All We're Missing Now Is a Volcanic Eruption...

An ~8.0 magnitude earthquake that shook our house for a full minute and woke us up from a dead sleep after midnight, followed immediately by our phones sounding off with tsunami warnings throughout our portions of Alaska, followed immediately by a snowstorm that snowed all day long and produced whiteout conditions on my drive to work, followed by a forecasted high temperature of -2 deg F (that's the high temperature) in the next day or two - - and with all that, no one even considers the thought of not going to work or not sending the kids to school.  Even better, the main topic of conversation at work, home and school today centered around how the snow was going to improve our skiing this weekend.  Alaska!

Reminds me of the earthquake followed by eruption of Mt Redoubt in March 2009.  Blog on that one here from 9 years ago:
http://jolenemcdowell.blogspot.com/2009/03/volcano-stuff.html.
That 2009 volcanic eruption also woke us straight up out of bed, as we could hear the boom from inside our house -  - volcanic eruptions on the West side of Cook Inlet have a clear unabated path over the inlet and hay flats right to our bluff, and arrive at the house as a cool shotgun-sounding boom.

This little guy has been hanging out around the house lately. He seems to be on his own this Winter, and I've seen him eyeing our apple trees lately (don't even think about it, Bullwinkle. I'm getting those trees through the Winter without being eaten to the stalk like they were last Winter, one way or another).