The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

“Life  as I know it… taking it one day at a time”

A couple of years ago I started a blog “There and Back Again – Alaska” – I spent a year getting to know my surroundings by committing to hiking 50 trails in 52 weeks.  My goal was to get active and start enjoying the area in which I live. I accomplished that goal in just under six months and the resulting experiences changed my life FOREVER.

I am retiring “There and Back Again – Alaska” in November 2011 because I feel like I am heading in a new direction and what I am focusing on now is different from what I was focusing on then.  Not to worry, you can still access that blog and see some of the great adventures I was able to enjoy – along with some awesome photos.

This new blog is more general… my views of “life as I know it”. The main focus will be on family, friends, travel, adventure, writing, photography, boating and LIVING. There may be the occasional musing but mostly I am writing about the things that I am experiencing and how those experiences are changing my life.

I hope that you will follow along and join me on this new adventure called “life as I know it.”

Thank you to all of you who have followed my adventures.  I have appreciated your encouragement and support.

I would LOVE it if you would follow me on my new adventures by subscribing to my new blog “Life as I know it”

Thanks again, and I’ll see you on my new site!

Just a “short” note to let folks know that I am putting this blog to rest… I have made a lot of changes over the past year – ALL GOOD – and to commemorate the changes I am going to be starting a new blog. There and Back Again Alaska helped me find my voice and kindle my sense of adventure but I am headed into a new phase in my life.  I know now that there is nothing that I cannot do.

I feel great about my accomplishments over the past year and how far that I have come on my journey.  I feel like a crocus peeking out from the snow-covered ground after a long dark winter.

Keep an eye out, I’ll be back again in the near future with a new blog and new adventures. See you in the Spring!

Thank you all for your support!

Finally, after a couple of days of monsoonal rains in Juneau we had a sunny day today.  Too bad I was working inside… I wasn’t able to enjoy the weather until I got off of work.

On my way home I really started noticing the signs of Fall… the cutest one that I LOVE most is little guy football. They are soooo cute…

We took Tot for a walk to Dredge Lakes this evening.  It was a SHORT walk… the river is high and we were not able to pass it on the trail. We opted for an alternate route through the woods, hoping we could bypass the flooding… no such luck on that.

Dredge Lakes Trail

It was a nice walk though.  You can smell Fall in the air, see the leaves turning, vegetation rotting.

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The final sign that Fall is here and Winter is on its way is the termination dust on the mountains… can it really be that time of year?  We barely had Summer.

My days are pretty predictable… I get up in the morning, take care of business, and check my email, WordPress and Facebook accounts while I have a cup of tea.

I go to work, I come home, I check my email, WordPress and Facebook accounts… So what was different yesterday?  My Facebook page and apparently I wasn’t the only person who was a little unhappy with the changes that rolled out quite unexpectedly.

I actually subscribe to AllFacebook.com so I was surprised when I logged in last night to find things had changed – AGAIN… oh well…

What’s really funny are ALL of the complaints… here was my post:

Tuesday, September 20, 7:52 PM

Really… Just once I would like for FB to stay consistent… while I am not against change and improvement I would at least like to see improvement with the change… ugh! 

Can you believe that the change in Facebook has actually caused such a raucous that it is all over the national news and is the subject of many, many stories… a quick Google search produced the following:

55,900,000 results … really, like people don’t have anything better to talk about (I guess not based on my blog post!)

On Wednesday, September 21, 9:19 AM I posted the following:

Stole this from a friends page… I’ll be quiet now…

You might say that it put things into perspective. I mean really, it is a free service.

Has anyone checked out Google+ yet?  I did just last night… While I signed up for a Google+ account and added a few people to my circle I am not convinced that I will be migrating there anytime soon. There are a lot of things that I like about Facebook and I just recently found this browser extension – Better Facebook.

I was okay with the somewhat regular changes that Facebook has been making because I was always able to change my settings, for the most part, to hide anything that I found annoying… I haven’t figured out how to do that yet with the new layout. SO… I may just make it easy on myself and try out the new browser extensions and see if that helps.

