus on their walk home from the bus stop.

Remember, it’s been cold, and the machines are under stress, too. We all have block heaters for the engines so we can start them after they’ve been parked overnight or all day at work. Even still, my truck had a case of the flashing check engine light the other morning. This place is a cold weather test lab. So we’re down to one vehicle now while the truck is in the shop along with everyone else’s. No big deal, we can make adjustments to our schedules, but we also use the truck to haul our water. Yeah. We carry a 300 gallon tank in the back and fill it at a bulk water place that sells water for about a cent and a half per gallon. This is kind of hard to explain, but for now I’ll just say that I figure we can go for about 12 more days with what we’ve got left in the storage tank. We’ve instituted a water conservation policy on long showers.

Then, yesterday, I got a call from a new internet service provider with a wireless broadband signal that comes in strong for us. We put our names on a list a few weeks ago, and today I went to town and picked up a little gadget that now brings us all the internet goodness we might want.

It’s weird. The cold weather keeps us inside days on end, a moose that we have to watch out for lurks outside in the yard, our water hauling truck breaks down, and a new blazing fast broadband signal starts bringing us more information than we need. And it all happened at the same time. The world we have to walk around in is messed up, but the internet blazes on. We call this progress.