How far in Alundra have you gotten? I got distracted by all my Tales games and need to get back to it at some point.
Don't get me started on Daylight Savings Time. I hate it, it wreaks havoc with my internal clock, and I HATE getting up in the dark and it was just starting to get light out at a reasonable time, too.
I'm seconding Mothman's guess about your blog being in draft state.
Nice to have you join us.
Hey Dan! Good to see you here!
Netflix streamed a six episode documentary about the Iditarod several years ago that was pretty good. I don't think they have it any more, though :(
I don't think it quite works that way, lol.
Authentic Mexican food is very rare in Maine, but we have plenty of places that sell Mexican Coke, strangely enough. I can think of only one place that comes close to real Mexican food, and that's in Portland. I miss being able to walk down there, they have these really yummy pork tacos with pineapple salsita. Damn, now I want tacos!
Travis, it's an amazaing event. I've been following it since I was seven or eight, which would have been in 1976 or 1977. Mostly because there was a sprint race on Lake Winnipesaukee that my grandparents took me to watch a couple of times and the family down the street organized one on the lake I grew up on one year. ABC's Wide World of Sports used to do a lot of race coverage, and I remember watching Susan Butcher win her first Iditarod in 1986. She went on to win three more. And she wasn't the first woman to win, either, Libby Riddles won in 1985, and the first woman to finish was Mary Shields in 1974, the second Iditarod ever run.
It's an education-friendly event, too, they have class room teaching tools and every year one teacher gets to be "Teacher On the Trail". I think Michael117's class followed them one year when he was a kid.
Liked your son's joke, by the way.
I've been a dogsled junkie since I was a little, little kid. Read every book I could get my hands on about sled dogs - Call of the Wild, White Fang, Silver Chief, and a bunch of YA books that I can't remember titles of now. There's a mystery series about a female musher - Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Yukon Quest, etc. by Sue Henry. I've also read a bunch of non-fiction about dog sledding. Gary Paulson's Winter Dance is a really good read, it's about his experience training for and running the Iditarod. Iditarod Classics and More Iditarod Classics are short essays/interviews about many of the better known mushers. And there's a book in my reading backlog called The Cruelest Mile about the serum run to Nome that was the inspiration of the modern Iditarod. Yeah, I'm not obsessed or anything...
That's a cool video. Dallas Seavey is a third generation musher and grew up mushing. He's won the Iditarod, the Yukon Quest, and the Jr. Iditarod. He's not the only multigenerational musher, either - Rohn Buser, the Mackeys, and I think there are a couple more.
Check out the Run, Dogs, Run! series of videos at Iditarod.com. They're pretty good.
What amazes me is that the guy (Aaron Burmeister) is currently running ninth. He popped it back in himself and just kept going, and that was over 300 miles ago! Most people think tht mushers just stand on the runners and the dogs do all the work, but in most cases, the mushers are either running between the runners of the sled or kicking/poling to help the dogs along. One guy ran the race with broken ribs, one finished on a broken ankle. They'll put up with all kinds of injuries to themselves as long as they can still take proper care of the dogs. And the dogs are checked by vets at every checkpoint and will be "dropped" if they're not in peak shape. They're taken care of at each checkpoint until they can be airlifted to Anchorage, where they're taken care of by prisoners until they can be picked up after the race.
Some day I want to be a checkpoint volunteer. That's maybe #1 on my bucket list.
