Pictures from around the home

The little critters are out in force. The geese are returning, the sun is out, and everything's turning to mud and slush. And these little guys are poking their heads up
I love how unwary spruce grouse are. Sadly, season for them ended March 31st.
These guys are out in number, too. They start to look dirty this time of year - like they've been lightly dusted with grey. You could reach out and grab them, there's so many around. But by now, they're becoming wormy, and not really good to eat.


Here's the pond behind (technically in front) of my home. I haven't seen any geese yet, but it's a little too early for them to want to try places like my little old pond. I'll have to go to "my lakes," which are away from my home a bit. The weather is too good. I feel like we're being set up for something nasty.

Here comes the sun little darling

It's got to that point of the year, where you need to get out the tinfoil...
... Unless you want to wake up at 5:30 each morning!

Tinfoil. It's Alaskan home decor.

You think your old landlords are nazis? Try this one, from Craig's list. Holy hell:

All the tenants I interview aren't good enough (Broadway and Commercial)

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Reply to:
Date: 2008-12-19, 6:05PM PST

I am a born again Christian. Why is this a problem for people????! I have a house that's MINE and I PAID FOR IT. I also have a basement apartment for rent. It's a great space for I'm charing very little for it, $480 monthly, for the right tenant. I know it's ILLEGAL to require a Christian in the apartment, against the human rights. That's why I NEVER put this in my ad. Why then does it keep getting taken down?

HERE IS THE AD I POSTED, AND THE AD THAT KEEPS GETTING REMOVED:

Available Immediately – Broadway and Commercial – Showing Saturday and Sunday – Email for directions and additional information.

What kind of apartment is it?

• One bedroom basement apartment with separate entrance
• Tastefully decorated with modern décor
• Approximately 650 square feet
• There is even a window! Security bars installed for your safety and to prevent unauthorized activity
• Closed circuit camera installed for security and safety. One in your suite, one at the entrance, and one in the exercise yard

Rent:
• $480.00 per month
• First month’s rent + ½ month security deposit due at move in
• Small pet allowed with approval and payment of additional ½ month pet damage deposit
• One year lease permitted, option to renew lease at end of the term with no increase in rent
• LANDLORD’S SPECIAL! Move in before January 1st and don’t pay for the remainder of December! That’s significant savings.

Included in the rent:

• Electricity
• Heat – Maintained at 21 degrees with lock box to prevent unauthorized tampering. Additional heating available for $20.00 per extra degree of heating per month. You may not use your oven to heat the apartment. If you do, you will be fined $50.00 per occurrence.
• Air conditioning – Maintained at 25 degrees during the summer with lock box to prevent extra cooling from being dispensed. Additional cooling for sale for $20.00 per degree of cooling requested per month.
• 25" Zenith color television set with basic cable service - INCLUDED IN RENT!
• Wireless internet (with content filter applied to block forbidden/immoral websites) - INCLUDED IN RENT!
• Provision of coin laundry services - You will have your own personal coin laundry washer and dryer machines. Washers and dryers are paid using a token system. Tokens can be purchased through the landlord. Washer tokens cost $4.15 each and dryer tokens cost $3.60 each. You are not allowed to use foreign
currency or slugs in the washer and dryer. Violators will be fined $100.00 per infraction.

About us: (Landlords)

We are conservative, bible believing, God-fearing, born again, evangelical Christians. We interpret the bible literally in every way possible. We live a strict moral code and observe God’s laws in our everyday life. My wife stays at home and teaches our home-schooled children. I work as a pastor at a local congregation and am active in the faith community.

About you: (Tenant)

• You are employed
• You do not participate in lascivious deviant sexual behavior
• You do not choose alternative lifestyles as your lifestyle
• You do not have any criminal history
• You must have excellent character references
• You do not smoke, drink or take drugs. Mandatory drug screening required.


