Here it comes...

Sunday afternoon and there's a storm coming to western AK - probably
the biggest I will have seen since arriving in August.

Our weather broadcasts at the station have doubled in length (to at
least 10 minutes), with all of the extra advisories for the villages
that stand to see damage and/or flooding. ("Be sure to tie up your
boat," etc.)

The worst is supposedly going to arrive overnight and continue through
Monday. Right now it's just windy, rainy, wet and grey in Nome.
Everything has this grey flatness to it. These will be a couple of
days good for just staying inside and reading...

Meanwhile, I'm starting to germinate ideas for my next themed music
show, which airs this coming Friday. Maybe "Bands from New Jersey?"
I feel like that could work.

Third time actually is the charm

It's October 8 and Nome has had its first noticeable snow
accumulation. Literally as I write it's melting away into slush in a
warmer evening's light rain, but last night we saw our third snow of
the season actually fall in air cold enough to allow it to stick to
the ground.

Kids were out playing and throwing snowballs at each other through the
night, which became problematic for them when the police showed up on
Front Street in Nome PD SUV's to enforce the (midnight) curfew.

Anyway, it's getting cold, but not even close to as cold as it'll be
by the time winter actually gets here. As an Alaska rookie, it's
still strange for me to see the snow falling, and thus bringing to
mind all of my own associations with winter and Christmastime, while
also realizing that Halloween isn't even here yet.

Friday Night = Movie Night

This Friday night has turned into movie night. All three of us in the
volunteer house (Jesse, Ross, and I) watched Jesse's Netflix pic,
"Thank You For Smoking," which I generally thought was well-done,
although certainly far from perfect: sometimes a little loose in its
plot, or maybe a little stretched thin in the message or idea it was
trying to convey. But still, not a bad movie.

And then, just a little while ago, Ross and I sat down and watched
"Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," which was the first time for
me. I really enjoyed it - it's such an imaginative, creative,
delightful film, and very thought-provoking.

Anyway, the past few days have been wonderfully sunny, brisk and crisp
in a way that definitely signals winter coming: chilly, but beautiful.
Here's hoping tomorrow is like that, too...

Getting to the weekend

Friday night and just generally relaxing around the house. For the
past couple of weekends I ended up spending Friday doing some errands
and then Saturday traveling (to Pilgrim, to Solomon, to Teller, etc.),
so I'm looking forward to a more laid-back Saturday before going back
to work on Sunday morning.

This has been a pretty busy week. My first round of new spots went
into rotation this past Sunday (Oct. 1), which means it's largely back
to the drawing boards for the next set of spots, scheduled to begin on
Oct. 15. (Sets of spots are on a two-week rotation.) I largely spent
the beginning of this week writing new spots and starting to get them
voiced. But I switched over in the later part of the week to prepare
for two projects that are both now out of the way.

The first (and by far the bigger) was Sounding Board, the station's
Thursday call-in show that features a news and/or public interest
topic relevant to Western Alaska. Each week it's a new topic and a
new host, and this week (Oct. 5) it was my turn.

I'd never done it before, and my subject was the PFD, or "Permanent
Fund Dividend," Alaska's pot of invested oil money surpluses whose
earnings get doled out, every year, to nearly every single Alaska
resident. (If I stick around for more than just a year, I'll start
getting them, too.) The fund dividend was pretty substantial this
year, although not the biggest: just over $1,100.

Anyway, there was a lot to learn about the PFD -- and thus lots of
time spent on the internet at work, reading about its origins, how the
fund is invested (mostly in stocks), the way people use their PFD
checks, various ideas on how to make it better, etc. I lucked out in
that I was able to chat with a few people - the manager of the local
Wells Fargo and even the 3rd party candidate for governor in AK - and
recorded their thoughts on the PFD.

Ultimately, things went pretty well with the show, I think - we had a
good number of calls, many of them from the smaller villages, and
people seemed genuinely interested in the topic. (We even had a call
in from the former mayor of Nome.)

With Sounding Board thankfully finished by Thursday afternoon, the
only thing standing between myself and the weekend was then my
bi-weekly Music Detour show, which just aired tonight.

I had intentionally left almost all of the preparation for this week's
Music Detour - the writing of the script, the recording of my voice
track, the ripping of the music itself, the final production, etc. -
until the last day. But things definitely fell into place, the script
got written and the recording got finished, and now the weekend is
finally here. Phew.