Dusk Through Narrow Streets

Spring here isn’t like spring everywhere else–around when other parts of the US are seeing the snow melt, we’re hitting breakup, and when my friend in Pennsylvania is talking about warm weather edging into the 70s and 80s, I’m thrilled to get a blue-sky day in the 40s.

Yeah, you’re all laughing at me now. This is spring in Anchorage: generally speaking, I’d say the latter half of March and first half of April tend to be breakup, which…I’m not sure if I’d define breakup as a fifth season, or a subseason of winter and spring, or what, but it’s a very common term here, and it’s that period between genuine winter, when it’s cold and snow covers everything, and genuine spring, when the vast majority of the snow has melted, the roads are dry, and the grass…well, the grass and trees aren’t green again, but they’re getting there. Breakup is the between-time, when all the ice breaks up (get it now?)  and the temperature settles above freezing and the snow starts to melt.

And it’s disgusting. Do not ever visit Alaska during that time of year. You won’t want to come back. Half the streets are flooded with giant dirty puddles, and the rest are covered in brown slush and mud. It’s too warm for winter boots but too dirty for normal shoes, and unless your shoes are waterproof (none of mine are), you’re pretty much guaranteed to get your feet soaked just walking to class. (Granted, that was true on all the rainy days in Norwich too.) Parking lots turn into giant muddy, slushy messes, some nearly impossible to drive in because the ice and hard-packed snow built up all winter melts unevenly. Park in a bad place and you’ll step into an ankle-deep, ice-cold puddle that probably surrounds your entire car.

If you couldn’t figure it out by now, breakup is one of my least favorite times of year.

Sometime around last week, though, I’d say we finally transitioned into spring. Everything’s still kind of dirty–during the winter, dirt is spread on the streets for traction, so when the snow melts, the dirt stays–and we haven’t had any rain, so there’s still a lot of dust and ash, and of course the melting snow reveals just how much litter everyone chucked out their car windows over the winter. Streetsweeper trucks sort of clean the dirt off the streets, although then it just gets in the grass and kind of stays there, so…I don’t know how helpful that is. But the vast majority of the snow is gone, and–this is the real mark of spring beginning for my purposes–almost all the roads, sidewalks, and various paths at UAA are clean and dry. Seriously, when breakup finally starts to leave because there’s not much left to melt, the most beautiful thing in the world is clean, dry pavement, and while I’m getting my feet soaked trying to get to my next class because everything is wet and slushy, I tend to think pretty longingly about places like Florida with sunbaked pavement that’s cracked from the heat, not potholed from freeze-thaw cycles.

Not very romantic, is it? But for me, spring means dry pavement. The first beautiful spring day meant clear skies, sun, temperatures above 40°, and the ability to walk outside without looking like a loon because I’m gingerly stepping from semi-dry spot to semi-dry spot. I wore my Converses outside again for the first time last week because they’re even less waterproof than my other shoes, which was kind of awesome.

Now I just need to get the studded tires taken off my car, and won’t that be fun…

Redoubt went off again last night, which I need to post about in more detail soon; I still haven’t actually seen an ash plume from where I live, but there was enough ash fall last night that people were advised not to go outside and to wear masks if they did. All our snow is pretty dirty, too.

What I’ve got right now is a post written up by a blogger with a number of sites about the New Jersey shore, an area where I’ve spent very little time but would really like to visit–at the tail end of a trip to D.C. and surrounding areas with several other college students, I did get to New Jersey and managed to sneak away with a few other students to spend about an hour at the nearby beach (I say “sneak” because it wasn’t actually directed by the professors, omg, but we had a free period between panels at this conference we were attending). We all rolled up our dress pants and took off our suit jackets and splashed around like little kids; the salt air and the wind were glorious.

So I have brief but very fond memories of the NJ shore. The rest of this post should tell you a bit more, from someone who actually, you know, knows about it:

“Many people vacation in east coast beach resort areas like Myrtle Beach, Virginia Beach, or at one of many Florida locales. These areas are great and offer lots of nice amenities - beachfront high-rise hotels, Subway shops and Starbucks - but they can be somewhat bland in regards to local culture. If you want to experience something a little different, you can instead head to New Jersey and see a slice of Americana. Continue Reading »

Wow, this has really been a month for plane crashes or something. (I guess the Hudson River one doesn’t count, seeing as it was in January…although it’s been less than a month since that happened. Whatever.) Just a day or two ago there was the one near Buffalo, NY, and today a plane crashed on landing at London’s City airport.  The really amazing thing there is that only two people were injured and no one died; in fact, everyone had already got out of the plane by the time emergency services got there. Of course they were already on the runway, so it wasn’t anything like as bad a crash as it could be, but…a crash landing is a crash landing, and one you walk away from is pretty darn good.

This doesn’t exactly make me feel better about flying, though. At times I sympathize with my grandpa and uncle, who absolutely refuse to fly.

(Image from Reuters.)

As I mentioned in an earlier post, tea is kind of an integral part of British culture. (”Kind of”? Okay, who am I kidding, it is an integral part of British culture.) Everybody drinks tea there; it’s just as ubiquitous as coffee here, if not more so. Any place offering free refreshments and even some that aren’t will probably give you tea. I bought tea at a few places but I got it free every week at church, World Cafe, and the church small-group/Bible study. It’s a thing. People offer you tea. And when they do, they almost always automatically ask if you want it with milk, to which my answer is always yes, and then I add a couple packets of sugar.