Additional Rules/Conditions:

CLEANLINESS: You are responsible for the cleanliness and orderliness of
your apartment. Beds are to be made before leaving your suite,
countertops must be wiped down, and you must remove all trash. Upon
inspection, if the tenant's basement suite is not clean, the cost of
cleaning services plus a fine of $100.00 will be levied.
LIGHTS: The lights in your basement suite and in the day room are not to
be tampered with. If a light needs repair, report the condition to the
Landlord.
WAKE-UP: Wake up will be at 5:30am each morning. All ceiling lights in
the suite will be turned on automatically.
LIGHTS OUT: Ceiling lights in the suite will be turned off at 11:30pm.
CONTRABAND: The following items are considered contraband – alcohol, illegal drugs, tobacco, weapons, lock picking equipment. If any contraband is discovered to be in your possession, you will be subject to a minimum $1,000.00 fine. In addition, your items will be confiscated permanently. Second offense – you will be evicted without notice. A bailiff will escort you and your belongings off the premises. Your security deposit will not be returned.
SMOKING: The basement suite is non-smoking. Anyone in possession of
tobacco products of any kind or any lighter or matches, will have their
contraband items confiscated and will be fined $100.00.
INSPECTIONS: The Landlord will conduct unannounced inspections to ensure
that these rules and regulations are being followed.
VISITATION: Visitation periods will be on Saturdays and Sundays from
1:00 p.m. until 3:00 p.m. All visitors and their vehicles are subject
to search while on landlord property. Refusal to allow a search can
result in their being barred from all future visitation privileges. All
visitors must sign the Visitor's Log. Unauthorized visitors will be
escorted from the property, and the tenant will be fined $250.00.
I.D. BRACELETS: Each tenant will be issued an I.D. bracelet with his/her
photograph. It must be worn at all times. If you lose your I.D.
bracelet or it is broken, you will be required to purchase a new one at
the nominal cost of $5.00.
EXERCISE YARD: The tenant will have access to the exercise yard in the
area to the back of the property for 2 hours per day from 4:00 pm to
6:00 pm. The tenant is not allowed to bring any personal property to
the exercise yard. Once the tenant leaves the exercise yard on a
particular day, he or she may not return. No boisterous behavior is
allowed in the exercise yard. There is no smoking allowed in the
exercise yard. Minimum fine for exercise yard infractions is $50.00.

• Location: Broadway and Commercial
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 964514051

Random bits of news

Here's a few stories that caught my eye this morning - I had a little extra time while waiting for my truck to melt to the point where it'd start. Kids, don't forget to plug in at night! (Actually, I only thought it'd get down to -20°C. Not -30°. Oooops.)

• Demand for apartments and cabins is down, according to this story by The Fairbanks Minor News. There are more postings than I remember, but also, they're still as over-priced as ever. Most of these places are cardboard boxes with fridges. And they charge 500 a month. Go figure.
• ADN linked to a story in Backpacker about conflict between trappers and wolf advocates near Denali National Park. Backpacker is usually a good magazine - I bought my father a subscription, once upon a time - but I think they're a bit heavy handed here. One thing I did notice is that there seems to be a lot of treating wolf packs as stable social units, instead of dynamic entities.
• The FBNSB is considering a trade in program for old boilers and wood stoves, writes the Minor News. I like this idea, as it tackles two problems, heating costs and air quality, by tackling inefficiency. I think about how much heat is wasted by the old oil drip-heater in my last home, it just makes me shudder a bit. The commenters on the story promptly jump the shark by accusing the bourgh of being out to steal their money, guns, and wood stoves. Fairbanks brightest and best, as always.
  

It's like a scavenger hunt, but only more bizarre.

Alas! Cabin Dweller has gone over to the darkside, with its running water and its flushing toilets. For shame! My water comes in big blue carboys and that's the way I like it!

(Well, actually, the plumbed places I looked at this fall were all even worse than the place I was living, so that never happened.)

