Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Autumn in the Arctic

Every year I'm newly amazed at how fast the leaves change here. I drive to work on a midnight shift, everything's green. By the morning when I drive home, half of the leaves have turned, or so it seems. Within a day or two, it's a mass of yellow (they are almost all yellow), absolutely gorgeous. And then....the leaves fall about a week later, and it all looks quite barren. Winter is only a week or two away.

Another winter in the Arctic.

My wife says I need to get out more. We are still waiting for my work transfer to come through but it's looking more likely I'll be out of here in January. My wife has been spending a lot of time outdoors, taking tons of pictures. She got a new SLR camera, it was a "cheap" one but the pictures are still amazing. What a difference from the point and shoot she had. She's on sort of a good bye tour. With our departure apparently around the corner, suddenly old things appear new again and the beauty of the area is more visible to both of us.

She was driving out to work at 4am the other morning and stopped to take pictures of some Ptarmigan in the road. They are the stupidest birds I've ever seen, if you define stupid as getting run over without moving year after year (she didn't crush any). I've never really been close a bunch of lives ones, I was commenting on one of her pictures of them and she wrote:

"they have a call that sounds like swearing, so silly. They sound like they are saying come 'ere, come 'ere, fck fck fck."

She could be pulling my leg a little.

She finished it up with a little chiding of my lack of time outdoors this year:

"Honey you need to get out more, not just to smell the roses but to hear the birds swear."

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