Nights and Lights

Started this last week...
Wow, Husband found this really cool sunrise/sunset calendar site on the Web today. I'm including a clip from the Barrow calendar for January so you can see the day and time the sun comes up and then how many minutes we gain each day for the rest of the month. Sorry, the whole thing doesn't fit in this space, but it's pretty cool. check out the site at: http://www.sunrisesunset.com.
You can put in your own location, or put in mine to keep up with what's going on here. Once the sun comes up, it comes up with a vengeance and we gain 2 hours and 32 minutes in 7 days. WooHoo!

Meanwhile, "Old Man Winter" is visiting today.  It is fiercely windy (26 MPH, gusting to 32 MPH) and a bit chilly (-15 ℉). With windchill, it's -45℉. Have I adequately impressed you with my meteorological knowledge? Really, I just check out the weather.noaa.gov website (much more often living here than I ever did anywhere else).
We've been treated to some of those famous northern lights, recently. You can't really predict when they're coming even though we have a website that tries to (http://www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/default.asp), so I just make sure I look up whenever I'm outside at night. Got some beautiful pics last week...this with my new digital Nikon CoolPix. I really love this little camera. Small enough to fit in my pocket, but has surprised me with the quality of low light pics it takes.

I may not have mentioned before that we live behind the Arctic Hotel. It isn't currently in operation and it looks like the inspiration for the song, Hotel California, particularly the part where you can check in, but you can't check out. All this to say that the Arctic Hotel is the building on the right in front of the lights.