Snowvember

The wild weather this month has shown us nearly an entire winter’s worth of excitement in just the past four weeks! Heavy snow loads on trees and high winds have nearly knocked down enough trees in the backyard to give us mountain views. You have to look between the remaining standing spruce to see the peaks of the Chugach Mountains across the bay. 

Big fat snowflakes fall beautifully on the trees when there is no wind.

November started off with lots of snow; Anchorage receiving the most snow in over 70 years for November. Then, around the middle of the month, high winds (70mph) coming through the Matanuska Valley combined with fresh snow to produce a blizzard which lasted for 4 or 5 days. The heavy snow and high winds caused lots of trees to come down, some of them landing on power lines which knocked out power to several thousand homes. Our area totaled nearly 50 hours without power this month. Fortunately, we’re able to get along just fine without the power company thanks to our generators and other off-grid gear. The blizzard subsided around the 20th of the month. Then, from Thanksgiving through the end of the month, a week of warm, above freezing temperatures and even a couple days of rain knocked down the snow depth, cleared off the roads, and washed all the snow off the roofs. So now, we feel like we either just got a super-condensed winter and spring will be rolling in just in time for Christmas, OR we only got a sneak peak preview of what the next 3 months have in store. Neither would surprise us, but either way, we’re prepared!

Highway not yet fully cleared after the second snow storm.

Cinnamon and sugar bites turned out great!

Rezzabeans enjoying the snow.

For our Thanksgiving holiday, we cooked a delicious feast including a whole turkey (wrapped in some homemade bacon!), stuffing, potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. But hands down the best part was the pumpkin pie we made from our homegrown organic pumpkins and the crust made with clean lard we rendered after processing our pigs. Obviously, this is waaayy too much food for two people and a toddler, so we spent the remainder of the month concocting soups, sandwiches, casseroles and other dishes from the leftovers. Hopefully by Christmas we’ve gotten some more of our pork cured and can do the whole feast again, but with homemade ham!

We’ve certainly discovered the vegetables we’ve been growing in the garden over the summer make the best ingredients for our holiday feasts! This gives us the motivation to put in the serious effort it takes to grow a big productive garden around here. Living near the arctic circle means it takes a lot more preparation and know-how in order to get a reliable harvest. With some summers being quite mild, and therefore pretty easy to grow outdoors, other summers can be cold, wet, and cloudy the majority of the season. Never really knowing which we will get, we will just always expect the latter and be pleasantly surprised when we get the former. Some of the main things we’re going to focus on for the 2024 growing season is setting up a space inside our heated shop for starting seedlings early on, and we’re also going to try different methods for raising the soil temperature around the plants. Hopefully these things yield measurable improvements which we can build upon in future seasons.

Heavy snow clings to every branch of trees and alders causing them to struggle to stand upright. Mixed with power lines, you can expect power outages.

The inhospitable weather this month forced us to spend some time inside. This wasn’t all bad because Wild North Design had a big holiday show the Saturday after Thanksgiving to prepare for. The show went great and it was so wonderful to see all the people out and getting into the holiday spirit! We love all the custom order requests we get when talking with people at these shows; it’s a great feeling to be shipping our Alaska themed crafts as gifts all over the world!

First snow, beginning of November.

Wild North's Star Wars collection rounded out well.

I made two potato crates for indoor potato storage.

We’re also excited to have started working on finishing out our office space inside our shop building. Last night (last day of the month) we poured a big batch of self-leveling cement underlayment to flatten out the floor. We certainly realized it’s cheaper and easier just to make the concrete slab level and flat when it’s initially poured, rather than fixing it afterwards. However, we were inexperienced and undermanned and that time and even though it didn’t look THAT bad, it definitely could have been better! Oh well, mistakes like not getting the building slab perfectly flat are all just part of the learning experience. I always remember it’s not that masters never make mistakes, just that they are experts at fixing them! So now we know how to repair a sloppily poured slab; another feather in our hat! Next, we’re going to install a vinyl plank flooring on top of the flattened cement. Then, we’re excited to get started on some CNC projects where we’ll design and make some custom cabinets and also a fold-up Murphy bed. This will let us organize some of our clutter, making the office a nice relaxing work space which can also be used for guests to stay when they’re visiting.  

2023 Colony High School Holiday Bazaar was a success!

It’s been a roller coaster of a month, so check back next month to see how December goes! We are excited to put our beautiful new workspace to use this winter. When things settle down after the holidays, we’ll really be able to dig in and spend some time working on and trying out new designs. We want to start utilizing our CNC machine more to start doing some larger and also more intricate pieces. We’ve got lots of ideas for combining laser cut parts, epoxy coatings, deep CNC engravings, and even LED lights! Stay tuned to see what we come up with, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’ve got a special idea you’d like us to help make a reality! Thanks for reading, and take care out there!