30 seconds later…

Okay, it’s done!  It took all of 30 seconds to download the extension, restart my computer and make the necessary preference selections.  I am back to being my same old happy Facebook self. Woot Woot!

I am liking the tabs on my Facebook page now and the ability to easily hide things that I just really don’t care about. So far so good!

Another cool feature… now I won’t be stumped when my “friend number” reduces… I’ll know who un-friends me…

Come to think of it, this may not be such a cool feature… now people will know when I un-friend them…

Sources:

For the life of me I can no longer find the name of the guy who posted the “I’m Appalled” photo… sorry dude, I wanted to give you credit but I can’t find you anymore.

I can’t find the names of anyone else either… my bad!

I just got home from physical therapy (PT) and I have another assignment. Consciously think about my posture and work to improve it.  Apparently I tilt my head to the right, a lot!

You would think that years of baton twirling, gymnastics,  pageants, etc., that I would have this posture thing down pat.  I guess that is another thing that goes to hell as we age.  OR, maybe it is my hours and hours of work at the computer that are causing me develop bad habits.

I didn’t get in too much trouble for my five mile walk yesterday although I have been asked to keep my efforts a little less ambitious.  So, no walk today.  My PT felt that I should rest in between walks and should not walk more than two and half miles at a time.  The main thing?  Pay attention to what my body is telling me.

 

Apparently I have my neck out of alignment and it is causing pain down my arm, elbow, forearm and hand… numbness, tingling… at least I know that I can do something about it.

Now, if I can just keep my head from tilting to the right… practice, practice…

I’m in trouble… I came home from work today and suggested to Fred that we take Tot for a “short walk”… well, 2 hours and a little over 5 miles later we got home, in the dark. It was windy and raining… at least part of the time.

A walk around "the block" - Julep to Riverside to Brotherhood Bridge Trail, back loop to Riverside again...

Tot isn’t very happy either. For not being walked all that often I would have to say that we all over did it just a tad tonight.

Fred loving on Tot... it's hard not to do...

We actually had a nice walk along the river. You could smell the rotting salmon and every once in awhile I got nervous thinking that I heard a bear in the woods. I didn’t… Tot had a great time running freely through the woods. He would check on regularly making big circles around us.

Last of the tourists for this season... rafting the mendenhall

We caught a glimpse of the river rafts coming down the Mendenhall. Just a few short weeks and “tourist season” will officially be over. We gave them a shout out and even though it was raining and breezy they seemed to be having fun.

We are all enjoying the warmth of the wood stove now, snuggled up on the couch watching movies… I wonder if the guys will let me talk them into another “short walk” tomorrow.

Stats: Block Walk – Brotherhood Bridge Trail: Sep 19, 2011
2:01:03 09/19/2011 2.6mi/h 23:15min/mi

We took Aristotle for a walk today. Something that we are committed to do as close to everyday as we can manage. It has been awhile since he has been for a walk. As much as we knew we needed to get him out, it was so hard to leave Tucker behind… he just couldn’t get out anymore and his sad puppy dog eyes were enough to kill you as we would walk out the door with Tot. For while his body was not cooperating, Tucker’s mind was still active… and every once in a while he would try to hop around like a puppy… probably wondering why his legs weren’t cooperating with his mind.

Today’s adventure took us to Nugget Falls at the Mendenhall Glacier. The last couple of times we had been to the glacier we could not get to the falls because of flooding. It started out sprinkling but fortunately there was no wind.

It is pretty amazing how many changes we see every time we visit the glacier. This time we saw an hourglass shape in the upper left quadrant of the glacier. It was apparent that there had been some type of slide where the glacier let loose upon itself. It appears to be shrinking more and more, and quicker than when I first moved to the area.

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First walk – Post Tucker. Nugget Falls
Date: Sep 18, 2011 2:26 pm
Distance: 1.97 miles
Elapsed Time: 1:09:51

So far, I am feeling pretty good. We’ll see how I do tonight and over the next few days. Keeping my fingers crossed that my pain level is low.

Aristotle had a fun time romping through the water, chasing squirrels, and meeting a few new people. He was very calm and did a great job of listening to Fred. It is nice that he is maturing but I think that Tucker was an instigator and Tot was a follower so now that Tucker is gone Tot should be calmer and less trouble overall.

