Happy 100!

This is the 100th blog entry! It really slowed down–we were stuck at 99 for almost a month. Now there is too much to catch up on! Matt had a great trip to Norway. Carrie was artist of the month at the gallery and is trying to keep up with the tiles, while getting into her new job at NOAA (and enjoying helping host lots of kids out there during Seaweek(s)), Torsten is having fun, learning, and continuing to keep us on our toes! Juneau is facing a power “crisis” with an avalanche taking down our main transmission line between the hydro-generation at Snettisham and town–so we’ve gone to 98+% clean, carbon-free hydro power at ~11 centers/kWHr to almost solely diesel–more carbon and a new price tag of ~50 cents/kWHr. We had started hanging clothes up inside about three weeks before hand, so were ahead of the gun on that one, but we joined the “unplug the hot tub, do lots more grilling, swap out all the lightbulbs we hadn’t yet, enjoy the dark, anything else we can think of…” Juneau-power-saving-game. We have gone from approximately 40 kWHr/day on average to about 8 kWHr/day (and started reading our meter daily!). Carrie is pondering adding an “energy sur-charge” onto her tiles as she did her first firing of the kiln today–about 30 kWHr for a firing, and each tile gets fired twice. Other “stuff”: the semester finished up (it was a good one, and a good one to be done with!), Torsten has two more weeks of preschool, but we had a great BBQ/potluck/picnic at Auke Rec Friday afternoon–the streams and waterfalls were great playgrounds, as we set a new record with ~1.25 inches of rain that day (at the airport–1.5″ at the forecast office).