I'm an honored slacker

I have been lucky enough to be given three awards. I'm going to start with the last first. Nick, Tweety, I promise I'll post the ones you awarded me, too.

So here's the award given me by tshsmom.

Lots of you are nice bloggers. We don't feel nice all the time, but we do try to keep things fun on the blogs. If you feel as if you'd like the award, please feel free to post.

Thanks, tshsmom!

Went to the river, took some pictures

I went down to the river a week or so ago and the clouds were just gorgeous. Here are my favorites.









Hope you enjoyed them.

Recent conversation at my house

Me: How was your swim?

Ich: There was a piece of poop in the pool.

Me: Oh, Ich, there was NOT.

Alaska, Cruisin', Part 5

We got up early on Monday so we could drive the 2 1/2 hours down to Seward for the day cruise. It was raining a bit on the way, but it wasn't too bad. What was great was the double rainbow it caused.



We got there with plenty of time to spare so we sat and enjoyed the sun and scenery.





Then we finally got going. It was just beautiful, if a bit chilly.







If you look at this on Flickr I put a note so you could see where the eagle is.


Here's one of the shots of seals that I got.


Here's the glacier that we stayed at for about a half hour, watching it calving. I'd never heard the term before but I found out it means big chunks falling off and hitting the water with the sound of an explosion.


This one looks much cooler in the larger size.


Every time I look at this I expect to see palm trees. This just looks tropical to me.


This bunch of seals was really neat. I like the old guy who was heading down to the water. If you look at the picture in Flickr I put a note on him so you can find him.


Here is the lodge where we had a nice salmon dinner.


Here are some whale bones we saw on the beach.


And here's the boat waiting to take us back to port.


Here's the whole cruise set.

Alaska, Being There, Part 4

Well, we'd had a bit of rain, but mostly sunshine and heat on the way to Anchorage. But Anchorage was cool, gloomy, and rainy. It didn't rain constantly, but there was a drizzle off and on. Like I said in the previous post, we weren't in the very best hotel even though it was a Days Inn. It wasn't bad, but the clientele was kinda noisy. But the good part about it was that we were right in the downtown area. We could walk to restaurants and the mall. One of the important parts of having the mall nearby was that we got umbrellas right away. This made walking around much more pleasant.

That day, Sat 8/4, we also went to the Anchorage Museum. There was some really interesting foliage outside. They used things like chard and kale for decoration.




The museum was pretty interesting. It's so hard to not take a gazillion pictures. Here are some that I did take.







wtf?




I'm glad I didn't meet this fellow in the wild!


Then on Sunday, the 5th, we were going to go on a flightseeing tour, but it was too cloudy and the flight got canceled. So we set up a cruise for Monday and spent Sunday driving around a bit. One of the places we went was the Alaska Botanical Garden. Here are some shots from there.












It was so sad, after seeing these beautiful mushrooms that someone had gone through and destroyed a lot of them. There was a sign at the beginning of the trail that had asked people to please leave them alone. I don't know why someone would do that, but it happened.







I know I posted a lot of pictures here. But there are even more in the slideshow. You may click here if you're not tired of them already. :-)

The next post will be my last installment of the Alaska trip, the one-day cruise. I might be able to talk Ichabod into doing a guest post for the part of the trip he did after I left.