I made a few new images for the pool of rotating header pictures for my site. Up to 85 different pictures now. Click them to see full size.

Having Kevin up for Christmas was nice.  Since he lives in LA now it is an easy flight up to Seattle and a connection on to southeast Alaska.  Flying to or from NY required an overnight in Seattle both ways which really drags out the travel time.  I received a lot of really nice gifts this year including a weather station that logs temperature, rainfall, humidity, and wind speed and direction.  Many other great gifts including Lego, shirts and underwear, a Lego/Star Wars watch, and plenty of other toys, snacks, and fun stuff.  We had Mike, Joy, and Seth over for Christmas dinner and had a smoked turkey from Tonka Seafoods. Unfortunately, i was too congested to taste the turkey very well but the consensus was that it was great.

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Every now and then i have a brilliant shirt idea.  While in Vietnam somehow this spilled out of my mind.  Take a wife-beater (tank top) and explain that you don’t beat wives.  So now it is time to protect my intellectual property… “No wives were harmed during the making of this shirt” copyright Ryan McFarland.  I made a prototype of this white using a white v-neck and wooden block letters dabbed in enamel paint.  I like it.

In my pseudo junk mail today was a message from TripAdvisor that said:

Hats Off to You for Contributing!

You posted on TripAdvisor and we’d like to send you a FREE hat as a token of our appreciation.

It’s our way of saying thanks for your wise words, candid comments and priceless photos.

Hurry to get your hat, but please don’t forward this email to friends. Instead, tell them to write a review so we can send them free stuff next year!

So i clicked on the link and filled out my membership details (couldn’t be phishing – there isn’t any points, money, miles or anything of value to steal from my profile there). Then i get this message:

I’m a little bummed because if the hat turns out like pictured i might actually wear it. So i sent an email to the address shown and i will just cross my fingers that it works out. Free is free. Hrm… speaking of, i never received my free luggage tags from Trip Advisor.

Update:

Received an email that seems to have gone out to many people…

Earlier today, you received an email offering you a free TripAdvisor hat to thank you for sharing your travel opinions this year. Sadly, we had a technical glitch that kept some of you from requesting your hats.

We’re very sorry for the inconvenience and wanted to let you know that the problem has now been resolved. We hope you’ll try again.

This time of year we’re reminded about the hassle of shipping this to and from Alaska. We don’t have mail delivery here so everyone has to go to the post office for their mail and packages. Sometimes the line is terribly long. The worst is that some companies will only ship to you via UPS or FedEx and they charge a lot of money to do that. I think a huge business could be made forwarding mail from UPS to Alaska via the post office in Seattle. People could send items straight to the Seattle address via UPS which would then just forward the mail to the postal address using a more economical shipping method. Until i find something like that i’ll have to try my best to find stores that have reasonable shipping or even free shipping that includes Alaska.

As Tiffany points out in the comments, Amazon is great because when you go to check out not only is it shipped free (if your order qualifies) but they also upgrade your shipping so you don’t have to wait 4 weeks for it to arrive by barge.  As an Amazon seller i wish that they would do that for the people that order items from sellers in Alaska.  We often get complaints from buyers asking where their item is when we ship out the very next day most times.

Any other stores that Alaskans have come across that have been pleasant to deal with?

Merry Christmas!

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Blue’s Clue finds a clue

Originally uploaded by zieak

I only moved Blue’s a few inches and stood him up for this picture.

Yeti and Ash in a rare tender moment

Originally uploaded by zieak

I’ve been sick for a few days. A head cold. Kevin arived Saturday and that night I played music for the Coast Guard Christmas party. Sunday, Zoom Bikes had Julebukking – a Norwegian tradition where businesses give patrons food and drink. We had a salmon tray from Tonka Seafoods, Coffee from Java Hüs, and Mike found Tiger Beer at the Trees RV Park. We had Tiger pretty regularly in Vietnam. I’ve never seen it in town before. I have to work a half day Monday.

Sure… it probably won’t pay as well as a contract with Halliburton i’m sure.  I have signed an agreement to become a vendor to an AOL owned weblog DIYlife.  So now i’ll be writing up some of my home improvement and craft projects for them instead of on this site.  Don’t worry about missing anything though – i’m sure to figure out how to make a feed of my posts or will alert you to my latest submissions.

I have been trying to stay fairly apolitical in my posts for quite a while. But while we were in Bali the United Nations Climate Change Conference the area newspapers were filled with reports from the meetings. Almost all of them pointed out the US led resistance to the agreement up until the end of the meetings. Also of major news was that the new President of Australia made his first official action signing on to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leaving the United States as the only major industrialized nation in the world refusing to ratify the treaty in 2005.  Neither the Clinton nor Bush presidencies or the congresses during their terms agreed to ratify the agreement.

The Bush Administration announced that the new federal energy law will require auto manufacturers to reduce emissions by 40% by 2020. That is a swift policy change. It requires that fleets average 35 MPG. Sounds pretty good! But California and more than a dozen other states have already adopted their own emissions plans that would bind manufacturers. It would set a target for 45 MPG average for most passenger cars, trucks and SUVs by 2016. The EPA just denied California’s application to waive the federal regulations in favor of their more restrictive state law. They denied it. And today our President said this:

“Is it more effective to let each state make a decision as to how to proceed in curbing greenhouse gases? Or is it more effective to have a national strategy?”

How about a global strategy? Like, uh, i don’t know – the Kyoto Protocol? Seems like that would be “more effective” than a “national strategy.”