Summer supermoon musings.

I'm feeling kind of free and easy tonight.  The Annealed blog tour is done (and thanks to those of you who followed along); I've unpacked from vacation, paid the bills, bought groceries for the week (usually that gets rolled over into Monday night...), and finished two vacation scrapbooks in two weekends.  Yes!  Both the Danube cruise scrapbook and the Alaska scrapbook are done!  I had no idea how much those books were weighing me down until I finished the Alaska book today.  Whew.

I mean, I still have to clean the bathroom and do laundry.  But with the scrapbooks finished, I feel like there might be light at the end of the tunnel.

Hmm, maybe it's the supermoon.  Tonight's full moon is the largest of the year, because the moon is the closest it will be to Earth for more than a year.  Okay, so it's not the humongous moon that you see photoshopped into calendars, or into web graphics like the one on the left.  But still, there's a difference in size -- even if you can't see it with the naked eye.  I found a website that has a nice comparison of the March 2011 supermoon with a regular ol' full moon in 2010. To see it, click here and scroll down the page.  Kind of cool, huh?

Maybe my ease is due to the supermoon plus the summer solstice this past Friday.  We haven't had a terribly hot summer yet in DC -- just one big heat wave so far, which I cleverly managed to escape by being in Alaska that week -- and I'm hoping it stays that way.  Fingers crossed....

Or maybe clearing away all these other tasks is freeing up space in my brain to start plotting the next series.  I can tell you that it will be set in the same universe as the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but a few years after the Big Mediation.  I have written a little bit, but I'm hesitant to post any of it because it's early days and the story might change a fair amount.  The only thing I'm committed to, apparently, is that there will be a cat, or cats, in this series.  My daughter Kitty insists on it.  So there you go.  More news as it develops.

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Let's see, thanks and congrats:  Congrats to Froggarita of Froggarita's Bookcase, who won the complete set of Pipe Woman Chronicles e-books!  And many, many thanks to those of you who downloaded copies of Seized during my summer solstice promotion on Amazon.  Enjoy!

(Psst: I'll be giving away the other books in the series this summer, too.  Watch my Facebook page for dates and details.)

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So that's pretty much it for now.  I guess I'll go start the laundry.  Maybe I'll even get to bed at a decent hour tonight....  Nah.  I don't want to do anything rash....

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These moments of bloggy ease are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

We have a bit of old business to discuss before I get to the travelogue.  Congrats to Rich Meyer, who won the Navajo dreamcatcher and the Amazon gift card!  Rich, I've e-mailed you -- check your spam folder if you don't see it.

Everybody, thanks for participating, and thanks for helping to make the launch of Annealed a big success!  I'm on virtual tour right now, courtesy of the Finishing Faeries, who have set up an amazing bunch of stops.  Check the "Tour Dates" tab for the schedule, and to catch up on any posts you missed.  (If y'all want to see my Bumble, say so in the comments and I'll post a picture of him next week.  And if you're wondering what I'm talking about, go read my guest post at today's stop.)

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One of the joys of going on vacation is inflicting your photos on your friends when you get home, right?  And we're all friends here, right?  So allow me to bore you with some scenes from my trip to Alaska last week.   

Just don't expect to see a bunch of shots of wildlife.  I am not a wildlife photographer by any stretch of the imagination.  While I saw many tourists with fancy DSLRs with lenses the length of a fencepost, and a tripod or two, the only camera I had was the one in my iPhone.  So because you'd have to take it on faith anyway that that dot of color waaaaay off in the distance is the animal that I say it is, I won't insist that you suffer through any of my wildlife photos.

I'll start off with a picture of my dinner table in the bistro car on the Alaska Railroad, coming back to Anchorage from Seward after the wildlife-watching catamaran cruise.  I saw plenty of wildlife -- a sea otter, puffins, sea lions on rocks, whales, and so on -- but my pictures suck (see above).  And anyway, I spent a good chunk of the cruise hung over the rail at the stern, parting with my lunch.  So let's settle for this shot of my turkey sandwich with a view.

From Anchorage, I drove north to Denali National Park.  On the way, I had to stop and get a picture of the post office in Cantwell, Alaska.  Yes, it's a real town, about 30 miles south of Denali on the Parks Highway.  I've known of its existence since I was a kid; Dad would pull out the atlas every now and then and fantasize, I suppose, of driving to Alaska, and he would always mention Cantwell.  So of course, I had to stop and get a picture.  Dad would've been so proud....

I stayed at a hostel about 14 miles south of Denali.  I had a cabin to myself beside a rushing stream.  The kitchen was in a separate building, and the bathrooms and showers were in another.  Having to walk to the shower house is a little inconvenient first thing in the morning -- or in the middle of the night -- but no worse than the campgrounds I've stayed at.  And the middle-of-the-night thing wasn't as bad as it sounds; it was close enough to the summer solstice that it never really got dark.  And hey, the bathrooms were heated, and they had real plumbing.  And it was worth it for this view out my cabin door -- the creek, the snow-capped mountains, the cobblestone path, the scavenged antler bolted to the door as a handle, the mosquitoes as big as a quarter....

