Ticklin' the Ivories in Anchorage

A question I received quite often in the months prior to my departure from Kansas was, “Will you keep playing the piano while in Anchorage?” In order to allay any and all fears you, the reader, may have, here is a synopsis of my piano playing these past five months.

One of my first items of business upon arriving in Anchorage was finding a piano on which to play. Luckily for me, there was a piano in the unit house. Unluckily for me, it was rather completely out of tune. I then turned to outside sources, and checked with the University of Alaska Anchorage to see if I could take lessons or, at the very least, use the practice rooms for my own study. Unfortunately, the former wasn’t feasible and the latter wasn’t allowed.

Things took a turn for the better when I checked with a few local churches, to see if I could use their pianos to practice. While I didn’t find a church I could practice at, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church did have a piano they said I could have. That week, I stopped in on the way back from work to check out what was a pretty decent Yahama upright, and very similar to what I grew up playing back home. To make things better, the church had been keeping it in tune! Feeling very grateful for the generous gift, several others from our church and I came back in a few weeks and moved the piano into the unit house.

The new piano!

It was a great improvement over the previous piano – a much richer bass, more full tone, and it was in tune… for about a day. I should have known that though it started in tune, any piano needs to be tuned after a move, especially when moved in sub-freezing temperatures. So now we had two pianos, both very out of tune. I then began to get creative and set out to sell the first piano on Craigslist, thereby financing a tuning for the new piano. That was three months ago, and nobody has sprung for it yet, though I have gotten a good handful of interesting folks and have been dropping the price. Maybe nobody wants a piano that makes you cringe when listening to it!

Attempting to tune the piano - a rather difficult task that I am not very good at!

Thankfully, I didn’t let all these events distract me from actually playing the piano! While I don’t practice as much as I did last year in high school, I still play generally every day and some days for as much as an hour or two. In the first several months I concentrated on three pieces: Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat Major by Beethoven, Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major by Chopin, and Virtuosic Étude No. 2 by Moritz Moszkowski. Now, I am working on a Bach prelude, Brahms’ Fantasies Op. 116, a Scriabin etude, and a piece by Władysław Szpilman. For those of you not familiar with Mr. Szpilman, he was a Polish pianist and composer who, as a Jew, lived through horrible years in the Warsaw ghetto. His story of survival is incredible and I’d highly recommend both his autobiography, “The Pianist” and a 2002 movie of the same name. I was able to obtain his music through Inter-Library Loan and it is a moving experience to play something that was written in the early 1940’s while in the ghetto.  

 
Pieces I have worked on so far this year.

In addition to my classical pieces, I’ve been involved regularly at church, playing hymns, special music, and accompanying singers. With all these opportunities to play piano, I hope to return next year to college with a deeper knowledge and ability than when I left! 

I hope you enjoy these select pieces I’ve been working on. I don’t pretend to have these pieces concert ready, but nevertheless, playing the piano up here has been a true joy!

Virtuosic Étude No. 2 - Moritz Moszkowski

Ballade No. 3 in A-flat major - Frederic Chopin

Prelude No. 6 in D minor, BWV 851 - Johann Sebastian Bach

Winter Photography

My first post on photography (see it here) generated quite a bit of feedback, so I figured you all might enjoy another photographic update!

My winter photography thus far has mainly been confined to numerous trips to Kincaid Park, the western most point in Anchorage. This 1500-acre park happens to be home to a sandy beach, now covered with snow, and my favorite spot in Anchorage to photograph.

An image I made in early November, before much any ice formed.

It is said that the best photographs are often made on “edges”: the edge between night and day, fair weather and a coming storm, or land and water. The beach at Kincaid offers one such boundary, allowing for myriad subjects, moods, and light at this junction between the coast and the waters.

My setup once I've skiied down to the beach.

With snow on the ground, the best way to get the mile from the parking lot to the beach is by ski. This journey prepares my mind to think photographically and also gets my body nice and warm, so that it can maintain core temperature a little longer once I stop moving! The cold does become an issue, influencing everything from how long I am out to what camera gear gets used or not. It’s actually been pretty warm up here by Alaskan standards (for example, as I write this, the outside temperature is 42 it and feels like spring!). That being said, the coldest temperature I’ve gone out to photograph in is 0 plus blowing winds. Always present in this sort of situation is the tradeoff between warmth and dexterity. I have found my mitts to work pretty well, though it can be hard to manipulate all the camera buttons and is all but impossible to do some things like attach a filter to my lens.