But in their dirge for the proper cheap-ass Alaskan Lifestyle™, they mentioned experiences with stumbling across weird stuff around their home. Namely, caribou heads nailed to trees. You might think `Wow, how random!,` and indeed I can't top that. But I can identify with the experience.

I frequently walk my home, sometimes heading back into the refuge, sometimes not. And about every time I go, I find some new, totally random thing out there. It started with a hobo camp hidden about 300 yards back from where I dump my slop. I didn't see it for the longest time because it's blocked by a thick stand of spruce. But when I went back there, someone built a camp out of tent parts, blankets, tarps, and other random crap. What got me is the cause for abandonment. It appears that it survived the winter, got to spring, and then a ridgepole broke. Whoever was living there could manage -40° (No one was in my cabin then), but apparently thought it was too much effort to get a new stick. A note said that someone can use it if they fix it.

Hooooookay.

Other things I've found include cookware in random places in the woods, and strange random shacks and sheds. Stacks of spent brass, and no shortage of beer bottles. There's a random dog-house just plunked out there that I'll tear down one of these days. There's random bags, torn and worn by the non-existant wind and very existent animals, tied up in trees, their contents long since gone.

One of these days, I'll also abandon the dry home, and move into a posh mansion with both running water and indoor rest facilities, just as soon as I have the time to commit to the project (Also, moving in the winter is a bit of a bad idea for me). In the mean time, I'm content finding random appliances, buildings, and signs of unwelcome habitation around my home, and resigned to living near the dog musher equivalent of welfare-parents, quite pleased with the neighbours that I see frequently enough to converse, and consigned to the fact that even if I get several of the feral dogs, I won't get enough of them to make a dent in their numbers.

Actually, now that CabinDweller mentions it, the outhouse stalagmites are kinda really annoying.

Now with extra rustic sauce!

As I said, I'm busy looking for a new place to live. It's really hit or miss here, because there seems to be no middle ground between utter looser buildings, and cabins that are a gift from the gods. To cover for their miserable, decrepit properties, lots of owners will wrap their dry cabin ads, or verbal descriptions, in verbage to make it sound less of a hole in the ground than it really is.

1. Nearly half of people lie about the dimensions of the place outright. If you see N x 20, become skeptical, because that's a popular dimension to estimate. And it's not just me eyeballing these places; my tape measure wouldn't lie. Most aegergious was a place about 12x14 being sold as 20x22. Off there by a little under half there, cheif.
2. When you see the word cosey, don't walk, run. That's a code work for `you will not have enough space to breath, nevermind live.` They'll spruce it up by saying it's a great place for one person, some times. That's because you can't fit a second person in there with origami.
3. It's bright! It's sunny! It has lots of windows! So... consequently, it leaks heat like a sieve! They may try to assure you that it's `energy efficient` none the less. This is stupid. Glass insulates about as well as a pile of frying pans - e.g., not really. Don't bother asking how much fuel it went through on these places, because they'll lie outright. Ma'am, if it really used 200 gallons of fuel all last year, why does it have a 500 gal tank? If it's that well built, 500 gallons would be enough to make the place a firey inferno.
   
4. Rustic! Rustic cabin with extra rustic sauce! Great for students! Translation: Hoooooooly crap this place is run down. Expect holes in wall, ancient and degraded flooring, broken windows, rotten bords, and more drafts than a government highway plan. They may say it's an adventure, which in horrible-lot-owner lingo means you'll get to know your dog well, because you'll be sleeping with her every night for heat.
5. This cabin is unique! Which is another way of saying I was /really/ drunk when I planned it. Expect things to be awkward and poorly thought out. Like kitchens in bedrooms, stairs in the closets, and sudden changes in floor-ceiling height. Nonstandard buildings like these aren't just a pain to live in, but they also conceal other building defects.
   

Feel free to add your own. I'm going to grab my camera, soon, and do `sure fire signs the owner doesn't know what they're doing.` Well, hopefuly soon.