Alaska travel articles – try a little harder to get it right!
It really bugs me to find travel articles that have either serious or many errors. The newly-posted article “Taking the Long Road: Exploring Alaska’s Scenic Highways” by Jamie Ehrlich (at http://www.frommers.com/articles/4847.html – now heavily edited from when I first saw it and wrote this post) is full of errors...
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The shortest day, and SAD
Today is “hump day” in the seasonal sense – the day when we get the least sunlight of the year. Winter Solstice, the exact time when Whitehorse is leaning farthest away from the sun, occurs at 10:08 tonight. The sun will rise above the horizon today (and tomorrow because...
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Our new home, “The Sanctuary”
The move is complete. Well, most of it is – I still have a lot of books and files to bring down from the cabin, and it’ll take a few weeks to get everything organized once it does all arrive. Despite the chaos, and the challenges of moving just...
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Alaskan Clydesdale
You might enjoy this email I received this morning: Only in Alaska… This guy raised an abandoned moose calf with his horses, and believe it or not, he has trained it for lumber removal and other hauling tasks. Given the 2,000 pounds of robust muscle, and the splayed, grippy...
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The Murphy’s Laws of Moving
The image below shows the “14 Day Trend” for Whitehorse at The Weather Network as of this morning. We’re moving tomorrow and Monday, when the high temperatures are forecast to be -21 and -24°C respectively. Brrrrrr! What a wimp, eh? 🙂...
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You can take the boy out of the country – for a while…
How much of who you are is defined by the space you occupy – by your office, your home, your community? How much of the character of those spaces can you define or at least influence? No doubt there are infinite variations in what occurs. The cycle that develops,...
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Customer service – are you getting it?
CBC Radio had a spot this morning that leads in interesting directions. CBC recently conducted a survey and tests of telephone call centres to determine the good, the bad and the ugly in the world of phone-based customer service. The results are interesting, and I agree with the results...
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A heart-warming husky story
What can you do when one of your working huskies goes blind? Certainly she can’t continue to pull tourists across the tundra around Churchill, Manitoba. Or can she?? When husky cross Isobel went blind 3 years ago, some of Jenafor Ollander’s friends said that she might as well shoot...
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Northern housing – no recession here!
The housing situation in the Yukon seldom makes it into the national spotlight, but perhaps it should. While we’re now in the slow season due to the simple fact that few people want to either build or move in the winter, it’s still a hot market, with contractors, sellers...
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Canada needs the death penalty
Many of you saw this scene on your television screen last night – the funeral of another murdered Mountie. We are far past the time when Canadians have to stand up and say in a concrete way that this cannot happen again. Bringing back the death penalty is that...
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