Anyway.  I need to brag a bit here.  The peak of Mt. McKinley -- which the Alaskan Natives call Denali, or "the big one" -- is 20,320 feet above sea level.  It's the highest mountain in North America.  So it has a few quirks, one of which is its micro-climate.  In other words, it makes its own weather systems, and it's often hidden behind clouds.  Only 30% of visitors to Denali National Park actually get to see the peak (or peaks -- Mt. McKinley has two). But somehow, I got lucky and picked the right day to visit.  That's Denali in the distance, snow-covered and framed between two closer mountains, and already starting to build the cloud cover that enshrouded it not long afterward.

The sign says, "Imagine this at 40 below!"

Next,I drove north from Denali to Fairbanks.  From there, I endured a seventeen-hour round trip on a bus to get to the Arctic Circle, thereby joining the 4% of Alaska visitors who have gotten to the Arctic.  Well, "endured" is perhaps too strong a word; the bus was perfectly comfortable and I brought my knitting.  But our route followed the Dalton Highway. The word "highway" in relation to the Dalton is, I think, a little Alaskan joke -- it's a two-lane dirt road for much of the distance.  And the rest stops (here's an example) were, um, somewhat primitive.  But we got there! Our driver rolled out a little red carpet, bisected with a dotted white line, for us, so we could say we crossed the circle.  And then we had tundra cake (chocolate chocolate chip Bundt cake) with "perma-frosting" (whipped cream).  The real permafrost is a big concern when building anything in Alaska, and a great deal of precise engineering was required for the construction of the Trans Alaskan Pipeline, which parallels the Dalton.

I also got to hang out for a day with Cabin Goddess Kriss Morton, who took great pride in showing me the real Fairbanks -- including where to get a bacon Bloody Mary, and where the yarn shops are.  No more needs to be said about that.

So I've been to the wilds of Alaska and lived to tell about it.  And I get one more claim to fame out of this trip -- go me!

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These moments of bragging blogginess are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

It's deja vu all over again. Sigh.

At least the critter didn't see his shadow yesterday.

It's that twitchy time of year for me.  It usually starts sometime in mid-January -- not long after the holiday haze wears off, but before the days begin to lengthen appreciably.  Maybe it has something to do with flipping the calendar page.  Or with the knowledge that the weather will be icky for at least another month, and there's nothing I can do about it.  In any case, I always seem to suffer an attack of disgruntlement at this time of year.

I'm not a SAD (seasonal affective disorder) sufferer.  It's not the lack of light, really; as an office denizen, I spend most of my daylight hours inside anyway.  And it's not a full-blown case of depression.  It's just that -- I dunno -- there's not a lot to look forward to right now.

Observing Imbolc helps me.  The beginning of February marks the halfway point of winter, and so Imbolc is a reminder that it won't be cold/gray/snowy forever.  (We had some conversational snow this weekend -- enough to make all the drivers freak out, but not enough to ice up the pavement.  Don't get me started on DC drivers in the snow.)  Winter weather in the mid-Atlantic tends to wrap up by the spring equinox.  I can remember one year when we had a serious snowfall around the middle of March -- we had to delay my older daughter's sixth birthday party by a week, which ought to give you a clue about how long ago it was -- but that's the latest that I can remember seeing a significant accumulation here.

Things were different when I was growing up.  Back when I was walking to school uphill both ways (it's a joke, okay? I rode a bus to school! And not the short bus, either, smarty pants!), we had to step over snowbanks to go trick-or-treating in October, and spring lasted about a day and a half.  I like to tell this to people who have grown up around here, just to see the horror in their eyes.  Muahaha.

(I have a bad feeling that I've told the trick-or-treating story here before.  If I've bored you with it multiple times, I apologize.)

Anyway, I didn't intend to make this post about the weather.  It's just that the gray skies are part of my general disgruntlement.  But my real problem is that another year has passed and I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and not getting anywhere.  I think I need a talking-to, and I'm just the person to deliver it:

"Okay, Cantwell, listen up.  Short term, you've got just two more weeks before you get another three-day weekend, and your sweater's almost done.  Longer term, you'll be in Indy next month -- and you get to take the train, which will be a hoot!  And you're going to Alaska in late May.  Now there's a milestone -- once you get to Alaska, you will have visited all fifty states, and you'll have just one more destination left on your bucket list!  That's pretty cool, huh?  And not only have you been a published author for a couple of years now, but you'll be wrapping up the Pipe Woman Chronicles this spring.  And don't forget that you just bought yourself a really nice podcasting mic, just in case you get the urge to make some books-on-tape or something. Just because you're still in DC doesn't mean you're not making progress.  It's a marathon, not a sprint, okay?"

Okay, okay, you're right.  These bleak days will pass.  But just so you know, Pep Talk Deliverer, we'll probably have to do this again next year.

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This moment of bloggy malaise is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. (Sigh.)