Lessons learned this trip? When I was taking photos I kept smelling dog poop… well duh! I was holding the poop bag… Sometimes I amaze myself with how dense I can be. Next time Tot is going to pack his own poop!

Today was a sad day. I have known for awhile that this day was coming but when I took my boy Tucker to the vet today I was not planning on making the decision I did. I thought I would be able to get an assessment of his condition and then take some time to figure out what to do. The vet was awesome and so sweet. No sugar coating but total compassion and caring.

Tucker man, Tucker poo, booboo...

When it came right down to it, I couldn’t bear the thought of bringing Tucker home only to take him back to the vet to put him to rest.

While talking with the vet he asked me to share some stories about Tucker and to work at remembering him as he was at his best and not how he was today.

Can I share a bit about my furry boy?

Tucker came to my home in 2002. He was four years old. My previous dog was nearing the end of his life and I wanted to have a dog prior to his passing so that he could be trained properly by his predecessor… you know… like, “make sure when you hear the car arrive in the driveway that you get off the leather couch and pretend that you were asleep on the floor the entire day” or “when mom gets home, no matter what, it was the cats fault.”

I found Tucker at the Gastineau Humane Society in November of 2002. I wanted another Golden Retriever because I loved the breed. When I went to the shelter he had been there about a month and there had not been any interest in him. He had been abandoned at the shelter, left in an outside cage with a bag of food. He was not in good shape. From what the shelter volunteers could tell, he had been in a kennel and abused or ignored. His paws were so raw that he couldn’t walk on them. He had been shaved because his hair was in such bad condition and so matted that they couldn’t brush him out. True to form, I fell in love with him immediately… I am a sucker for a sad story/hard case. The shelter folks had named him Kelly – don’t ask me why because that name did not suit him at all. My husband was out of town on an extended trip and I called to let him know that I had found a companion for our other dog. He was not happy about it. I got him anyway. We named him Tucker.

Tucker has been a joy and a frustration. He was not at all like my other golden in temperament and there were times when I knew exactly why his former owners left him at the shelter in the dark of night. His nick name was “rodeo dog” – and while he was four when we got him he acted like a puppy long into his adult years. Even when he was nine years old he acted like he was nine months old. He didn’t start showing his age until he was about 10.

Tucker LOVED to swim. I remember walking him to Dredge Lakes where he would play fetch with his ball swimming the Mendenhall River until he was close to hypothermic and begging to fetch some more. He would bark like crazy until you threw the ball and sit there shaking with cold the whole time. When he was tired he would get drawn down the river and then he would hit the shore and run through the bushes, drop the ball and my feet and bark again until I threw the ball.

We used to cross country ski together. I remember the first year that I got him, I took him to Dredge Lakes again and we skied along the river on a narrow trail. There was one particularly funny time when it was snowing like crazy, the trees were laden with heavy snow and I had pulled of the trail to allow another skier to pass with their dog. Just as they passed, Tucker decided to run after the other dog and in the process he pulled me backward onto my skies causing the tree above me to drop all of its snow on top of me – whoosh. Or the time when we were skiing and he pulled me into another tree with the same result. I felt like one of those cartoon characters with my arms and legs splayed around the tree.

We had a lot of adventures together. He liked to hike with me. He was a huge comfort to me at a time when I needed it. He didn’t like to be “hugged” and he was not a snuggler at all but he knew when I was having a tough time and would come and lay his head down on my lap or sleep at my feet – instinctively knowing when I needed some comforting.

Tucker man...

Tucker was a hoot… I have to admit, he was a terrible fishing partner. I couldn’t keep him out of the water. He snored and “talked” in his sleep and sometimes would wake me up multiple times during the night wanting out or in or out or in… I was just wishing he would make up his mind.

We used to play games while walking. He would run ahead and I would duck off into the woods to see how long it would take him to realize that I was not behind him anymore. It was like playing hide and seek and he would always come back running to find me.

One winter, while walking him near the glacier, he ran off with Romeo – a lone wolf in the area. I was frantic… but I called for him and after a little bit he came back, all wet and panting.