Sunrise and a crescent moon rises over a cold (0 degrees) Cook Inlet at low tide.

One issue at this time of year is the short amount of daylight (though we are gaining light back more rapidly every day!). Currently, the sun sets around 4:20 pm in Anchorage, making it hard to be anywhere to photograph the “magic light” except on the weekends. Add to that the fact that Anchorage’s weather lately seems determined to remain overcast and grey without let up. Often, there are long stretches of flat, uninteresting light, but that only makes it more special when dazzling light breaks through, illuminating the Alaskan landscape. Enjoy!

Redoubt Volcano, sunset

Sunset, low tide

sometimes it's just sort of grey...

Sunset, Cook Inlet

On Our Internal and External Lives

Several days ago, I received a letter from my brother. I had sent him a letter a week earlier, mainly focused on all the cool stuff I was doing. The keyword here being “doing”… Not “being” or “feeling” or “thinking”… In his letter to me, my brother wrote the following:

“Life sounds filled with cool activities – choral music, skating, XC skiing, which are all awesome – but how is the internal life – passions, energy, dreams, hopes, struggles?”

midnight cross-country skiing

I thought to myself “You’re right. All I did was list all the outwardly exciting activities I’ve done recently, forsaking how I really actually was.” As I look back on my blog posts, they are virtually all focused on external events, not thoughts, feelings, or ideas. It’s all too easy to get caught up in one’s external life as the internal life goes to the wayside. I find myself, far too often, using my external life to distract from really addressing my internal life; my “passions,… dreams, hopes, struggles.” When asked, “So how was your week,” many people (including myself) seem to respond with a generic “good” and then go on to list the external things they did. Yet it is usually the subtle, quiet, mundane things – not the flashy, exciting activities – that determine how meaningful our lives are.

backyard camping in 0 degree temperatures

a friendly moose out the dining room window

 So while sledding, midnight cross-country skiing, and photography are all enjoyable things, you should also know that I had a good conversation with one of my unit mates, spent the commute to work reflecting on a number of questions and thoughts, really enjoyed the 20 minutes of piano I was able to play one morning, and that I have a hard time apologizing to those around me when I mess up. These are not particularly breathtaking activities, but in a way, they give a better representation of my life than the fact I did this or that snow sport.

Relationships – with God, others, and ourselves – are the most important things in life. It is to these that we should devote our time and energy. The good news is that with a healthy and vibrant “inner life”, cool external experiences usually follow. But they must not be a mask that gets in the way of grappling with our dreams, struggles, and passions.

            

Ice Skating and Northern Lights

To those of you who read my previous blog post about the onset of winter (you can see it here), it may seem as if the only components of an Alaskan winter are coldness, darkness, and overcastness. Though these all do seem to occur quite often, there are bright spots. Here are a couple of great winter activities that we were able to experience this weekend.

I was pumped on Saturday to read in the paper that the city-managed ice-skating rinks and ponds were ready and open for public use. Ice thickness is over 13 inches, allowing the city to clear and hot mop numerous ponds and rinks. 

all the skates and cross-country skiing boots in our "Adventure Closet"

Growing up in Kansas, we are lucky if even have a few days of decent ice every winter. As such, it is a big deal when good ice does occur. The call goes out and everyone drops what he or she was doing to come play hockey! Here in Anchorage, it is going to be a privilege to have numerous maintained venues for skating all winter long!

When we tried to go skating on Saturday, however, we returned a little disappointed. Though much of the lower 48 is currently experiencing frigid winter weather, here in Anchorage, the temperature was in the mid 30s. Though the ice was certainly thick enough, its top layer was too soft to do any quality skating. We resigned ourselves to the fact that we had to wait to come back at a later, colder time.

Marlene skating on a pond near our house. There is also a skating oval adjacent to this pond for those that appreciate speed-skating.

Luckily, today (Sunday) – with temperatures just slightly below freezing – a couple of us headed out again and found skate-able ice! It was great fun to get back on ice and it whet my appetite for the many hours of skating and hockey I am sure will be enjoyed this winter!

