A few weeks ago, our good friend Andy Johnson emailed to ask whether we’d like to get a bunch of fresh New Mexico chiles. It sounded great, so last week when we met at the American Ornithologists’ Union meeting in Estes Park, Colorado, we transferred 40 lbs. in a large gunny sack from the trunk of Andy’s car onto my shoulder, and I marched off happily in the dark to put them in my room. All during the meeting my room smelled fantastic. I rotated them every day to keep them as fresh as I could, then packed them into a recycled box I found behind the dining hall and checked them as baggage for my return flight from Denver.
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Mystery at Bird Tree (a Tail Tale)
This morning under Bird Tree I found the remains of a grisly incident: the tail of a northern flying squirrel. There were no other clues. No tufts of fur, no blood—nothing in fact to indicate whether the whole animal met its demise or whether it only lost an appendage. Who did it? And is the victim still alive?
A northern flying squirrel tail. The evidence of the case.
Chicken Stinkum
When you don’t get a moose and you’re tired of salmon, there’s chicken. This recipe began as a quick way to whip up a tasty tortilla filling from leftover roast chicken. It has since grown into its own entity, and it’s a favorite.
Chicken Stinkum (a recipe from The Church of Chicken)
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 medium onion
1 jalapeño
5 chilpotles in adobo sauce
1/2 can of black beans
salt to taste
chile powder, or salsa as taste dictates
cheese if you’d like it
good tortillas
Power to the People
We had a nice snowfall last weekend that ended in time to clear the driveway on Sunday afternoon. It was a good, 8-10 inch powder that had the skis rattling in the racks in anticipation. But a late warm front blew in mid-week and wreaked havoc in the Fairbanks area. On Wednesday morning I got up early to do some writing before having to give it up and go in to work. (It’s not possible to get any serious writing done at work, unfortunately.) Rose had gone in but had come back shortly afterwards—her trusty CRV’s defroster couldn’t keep her windshield free of ice. Although the temperature was in the teens, a very fine drizzle was falling and freezing on contact. It took me almost 20 minutes to chisel the incredibly hard accumulation off of my windshield, but the drizzle had turned to snow, so I had no trouble getting in with a clean windshield (though I kept the heat off and the window open to keep it cold and prevent any melt-and-stick). Not many people were in at work, and meetings were being cancelled. One of our dedicated staff described an hour-long commute on the way in, stopping often to manually clean the windshield. Yuck.
Rose gets an “A+” in Couch Science
For a long time, Rose said she didn’t like our old fold-down, futon-on-a-frame couch. She didn’t think it was comfortable. Well, it wasn’t a dream couch, but it didn’t bother me enough to want to hunt down a better one. We’d gotten it new when we got up here to Alaska, and it had been an improvement over the ancient, government-issue one we’d had when we lived in Virginia. But it did have more than a decade of good use on it (although it still looked like new), and if we could find a decent replacement without paying an arm and a leg, I was okay with replacing it. So Rose began the hunt and had me sit on prospects when we were in various stores together.