And then… there was the “porcupine incident” …

Porcupine 47 Tucker 0

He apparently didn’t learn a lesson the first time because he went after another porcupine about a month later.

About six years ago I added another dog to our family… another rescue, another hard luck story. We have had a full house with two dogs and two cats. One happy family where the kitties and doggies had no problem eating and sleeping together.

It has always been comical at bed time… I head for the bedroom, Tucker heads down the hall after me, then Tot and then Sam. He always slept next to my side of the bed close enough that I could reach down in the night and touch him or scratch his nose.

There are too many good memories and stories to share. All I can say is that we are all feeling the pain of our loss tonight. Tucker was 12 years old, and now he is gone. Sam (my 20 year old kitty) is sleeping on my left arm and Aristotle (Tot) is sleeping at my feet. Everyone has been very quiet.

While today was difficult, I can say this… Fred and I sat on the floor at the vet clinic today and held our boy as he fell asleep for the last time. We cuddled and loved him and said our goodbyes. We will have his ashes back in about a week and I imagine that we will have a plaster paw print arriving from the vet in a few days. He’ll join his brother Newton on top of the china cabinet, we’ll add his plaster paw print to the “dead dog wall” (a shrine to my beloved furry children) and we’ll take some of his ashes to our favorite place – Sunshine Cove – where we’ll say goodbye and remember the good times that we had with him.

Every once in awhile I find myself wiping the tears that are running down my face but I remember what we shared and know that he is in a much better place now.

A friend posted this video to my Facebook wall this afternoon… Needless to say I bawled, again…

Photo Album: Tucker Poo – RIP September 17, 2011

So, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything consistently.  I guess sometimes life just has a way of interfering with my other activities.  Blogging gets put on the back burner every now and then.

Someone asked how I have been doing with regard to my pain levels… well, that depends. In an earlier blog post I wrote that I was in a lot of pain with most days in the 8 – 10 range. I had been to the Dr. in Seattle while I was there, had an MRI to make sure nothing was seriously wrong with me and had a few tests to make sure I was not experiencing an auto-immune issue… thankfully, I am not… on either count.

So what did the Dr. say? There is nothing remarkable, and that I have a 45 year old back with some old trauma (I guess falling on my head on the balance beam in high school, or fracturing my tail bone in Jr. High doesn’t help). His recommendation? Take is easy, rest up and no lifting… oh, and “PT for an extended period of time”… really, ugh!

In all fairness, I did explain to the Dr. that I had just completed a 33 mile hike with 45 pounds on my back and then went on a canoe journey – where I did not paddle but was active (as active as I could be – which was not all that active).

I went for a follow-up before returning to Juneau and when he asked me how my pain was I said I was at about a 6 – 7, he then asked what I had been doing the previous day and I responded that I had been painting a patio at my parents house… to which he replied “what did you not understand about ‘take it easy’”… I was taking it easy, I told him… apparently he had no idea what my normal daily activities looked like.

So, a little Prednisone later and some PT and I am doing much better. Better enough that my assignment last week was to start walking – easy… no mountain climbing or elevation and no load (pack). Well that pretty much cuts out most of Juneau. However, Fred and I did take a walk on the Airport Dike Trail. It was a beautiful day after a long long bout of monsoonal rains.

Taking a walk with Fred on the Dike Trail

It was a pretty nice walk. Flat, gravel. 2.5 miles round trip for this walk and we ran into a few people that we knew along the way.

A short walk...

How did I do? Not so great. Apparently I over did it… who would have thought at 2.5 miles was overdoing it? Go figure. A week after the walk I was still in pain and working my exercises is helping just a little. Rest, that is what is working but that is not at all easy.

I refuse to get old. It’s not the age that I am talking about here… I am loving every gray hair that I find on my head. I am saggy and baggy and getting wrinkles… whatever! It is the joint pain – the hip(s), knees, feet, elbows, hands… that is what stinks. My dream of kicking @ss on the trails when I am 70 is not looking too promising. I hate to think that I waited too long to start enjoying my life and the outdoors. I will however keep plugging along. I have a feeling that pain is just something that I am going to have to get used to and just live with.