Now what am I up to?

Well, I had so much fun setting up the little Happy Greeting Cards site that I decided to give something else a try.

You might not be too surprised to learn that the Discover channel show "Deadliest Catch" has quite a few fans. So I thought I'd see if there was any kind of market for cards and shirts and whatnot that have some of my photos from Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where Deadliest Catch was filmed. I searched online and found that most of the Deadliest Catch-related stuff was shirts that refer to crabbing and fishing. But there wasn't much with just lovely scenery from Dutch, so I set up this site on Zazzle (a sort of Cafe Press competitor).

I'll be curious to see if it's the sort of thing people are interested in; I imagine there might be a few people who want a pretty photo of crab cages, or of a rocky coastline, or a lonely tree in the snow—on a t-shirt or a hoody, or a greeting card or poster.

Now, I'm not holding out any hope that Phil Harris or Murray Gamrath of the Cornelia Marie will go buy a poster of Dutch; they probably see it too often to want it hanging on their walls. And I'd be really surprised (but thrilled!) if Sig Hansen, or Sten Skaar, or Keith or Monte Colburn of the Wizard (my hubby's fave boat—guess why) wanted a hoody for their sweeties. But maybe some of their fans might.

And maybe not. It only took a Saturday morning to set up, so it's not a huge effort. I should probably get off the computer now, and get back to drawing, so I can add some stuff to my illustrated greeting card site!

Here's the link to the Dutch Harbor site.

Home, and a little time off

I think it might be a while before I feel like flying again. It's sad: when I was a kid, and later as an adult, I loved to travel. I lived to travel. After the last couple of airline experiences, I think I'm starting to dread it.

We were delayed out of Dutch Harbor, and didn't get home until after 1 am. Our luggage didn't make it, and isn't here yet. We are rigorous about traveling with carry-ons only, but for the hop from Dutch to Anchorage, we let them load our bags into cargo - or so we thought. When we got to Anchorage, we were told that luggage had been "bumped" and ours would not be there until the next flight. And, of course, it wasn't there with the next flight. They assured us that when it arrived, it would be delivered to our house. Hmm - it's been over 24 hours since we last saw those bags; wonder if we'll ever see them again? Thanks so much, Alaska Air (and PenAir).


But otherwise, the visit to Alaska was pretty nice. I saw dozens of nearly-tame bald eagles, a couple of pods of humpback whales, some curious sea lions, and some of the most beautiful scenery imaginable. It never got unpleasantly cold (at least for the gear I brought). And the people were unbelievably friendly.

Seriously: everyone I met there was chatty and nice. I've heard about the so-called "Seattle Freeze" which implies that we Pacific Northwesterners are a little distant...this was like going to the anti-Seattle. It was strange, but strange in a good way. They say that the best part of travel is meeting people, and I felt this to be really true for the first time.


I took over three hundred photos, and some of the better ones are viewable on my Flickr stream here.

One thing I wasn't able to photograph: we were in close proximity to most of the "Deadliest Catch" captains while we were there, and Brett even got filmed by the crew, as he was assisting with the "fish tickets" for one of the captains. There's a small chance that he'll be in the show when it airs in April. Even if he's not, we should see several of the people he worked with.

There's a big scandal going on in the world of crab fishermen right now: crab icon Sig Hansen has allowed his name and image, and his boat's name and image, to be used for the packaging of some King crab that's actually from Russia. Everyone was talking about it while we were there, and no one was happy. Poor Sig is going to be the black sheep of that industry for a while. Remember, people, crab that only costs $9 a pound is NOT fresh Alaskan Red King. Bleah.

In other news, I got my CueCat while we were gone! Do you remember in the late 90s or early 2000s, when they tried to sell these goofy barcode scanners, intending that you'd scan a product label and get more info about it online? Well, for various reasons, the program failed. But the millions of CueCats that were produced are mostly still out there. I bought one from LibraryThing, because they've got their site set up so that with a CueCat, all you have to do is swipe a book's barcode and it will enter it into you library. Here's mine, as of right now. I'm probably going to try and find some time to enter all of our books (or Brett will) eventually. Tagging them might take a while, but it's still fun.

This place...it's really something!

I'm sitting in the lobby of the Grand Aleutian, after a tiring day. This morning, I went out for a walk around the loop that encompasses the hotel and surroundings. Crossing the road towards the bay, I saw the breaching fins and tails of several humpback whales in the water! There were two groups, with what looked like two or three whales in each group. I stood there, watching, with my mouth literally hanging open in awe, for several minutes. As I watched, I heard someone behind me yelling, "Do you see the whales?" I turned around, and a woman was waving, running towards me. It turned out that her name was Janice, and she lives here in Dutch Harbor. We started talking, and she asked if I wanted to take a walk around the area. Absolutely! And having a local as companion was ideal.

We walked, and she told me all kinds of interesting stuff about the area. Her husband works for one of the main employers here (as does mine), and they've lived here 15 years or more. She knew most of the people we passed, and waved or stopped to chat with most of them. It was a really pleasant time, walking, taking pictures (which, damn it, I still can't upload. But they're good!) and chatting. She's incredibly nice, and volunteered to take me on a longer tour of the island tomorrow. So maybe I'll do that; I ran the batteries of my camera down and replaced them, so I'm ready for more.

The weather was gorgeous this morning: a low, bright sun that gave everything that perfect yellow light. Then, as we were heading back around 11:30, it started to hail - actually, it was what they call "corn snow" - hard little bits of snow that hurt when they hit your skin. I met up with Brett and a co-worker of his, and we had lunch at "the Galley" - the company-run cafeteria where everyone who works there can eat for free. After we ate, he took me down to the docks where the "Arctic Lady," a crab boat, was unloading its load of red crab. We watched for a while, then went to see the next step in the process: the line where live crabs are cut in half and dropped onto a production line for further processing.

Right now, I'm in the hotel lobby, and sitting across from me is at least one crew member of the "Time Bandit" - one of the ships shown regularly on the "Deadliest Catch" tv show. We saw the film crews coming in last night. Janice said that the guy who does the Discovery show "Dirty Jobs" is here too, filming an episode of that show, so I suppose it could have been his crew. In any case, it's been a very interesting day! I hope the weather clears up tomorrow morning.