Gaining daylight

I snapped this photo from my balcony as the twilight set in this afternoon. Today is the shortest day of the year, with just 5 hours, 26 minutes and 58 seconds of daylight in Anchorage. Tomorrow we gain 6 seconds of daylight, which may seem small, but it means a lot as cold winter days become brighter and lighter. Cheers and happy winter solstice!

My website

I recently purchased a URL to host my professional portfolio.

KernThisStudio.com


It's very simple at the moment, but a start for displaying my design work and portrait photography and hopefully drum up some additional freelance work. I did a couple family photo shoots this month and a newborn photo session. Also, I designed Christmas cards for the families, save the dates for engaged friends and have two more photo shoots in the coming weeks. This new project has been a whirlwind of fun and I'm excited to see where it goes.


I will still be blogging here about my Alaskan adventures, family fun and personal projects.As Kern This has been my blog, twitter name and phrase for many creative things over the years, it seemed like the natural choice for my portfolio and brand. To avoid confusion I'm going to need a new name for my personal blog.

For the non-design geeks out there. Kern This is a play on words involving design. To kern is to adjust the space between letters in typography.

Thanks for reading and please take a moment to stop by my portfolio when you have a moment. I'll be updating frequently. But don't stop checking in here. Thanks to my friends and family for all the support.

First big photo shoot

Saturday I took pictures of the very beautiful Zepeda family on Chester Creek Trail. They were so much fun. With a 7-year-old, 5-year-old twins and the youngest is weeks from her third birthday, things are never dull. Like me, their families live far from Alaska, so they wanted to capture a little of their surroundings in the shoot. This is my first big shoot, so any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks!

No baseball today

While I hear Washington feels a bit like Alaska this week, I think we've gotten a dose of Seattle's typical weather. It's rained on top of our snow for three consecutive days turning our winter wonderland into patches of ice, slush and mud. While school has been called off in Seattle for too much snow, we had the first "snow" days here in my two years here, for a lack thereof. The rain on top of snow made roads so slick that police responded to 89 vehicle incidents on Monday. I got off work a little early at the start of my four-day weekend and decided to walk through the baseball fields across the street to capture a little of the drizzly mess and play with my new camera.

Halloween ... a belated post

Davin dressed up as a gangster for Halloween and we did both Trick or Treat Street in downtown and Trunk or Treat at a friend's church with my parents while they were in town. Strangely, I never chased them with the camera while they were here like I usually do and am dismayed to not find any pictures of them to add to this post. We had a wonderful time cooking, visiting and relaxing with them.

 Trick or Treat Street was a cool idea but I wouldn't recommend it to parents. It was a lot of long, cold lines at downtown stores for not a lot of childhood sweet rewards. But Trunk or Treat was a ton of fun and will be in our future Halloween plans.

A funny thing actually happened on the way to the opera

Joshua and I got a great deal on Opera tickets and invitations to the Anchorage Opera's season opener after party, so we got dressed up and went. Walking to the restaurant downtown for dinner before the show a yellow car honked at us while we were in the crosswalk. I jumped and glared at the driver, before realizing they weren't being rude but trying to get my attention. It was my coworker Nadya with her friend at the wheel, also on their way to dinner before heading to the show. So we decided to join forces and share wine and laughs at Ginger. She was even kind enough to share her pictures from the evening with us since my camera would not fit in my tiny dress-up purse. Can you spot us in the atrium of the opera house above?

 

Photos courtesy of Nadya Gilmore.

Fun new heights

Davin and I discovered a new piece of playground equipment had been installed at our favorite playground on a recent bike ride. It's a giant jungle gym made of steel and rope. I climbed to the top with another mom on the playground at the cajoling of our kids. It wasn't so bad.

Cotton candy, giant cabbage and the gravitron

The Alaska State Fair is know for it's giant cabbage competition with a record of 127 from our intense growing season. But Thursday night, we went to the event in Palmer for the rides and the food. Above is a view of the grounds from the Ferris wheel. We ran into Davin's friend from school and her dad and hung out with them at the rides.

Here, missy got told she was just barely too short to make the cut for the Apollo, a ride none of us adults were brave enough to try.

 

So instead I braved the Gravitron with the kids and my stomach -- and equilibruim -- was angry with that decision. So was Davin's. But his friend was so non-phased she was riding upside down.

However, it was nothing a little over-price cotton candy couldn't cure.

Planes, trains and ... bicycles?

We hit the bike lane and didn't start up either car for most of the weekend. Saturday we cruised downtown to the Fourth Avenue Marketplace for a late afternoon lunch of festival food. Sunday we braved the hills to midtown for lunch at our favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican place, Burrito King, and a matinee of "Dinner for Schmucks." Afterward, we passed the apartment and decided to keep riding for some time. Downtown we watched the airshow pass overhead. We continued through the Alaska Railroad Depot to Ship Creek.

Ship Creek as seen from the deck of The Bridge restaurant ...closed until further notice.

The old fish processing plant looked like it had seen better days.

Camping on the Kenai

Thanks to all the of the thoughtful people who gave us Target gift cards for our wedding, most of them went to camping equipment. Joshua and I packed up the Subaru for an adventure Friday night. We had no idea what we were getting into.

We drove just past Cooper Landing and bought a regional map marking area campsites. First we checked Russian River Campground: 44 sites. All full. So was the next stop. And the next. All the campgrounds for the next hour and back. We know, because we checked.

So we drove back to Cooper Landing crossing our fingers for good luck at the Quartz Creek Campground just before Cooper, that we blew past two hours earlier thinking, oh, let's go further to somewhere we've never been. Now we were humbled. We would be happy for any campsite at all.

They were full. We stopped and asked locals locals where to camp. They suggested all the places we had already checked. At past 11 p.m. we were losing hope and trying to think of any way not to drive home.

Josh kept driving down the road off Quartz Creek near beautiful Kenai Lake and randomly turned down a bumpy deserted powerline road.

There, in the middle of nowhere, were two vacant campsites with firepits. No amenities, but at nearly midnight and losing daylight, it was perfection. And it was. Soon our brand new tent was up without too much trouble for the first time set-up and the fire was blazing.

The rest of the weekend was smooth sailing with bike rides, walks, tending to the fire and lots of mosquito swatting. It was refreshing to get out of the city and iPhone range for a couple days.

The Kenai River looks bright turquoise from glacial melt.

 Alaska's fireweed was in bloom everywhere.

Another two-wheeled adventure

We took another long bike trip last Monday. This time we took Chester Creek Trail the opposite direction. I've seen this creek before, but the greenbelt leads all the way to a community pool and a Chinese restaurant we like, so we are scheming future weeknight rides here.

New bikes!

 

My wonderful husband treated himself and I to new bikes recently. The day we bought them we rode several miles from our apartment, to Westchester Lagoon, along the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, to downtown Anchorage. We stopped for lunch at a park and later in downtown to browse the Saturday Market. Then we looped back home up Cordova. Davin was a trooper, his first real long bike ride since he's previously had to stick to our neighborhood.