This is how you do tea. Milk and sugar. Okay okay, I know some people like it better with cream or whatever, but milk and sugar is a very basic way to do tea that is simple and good and comforting (also caffeinated, which is important when you’re pulling an all-nighter), and in England you can get it that way, no problem. I even asked for tea with milk on the flight from London and got it. The very next flight, on the same airline, between (I think) Cincinatti and Salt Lake City? Well, they had tea, but no milk. Just those weeny little individual creamer-cup things. In America, generally speaking, that’s the way it is: they have to ask you what kind of tea, for one thing, rather than assuming you want black tea (yes, there are other flavors available in Britain, but if you’re just talking “tea,” the kind that comes to mind is normal black tea, in which you’re almost expected to put milk), and chances are all you can put in it is half-and-half or creamer which doesn’t do as much to cool it down, blunt the bitterness, or add body to the tea, all of which milk does, especially since I personally don’t want to add as much of something that is high in calories for no real purpose. And then if you’re lucky you find a packet of sugar, and if not artificial sweetener which is nasty.

Starbucks has actual milk. Most places, not so much. And at least for me, I have zero patience with most kinds of tea served here: it smells good but has just barely enough flavor to taste weird. Give me British-style tea any day.

Now offering e-mail subscriptions to this blog! Come on, you know you want one.

No, seriously, I am more awesome than you. I have photographic proof. Observe:

Yes. I have a baby TARDIS on my dashboard. Isn’t it adorable? My car needed an air freshener anyway because when it isn’t cold, it always smells something like a wet dog, which is odd because to my knowledge my car has never transported a dog, wet or otherwise. So when I found the Television and Movie Store (uh…Darleks? Dude…) across from the Forum in Norwich and discovered that among hordes of other Doctor Who merchandise like action figures and rubbish bins and lunchboxes, they sold air fresheners shaped like little Daleks and TARDISes…well…could you really expect me to resist?

No I’m not a hopeless nerd, I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

Okay, well, maybe this will be considered a bit closer to genuinely awesome and less hopelessly nerdy?

See? Pins all over my backpack from basically everywhere I visited and then some because…I always like the whole vintage-luggage-sticker thing and wish I could do that? Something. So what we’ve got here, not in order because I truly cannot be bothered, is Coldplay, Philadelphia, Barrow, North Slope Borough, Disney World (yes, that’s Stitch in a Hawaiian shirt), Guillemots, Marseille, Cambridge, London, Oxfam, Scotland, Poland, Anchorage, Turkey, a campaign button for my grandpa when he was running for Minnesota governor, and…hm. I have a pin for Codes in the Clouds, too. I’d be rather annoyed if I lost it, because it was cool. And yes, all the ones for bands are of acts that I actually saw live. Because I’m awesome.

I usually try to avoid politics. I have opinions about things, don’t get me wrong, but even when I know enough facts about something to be confident of said opinions, I can rarely haul those facts from the dark recesses of my brain when I actually need them, so I pretty always come out of political debates/friendly arguments/whatever still reasonably confident that I’m right but deeply frustrated that I couldn’t prove it. I suppose I don’t so much mind writing on political topics, because then it’s a lot easier to dig up the right information and link to it as I go, but I never seem to remember stuff when I need it.  I rarely do either, though, which is probably because I’m just too lazy.

Also, I’m not too keen on getting flamed.

(Wait, no…getting flamed would imply that people are actually visiting my blog, and I get UVs from people whether they agree with me or not. Okay, so the real reason is just that I’m lazy.)

But it’s kind of hard to ignore politics on a day like today.

I was in England when the actual election took place, but I sent for an absentee ballot (which actually cost me money because of international postage–probably about $5 total, so that let me feel even more superior for doing my Civic Duty and stuff), not so much because I thought my vote was so important but because I wanted to be part of what was, no matter your political views, a historic and important election. But being in England for it was weird, because people seemed to be more liberal across the board there, and even other conservatives who might normally agree with me on political topics were all for Obama. Nearly everyone I talked to seemed to assume that I was an Obama supporter just because, I don’t know, I’m American? I’m a college student?

The emphasis on politics there in general was a bit surprising, especially when it came to American politics; a bunch of people stayed up late in the pub to watch the election results come in, for instance, which I didn’t because I just couldn’t be bothered (it’s not going to change things when I find out, after all), but it was interesting that Europeans would be so interested in our political process, maybe even more so than the average American.

Of course, the most common political discussion I got roped into was one about Sarah Palin. “Ooh, Alaska–you’re from Palin country, huh?” The next question was pretty much always “What do you think of her?” except when it was “Do you know her?”, and while the latter was easy enough to answer (I’ve seen her, never met her), I barely knew my own answer to the first and didn’t really want to fumble through an explanation of why I mostly liked her when my questioners almost invariably thought she was “scary” for one reason or another. I mean, it’s kind of hard to be honest when you know exactly what the other person’s opinion is before they even tell you.

Also, notice that I’m not even saying here why I’m conservative, why I voted McCain, or why I like(d) Palin. That’s ’cause…well, mostly I just can’t be bothered right now.