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When you come to visit Alaska, don't be surprised to hear the terms "Cheechako" or "Sourdough". Currently I'm a Cheechako -- a person who claims to live in Alaska, but hasn't lived here for a winter yet.

Conversely a Sourdough is someone who has lived in Alaska for at least one winter, and more typically has lived here for many winters.

During the last few days I decided to redesign this website to give it more of an "Alaska look and feel", and what you're seeing now is the result of that effort. I wanted to created a website design that had a clean, minimalist look and feel, but something that also had a touch of Alaska to it.

A grizzly bear attacks a man -- twice -- and the man survives.

The Anchorage Daily News has a story of a 54-year-old geologist who was attacked by a grizzly bear -- not once, but twice -- and lived to tell his story. It's actually a very good story about how to handle a grizzly bear attack, because as the story says, a grizzly is usually just trying to "neutralize" you, it's not trying to kill you. (Note: If you visit a place like Denali, they will teach you things like this about grizzly bears, and also the differences between grizzly bears and black bears.)

I don't often write about my work on the devdaily.com website here, but since this application was largely written in Alaska, I'll mention it here. :)

I walked past a woman around 3pm this afternoon as I was coming back from the mailbox, and just as I was about to say hello, she says "Good morning". We both pause, and laugh.

The funny thing is that this has happened many times now, I just keep forgetting to write about it. I guess that's what 19 hours of sunlight a day does to people. :)

While looking for some information on Marcel Proust, I stumbled onto a wonderful Northern Exposure website. If you loved the Northern Exposure television show, this is a great website to bookmark. I really like how they have organized some of the information, including "facts" from each show. The idea of categorizing Ed's t-shirts, and making note of the films he references, are also great ideas.

I was wondering about bears the other night, about things like how they hibernate, if they ever wake up during the winter, things like that, and then I found this link at NOVA Online where they write about hibernating animals, including bears.

If that link is right, it's interesting to me that bears don't hibernate in the same sense that other animals do. They refer to bears as being in a state of lethargy (kind of like me in the winter), as opposed to hibernating like the other animals do.

Mount Redoubt erupted very early this morning, and continued erupting five times during the early morning hours. Ash has now been detected as high as 60,000 feet above sea level, and the ashes have headed north and northeast, towards the towns of Willow and my former home, Talkeetna.

If it's March, it must be Iditarod time. Here's the 2009 Iditarod page at the Anchorage Daily News with all your update information. Before I go, here's a cute picture of Larry the lead dog. He looks a lot like a husky I used to have named Indy.

I woke up this morning with a bad case of The Call of the Wild, which, yes, is just like the book of the same name. It's that feeling of wanting to be "out there", in the snow, deep in a forest, or climbing a mountain. Just you and nature, mano a mano, one of those times when you have to "risk it all just to feel alive".

Once again, Heather Lende describes the feeling very well in her book If You Lived Here I'd Know Your Name: