Happy late Thanksgiving! - and pics from home

We had a good holiday here, friends at the cabin enjoying food and playing games. I hope family and friends all had a good long weekend too. I hear it's been pretty warm back in New England. Temperatures in the 50's and 60's at the end of November is just not cool. Hopefully more snow comes soon. Here in Fairbanks it has been almost exclusively far below 0°F for over 3 weeks. Our road has looked like this since the beginning of October:

Thought I'd share a picture of our nice clean home on Thanksgiving morning too.

That's Otis trying to figure out what to do with himself. I have three weeks left of classes and finals and then Kate and I are New Hampshire bound for the holidays. It's a little scary since we haven't left Alaska since August 2010. I think this is the longest period of time I've ever spent in one state.

When the weather outside is . . .

I woke up this morning and went to the outhouse; it was pretty freaking cold outside. Cold and dark. The Sun is only out for a little over six hours today (rise at 9:29 am and sets at 3:41 pm). More importantly, it is cold! Depending on where in town you are it's somewhere between -36 and -42 right now. It doesn't really matter if you're measuring in Celsius of Fahrenheit, since they are about the same at this temperature (exactly at -40).

Last night Jason (bookmark it!) and I witnessed a really cool display of light pillars, something that the friends and family that refuse to come here in winter will never see. We took a few pictures. I suffered slight frostbite on my right hand as I was trying to rest my camera against Jason's metal roof rack on his car. I liked what he said: "you can't complain about the cold until it's dangerous; it's dangerous now".

This picture was taken from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks up on the hill near the entrance to the ski trails. The optical effect here is called a light pillar caused by reflection off of planar (horizontal) ice in the air. This usually only happens when it's cold and the air is calm. This night it almost made it to 40 below at the airport (the green lights in the center/right.

We also get really good sundogs and light pillars on the Sun when it's cold:

Ode to the cold

It's cold! Cold is here! It is -14° F right now as I'm writing this; two degrees less than when I woke up this morning. Since the beginning of October we have slowly crept up to about 10 inches of snow, the temperature hasn't gone above freezing for almost a month, and we now have 40 below in the immediate forecast. In fact, there is not one day in the week forecast above 0° F. Hooray!

Happy November

Sorry it has been a while since my last post. Work and school have been busier than ever. I hope that in a couple weeks it will start to slack off a bit, since I'll be mostly done with one of my classes for the semester. Besides work, not much has been happening, so you're not missing anything by my lack of posts. Here is the biggest update in picture form:

Over the month of October, Fairbanks has become cold and dark. I took this today when Kate was driving me to work at 8 am. We have had some snow for about three weeks, but desperately need some more for skiing. I got cross country skis last week.

We had some fantastic, albeit brief, aurora last night. A little before midnight I stepped outside and was treated to this view of the sky just on the porch of our cabin: