Also posted at the Facebook group, I made myself this cute progress chart to keep track of where I am in all my various projects for current pen names.
I’m cycling back and forth between my different pen names for the first half of 2022. Right now I’m working on Metal Gladiator while noodling over some of the finer plot points in Keeley #5, and then I’ll switch back to that in February and aim for getting it off to my betas.
I looked out the window just now and the snow was coming down in astonishing thick flakes. It really shows up against the wall of the shop.
We’ve also had some moose hanging around the last few days. You can see SEVEN at once in this astonishing video taken by my husband as he was trying to get to work a couple of days ago!
The one that’s been mainly hanging around the yard lately is a yearling calf. It was out there again today.
The closest approach of the sun on the shortest day.
The lovely pink light above is the sunshine on the hill opposite our house. You can see the shadow of the opposite hill where the color transitions to white. This is as close as the sun gets to us right now … but now the shadow will begin creeping down the hill as the sun rises a little earlier and gets a little higher each day, until we’ll start getting sunlight on our house around Feb. 7-8 or so.
The world ushered in the Solstice with a snowstorm over the weekend. I wandered out yesterday and took some pictures of the snow-covered world.
We also got wind, scattering leaves across the fresh snow.
They’re forecasting another storm system to move in soon and dump more snow, so Orion plowed last night.
Plow that snow!
I walked up to the highway to get the mail today and found moose tracks all over the freshly plowed driveway. There’s been a moose hanging around for the last couple of weeks—we haven’t actually seen it, but it browses around the driveway most nights, based on the tracks—but I think these may have been two different sets. There were the usual single-adult-moose tracks near the house, but the tracks of an adult and a calf up near the road.
At least it’s a bit warmer that it was. It was -30F a week ago, but the last few days have been much milder. There are still a lot of long cold days ahead of us, but we hung on until the darkest night, so now the sun will start coming back.
On a less wintry note, I leave you with another of last night’s pictures—of the tiny horse herd that lives on my studio windowsill.
Let the cardening begin! I got three cards in the latest batch of mail, so I dismantled my fall table display and established a holiday card display in its place.
That’s my tea advent calendar in the back there. I’ve been opening it every day, but not really keeping up on the teas.
Taking down the fall table display meant disposing of the gourds from this year’s garden that were too underripe or over-aged to eat. Orion talked me into letting him throw them off the deck, which we decided was the ceremonial new year Tossing of the Gourds, and if your gourds go far, you get a nice year! They went far. Then I immediately had second thoughts, visualizing our property as Ground Zero of the 2022-30 Interior Alaska Invasive Pumpkin Infestation, and promptly went and found them again.
I put them at the bottom of the bird feeder instead, to see what comes to eat them.
Also, we’ve gotten several inches of light, fluffy snow lately. I put up my outdoor ornaments just a few days ago (these are just indoor ornaments that I hang in the trees every year – I’ve done it ever since Ellen Million Graphics found that someone had done it around where she lives a few years ago) and they look very fresh and seasonal.
Wild Island Horses by Liz Harman – Contemporary beach romance. (Update: this book is not currently available for sale. Please stay tuned for a future re-release.)
Meanwhile, it’s the height of summer in Alaska, with brilliant sunshine, 85F heat, and a glorious abundance of plant and animal life.
One of my pumpkins is starting to ripen!Raspberry season!Beavers working on their dam.
Watching the beavers at the nearby creek build their dam has been one of our most enjoyable activities this summer. We learned that beavers make noises to each other, and got to watch some juvenile beavers grow up! We do have some worries that at least some of them may have fallen victim to predators or trapping, especially since we hadn’t seen any around for a couple of weeks, but there were two out working on the dam today, so maybe they’ve just been working on dam-building upstream or something.
Other summer animal-life highlights include what I can only describe as woodpecker pecking school – with a flock of newly fledged woodpeckers practicing their pecking on the log walls of our house, including pecking so hard they kept falling off – and various other wildlife including porcupines and the first gopher I’ve ever seen here.
You’re very cute, now please leave my garden alone.
We’ve also enjoyed the summer’s lush wildflowers. We’re almost out of the height of wildflower season now; it’s mostly just fireweed at this point, but it’s one of my favorites.
This photo is from a little earlier in the year – it’s more bloomed out now – but continues to be lush and brilliant all around the house.
We’re starting to get into the winding down of summer now. In a month it’ll be autumn already.
Yesterday I got the greenhouse cleaned up and ready for planting!
View through the door into the greenhouse interior.
There are already some corn plants that I got at the farmer’s market yesterday. We’re supposed to have rainy weather this weekend, so it’ll be good for transplanting and I think I’m going to try to get some more plants in.
Green leaves behind the outside garden beds.
Normally Memorial Day/the end of May is the approximate “safely past the frost” date for planting outside, but I think we’re good for this year and I’d at least like to get some salad stuff in this weekend.
I also tried taking some pictures of the beavers a couple of evenings ago, when they were out and about in the creek, but my camera kept focusing on the brush so all I got was some blurry vaguely Bigfoot-like beaver cryptid images. This is probably the one that came out most recognizable.
For certain values of spring. We had a massive snowstorm the first week of April, on top of the snow we already had, and now it’s 60 degrees and we still have this massive snowpack. The results are interesting to say the least.
This is what it looked like a week ago.
So basically … snow. We have it.
I think one of these should be my new author photo.
I think we can all agree 2020 has been a dumpster fire we’ll all be glad to see the end of, but December has brought brightness as well. We had a very pleasant, quiet Christmas, and here on the north side of the world, we’re on the brighter side of the solstice now, with more light coming back into the world every day.
Weird little swamp spruce Christmas tree. It has more ornaments than branches.
We are having an incredibly bright full moon with brilliant clear skies, and the moon on the snow is like a wan sort of daylight, casting clear shadows at midnight.
You couldn’t quite read a book out there, but it’s close.
I’ll have a post up in a day or two with a full rundown of my books from the past year (including some freebies and sales!). In the meantime, I hope you’re not having too rough a time with these last days of 2020. Realistically, the arbitrary switchover of the calendar doesn’t make that much difference, but there’s something in us that likes milestones and fresh starts. Here’s to a better 2021.
… and the country gave us Election Day 2020. I voted for the first time when I turned 18; I still remember how excited I was about it. I haven’t missed an election since. I’m older now, a lot more jaded (especially lately) but I still believe that voting is the way you wish the future into being.
Today we hiked over to check out where the beaver lake used to be until about a week ago. We found many fascinating things, such as: fallen trees! Mud! Holes!
… maybe you had to be there.
The sheer SIZE of some of these downed trees is really impressive. (Also shown: my foot for scale.)
Whole lotta trees, whole lotta mud.
There were also some obvious channels dug by the beavers in the bottom of the former lake. I can’t really think of a natural process that could have made these.
Here’s basically the same view as above, but from a week ago:
Meanwhile, the creek is just back to being a creek, now running between 4-foot banks of mud that were deposited on the lake bottom.
And so many gnawed trees. So many. Beavers … why are you like this.
With this one tree along the (former) lake shore, they also ate its roots and dug around it, making it look weirdly like a cutaway view of a tree.
And I found a chokecherry tree growing wild, with some fruit on it:
And I got a (slightly) better picture of this cottonwood tree that’s gnawed through to the point where walking around it is kind of … uneasy.
It was a nice walk, but I miss the lake and really hope the beavers are okay. We’ve been leaving the area around the beaver house alone and trying to be quiet when we’re out looking around, hoping not to spook them off. They might’ve left for greener, damper pastures, though.
So, for background, we live out on the highway with a creek in our backyard. Adjacent to our property, there’s a section of the creek that’s been intermittently occupied by beavers ever since we’ve lived here. It was unoccupied for a while, but a couple of years ago a new set of beavers moved in and rebuilt the old dam. We didn’t see them for most of the summer, but their dam-building ways kicked into high gear this fall, and we’ve been enjoying going out and looking at them, checking on the progress of the dam and watching them swim around, dragging branches from place to place, and preparing for winter.
Beaver dam in the sunset light.From up on the hill. This used to be a creek meandering through a small valley; now it’s nearly all underwater.
Their pond start out small, but has been growing in size, rearranging the creek’s course and reconstructing that entire section of creek. It’s been really fascinating to watch.
Dam from the hill on the other side. The actual (original) creek bed is all the way at the top of this image and basically off camera; the creek used to meander absently through the valley and now it’s pretty much all underwater.Well, this isn’t alarming or anything.
They’ve done an astonishing job of clearing out the trees in what used to be a wooded patch of valley and is now basically a lake, including gnawing through 50-foot cottonwoods.
It’s fun though – I mean, they’re cute, they’re not bothering anyone, and we like going out in the evening to watch them.
I don’t have very many pictures of the actual beavers because they’re usually seen from a distance and mostly swimming, so it’s just beaver heads. We’ve been trying not to go too close so as not to bother them. They seem to be largely unaware of us; they’ve never seemed to mind us being there.
Tonight, however, I went out for my evening tour de beaver, and the lake was … GONE?!!
This was all underwater a day ago. That pile of leaves and sticks is the dam …The creek is back to more or less its original course.Before and after – a side spillway below the dam, a couple of days ago and today.
We worried at first that someone had actually done it – destroying beaver dams is a thing that happens, sometimes out of necessity (because they do tend to build their dams in places that can threaten human infrastructure like roads). But we’re pretty sure the dam simply collapsed under our recent rains, especially since the beavers are fine. We saw three of them out there, busy trying to rebuild.
The only picture of an actual beaver I managed to get tonight – a bit blurry though.
So hopefully they’ll be okay. It’s late in the season for it, but they still have the creek and plenty of food, and they also still have most of the previous dam. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve managed to rebuild a tidy little lake by the time things freeze up.
