6/3/05 This gem was in the basement of the chapel.  :) When one squeezed the one paw, it made a bunch of "sproingy sounds."  :) Man, I wish I had one of these when I was a grown-up! :)

      6/3/05 This is the view from my friend's back yard.  (!!) When I showed this picture to my landlady, she asked, "How can someone see something like that--and believe there is no God?"  I wasn't able to give her an answer.

      6/3/05 And here is a picture of the cabin he's building.  He had to import logs from Canada---what with all the permafrost around here, they just don't grow big enough locally.

      Wow.

      6/3/05 And here is the view from his roof.  He told me that just a few days ago, he watched a rotating updraft.  (!!!!) (Rotating updrafts are what spawn . . . TORNADOES.)

      6/4/05 I ride my bike to work every day, and I do this approximately 2 mile "switchback"--to avoid having to cross the Johansen Expressway, and to get a bit of a "warm-up," before I attempt "the hill" ( :P ) up to upper campus.  When I started coming back in the direction of where I came [from], I saw this smoke; however, I was at too low an elevation to see where it was coming from.  All I could think was, "Please don't be the apartment, please don't be the apartment." Thank God it wasn't.  This wasn't a good picture of the blaze---the flames reached well into my field of view.  (I just "snapped" at the wrong time.)  I took this pic at maximum zoom, held up over a fence, and over the Johansen Expressway---with traffic going through my field of view.  :)

      6/6/05 I'll be he gets really good reception:

      :)

      6/9/05 This picture was taken from behind my apartment.  I was pointing into rain blowing at a 45 degree angle towards me.  (!!) This was some storm---some meteorological-dude from Denmark said that this thing had the best "gust front" that he had ever seen.  It also spawned a funnel cloud (!!!!) over Murphy Dome.  (Funnel clouds are pretty much unheard of in the Interior.  There was a small tornado off of Van Horn Road in 1967---and there was a "damage path" in the Kuskokwim Valley, consistent with a tornado, but--and this not so surprisingly ;) --nobody was there to see it [that is, like, the TORNADO, 'n stuff ;) ].  The summer of 2005 has been a berzerk season for storms in the Interior. . . .

On to more Alaska pics.