Tribute to Our Little Girl (Sat, Feb. 25, 2012)

Atti just outside of Denali

Atti camping

Atti at the top of Bear Moutain

Atti and Rochelle at the top of Skyline Trail (very windy day)

Atti and Jon descending Skyline Trail

After spending 6 weeks with Atti this summer in addition to many play dates and sleepovers, we are forced to say goodbye. Last night, Atti's owner and our good friend, came over and told us the bad news. On Saturday afternoon Atti went out on the road to greet another dog and was hit by a car. Although she was not ours, she was as good as. Her excitement at seeing us always lead to her wetting herself and then an attempt (usually successful) to jump into our car. She traveled all over Alaska with us this summer. You can see just a few of the places in the pictures above. She will be greatly missed by both the Felchles and the Horbaczs. Although hard, I am somewhat put at ease knowing that during her 4 years, she was a happy dog.

A Windy Day at the Beach (Feb. 19, 2012)

It was a cloudy weekend in Kenai. This ended up being okay as we both recuperated from sporting events: Jon had two basketball games (Friday and Saturday) and I had a cross country ski meet hosted by our school on Friday. There is a lot of work that goes into pulling off a ski meet. We both have one week of coaching left. It's been a great experience for both of us, but we are ready to close this portion of the year.

Convalidation (Feb. 14, 2012)

On Tuesday we celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary. It's hard to believe we've been married that long. To celebrate, we had our marriage convalidated (blessed) in the Catholic church. The ceremony was short and simple. We celebrated the convalidation at Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church in Kenai. The presider was Deacon Rick Ernst whom we've gotten to know a bit over the past few months. Jon and I are both taking RCIA through the church and Deacon Rick is the teacher. For witnesses, we invited our RCIA classmates. To celebrate our convalidation we had homemade cake, ice cream, sparkling cider, and chips with salmon and cheese dip!

Kodiak Island (Feb. 8-12, 2012)

Whittier

Kennicott Ferry

Kodiak

On the Ferry

The boys basketball team went to Kodiak Island for two games this weekend. We played Friday and Saturday, but the travel to and from Kodiak made it a much longer journey. We left Wednesday after school to travel to Whittier where we spent our first night at their small 4 classroom school in the gym. The next morning we boarded a state ferry and left on our first sea voyage of the trip (22 hours). The ferry took us through Prince William Sound with many mountains that fall off into the ocean and eventually to open ocean for the second part of our "cruise". I saw a harbor seal and 3 different pods of Dall Porpoises. The overnight portion of the trip found me sleeping toward the middle of the boat on a plastic fold-out lawn chair that people have in their back yards. I never felt sea sick but we were told that seas reached 18ft. when we were out in the Gulf. The cool part of taking the ferry was that we could sleep anywhere that we wanted to on the boat. There are a lot of large open viewing rooms (with not very many people on a good size vessel) so we found one that worked for us and set up camp. We were arriving at Kodiak just before day break and some of the rocks were gorgeous as you looked out at the ocean. The basketball games went well. Kodiak really gets the gym rocking with a lot of community pride. My team lost the first game on a last second shot, and then we got blown out the next day. The Varsity games were very good. Kenai won by one on Friday and lost by 4 on Saturday. As is with every out of town weekend trip we slept on the floor in classrooms at the school Friday night and were back on the ferry Saturday night. We arrived in Homer around 2PM and I finally got home around 5:30 PM Sunday evening.

My Buddy and Me (Feb. 11-12, 2012)

Atti running at low tide

Can you find Atti?

Tiny Atti next to Large Ice Chunk

Atti watching a moose from the living room window

While Jon is off coaching basketball on Kodiak Island from Wednesday to Sunday, I have spent time the last two days hanging out with my buddy, Atti. She is a good companion and helps make the house more lively when Jon is gone. The two of us were able to spend a lot of time outside on Saturday, waking up to temperatures in the 30s. We took a walk down Cannery road in the morning and spent the afternoon roaming the beach. The tide was low, exposing the ice chunks and sand. This made it easy walking and easy for Atti to get good and dirty.

Sunday morning we woke up to a moose just outside the house. It's still here. Atti is having a good time watching it! Looking forward to Jon's return this afternoon!

sunrise- 8:56am
sunset- 5:42pm

Avalanche (Feb. 2-5, 2012)

An early morning avalanche on Thursday morning closed all land access to Anchorage. I dropped Jon off at the high school about 9:10am to head up on a school bus with his basketball team for a couple games in Anchorage. Fifteen minutes later I received a phone call from him telling me the trip was cancelled due to the massive avalanche. As far as we know, no one was hurt. They closed the roads on Friday and spent the day blasting the snow off the mountains in various areas along the mountains. This creates avalanches, which is their goal. The purpose is to get some of that snow down to prevent future avalanches when the roads are open.

We had conferences Thursday and Friday and I was going to be the only member of the 7th grade team there due to basketball, but the avalanche allowed two of my 7th grade team members to be there with me after all. It's much less pressure when you have a team of co-workers to support you.

We got out for a gorgeous ski on Saturday. The temp was 18 degrees with no wind! On Sunday we went to Tim Sandahl's house (the 7th grade language arts teacher) for the Superbowl. We ate a lot of great finger food!

sunrise- 9:10am
sunset- 5:29pm
daylength- 8 hrs. 19 min.