Another exciting winter activity presented itself on Saturday at 10:50 pm in the form of a phone call from my host dad. He informed me that from his property thirty minutes or so out of Anchorage, he could see the aurora borealis, or northern lights. Though our house was socked in with a thick, pea-soup fog, my host dad stood several hundred feet higher, with clear views of the night sky. Our whole unit piled in the van and headed off in search of northern lights – the first for many of us including me.

the Aurora Forecast from the Alaska Geophysical Institute. If this is what a "4" on the scale looks like, I want to see a "9"!

northern lights

Emerging from the fog half an hour later, we were greeted with a subtle yet incredible display of northern lights. I was informed that this display was pretty weak in Alaskan terms, but for someone who has never seen such phenomena, it was awesome! We arrived back home at 2:00 in the morning a little tired but definitely excited. As we enter into prime aurora viewing season, I look forward to seeing more displays of this captivating and awe-inspiring occurrence. 

Winter is Here!

I start out warm. Emerging from the unit house on bike, I am wearing wool socks, winter boots, long underwear, pants, two jackets, glove liners, mittens, balaclava, neck gaiter, and ear warmer. There are still two hours before the sun rises and the temperature here is hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit. As I bike to work, it continues to get colder. Where I work at the Bureau of Land Management is the coldest place in Anchorage (not an exaggeration – the weather station here is consistently the coldest of the 17 stations reporting to NOAA) As a result, by the time I reach work, it is -16 degrees, and what I think is the coldest locale I have ever been in. Though my hands and toes are a little numb, and my legs are tingling and feeling a little uncomfortable, it is exciting to be out in such a temperature. I can feel my breath condensing and then freezing on my eyelashes and my snot begins to freeze a little.

Ice forming form my breath - on my neck gaiter, eyelashes, helmet, etc...

Winter began for me with the first major snow fall a week and a half ago. As the flakes began to come down on a Sunday afternoon, my unit mates and I rushed outside and soon were pelting each other with snowballs. The five inches or so of snow was and still is beautiful, but it also presented issues for transportation and commuting. For these three months here in Anchorage, I have been biking to work each day. After the snow, it took several days for sidewalks to be cleared, and even then, some were filled back in with plowed snow, or made otherwise unride-able by big chunks of ice and snow flung from the road. Unfortunately, the nearest bus stop from my work is over a mile – therefore, my solution has been a combination of biking and busing: I bike to the bus stop, catch a bus that I ride for about 3 miles, and then bike another mile and a half in to work.

just before heading off to work

waiting at the bus stop

The onset of winter has meant a few changes at work. Most outdoor work has ceased, unless very important. Snow plowing is the primary objective on mornings after it snows – this ordeal usually begins at 4:00 am in order to have the BLM facility cleared by the time employees arrive. Luckily, I do not take part in these early-morning festivities, instead enjoying several more hours of sleep! I have had an opportunity to operate the plow truck, however – a fun experience – and I think that I have more responsibilities with plowing in the future.

On the way back from work, the last rays of sun strike the Chugach Mountains. Biking is much easier on when the sidewalks are cleared (as in this image)!

I’ve noticed how relative temperature really is. Sure, -50 will always feel cold no matter who you are, but I’m really starting to build a new frame of reference than what I had back in Kansas. There, it was cold when it was in the 20s. Getting down in the teens was really cold! Fast forward to the current; -16 sets the benchmark for what is cold and later in the afternoon while biking home, 0 degrees feels pretty nice. Anything above 20 degrees would be downright balmy! And I’m sure my frame of reference will be shifted even further yet, as we really move into the cold months and I possibly venture into the interior of Alaska and it’s frigid temperatures.

"Pogies" - insulated overmitts that fit onto the handlebars of a bike. They are hand made in Alaska and all the bike commuters seems to use them. I just got them from work recently and haven't had much time to test them out, but they sure do keep your hands warm!

The amount of darkness has also been a change from the Kansas winters I’m used to. Today in Anchorage, the sun rose at 9:25 am and set at 4:06 pm. And we will continue to lose daylight every day until the winter solstice, a month away. There are flipsides to the short days however; it’s exhilarating to bike home from work with sunset’s colors blossoming across the sky or slowly fading into darkness. Also, with the sun setting so early, I often have much more time in the evening than I think (“Oh, it’s only 5:30? It feels like 8:00!”).

With all that darkness, lights are important. Here are the lights I currently have on my bike, with plans to add more!

There are many things I look forward to doing this winter season. Cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, seeing northern lights, and spending a night or two at a public use cabin are just several things on the list.

It might be cold, dark, and long. But I’m excited for what winter has to hold!

full moon rising

Photography in Service Adventure

Kincaid Beach, Sunrise

 The past several years, photography (predominately of the natural world) has been a growing interest for me. It has steadily developed into a passion of mine; something that to which I have devoted many hours reading about, looking at, and, of course, actually making photographs. I was excited about what the nature photography prospects might be up in Anchorage. Having been in Anchorage for over two months, I have found time to spend out in God’s wonderful Alaskan creation doing photography, even in spite of the numerous other commitments, activities, and experiences that we have going on. Alaska has no shortage of the beautiful outdoors, and our unit has spent a good amount of time out in it, hiking, backpacking, biking, or otherwise.

My favorite place to photography near the house is at Kincaid Park, a large park about 7 miles from the house with plenty of bike and ski trails as well as access to a beach. We have made a number of trips down to this beach at sunrise or sunset to observe the changing light, weather, and landscape. Sometimes these trips are impromptu – a seemingly compulsive response to the vibrant sunset light beginning to blossom in the sky. Other times, it’s more of a planned endeavor. As can be seen in the photo below, I am in the process of trying to make a photo I have in my mind’s eye: the setting moon at sunset over a certain mountain. (fun fact: the moon only sets with the sun when it’s a new moon; it therefore might be quite hard to actually make the image described above. But we’ll try!)

Redoubt Mountain, Sunset I

Below is a selection of photographs I have made thus far in Alaska. I hope you enjoy them – comments and feedback are always welcome!

Redoubt Mountain, Sunset II

Redoubt Mountain, Sunset III

Star Trails and Mountain

Kincaid Beach, Sunrise

Voluntary Service and the Shutdown

Today marks the last day of the partial federal government shutdown, of which I’m sure all of you have heard about and many have felt firsthand in some respect. Beginning October 1, after Congress was unable to come to any sort of agreement and pass a budget, many aspects of the government were shut down and employees placed on furlough. That included the Bureau of Land Management, where I volunteer (or did before the shutdown…). I last stepped foot onto the Bureau of Land Management facility on the first of October for a brief all-employee meeting before biking home, making a brief stop along the way at a donut shop for a delicious maple bacon-topped donut to commemorate the shutdown.

Not being an option to stay at home and mind my own business while I was furloughed, I looked to another option for voluntary service. I decided to go and volunteer at the service placements at which my unit mates volunteered. During the past two weeks, I have volunteered predominately at the Downtown Soup Kitchen and also at the Children’s Lunchbox (a program that prepares lunches for school children and other food for weekends). It has been a joy to see where and with whom my unit mates work on a daily basis.

The serving line at the Downtown Soup Kitchen

The Downtown Soup Kitchen, where I have spent most of my days “off” from work, serves lunch to anywhere from 200 to almost 600 people a day. My work there has involved everything from de-boning turkeys to serving clients bread, soup, and a sandwich to reorganizing the walk-in freezer. Over a time period of only a couple weeks, this place has become like home to me. Coming from the Bureau of Land Management, a very solitary job, to the Soup Kitchen, where there are always people to talk and interact with, has been great. Whether through conversations while slicing torta bread for sandwiches to talking with clients, I have truly enjoyed the opportunity to interact with people and build a whole number of new relationships. I have been made very welcome and the work feels rewarding and life-giving. Another aspect I have enjoyed is the faith emphasis that the Soup Kitchen brings to their mission. While the Bureau of Land Management is a government agency and as a result has no faith component, at the Soup Kitchen, there is a strong emphasis on showing God’s love to all through serving soup. Devotions and prayer are a regular part of the day. In a less organized setting, I have enjoyed having conversations on faith and life matters with a Soup Kitchen employee as we do food pickups at local grocery stores.

A couple of the prep tables in the kitchen

With the government finally back up and running, it is a little sad in some ways to leave the Downtown Soup Kitchen. While I know that there will be plenty of work to do at the Bureau of Land Management, I will miss the people that I have built relationships with at the Soup Kitchen, and the experiences that I have had. In any case, I am grateful for this opportunity to experience another way of serving others and showing God’s love.

On a side note, my last day at the Soup Kitchen, a TV News crew came in for a story about furloughed government workers being affected by the shutdown and how they are responding. Here’s the short article and video from Anchorage Channel 11 News: http://www.ktva.com/home/top-stories/Furloughed-workers-spend-time-volunteering-228121181.html